Jaylen Brown and the Simulation of Sports

Is the East Conference Finals and Finals MVP the NBA's Morpheus?

In the midst of the Olympic games, the USA Olympic Men’s Basketball team was “shaken” by a scandal that played out across media. Kawhi Leonard was deemed unfit to participate for the team opening up a roster spot. Many people following the team assumed that Boston Celtics Finals MVP, Jaylen Brown would be selected for the team and were shaken when his teammate Derrick White was selected instead to replace Leonard. In a cryptic tweet Jaylen seemed to suggest that Nike was the reason for the snub causing a stir online. All of a sudden people began speculating about a Nike conspiracy to handpick all the USA team players.

But was this actually the case? As one began to investigate into the situation, most of the athletes on the team were in fact Nike athletes. Kawhi Leonard himself used to be a Nike athlete but ended up suing them for ownership of his logo he created for his shoe, though he would lose the lawsuit.

The replacement, Derrick White was indeed a Nike athlete. But under the surface it became obvious that Derrick White was first in line for a replacement, as it had been floated as early as the NBA Finals in June. He fulfilled a role on the team that was thoroughly needed: a two way guard.

If one looked further, Kawhi Leonard was not told he could not play in the Olympics due to his health. The Clippers stressed that they never made such a declaration to the team, as many people had assumed. Even further, Grant Hill spoke very carefully in interviews not to actually state outwardly that Kawhi was too injured to play. If one reads in between the lines, it could be that Kawhi was simply cut from the team, due to redundancy at his position and skillset. Maybe it was insinuated that health was the issue in order for everyone in the situation to save face. Hmmm? So much ado about nothing.

But where does this leave Jaylen Brown and his claim of Nike being behind his snub? Well in comes Stephen A. Smith. Back in May he claims to have been told by an NBA source that Jaylen Brown was “not liked because of his I-am-better-than-you attitude" and was "not as marketable as he should be". Stephen A. doubled down on this claim in light of the conversation generated by the Olympic snub. This all begs the question about what a so-called scandal of a Nike backed conspiracy, a vocal yet cryptic NBA star, and marketability have anything to do with one another.

It all comes back to Jaylen Brown and his position as a public figure. Despite being a Celtics fan, I first became aware of Jaylen Brown off the basketball court when he made waves in 2018 in a very candid interview he did with the Guardian. When speaking about Colin Kaepernick and why no NFL team would sign him to their team, despite his clear ability to play at a high level, Brown noted that he wasn’t surprised that someone as politically outspoken as Kaepernick was being blackballed by teams in the league. He went on to make an important point that made headlines:

“That’s the reality because sports is a mechanism of control. If people didn’t have sports they would be a lot more disappointed with their role in society. There would be a lot more anger or stress about the injustice of poverty and hunger. Sports is a way to channel our energy into something positive. Without sports who knows what half of these kids would be doing?”

It’s important to dig in to what Brown was saying in this comment because it’s very easy to misconstrue his intended point. When he insists that sports is a mechanism for control, he is not literally stating that sports exist for the sake of some conspiracy to control the masses. What he is suggesting is that sports are a form of what French philosopher Jean Baudrillard would call a “simulation”.

Baudrillard came from the field of semiotics, which to put simply is the study of signs and symbols. Think of a sign as a stand in for a real concrete thing. The Coca-Cola logo is a stand in for the real life existing soda. But it doesn’t end there. Coca-Cola also exists as an idea or feeling. When Coke markets, they are selling this feeling. The nostalgia people have of sharing a coke on the beach with friends. The feelings and memories associated with the soda. Unconsciously people are buying this feeling, not the drink itself. The drink is a stand in for the feeling.

Simulation exists when the connection to the referent, or the original, no longer exists as the primary form and reality itself is usurped. With the Coca-Cola example, the feeling of nostalgia becomes the primary reference in the mind of most consumers. When you get enough of this severance or detachment, reality itself is usurped and the primary references are the various forms of abstraction. The entire field of marketing is designed around this abstraction of the “real” existing product into a sign and then that sign into something else. All of these these elements are equally “real” to the consumer. There is no true or false in this equation.

For him [Baudrillard], modern societies are organized around the production and consumption of commodities, while postmodern societies are organized around simulation and the play of images and signs, denoting a situation in which codes, models, and signs are the organizing forms of a new social order where simulation rules. In the society of simulation, identities are constructed by the appropriation of images, and codes and models determine how individuals perceive themselves and relate to other people…The realm of the hyperreal (e.g., media simulations of reality, Disneyland and amusement parks, malls and consumer fantasylands, TV sports, virtual reality games, social networking sites, and other excursions into ideal worlds) is more real than real, whereby the models, images, and codes of the hyperreal come to control thought and behavior.

If one is to take this quote and apply it to Jaylen Brown’s analysis of sports, one can say that sports are a simulation. In this simulation, identities are constructed by the appropriation of these various signs and symbols. When someone defines themselves as a fan of a team, they are constructing an identity around the images of the team, whether it be the logo, colors, or even the players, who ultimately can stand in for the team as symbols. When someone is a fan of a player they construct a similar identity.

This is why someone can simultaneously be a fan of Lebron James while not necessarily being a fan of the Lakers. The identity they have constructed for themselves as a Lebron fan slots into whatever team Lebron currently plays for. At this moment they are Lakers fans but that is conditional upon Lebron playing for them.

Let’s delve a level deeper. Now that we have an identity constructed around the idea of being a fan, we have the “code”. Baudrillard says “that life, or reality can be subordinated to or replaced by a set of categories. The code is what subordinates life to a particular set of systems.” In sports the interactions of fans and fandoms during a game, or in a league and the reality created by that league can be considered the “reality” in which the fans are interacting.

These are the agreed upon rules of engagement for fans when they interact with other fans. Within the confines of a game for fans, nothing else matters. Nothing else exists. Getting fired from your job or getting dumped by your significant other doesn’t sting as hard when your team wins. If your team wins the championship, this feeling can extend much further than the moment of the championship game.

Inflation may be going up, and the country may be engaged in endless wars, but dammit the Celtics are NBA champions! In these moments your identity as the fan of a championship team keeps the simulation of sports relevant. It only matters if other people acknowledge it or else the simulation is ineffective. Sports are a simulation in the same way Disneyland is a simulation. As Baudrillard states in Simulacra and Simulation:

“The imaginary of Disneyland is neither true nor false, it is a deterrence machine set up in order to rejuvenate the fiction of the real in the opposite camp. Whence the debility of this imaginary, its infantile degeneration. This world wants to be childish in or­der to make us believe that the adults are elsewhere, in the "real" world, and to conceal the fact that true childishness is every­ where-that it is that of the adults themselves who come here to act the child in order to foster illusions as to their real childish­ness.”

This brings us to a point where Jaylen Brown’s statement became prophetic. In 2020, in the midst of a month long quarantine at the onset of a global pandemic, society came to a halt. Reality asserted itself. As a result, sports had to come to a temporary halt. In that time people could no longer be satisfied to distract themselves with television, streaming, social media, or sports. Whether they liked it or not, life was at a halt, there was a virus spreading through society, the economy was collapsing, and the anxiety of uncertainty took a primary position in peoples’ lives.

What resulted from this was a series of general anger, civil unrest and rioting that was not just confined to a single group of people. People protested against the government and people protested because of the death of George Floyd at the hands of a police officer. For a moment it felt as if we were on the verge of something significant politically with people upset with the realization of the 20 years of government infringement upon civil liberties, people were upset with the inequality in our society - socially and economically - and people were upset by how poorly our country was being run top to bottom by the Trump administration in a moment of great crisis.

Of course we remember how this went right? The protests after being overtaken by rioting, died down, the quarantine was lifted with conditions, and the NBA season returned in the form of the NBA bubble. Other leagues followed suit and before we knew it, people were attending NFL games without any care or fear that there was still a pandemic happening. This is what Jaylen Brown was referring to when he was stating that sports were a mechanism of control. The identities people constructed as a fan of their favorite team superseded their identity as a citizen and the idea of the common good and people, who vehemently opposed even going outside at one point in time, were fully indulging in their team’s fandom in the company of tens of thousands of people.

This is simply one instance of the simulation of sports becoming a primary driver over our identity as a citizen acting in the common good of our neighbors. Think about the number of times where sports and arguing with other self professed fans mattered more to your identity and sense of self than the “real” concrete parts of your life.

Now lets bring this full circle with coming back to Jaylen Brown and why he is not “marketable” and why it could have been possible (but of course we cannot truly know at the moment) that Nike had a hand in him not being chosen for the Olympics. Jaylen Brown as a player doesn’t fully participate in the simulation of basketball and sports as whole. His identity isn’t solely dependent upon him as an athlete. He is a multifaceted human being with interests ranging as wide as chess, piano, robotics, politics, social and economic activism.

When he interacts with people in this simulation, he does not fully commit himself to the widely agreed upon contract by all of the participants: this is a fantasy, don’t bring reality into this! This is why there is such a strong sentiment that athletes should just “shut up and dribble”. They are nothing more than representations of the team or their public persona as a player. Jaylen Brown is an individual who meets with the governor of Massachusetts to discuss how he can help his wider community in Boston. He is an individual that wants to educate people on the panopticism and surveillance in our society. He wants to make a difference in society outside of sports and he uses his platform as an athlete to be able to do so. Nike cannot monetize civil commitment to societal betterment without the possibilities of their profits being affected.

The very nature of the reality behind the political simulation we participate is that corporations, our political parties, and many of our public figures simply do not have our interest in mind. They care about power and money as a means for their own advancement at our expense. If they can get us to go along with the means of our own subjugation and disenfranchisement, that is all the sweeter.

Players like Jaylen Brown cannot be allowed to have a Michael Jordan or Lebron James level platform, being a billionaire and having the means to participate in society in the same league as the corporate and political elites. He might just have the ability break through the simulation and shake our society into consciousness just as he routinely breaks the simulation of sports.

Which is why most people don’t know much about Jaylen Brown other than what he has done on the court.