Model Text: “A Changing Ball Game:

A Changing Ball-Game^[1]

LaVar Ball is changing the National Basketball Association’s shoe- and player-branding culture without playing a single NBA minute. His son, Lonzo, is a few short weeks away from hearing his name among the first few called in the NBA Draft after a standout year playing basketball at UCLA. Lonzo has two younger brothers as well, one of whom, LiAngelo, will play at UCLA in the 2017-2018 season, and another, LaMelo, who committed to the same university as his brothers two years ago even though he was just an eighth-grader (Calle). The three Ball children played on the same high school team in Chino Hills, California, setting the world alight in early 2016 with their high-powered, free-flowing offense centered around the brothers. They would jack shots that “traditionalists would argue against” but after winning a national championship, “Chino Hills [had] proved its effectiveness in ways never seen before” (Calle). Since then, as the Balls have started to transition out of the world of children playing basketball and entered into the more adult level of college sports (and, soon, the NBA), the attention has shifted from the boys to their father. His outspokenness and demands for respect and inclusion are making waves across the basketball world, even possibly having lasting effects on athletes in every sport.

LaVar is attempting to influence everything around his sons, particularly Lonzo as he goes into the league: he is claiming his son will only play for certain teams and, most controversially, distancing himself and his sons from the major shoe companies in a way that an athlete’s camp rarely does at such an early stage in their professional career. What he is doing is undoubtedly risky, but it has clear upside too. If it works, it could clear a path for future athletes to be successful building and monetizing a brand that is not dependent on the sneaker industry. Even if it does not work, it will provide a rough blueprint upon which others can improve in order to become as big as the major signature athletes without having to depend on the corporations backing them.

Attacking the status quo is LaVar’s forte. When he and his family first moved into their home in the Alterra neighborhood in Chino Hills, he received grief from the homeowner’s association for attempting to paint his home white and not sticking with the peach color mandated by the association’s guidelines. Fast-forward to now, and President of the Alterra Homeowner’s Association LaVar Ball lives in a white home, proclaiming, “If Obama can have the White House, Goddamnit Big Baller can have a white house!” (Calle). LaVar’s haughty yet sometimes wildly ambitious statements about his family and esteemed symbols like the president have become a bit of a… thing, too. To date, he has said that Lonzo would make the best team in the league (the Golden State Warriors) better if they somehow swapped him with Steph Curry, the back-to-back and first-ever unanimous NBA Most Valuable Player. Lavar has called Lonzo the best player in the world; he said that Lonzo would only play for the Los Angeles Lakers. Lavar said that he himself would beat Michael Jordan, arguably the greatest human basketball player to live on the planet Earth, in a one-on-one game. These comments, along with Lonzo’s campaign on the court and LaMelo’s highly controversial 92-point game at Chino Hills, have all coalesced into making the Balls the most (in)famous family in the basketball world’s recent memory. They have created a name for the family that is extraordinarily atypical in a time where players are coming in as more and more nondescript products to the league each passing year.

The Balls’ need to have creative control has not stopped at the painted house, either. In fact, the largest dispute surrounding their branding with shoe companies today is centered around their need for creative control. The types of deals that are available to NBA players are very structured and limited to three tiers. According to Yahoo! Sports’ NBA shoe insider Nick DePaula, undrafted rookies and fringe NBA players typically receive “merchandise” or “merch” deals from shoe companies that gives them sneakers and gear for them to play in. These deals amount to products around $50,000 to $100,000. That is just a baseline though—effectively the minimum wage a professional hooper can be paid to promote a brand like Nike, adidas, or Under Armour, rather than the player cutting a check from their own wallet for footwear.

The next tier of deal is called a “cash” deal, “where the majority of the league falls” (DePaula). Players with these deals will get a certain amount of cash, essentially a salary, over a set number of years according to the contract they sign with the company. On top of that, though, many of the best players in the league will get their own logos, phrases or ad campaigns along with colorways, known as player exclusives, of the shoes that Nike is running out that season to match their team’s jerseys or something connected to the player. The salaries are negotiated by agents and depend on how marketable the player is. Usually, “a rookie will sign a shoe deal with a brand that’ll last three or four years” and the “current shoe deal range for a marketable lottery pick [such as Lonzo Ball] can be anywhere to $200,000 to $700,000 [per year], with exceptions every so often for what brands consider to be ‘can’t-miss’ endorsement stars” such as Andrew Wiggins, who signed an $11 million deal spread over five years with the bonus as being a key headliner for their new line of sneakers (DePaula). This is the same tier where Lonzo would probably find himself, given the fame the Balls have crafted for themselves coming into the draft. In an interview with ESPN Radio’s The Dan Le Batard Show with Stugotz, Lonzo confirmed that Nike, adidas, and Under Armour offered five-year deals worth $2 million per year.

The most exalted compensation a player can get for partnering with a sneaker company, though, is a signature sneaker. A signature sneaker deal offers more money, the status as one of the company’s premier athlete in the sport, and a shoe designed and marketed specifically for the individual player. This is only for the most elite of the elite and “will forever be the most sought after deal in basketball” (DePaula). There are only ten basketball players out of the current 450 active NBA players that have signature shoes with American brands: LeBron James, Kevin Durant, Kobe Bryant (now retired), and Kyrie Irving with Nike; Chris Paul, Russell Westbrook, and Carmelo Anthony with Nike’s subsidiary Jordan Brand; Derrick Rose, Damian Lillard, and James Harden with adidas; and Stephen Curry with Under Armour. Most of these superstars came into the NBA with cash deals and player exclusives and worked their way up to a signature. Signature shoes are so hard-earned that rookies are rarely awarded them for their first professional game. The last two times it happened were John Wall’s Reebok Zig Slash seven years ago and LeBron James’ Nike Air Zoom Generation in 2003, nearly a decade-and-a-half ago (DePaula). The two were surefire commodities, John Wall becoming a multiple time All Star and one of the best players at his position and LeBron James cementing himself as one of the greatest players in the history of the game. So, for someone to waltz into negotiations with sneaker company powerhouses and expect anything more than a cash deal—maybe a player exclusive colorway or two without being billed as a bona fide superstar—would be like a player walking up the court and launching shots up from 20 feet beyond the three-point line.

Of course, shooting shots like this are exactly what the Balls do, whether that is figuratively in LaVar’s comments or literally in LaMelo’s shot selection in games. There exists a subset of players in the league with cult-like followings because of the shots they shoot. Earl “J.R.” Smith, Dion Waiters and others live in this beloved sphere despite their questionable added benefit to their teams. A wise man, Wayne Gretzky, once said, “You miss 100% of the shots you don’t shoot,” essentially stating that no inherent harm exists in attempting the unimaginable. Even wiser and less accomplished men boiled this down to the phrases “If You Don’t Hunt, You Don’t Eat” and “Shooters Shoot.” The Balls are shooters who walk into any room with two spoons in their holsters equipped to dine. In a widely circulated clip from a Chino Hills game earlier this year, LaMelo dribbled the basketball up from the backcourt, pointed at the half court line to indicate the spot he was going to shoot from and audaciously pulled up from the exact spot. The net subsequently swelled in the purest of ripples. LaVar did the same thing. He told the world that he would take nothing less than a billion—with a B—dollars for his sons to sign with a shoe company. The typical cash deal would not be enough, though, even if they met his billion dollar demands. Companies would need to absorb the family’s business, Big Baller Brand (or 3 Bs), rather than simply adding a swoosh or three stripes onto Ball products. They required co-branding, a partnership that would be more akin to Jordan Brand’s current relationship with Nike than to athletes like Kyrie Irving or Kevin Durant’s relationships with Nike. LaVar has said, “[We] aren’t looking for an endorsement deal…. We’re looking for… a true partner” (Rovell). This is relatively unprecedented with Jordan Brand being the only real comparison in the sneaker world and that only became independent towards the end of Michael Jordan’s esteemed career (Sole Man). Even LeBron, Jordan’s only active peer in terms of greatness, operates wholly under Nike when it comes to shoes and athletic-wear.

Naturally, all three of the major shoe companies rejected the Balls’ request (Rovell). Not only was the request itself unique but, “never in the history of modern-day shoe endorsements have the big companies all stepped away from a potential top pick nearly two months before the NBA draft” (Rovell). LaVar maintains that he does not care about the rejection and this is all for the greater good, part of the bigger plan. He said that he knew the companies would never agree to his terms but he had to get them to say no because he “wanted to make sure so when they make this mistake and they look back, they’re going to say ‘man, we should’ve just given that man a billion dollars’” (Le Batard). Some people, including FOX Sports’ Lindsey Foltin, have claimed that despite the fact that “LaVar insists he’s doing what’s best for Lonzo, his behavior could end up costing his son millions.” Unsurprisingly, LaVar replied, “you goddang right I’m costing him millions because it ain’t about millions with us. It’s about them Bs. Billions” (Le Batard).

Beyond the dollar figure and amount of zeros on the contract, the biggest and most important part of these public negotiations have been the extent of input the Balls have on their own brand. That is the essential aspect of co-branding: the retention of creative control. When it comes down to it, LaVar asserts that “as long as my son’s got a shoe, if I only made 50 shoes, they’re for him. It’s his own shoe” (Le Batard). The pride that he has in Lonzo and that the Ball boys can have in their product is vital, and that is something he says his young, unproven sons would never get from the giants Nike, adidas, and Under Armour.

Besides a father’s pride in his sons, an athlete’s control over their own brand is increasingly becoming a point of contention between the players and the shoe companies. In his seminal piece examining how and why Stephen Curry walked away at the expiration of his deal with Nike, Ethan Strauss discusses Curry’s own journey to create his own space in the sneaker and basketball worlds. A huge concern for Curry while negotiating a renewed deal with Nike, which he signed as a rookie before he became the superstar he is today, was whether he would get to lead his own Nike-sponsored camp for elite youth players. This not only lets young players learn from the best, but it also allows the professionals to tangibly affect the best up-and-coming talents, something much “more meaningful than strangers clamoring for autographs on the street” (Strauss). Nike, though, did not value Curry enough to give him this and put him on their second tier of athletes, the athletes without their own signature. Now, though, with Under Armour, Curry has both his camp and a signature sneaker and is a bigger, more unique star than he ever would be under Nike.

Curry is not alone in this, either. A player’s brand is inextricably linked to their footwear nowadays, perhaps more than the teams they play for and their on-court prowess. DePaula points out that shoe deals are actually negotiated in much the same way that free agent contracts are hashed out. He also writes, “[As] players of all levels enter the league, their eventual shoe deal continues to be secondary to team deals, but sneaker contracts have become more lucrative and incentivized.” This has gotten so extreme that in the same offseason that LeBron signed a one-year contract with the Cleveland Cavaliers, he signed a lifetime deal with Nike worth more than half a billion (Strauss). ESPN Radio host Bomani Jones even argues that, because of this, many players’ first loyalties lie with the shoe companies instead of their teams: “your primary employer is who pays you the most money…. LeBron was Team Nike before he was a Cleveland Cavalier or a member of the Miami Heat or any of those things. We contextualize guys around the teams they play for because that’s the relevant variable for the kind of work that we do” (Strauss). In fact, Jones and Curry got into a minor spat on Twitter when Curry saw some jabs that Jones had poked at his Under Armour shoes. Curry took it very seriously and personally, said Jones, pointing out that “there doesn’t seem to be much space in his mind between himself and Under Armour” (Strauss). This is why many athletes, the Balls foremost among them, are becoming more and more concerned with their role in crafting their own brand and how it is all integrated into their overall image as public figures: “Curry and James aren’t just salvos in a battle between brands; it’s a personal war…. It’s a fight for something even bigger than a basketball career” (Strauss).

While this is all nice and well for players at the height of their basketball powers, LaVar is endeavoring to claim agency for himself and his family before any of them have stepped on a professional basketball court, a fact few critics have failed to point out. They have not earned this yet. Nobody’s ever tried to forge their own lane without already being great. But maybe this is not the case. In fact, LeBron began breaking out of the corporation-defined mold after just one year in the league, albeit an all-time great year. After his rookie year, “Mr. James did the almost unthinkable in the sometimes stuffy world of sports marketing — he handed his off-the-court businesses and marketing over to” his childhood friends Maverick Carter, Rich Paul, and Randy Mims (Thomaselli). LeBron was searching for the same self-definition that the Balls are now. Looking back, LeBron recalls, “I wanted to wake up in the morning and say I did it my way. I’m not being cocky and saying it’s my way or the highway; I just wanted to make a decision” (Thomaselli). It is nearly the same exact notion that LaVar and Lonzo are currently pushing more than a decade later. At the time, LeBron “and his friends also wanted a new type of sports marketing. Rather than endorsements, he wanted partnerships” (Thomaselli). This reads almost verbatim to what LaVar is talking about now in the year 2017. History may not be repeating itself but it is, at the very least, rhyming.

Neither of these journeys—LeBron’s and the Ball family’s—are without speedbumps, though. LeBron and his people created their own management and media agency, LRMR, in Maverick Carter’s mother’s kitchen after firing LeBron’s agent (Torre). LRMR’s first major media project was “The Decision — the broadly consumed and deeply unpopular ESPN primetime special wherein James announced he was leaving the Cavs for the Heat” (Torre). This seemingly self-indulgent, look-at-me production made LeBron the most hated player in the league for quite some time (despite it raising tens of millions of dollars for charity). Similarly, the Ball family’s notoriety is coming at the expense of many criticisms of LaVar’s outspokenness. The resemblances between the two cases are uncanny; the Balls are just more pronounced in their desires while moving the timeline ahead a year. After all, LaVar did declare that they were never planning to “sign with a company and then wait around for five or six years for a shoe” (Rovell).

Now that LeBron has neared the mountaintop of basketball and dominates the sneaker world as well, he has set his sights to other avenues. He has continuously chosen partnerships—such as his with Warner Bros. that the studio called “unprecedented in scope”—that give greater creative control than their competing alternatives offered (Torre). LRMR has created Uninterrupted, a media outlet for players to connect directly with fans. Continuing to buck traditional sensibilities that hang on to the players’ teams as their primary allegiance, he headlines and works closely in this effort with Draymond Green, “James’ ostensible [Golden State] Warriors rival” (Torre). Notably, Draymond Green is also a Nike athlete, another hint to the waning importance of team conflicts as opposed to promotion of more personal undertakings. According to LeBron, the projects he is participating in now are all part of the “vision that [he] had 10-plus years ago” (Torre).

The Balls’ sights, while lofty in their own rights, have only been set on the sneaker industry as of now. Still, with their “Shooters Shoot” mentality and their propensity to reject established and outdated standards, it is possible that their ventures will lead them to paths outside of shoes. They are branding themselves in a vastly different way than most everyone else has and, most importantly, they are doing it their own individual way. LaVar said a year-and-a-half ago that they are “doing some shit that has never been done before. We kind of march to our own beat in the fact that we make our own rules…. We jumped out the box and took a risk” (Calle).

In a similar vein, LeBron cited the television show The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, noting similarities between himself and Will Smith’s titular character:

It was, [LeBron] admits, more than just a character on TV. More like an inspiration. ‘The guy makes it out of Philadelphia? I treated that as Akron, Ohio [LeBron’s hometown]. He makes it to Los Angeles with a rich family, but he can still be himself? That’s what I wanted to be. With the blazer inside out… All of that.’ (Torre)

The way players cling to this individuality within the often-starched backdrop is crucial and only growing in importance as values moves away from conventional team-based allegiances towards personal brands. LeBron’s circle mentioned how different things were in the early 2000s, when he came into the league, from the ‘80s, when Michael Jordan made his name because of the uprise of mass media and its use in making wider audiences more accessible (Thomaselli). This applies even more aptly in 2017 with social media’s advent, a huge advantage in marketing that has benefitted the viral-ness of many of the more eccentric shots LaVar has put up.

Frankly, the stakes are huge. It may be just sports, but the money exchanged on these playgrounds is massive. Stephen Curry’s “potential worth to [Under Armour] is placed at more than a staggering $14 billion” and business experts “peg total sneaker sales somewhere north of $20 billion annually, and rising” (Strauss). Unsaid but assumed up until now, much of the Balls’ potential as transcendent difference-makers depends upon at least one of the Ball brothers (Lonzo, LiAngelo, and LaMelo) being exceptional at the game that allowed them to get here. They are using what LeBron has been doing for nearly 15 years and refining the blueprint, but LeBron has a leg up as one of the few unequalled players in the game’s history. So, let us hypothetically assume the worst—that the Balls all bust or wear upon the public’s nerves to the point of no return: the fact that they have gotten this far is nevertheless remarkable. This phenomenon has not occurred in a vacuum. Even if they end up being nothing more than a small blip in Nike’s, adidas’s, and Under Armour’s smooth-sailing Titanics, they matter. They have presented those who follow a longer runway to launch from than was there previously—a runway that does not rely on these major corporations’ backing. When recalling his time playing at Chino Hills High School, Lonzo reflected, “I felt like I helped change the culture over there” (Calle). Now, before he has had his name called at the NBA Draft, he and Big Baller Brand are changing have already changed the culture on an even larger scale.

Works Cited

Calle, Franklyn. “Ball Is Life.” SLAMonline, 4 Aug. 2016, www.slamonline.com/blogs/on-the-come-up/ball-bros/#y4Hp1E4EKHUGZHLE.97.

DePaula, Nick. “Inside the Sneaker Industry: How NBA Shoe Deals Work.” Yahoo! Sports, Yahoo!, 29 Jan. 2016, http://sports.yahoo.com/news/inside-the-sneaker-industry–how-nba-shoe-deals-work-032155839.html.

Foltin, Lindsey. “How LaVar Ball Cost Lonzo a Shoe Deal with Nike, Adidas and Others.” FOX Sports, 30 Apr. 2017, www.foxsports.com/college-basketball/story/lavar-ball-lonzo-ball-cost-shoe-deal-endorsement-nike-adidas-under-armour-nba-draft-043017.

Le Batard, Dan and John Weiner. “The Dan Le Batard Show with Stugotz: Hour 1: LaVar Ball.” ESPN Radio, 5 May 2017, https://www.mixcloud.com/thedanlebatardshowwithstugotz/hour-1-lavar-ball-5517/.

Rovell, Darren. “Nike, Under Armour, Adidas Not Interested in Deal with Lonzo Ball.” ESPN, 30 Apr 2017, www.espn.com/mens-college-basketball/story/_/id/19264024/nike-armour-adidas-not-interested-deal-lonzo-ball.

Sole Man, directed by Jon Weinbach and Dan Marks. ESPN Films, 2015, http://www.espn.com/30for30/film?page=soleman.

Strauss, Ethan Sherwood. “You Won’t Believe How Nike Lost Steph to Under Armour.” ESPN, 23 Mar 2016, www.espn.com/nba/story/_/id/15047018/how-nike-lost-stephen-curry-armour.

Thomaselli, Rich. “All the King’s Men.” Advertising Age, vol. 77, no. 29, 17 July 2006, pp. 1-25. EBSCOhost, http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=buh&AN=21668901&site=ehost-live.

Torre, Pablo S. “Lebron: The Sequel.” ESPN, 15 Feb. 2017, www.espn.com/espn/feature/story/_/id/18686205/the-second-chapter-lebron-james-career.

Teacher Takeaways “This essay is an impressive exploration of a current issue: I can tell how passionate the student is, and they develop a nuanced thesis about the Ball family’s influence on sports marketing and branding. While the essay is fluid, segueing from idea to idea pretty smoothly, the overarching organizational logic seems arbitrary. In other words, the structure feels fine while reading, but taking a step back makes the train of ideas blurry. I would encourage this student to make a reverse outline to clarify this issue. On a local level, I would also emphasize that the student should spend more time unpacking the quotes they use, rather than moving on right away. (Generally, you should avoid ending a paragraph with a quote, which this author does often).”– Professor Wihjlem