Ramona and Beezus, and Kendrick Perkins

There have been some big stories in the NBA this year.  Lebron and Bosh join Wade in Miami.  Carmelo forces his way to New York.  Utah trades Deron Williams to New Jersey to avoid having him force his way out next year.  And to hear most people talk about it, the NBA is doomed because of this.  We can't put up with a league where stars pick where they get to play.  It's all too selfish, too contrived, and leaves middle America feeling like a basketball farm system.  Something needs to change.  Or so they say.

Well, to me, the biggest story of the season is that Kendrick Perkins was traded from my beloved Boston Celtics to the Oklahoma City Thunder and cried about it.  I know that's a little like saying "Ramona and Beezus" was a more powerful movie than "The King's Speech"...which...well actually...funny you should mention it...

I watched these two movies about a week apart from one another.  I saw "The King's Speech" first.  I was moved, not quite to tears, but I was moved.  I thought it was one of the finest movies I had ever seen.  So you can imagine my confusion when I found myself sobbing by the end of "Ramona and Beezus" a week later.  It was not the finest movie I had ever seen, but it was the first that ever made me cry.

Just a couple of days before watching "The King's Speech", a fellow pastor's kid and I (we are now both pastors) were sitting at a table with our dads.  We were talking about how difficult it was for us to move at age twelve.  His story involved sincerely invoking the words, "My God, why hast thou forsaken me."  Mine involved lying in bed as my dad shared the news with my older brother, thinking that I was asleep.  I was not ready to leave Connecticut for Nebraska.  I cried all night.

These feelings were fresh in my mind, when I sat down to watch "Ramona and Beezus" with Kathy one week later.  So when Ramona was struggling with the idea of moving from the only house she ever knew; I was right there with her.  And I cried like a baby.  My eyes didn't just get a little moist like they do when they "move that bus" on Extreme Makeover Home Edition.  I bawled.

Moving is hard.

Kendrick Perkins cried because he left the only basketball city he had known.  A place where he was a key player on a championship team.  A place where he had become best friends with Rajon Rondo.  A place where he felt like he belonged.  And without his consent, he was sent away.  Kendrick Perkins, he of the prominent shoulders, needed a shoulder to cry on.

Kendrick's story is the biggest of the season, because it gives us perspective.  It reminds us that:

1.  Most players don't actually make their own decisions about where they'll play.  Not even very good players like Perkins.  Most players' fate rely on the decisions of billionaires and executives.  So maybe we should be slower to judge the ones who are good enough to make their own decisions, even if we disagree.  The NBA essentially has a system in which a team has 7 year's to build a competitive team around a young player.  The financial incentive to stay means that most star players spend at least their first 5-7 years in one place.  We expect too much if we think they should have any obligation to stay longer than that.  And with talents like Lebron, or Carmelo, or Deron, if you can't put championship pieces around them in seven years, it's actually better for them, and for the league to give them all a fresh start.

2.  One of the teams that has the best chance to win over the next 10 years is in a tiny market in middle America.  The OKC team to which Perkins was traded, is young, talented, and seems committed to stick together.  So maybe basketball in small markets is not dead.  And maybe not all star players (see: Kevin Durant) are wired the same way, which leads me my final point...

3.  Basketball players are human beings.  Muscles, money, and expectations do not make athletes any less or any more human.  When we put athletes on pedestals we give them superhuman qualities.  When we reduce them to trading cards, we strip them of that humanity all together.  We forget that they are human.  We forget that they have emotions, weaknesses, and goals separate from our own. 

I loved "The King's Speech" because it emphasizes what we all have in common as humans.  We all have weaknesses, and we all have a purpose.  We may have different roles, but no one role is any more or less important than any other.  A king may need a speech therapist to look him in the eye, call him by his nickname, and have the gall to see him as an equal.  And because of this speech therapist, the king could perform his kingly duty when the world needed it most.  In order for this spectacular moment to happen, they had to reach some common ground.

Kendrick and I have common ground.  We both moved.  We both cried.  If I met him, I might not be able to look him in the eye (he's really tall), but I would hope we could sit down and watch "Ramona and Beezus" and talk about how hard it is to move.  But most of all, I hope that he'll someday be able to say, like I do now, that moving was one of the best things that ever happened to him.