You don’t hate Draymond, you hate where he’s from

[video essay companion piece]

I already did a 27-minute video essay on this, and maybe this is the sharper-edged version because of the title, but now that a few hours have passed since I uploaded the video (embedded below) to our YouTube channel, a few extra thoughts came to mind.

I think it’s important to understand my background and why I’m qualified to write this piece, why I’m qualified to say anything about the Golden State Warriors, to be honest. That’s within the first ten minutes of the video:

Have you ever walked into a basketball gym in a predominantly black neighborhood? It’s quite different than walking into the hoop court at, say, the Olympic Club.

The one in the ‘hood is usually loud. There’s yelling. There’s arguing — constant arguing, to the point where you and I might throw up our hands and just go home. Sure, sometimes a fight might break out, but rarely.

I’ve been super-intimidated at these places. For me, there was pickup ball as a college student in places in Berkeley or Oakland. And then as the first ten minutes of my video explains, I literally ran basketball leagues in the hood, so I literally had to walk in to those types of gyms any given weekday, after school where these crazy basketball games were happening and talk to the gym director about renting the gym.

When I played ball and encountered these environments, it was scary, of course. I never did get used to it. My game was affected. Your defender is yelling, “He don’t want it! He don’t want it!” That’s definitely Number One on the list of head games they’ll play.

I kept quiet because I wasn’t from that area, I didn’t want to piss anybody off. Heck, maybe they’d want to beat me up or shoot me outside? I don’t know. It was not a fun experience. And the arguing! You’d be standing there waiting for “check ball” for like twelve minutes as two dudes, one of them on your team, stood there in front of each other barking what they thought was the right score.

Oh, and they never passed me the ball. I didn’t look like them. They didn’t trust me. They made presumptions about me based on how I looked.

All that loud, boisterous shit? To them, that’s four o’clock on a Wednesday afternoon. All that verbal chatter is what they do. The put-downs, all that confrontation, chest-thumping, disrespectful shit.

Wait, did I say disrespectful? Oh, I mean, from my world it felt disrespectful. Like, that would never happen at my dad’s Chinese Silicon Valley engineers’ run at Mountain View High School on Sunday mornings. It wouldn’t even happen at open gym at the RSF at Cal. And so, disrespectful to you and me is just another day in the ‘hood.

Draymond Green is the embodiment of ‘hood basketball. The antics, the verbal assaults, the possible escalation to the physical, at the very least where chests thump. He grew up in a “war-torn” environment where he honestly didn’t know if he was gonna walk through his mom’s front door again. Btw, I talked to her after I uploaded the video. She didn’t really have much to say because it’s the same cultural differences every time Draymond gets that target on his chest.

As I said in my video, I can’t relate to not really knowing if I’ll walk through my front door again. But I’ve come close. I know how it is because one of my league scorekeepers, James Love, 18 at the time, was shot and killed outside the very projects that I dropped him off at after he worked for me every Tuesday and Thursday night for about a year in the Sunnydale in SF at Visitacion Valley Middle School.

Now, you might use a counter-argument like Jason Richardson. He’s from Saginaw but he doesn’t get into confrontations, you say. Well, the star players who usually make it to the NBA just don’t need to do that. The best players in the Oakland gyms never argued the score. They were too busy honing their extreme talent than they were developing a personality, and I mean that with all due respect. The list of such “quiet guys” is long. I’d be shocked if Damian Lillard ever argued a pickup score. Also, different personalities for different roles, it’s not rocket science.

I’ll give you this: Draymond’s drag of Rudy Gobert did go too far, but I also understand him sending a message to Gobert. By the look on Rudy’s face, he got it. If this were my Oakland league, I would’ve given Rudy a one-game suspension for grabbing Klay Thompson and two games for Draymond for the drag and the fact that his suspension has to be a little bit worse than Rudy’s (also one game for Jaden McDaniels for double-horse-collaring Klay, as explained in the video).

But as Steve Kerr is on the pregame podium talking as I write this, I humbly disagree with Kerr that Draymond’s headlock and drag were “inexcusable”. If this happened in Oakland or Saginaw, Rudy left the gym unscathed. He good. Granted, the neighborhood would talk about it for a couple months, so it’s not necessarily another Wednesday afternoon in the ‘hood, and Gobert would return with some embarrassment and full understanding that he shall never again touch an opposing teammate in an altercation.

Sorry, Steve, that doesn’t fall under “inexcusable” for me. If there was so much as a fingernail scratch on Rudy’s neck, then okay. Michael Jordan’s punch was inexcusable, yes. Like, physically scratched is the line. Me getting choked with two hands around my throat, by a dude one time at a pickup game, that’s inexcusable but then again I could have avoided it by not popping off verbally at him.

Steve, not everybody is going to act like the perfect Lute Olson disciple at goodie-two-shoes University of Arizona. But, I do get it. In our world it IS “inexcusable”. And it’s “inexcusable” because we don’t want a Steve Kerr-looking dude to ever do that. We don’t want anybody to do that because they may not be able to hold back the way Draymond did. It’s not a scalable look at the expense of the School of Hard Knocks lesson for Gobert. And, oh, there’s sponsors.

But there is an underlying cultural problem with the NBA. I talked about it more in the video. It’s happening with the refs, too — more on that some other time although you can search this website on “too many refs”. The NBA has different constituents, different white-collar sponsors to keep happy, though. It always comes back to that. We are not gathered at Civitan Rec Center to watch future NBA games together. I get that.

After all these years and all these repeat experiences, I no longer think walking into a gym in the ‘hood and seeing all of the above is “scary”. I’ve grown. Heck, I’d go mediate the stalemate argument and joke that they should rochambeau or something.

I’ve come to respect that there’s value in the game of basketball with the antics from the ‘hood. You actually need a guy from Civitan (theoretically, because if you a Google it you’ll see that it’s closing its doors). You need an enforcer. You need a guy who cares so much about the score that he’ll argue about it for twelve minutes. I’d even say you need a guy like Rudy — all cultures are welcome — but the NBA is already skewed WAY towards that “civilized open gym” look.

Draymond is a unicorn. If you’d told me that the first time (well, fifth time) I saw two of them dudes arguing the score at “check ball”, that one of those types of guys is gonna end up in the Hall of Fame, I would’ve thought you were nuts.

So if you hate him, then really you hate where he’s from, and I’d ask you to be a little bit more cultured.

👍👍💛💙