NBA – The Kyrie Irving Saga Continues
Bob Roberts
In today’s post we have a look at Kyrie Irving and his desire to have his cake and eat it too. Or, we could discuss what happens to people who suddenly come into mind bending wealth at a young age. Perhaps I should have titled this entry, ‘Just because you’re rich doesn’t mean you’re smart’. Conversely, just because you’re not rich doesn’t mean you’re stupid. Too many people, predominantly wealthy people but definitely not all, still believe that the amount of money you have is proportional to the size and ability of their grey matter. It’s why rich people believe that they should be judged under a separate set of rules. We see it everyday on the roads, people in BMWs and Audis ignoring the rules of the road as suits their purposes. It’s also why rich people often make terrible, terrible mistakes.
Enter Kyrie Irving, a talented basketball player or entertainer as he like to be called. Gifted with immense basketball talent he suddenly wakes up to the fact that there is a world outside of basketball and begins believing he knows as much about everything else as he does basketball. The world is flat, or at least it looks that way to me and in a breath, blows by hundreds of years of research by brilliant minds across the ages. Not since Columbus headed out across the Atlantic (look him up Kyrie) and did not fall off the edge of the planet, have people of even basic intelligence believed the world was flat. Much later of course, Kyrie decided that he was in fact kidding, that the world only looked flat.
Kyrie was stifled by Lebron until he understood that young guys don’t understand that they are only part of a whole. Then he announced he would be a Celtic forever before becoming stifled by the young Celtic stars.
Now, only a few years later he wants his privacy regarding his vaccination status. Boy, if there is one thing Kyrie doesn’t care for, it’s being told what to do. He showed Lebron and the Cavs, he showed the Celtics and now he’s showing the Nets. Not content to be part of a team, not content to be part of society, Kyrie is his own one man band. Thankfully he has enough money to believe that he doesn’t need anyone’s help, other than the people he pays to do his laundry and cooking and housecleaning, you know, the pawns in the game of life.
Irving has the right to choose not to be vaccinated — despite the vaccines being overwhelmingly successful in preventing hospitalizations and death from Covid-19, and a fully vaccinated (or close to it) society being our only real chance to getting fully back to normal in our world.
But given what we know about Covid-19’s infectiousness and the serious threat unvaccinated people pose to themselves and others, the Nets — and the broader society — have the right to say that you simply can’t be a part of what they are doing. Because actions have consequences. And while you can choose to do whatever you like with your body, you also must then accept that your choice may well negatively affect other parts of your life.
Earlier this month, while still not disclosing his vaccine status, Irving tweeted this: “I am protected by God and so are my people. We stand together.”
An according to CNN, “In an attempt to further clarify his position, sources “with knowledge of Kyrie’s mindset” told The Athletic’s Shams Charania that Irving is “not anti-vaccine and that his stance is that he is upset that people are losing their jobs due to vaccine mandates. … To him this is about a grander fight than the one on the court and Irving is challenging a perceived control of society and peoples’ livelihoods.”
So society, Kyrie, the very fabric that holds together the needs and wants of 7.5 billion people is controlling people’s livelihoods? Well of course it is, just like it always has from the first time 2 groups of humanoids came together for the betterment of both tribes. Their rules may have been very different, but they still had rules that members of the group had to follow in order to continue to be members of that group. Kyrie should know this because his talent isn’t valuable unless he has 4 more teammates, a front office, a league for many people to play in and perhaps most importantly, the tens of millions of fans who pay his salary. Without the fans, there is no money regardless the talent.
There is an old saying that a little bit of knowledge is dangerous. It certainly is but it’s also sad to see such potential burying itself in a morass of ignorance.