“Don’t wear your dad’s DIY sneakers” is a lesson Lonzo Ball learned in the most painful way possible

Lonzo Ball has been through hell. That’s the very clear impression left by an ESPN story published Thursday by Ramona Shelburne and Jamal Collier. Ball has spent the better part of three years battling a persistent injury to his left knee; The knee itself was steadily deteriorating most of the time. The injury was characterized by cartilage damage and sharp, overwhelming, hostile pain, the kind of vicious, penetrating pain that moves beneath the surface, expanding and tunneling and throbbing with its own hideous heartbeat. When I read about it, goosebumps run down my spine. This shit for months. Pain that started with a harmless jammed knee and then progressed into a debilitating but fundamentally mysterious chronic condition that negated multiple surgeries and thousands of hours of rehabilitation and physical therapy.

Ball had cartilage replacement surgery in March 2023 and his condition steadily improved from that point on. This was apparently a risky maneuver, and in fact his surgeon tried to talk him out of it, saying it might not work and might even make the situation worse. It worked, or has worked so far, and Ball is back on the court for the Chicago Bulls this season (more or less: he missed 16 games with wrist problems and played less than 100 minutes total), which is great news Feel-good story.

It’s probably too much to hope that Ball will ever be able to make up for the hype that accompanied his arrival in the NBA, which largely faded after his first All-Star break in the pros, but there are already signs that he can bounce back to life as a useful rotational basketball player. The sample size is tiny, but the Bulls, who stink, are a whopping 17 points per 100 possessions better on offense when the ball is on the court, according to NBA stats. And that was his whole thing in Chicago before his knee went out: When he was on the court, the Bulls were quicker, more fluid and more organized, even if his individual numbers never stood out from inside the box.

Back to me: Over the summer I experienced strange, unexplained, persistent and increasing pain for about three weeks until, at its peak, I spent a few days in the hospital. At the end of this process I was a completely scraped shell of a person. That was three weeks! Ball struggled with “excruciating and unrelenting” pain on and off for more than a year, not to mention the loss of career opportunities, long-term job security and basic bipedal mobility. It says something about his strength and the quality of his support systems that he appears to have come no closer to madness than starting his own podcast.

About that support system: Lonzo is known to be a member of the Ball-Ball clan. His younger brother LiAngelo is a basketball player and most recently played in the Mexican league CIBACOPA. The youngest brother, LaMelo, is the star of the Charlotte Hornets, who also stink, but in an entertaining way. Famously or infamously, her father is the dreaded LaVar Ball, a coattails entrepreneur and world-class overbearing youth basketball coach who moved frighteningly close to the center of the basketball universe during Lonzo’s time at UCLA and during his two seasons with the Lakers. As I type this, I’m gritting my teeth so hard that you can hear not only their squeaks but the echoes of their squeaks, but I have to type it: You just have to hand it to LaVar on the basketball development front. No matter how offensive one might otherwise find his parenting achievements, the man definitely raised two NBA-level basketball players.

At the height of Lonzo’s initial fame, LaVar also launched the Big Baller Brand (BBB) ​​clothing and basketball shoe line. Here’s where the ESPN story gets pretty tricky: An unnamed person apparently gave the young Lonzo reason to believe that BBB was his only option for a shoe sponsor after he graduated college – although, to be clear, he was a presumed lottery pick. Draft pick and perhaps the most famous college basketball player of a generation. This led to Lonzo wearing his father’s shoes during his first days as a top-level basketball player:

“I’ve been an Adidas kid since high school, so I thought this was the way to go,” Ball said. “But what I was told was probably not what really happened. I was told no one wanted to work with me, so my dad was like, ‘Just rock the brand.’ And I thought, ‘All right.'”

The problem, Ball said, was that the first shoes his father made for him for the 2017 NBA Summer League were unwearable.

“They were like kickball shoes,” Ball said.

There is nothing in this that clearly suggests that this choice of completely inadequate footwear (the ESPN blog has a photo of the hilariously sock-like BBB shoes Lonzo wore as a rookie) weakened or aggravated anything about Lonzo’s legs. But it sure sounds like Lonzo’s dad tricked him into wearing some shit that had been sewn together (at least figuratively) in the family living room, and it also sounds like Lonzo is wearing the rest of his Spend his life wondering whether those early shoe decisions led to his later, catastrophic, career-altering knee problems.

Eventually, Big Baller Brand entered into an agreement with Skechers to manufacture its shoes, which Ball wore throughout his rookie season. But Ball said he wasn’t happy with those shoes either and believes they may have contributed to the first meniscus injury he suffered as a rookie in January 2018.

“To be honest, I think it’s definitely a possibility,” Ball said. “I didn’t really hurt myself that much until I started wearing them.”

Yikes.