LaVar Ball deserves credit for painstakingly molding his three sons, Lonzo, LiAngelo and LaMelo, into elite basketball players and celebrities from their earliest years. The three brothers became a sensation in 2016 at Chino Hills High School, and now two of them are established NBA players. The middle child is a rapper.
But what happens when the manufacturing of children into elite athletes fails?
Take Jamie Newman. Newman wishes he could be Ball. He took a position as a high school basketball coach to give his fifth-grade son Julian (whom he had trained intensively since age 3) the opportunity to play against better competition. Julian did quite well for a fifth grader playing varsity (which is no small feat), and the national media loved the story. Through this attention, Newman was able to profit from his son. However, it turned out that Julian never grew taller than 5-foot-7 and never achieved more than an unceremonious and brief stint at Bethesda University. He is now an influencer. In a basketball sense, Julian’s ‘prodigy’ was ultimately little more than a vessel for his father’s profit and ego.
Parents like LaVar Ball and Jamie Newman are simultaneously altruistic and selfish. While they receive the vicarious satisfaction of reviving their own unlived dreams, their true intention lies two fold in a predatory benevolence. The psychotic strictness, the imposition of an adult professional athlete’s regimen upon their child, arises at first from a genuinely good-hearted interest in their child’s success. But this desire for their child’s development seems to slowly mix with their own desires, and the parent-child relationship is corrupted by the parent’s self-interest.
While there are parents like this in every field, I believe the dynamic is far worse in sports. Unlike chess or mathematics prodigies, a true prodigy in athletics is an unknown quantity until at least adolescence. LeBron James, probably the greatest basketball prodigy of all time, could have arguably played in the NBA at 16 (and this is incredibly generous). Yet the LaVars of the world maintain the belief in their young children as athletic ‘prodigies’ and are often dragged into an extreme developmental sunk cost fallacy. All the while, they attempt to market their children in an attempt to profit from their work.
Now, while a parent pushing their kid isn’t inherently bad, there is sometimes a fine line between a push and a shove; and in these parents of prodigies, it is hard to make out the difference between a well-intentioned desire for development and a proclivity towards exploitation.
In the most famous cases where ambitious parents succeeded in their plans — Tiger Woods, the Williams sisters and (two of) the Ball Brothers — we must remember that under their triumph lies a mountain of broken dreams and childhoods colored by trauma, wasted by parents whose dreams took precedence over the child’s. The biggest tragedy is that this dynamic of parental sports exploitation will be perpetuated in part because these stories serve as an inspiration to parents.
And for every LaVar Ball, there’s probably a thousand Jamie Newmans.
