Jaylen Brown exit interview: the perils of success

I’ve talked more about Jaylen Brown in therapy than perhaps I have any other basketball player. Not more than any other human being. That would be asinine. But basketball player? Most definitely. He still comes up more than he should. Probably more than any basketball player should. But these are my therapy sessions, and thus my analogies to toy with. They work for me; I haven’t asked whether they work for Dr. Bailey, but she also hasn’t asked.

There has never been a professional athlete to which I’ve felt more connected to than Brown. I relate to his experience with anxiety, the voices in his head that he’s previously struggled to quiet. Back in February of 2020, he told Bleacher Report’s Taylor Rooks, “It was tough,” referring to the 2018-19 season, during which Brown briefly lost his starting spot, and the Celtics lost more games than preseason prognosticators anticipated. “I suffer from a lot of anxiety. When you have so much expectations, especially in a city like Boston, which is like they want to win. If you’re not performing, you start to lose your confidence. You start to doubt yourself.”

Even though the fears he’s detailed in the past exist primarily on the basketball court – that is, per what he’s detailed – I can understand them. The nagging thoughts of inadequacy in your field, for one; I never stop itching to be a better writer, editor, reader, listener. The idea that others around you, proven or otherwise, might look down on you, no matter if it comes from a place of pure malice or is done in an effort to pick themselves up. That might happen more often in professional sports than in any other field in the world, sans politics. They call it trash talk for a reason, the same reason it might be said that someone “talks a big game.”

Maybe that’s why I can fathom the urge Brown has to like a tweet referencing how he’s disrespected by Celtics fans amid swirling rumors surrounding Brown’s inclusion in a hypothetical deal to acquire Kevin Durant now that he asked the Brooklyn Nets for a trade. Or his impulse to respond to Draymond Green’s comments about taking Brown’s “heart” in the NBA Finals. On a paired podcast recording of Green’s “The Draymond Green Show” and JJ Redick’s “The Old Man and the Three”, Green opined, “when Jaylen Brown went in the media and said, ‘he tried and pulled my shorts down,’ I knew I took his heart.” Brown responded accordingly, saying Green “lost…