That Jayson Tatum Dunk on LeBron

My son just finished watching the same clip for the third time, and each time, he said the same thing. 

“Oh, damn! Oh, shit!”

He’s fifteen. I’m not about to get on him about the cursing. His friends say far worse when they’re on Discord together. It’s not what he’s said that concerns me, it’s what he said it about. 

The clip is from last night’s Eastern Conference Finals game between the Celtics and the Cavs. Jayson Tatum, a rookie, dunked on LeBron James about halfway through the fourth quarter. When I say dunked on him, I mean dunked over him, or maybe dunked right through him, in humiliating fashion, especially when it’s a rookie up against a guy who’s in the conversation for greatest of all time.   

“And he punked him right after, too. Get that, bitch!”

“Duncan!” Small swear words are fine, but we draw a line at misogyny, even when the bitch he’s talking about is a six-foot-nine man. 

“Well, look at it, dad.” He holds up his phone, eating the last of his eggs with his other hand. He keeps stabbing until the tines are full, then crams it all in his mouth. 

“I saw it last night when it happened. Tatum could have gotten a technical for taunting, and then that would have wiped those points right out. I also saw that after that dunk, LeBron and the Cavs won game seven on the Celtics’ home court to move on to the finals. Again.”

“So what? They’re just gonna lose to the Warriors.”

He’s almost certainly right, but this seems like one of those important moments when I’ve got a chance to use the five minutes before school and what little bit of waning influence I have to steer him in the right direction. Tatum intentionally ran into LeBron after dunking on him, in order to add to the humiliation. LeBron is made out of sheet metal, so he wasn’t hurt, just surprised by the little bump he felt, but Tatum was obviously pleased with himself in the clip. And Duncan is pleased watching Tatum.

This calls for finesse. LeBron can handle finesse as well as brawn. It’s what makes him the best. I wish I were as versatile as a father. At the adopted parents of children of color support groups, most of the other parents talk about how important it is not to see ourselves as white saviors, thinking we rescued our kids like they were puppies from a mill. I don’t know how anyone could think I saw myself as anyone’s savior. Fact is, once Duncan goes to school, I’m off to a job walking dogs. I’m sort of in between better things right now, which means Elle’s pulling most of the weight with the bills. If anything, Duncan is saving me at the moment, because Elle is more willing to put up with my lack of a grown-up income on account of how closely I’ve been keeping an eye on him lately. Not saying we don’t trust him; we just know these are the years where it starts to count a lot more if something goes wrong. 

Elle and I knew when we adopted our son we’d need to find black role models for him. It’s why we named him Duncan, after Tim Duncan, the Spurs’ power forward. We knew one day he’d find out about how and why he came to us, and we wanted him to know there are a lot of strong black men who stay with their families. I read the other day the number is increasing, actually. There are plenty of great role models, enough he doesn’t have to settle for weak ones. It’s why I wish he’d idolize LeBron, instead of the punk who thinks he’s somebody because of one big dunk. 

He’s hasn’t listened to me as much since he could beat me at basketball, which was about four years ago. Not that he doesn’t listen at all, but if I come on too strong, I’ll blow it and lose whatever ability to sway him I have. 

“We all get dunked on sometimes, son. And we all dunk once in a while, too. We have good days and bad days. But they’re all just days, and there’s another one coming right after it, just like as soon as you dunk on someone, you’ve got to run back and play defense. That’s why I like LeBron. He’s in it for the long haul, for the whole season, not just one play or one game.”

That was lame. I know it was. I wouldn’t have bought it when I was fifteen, and my generation had about one-tenth the cynicism his does. For the life of me, I can’t understand why they hate LeBron James so much. A generation before, I watched Michael Jordan kill my beloved Cavs every year, but I never hated him. Nobody did. He was the best, and that meant you couldn’t hate him. These kids, though, are ready to hate anything, to come up with a hot meme for why it sucks, to worry about LeBron’s hairline more than his game. Duncan doesn’t even eat Wheaties for breakfast. He thinks the carbs will be bad for his abs. He doesn’t want to be like Mike. 

He rinses his dish off and puts it in the dishwasher. He puts his silverware in the way his mother wants him to, tines up, although I always think it should be tines down so you don’t touch the part you eat with when you pull them back out. His friend is driving now, and he’s waiting for Duncan outside. 

“Have a good day, pops, he says,” still watching the clip as he pushes the door open with his backside. I think he goes through doors backwards to keep his kicks from getting scuffed. He’s tall and getting taller. 

It’s the end of his freshman year. He already knows he’ll play varsity next year. There are eight black boys in his school, and three are on the basketball team. If I had my druthers, he wouldn’t be playing, wouldn’t be propping up a statistic like three-eighths of black boys in a mostly white school will make the team and all the other assumptions in our community that get support from a statistic like that. But he’s good. I don’t want to tell him to play, and I don’t want to tell him not to play, just like I don’t want to tell him who to look up to, and yet I don’t want him to look up to the wrong people, either. 

To be the white father of a black boy is to assume you’re screwing everything up, especially when you’ve been walking dogs for a living since you left your job at the bank. My boss shouldn’t have said what he said about my son and basketball and why it’s lucky he didn’t get my genes or he wouldn’t have been as good. Maybe my boss didn’t really mean anything racial by it, was just giving me a hard time like he said. Maybe I shouldn’t have told him to fuck himself and ended up walking dogs. At the time, it felt like I was protecting Duncan, but now, we’re not going to be able to get him a car when he turns sixteen, and college is going to be a lot harder, too, so how it that looking out for him? 

I wish someone were keeping score of how I’m doing here. If I’m fucking this up, at least I’d know. I could live with getting dunked on if I knew I were getting dunked on. 

I hear his friend’s car pull away too fast. It’s time for me to go now, too. I start the dishwasher without having to look to see if he put his plate and fork in the right way. He’s mindful of some things. 

Jacob R. Weber is a translator living in Maryland. He has published fiction in The Baltimore Review, Another Chicago Magazine, The Chattahoochee Review, and other journals. His book of short stories, Don't Wait to Be Called won the 2017 Washington Writers' Publishing House Award for Fiction.