Ja Morant caught in optical crossfire of NBA’s global ambitions

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These days, the fact that Memphis Grizzlies star Ja Morant likes to take pictures of himself dancing around with a gun doesn’t make him weird. It makes him American.

A lot of the things that currently get people exercised in sports and entertainment fall under that heading.

Fear and suspect authority and look forward to the revolution? American.

Hate a wide swath of the body politic and need to let everyone know? American.

Caught in some swindle/crime/outrage against the norms of decency and don’t feel in the least bit bad about it? American.

They do this elsewhere, too, but not with as much vigour.

What do you expect? It’s a society popping rivets. Sports is just the most visible seam of the rupture.

Morant is this week’s pantomime villain – a gifted 23-year-old basketball player who cannot sing along to the music of today without Glock accompaniment and a live feed going. In another time, we would have called this behaviour Yosemite Samming.

A couple of months ago, Morant was caught doing the same thing at a strip club. That, along with other bad behaviour – slapping around a teenager he’d invited over to his house, flashing a gun in his waistband – got him suspended for “conduct detrimental to the league.”

His actual crime? The best description for it is being exaggeratedly American. This is a guy who watched King of New York too many times as a kid.

Afterward, Morant did another of-the-moment American thing – he went to therapy and then gave a bunch of interviews about how much he’d learned.

“I went for counselling to learn how to manage stress, cope with stress in a positive way, instead of ways I’ve tried to deal with it before that caused me to make mistakes,” Morant said.

He deals with stress by dancing with guns? Wouldn’t a karaoke microphone be cheaper and less stressful?

Pro athletes memorized this shtick a long time ago. Only the details change. A few years ago, if you got in trouble, you said you had a drug problem and disappeared into rehab for a few weeks. Scandal neutralized.

Now you say you’re anxious or stressed and you do the same thing. It’s not a get-out-of-jail-free card, but it’s close.

This week, Morant was at it again. Sitting in a friend’s car, doing a live feed, bopping around, holding a gun.

This is an American story featuring an American athlete, so it is largely handled from the American media’s perspective. There’s some talk about toxic masculinity. There’s a whole line in the phony romance of the gangster lifestyle. There’s a lot of attention paid to the fact Morant – who’s already made US$40-million – could leave real money on the table.

One thing nobody down there thinks worth a debate is why this guy owns a gun to begin with? Why is that okay? What does he need it for? Why isn’t anyone around him worried about it?

Morant lives in Tennessee. It’s an open-carry state. Just about anybody can pack a loaded weapon. There’s no need to conceal it. You can bring it shopping. You can put it in a shoulder holster like Bullitt to go pick up your dry cleaning.

There are limits. As the Memphis Police Department’s website reminds citizens: “This new law does NOT affect the carrying of rifles or shotguns, ONLY handguns.”

Got that? No AK-47s at the Cheesecake Factory. Leave those at home. For date night, you’re going to have to make do with a spring-loaded SIG Sauer and a .357 Magnum. Just in case your server puts the knives on the table too quickly.

Does any of this make sense? To Americans, it must. They continue to live there and put up with this.

To me, it sounds insane. If I was forced to live in Memphis, I’d go everywhere with my hands over my head, just in case.

This must be why American-made zombie shows are such a big deal right now. It isn’t, as American critics would have it, commentary on the collapsing social contract in that country. No, they’re PSAs reminding viewers to keep their home arsenals oiled and ready.

From that perspective, what has Morant done wrong exactly? As far as we know, he hasn’t broken any of the gun laws of his home state.

Tennessee residents are allowed to have a gun in the privacy of their conveyance. He wasn’t pointing it at anyone. There’s no threat involved.

Morant’s real infraction is being famously, flagrantly American where the rest of the world can see him.

He’s reminding non-Americans of how zany America – and by extension, the globally ambitious NBA – is right now.

The Grizzlies suspended Morant again. Okay. What’s the next step? Asking him to go around unarmed? Because that would cause a different sort of uproar. That would be depriving an American citizen of his fundamental right to protect himself (in a car, with his best friend, while listening to – and these are the kinds of details that half-convince me we’re living in a simulation – the rapper NBA YoungBoy).

Nobody’s asking Morant to give up the gun. They just want him to stop showing it to people. The distinction may mean something in America, but it doesn’t mean much to me.

Meanwhile, Morant is pulling triple duty. He’s generating an entire ecosystem of content. He’s acting as a cutout for American commentators looking to push their own political agendas. He’s letting the NBA demonstrate how apart it feels from the wrong side of the national mainstream (the side that isn’t the league’s customer).

What he hasn’t done is anything illegal. He’s just an average American doing average American things in a country that has gotten so far down a dark path that its best solution is not to talk about it anymore.