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Durant bought her. She stepped out of the room for a moment, and when she
came back she saw her phone fluttering. Fifteen texts?
She looked at the first. It was from a friend. It just said: Oh no.
Frantic, she rewound the game, pressed pause, put her face close to the
screen, looked deep into her son’s frozen eyes, trying to see how bad it was.
It was bad.
She cried when he answered the phone. He told her it was OK, because
that’s what the son of a single mother says. She said she was on her way, she’d
be on a plane that night. He said no. The next day would be soon enough.
She was at New York’s Hospital for Special Surgery 48 hours later, the
last face he saw as they wheeled him into the operating room and one of the
first he saw when he woke from the anesthesia. She then followed him to
a suite at the Four Seasons, where she did all the things he couldn’t do for
himself. “He was in the tub,” Wanda says, “and I was washing him, and we
were talking, making sure his leg didn’t get wet and the bandage stayed dry,
and he said: ‘Mom, it feels good to have you take care of me.’ And it just—”
She stops, overcome with emotion.
The moment was especially sweet because not long ago mother and son
were on the outs. Wanda had been handling Durant’s financial affairs since
he broke into the league, but in 2014 he decided to take control. It caused a
rift, which took months, Durant says, to heal.
After several days Wanda went home, and Durant moved to a temporary
apartment in SoHo. His father came. (Wayne Pratt wasn’t present for most
of Du ra nt ’s ch i ld hood, but he’s now pa r t of Du ra nt ’s sma l l i n ner ci rcle.) They
ate vegetarian takeout, watched The Black Godfather, spent a whole after-
noon together without once mentioning basketball, even though the NBA’s
free agency period was days away. The basketball world was breathlessly
waiting to hear which team Durant would choose, and Durant’s father was
breathless too. But Durant was determined to keep his own counsel.
A far cry from three years ago, says Rich Kleiman, Durant’s manager,
business partner and close friend. In the summer of 2016 he and Durant
rented a palatial estate on Further Lane in the Hamptons and welcomed a
procession of lobbying delegations from various teams, including a party
of four stars from Golden State. This time around, shortly before the start
of free agency, Kleiman met Durant for lunch at Cipriani, a chic restaurant
in SoHo, and gave him one last overview of all the teams and all his options.
Durant said: “All right. Well. I’m going with Brooklyn.” Just like that.
Kleiman was taken aback: For real? Yes, Durant said. End of discussion.
(Looking back on both free-agency crossroads, Kleiman laughs. “The
Hamptons and Cipriani? How bougie can you get?”)
Durant says his decision-making process was as simple on the inside
as it looked from the outside. Brooklyn was the right fit; he just knew. He
didn’t even speak to the Nets before his decision, he says. He didn’t need a
PowerPoint. He’s always felt big love as a visiting player at Barclays Center,
he says, and he wondered what it might be like if he were on the home
team. Plus, the Nets offered the opportunity to join his “best friend in the
league,” Kyrie Irving.
Of course, Durant says, he was conflicted about leaving the Bay Area. “I
came in there wanting to be part of a group, wanting to be part of a family,
and definitely felt accepted,” he says. “But I’ll never be one of those guys.
I didn’t get drafted there.... Steph Curry, obviously drafted there. Andre
Iguodala, won the first Finals, first championship. Klay Thompson, drafted
there. Draymond Green, drafted there. And the rest of the guys kind of reha-
bilitated their careers there. So me? Shit, how you going to rehabilitate me?
What you going to teach me? How can you alter anything in my basketball
life? I got an MVP already. I got scoring titles.”
That he stood out, stood apart from the group, felt preordained.
“As time went on,” he says, “I started to realize I’m just different from the
rest of the guys. It’s not a bad thing. Just my circumstances and how I came
up in the league. And on top of that, the media always looked at it like KD and
the Warriors. So it’s like nobody could get a full acceptance of me there.”
He scoffs at rumors that his public disagreement with Green, in the final
moments of a game last November, was determinative. (Durant scolded
Green for not passing him the ball; Green then berated Durant, repeatedly
calling him a bitch.) It was “a bullshit argument,” he says, “that meant noth-
ing. Absolutely nothing. We were good before it. We were great.”
And great, he insists, after.
But there was also this: From a strictly competitive, strategic standpoint,
Durant had come to fear that Golden State had hit a ceiling.
“The motion offense we run in Golden State, it only works to a certain
point,” he says. “We can totally rely on only our system for maybe the first
two rounds. Then the next two rounds we’re going to have to mix in indi-
vidual play. We’ve got to throw teams off, because they’re smarter in that
round of playoffs. So now I had to dive into my bag, deep, to create stuff on
my own, off the dribble, isos, pick-and-rolls, more so than let the offense cre-
ate my points for me.” He wanted to go someplace where he’d be free to hone
that sort of improvisational game throughout the regular season.
His tenure in the Bay Area was great, he says, but because of media
speculation, fan anxiety, “it didn’t feel as great as it could have been.”A
SMALL DETAIL, perhaps telling: He hasn’t been back to the
Bay Area since June, since the injury, and he has no plans to
return. His staff cleaned out his apartment in San Francisco,
packed up the furniture, the memorabilia, including the
MVP trophies that sat on the mantel. He doesn’t know when
he’ll return again.
Meaningful? Merely logistical? People want to know. Desperately. Durant
knows they want to know. Breakups represent change, and change repre-
sents death—naturally people obsess. Some still need clarity on Jennifer
Aniston and Brad Pitt, the Beatles. What the hell did Yoko do?
Durant has a Ph.D. in this phenomenon. When he left the Oklahoma City
Thunder for Golden State, reaction was intense. Overnight he went from
icon to traitor. The memory still pains him.
“People coming to my house and spray-painting on the for sale signs
around my neighborhood,” he recalls. “People making videos in front of my
house and burning my jerseys and calling me all types of crazy names.”
At his first game in Oklahoma City as a visitor—February 2017—fans
yowled for blood and brandished cupcakes, because Durant was supposedly
soft. “Such a venomous toxic feeling when I walked into that arena,” he says.
“And just the organization, the trainers and equipment managers, those
dudes is pissed off at me? Ain’t talking to me? I’m like, Yo, this is where we
going with this? Because I left a team and went to play with another team?”
His mother recalls one particularly appalling piece of video: a Thunder
fan firing bullets into a No. 35 jersey. Bullets—after she and Durant and half
his extended family relocated to Oklahoma, after they embraced the com-
munity, after Durant gave a million dollars to tornado victims.
“I’ll never be attached to that city again because of that,” Durant says. “I
eventually wanted to come back to that city and be part of that community
and organization, but I don’t trust nobody there. That shit must have been
fake, what they was doing. The organization, the GM, I ain’t talked to none
of those people, even had a nice exchange with those people, since I left.”
Though fans in Toronto roared with pleasure and glee the moment he
ruptured his Achilles, he doesn’t view that behavior in the same light. On
the contrary, it tickled him. Torontonians knew he was playing the best
basketball of his life. “They was terrified that I was on the floor,” he says,
suppressing a smile. “You could feel it the second I walked out there.”
Does this same largesse extend to Toronto’s über booster, Drake,
who trash-talked the Warriors and practically ran the floor on every fast
break, thus irking half a continent? It does, it does. “That’s my brother.
I view him as, like, blood.” If you get upset about how Drake roots for his
hometown team, he adds, “You need to reevaluate yourself.”
No, what Durant doesn’t like, what unnerves him, is when raw hatred
poses as fandom. “We talk about mental health a lot. We only talk about it
when it comes to players. We need to talk about it when it comes to execu-
tives, media, fans.”
As with the ruptured Achilles, however, the bitter parting with Oklahoma
City brought hidden boons. “It made me realize how big this whole shit is,”
he says. The “shit,” he says, is “the machine,” a great big invisible generator
of narratives, programmed by the powers that be to gin up controversy, con-
flict, whatever keeps people dialed in. He’s learned—he’s learning—to free
himself from the machine, to separate the game he loves from the noise and
nonsense surrounding it.MAN IN FULL
Laurene Powell Jobs,
who helped Durant
establish an educational
program in Maryland
near where he grew
up, calls him “a deeply
integrated individual.”
Louis Vuitton jacket,
Ralph Lauren turtleneck
and Durant’s own pants
and accessories.