Lonzo Ball has been through hell. This is the very firm impression made by an ESPN story published Thursday, written by Ramona Shelburne and Jamal Collier. Ball has spent most of three years dealing with a persistent injury to his left knee; the knee itself spent much of that time steadily worsening. The injury was characterized by cartilage damage and sharp, overwhelming, hostile pain, the kind of malevolent invading pain that shifts around under the surface, expanding and tunneling and throbbing with its own vile heartbeat. Reading about it makes my skin crawl. Months and months of this shit. Pain that started with an innocuous jammed knee and then blossomed into a debilitating but fundamentally mysterious chronic condition, and which defeated several surgeries and thousands of hours of rehabilitation and physical therapy.
Ball had a cartilage replacement procedure in March 2023, and from that point forward, his condition has been steadily improving. This was apparently a risky maneuver, and indeed his surgeon attempted to talk him out of it, on the grounds that it might not work and could even make things worse. It worked, or has worked so far, and Ball is back on the court this season for the Chicago Bulls (more or less: he's missed 16 games with wrist troubles, and has played fewer than 100 total minutes), which is great news and a feel-good story.
It's probably too much to hope that Ball will ever come close to redeeming the hype that attended his arrival in the NBA, much of which had dissipated by his first all-star break in the pros, but already there are signs that he can resume life as a useful rotation-grade basketball player. The sample size is tiny, but the Bulls, who stink, are a whopping 17 points per 100 possessions more proficient on offense when Ball is on the court, per NBA stats. And that was his whole deal in Chicago before his knee kerploded: When he was on the court, the Bulls were faster and more fluid and more organized, even if his individual numbers never popped off the box score.
Back to me: Over the summer I had weird, inexplicable, persistent, and escalating pain for about three weeks, until at its climax I spent a couple days in the hospital. By the end of that process, I was a completely scraped-out husk of a person. That was three weeks! Ball was dealing with "excruciating and unrelenting" pain, on and off but mostly on, for more than a year, to say nothing of the loss of career opportunities, long-term job security, and basic bipedal mobility. It says something about his fortitude and the quality of his support systems that he evidently came no closer to insanity than launching his own podcast.
About that support system: Lonzo is, famously, a member of the Ball ball clan. His younger brother, LiAngelo, is a hoops journeyman who most recently played in Mexico's CIBACOPA domestic league. The youngest brother, LaMelo, is the star of the Charlotte Hornets, who also stink, but in an entertaining way. Famously or infamously, their father is the dreaded LaVar Ball, a coattail-riding entrepreneur and world-historically overbearing youth hoops coach, who put himself shockingly near to the center of the basketball universe during Lonzo's time at UCLA and during his two seasons with the Lakers. I am gritting my teeth so hard as I type this that you can hear not only their squeaking but the echo of their squeaking, but type it I must: You simply have to hand it to LaVar on the basketball development front. However otherwise objectionable you may find his performance as a parent to have been, the man certainly reared two NBA-grade basketball players.
LaVar also launched, at the height of Lonzo's early-career celebrity, the Big Baller Brand (BBB) line of apparel and basketball shoes. This is where the ESPN story gets pretty icky: Some unnamed person evidently gave young Lonzo reason to believe that BBB represented his only option for a shoe sponsor coming out of college—when, to be clear, he was a presumptive lottery draft pick and perhaps the most famous college basketball player in a generation. This led to Lonzo wearing shoes made by his dad, during his first days of playing basketball at the highest level:
"I was an Adidas kid since high school, so I was thinking that was going to be the route," Ball said. "But what was told to me, I guess, wasn't what really happened. I was told that nobody wanted to partner with me, so my dad was like, 'Just rock the brand.' And I was like, 'All right.'"
The problem, Ball said, was that the first shoes his dad had made for him to wear at NBA summer league in 2017 were unwearable.
"They were like kickball shoes," Ball said.
There is nothing in here that says definitively that this choice of woefully inadequate footwear (there's a photo in the ESPN blog of the hilariously sock-like BBB shoes that Lonzo wore as a rookie) in any way weakened or exacerbated anything in Lonzo's legs. But it sure sounds like Lonzo's dad tricked him into wearing some shit that had been (figuratively, at the very least) stitched together in the family living room, and it also sounds like Lonzo will spend the rest of his life wondering whether these early shoe choices led to his later, catastrophic, career-altering knee troubles.
Eventually, Big Baller Brand set up an arrangement with Skechers to manufacture its shoes, which Ball wore for his entire rookie season. But Ball said he wasn't happy with those shoes either and believes they could have contributed to the first meniscus injury he suffered as a rookie in January 2018.
"I think it's a possibility for sure, to be honest with you," Ball said. "I wasn't really getting hurt like that until I started wearing them."
Yikes.
