The summer after he wins it, the most recent NBA Finals MVP should never experience anything like tenuous reputational standing. And, really, Jaylen Brown isn’t. Everyone knows that in any game, he can be the best player on the floor, and that he frequently is. He’s improved every season, on both ends of the ball; everyone knows this, too. He’s paid accordingly, on a $285 million deal that’s one of the largest in league history. There’s very little missing from his basketball resume, and time aplenty to still add the rest, at 27 years old. He is, in so many ways—obvious to all who follow the sport—thriving.
Like many elite athletes, though, Brown has figured out how to construct a worldview in which he lacks proper respect. In which he is on the outside, denied access to something he deserves. And there is a minor credential gap, to be sure, between how good we know him to be and how he’s been honored for his play. Brown’s been an All-Star just three times, which he might argue is only half of what he’s deserved, and he’s been named to All-NBA squads just once, making the second team in 2023. He might fairly argue, too, that he deserves All-Defense selection, too, which has never happened.
More irksome to Brown, these days, is that Team USA goes to Paris for the 2024 Olympics without him. Presumably, every player in Brown’s position—narrowly on the wrong side of the invitational fringe—feels miffed. It’s the Olympics, after all. But Brown’s performance of his displeasure is notable. “Im not afraid of you or your resources,” he tweeted upon his snub. (The day before, as the roster selection process settled without him, he posted three of the same emoji: a curious man, arch-browed with a monocle).
Brown went on to accuse Nike of playing a role in his snub. For the past year, he’s worn their shoes with the swoosh logo unstitched from them. In 2022, he tweeted a critique of the company for ending their contract with his former teammate Kyrie Irving: “Since when did Nike care about ethics?” he asked, upon the news. In a subsequent interview, Brown said he was open to talking things out with the sneaker goliath, but it would seem that such a conversation has not transpired.
Perhaps that’s because a P.R. staffer at the company has researched Brown enough to be extra wary of his viewpoints. In 2021, he visited a classroom at his alma mater, The University of California, Berkeley. During the visit, Brown spoke about his experiences as a professional athlete through an unusual framework: Michel Foucault’s. The French historian and philosopher, famous for his ideas about social control in the 20th century, offered Brown a vision of the downright panoptic professional regiment that NBA players are put through.
He doesn’t mention Nike in his talk, instead referring more obliquely to a set of corporate and institutional powers who, together, monitor and punish the behavior of publicly visible athletes, to enforce favorable norms and quash out individuality. He explains that through his rise to the professional level, every camp of promising young ballers he went to featured extensive media training segments, in which the model behavior offered never spoke of politically outspoken examples like Bill Russell, Muhammad Ali, or Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. Maybe most importantly, Brown mentions that athletes risk the loss of endorsement if they don’t carry themselves in a certain way.
Brown’s opposition to Nike, and all that comes with it, stems from a nerve struck somewhere between pettiness and pure ideology. Exactly where he’s at on that continuum seems less important, however, than the dance of signifiers he does to get there. Authenticity is hard to confirm in the haze of multi-billion, international entertainment products, but what’s clear to all about Brown is that he really does want to mess with your understanding of how the league works. Whether you find meaning in his criticisms is not really what the Jaylen Brown experience is about; it’s more psychedelic than that. Just let yourself go into his thought voyage, into the haze of it all. It’ll make it all the more fun when you watch him cut through all that on the floor next October. There, he is quick, judicious, and mean. And there, he is free—as he’s happy to tell you—from the approval of the world.
