Opinion: Big Baller Brand was too beautiful to last
This is the online version of our morning newsletter, The Morning Win. Subscribe to get irreverent and incisive sports stories, delivered to your mailbox every morning.
The most compelling and incisive conceptual art piece of the 21st century met its symbolic end on Monday in the Instagram story of an NBA hanger-on named Dmo. Properly known as Darren Moore, Dmo has 271,000 followers on a social-media account largely dedicated to proving he is friends with Lakers guard Lonzo Ball, the eldest son of "globally loud" sports dad LaVar Ball and majority owner of Big Baller Brand.
Big Baller Brand seemingly started as the eldest Ball's ploy to convince a major existing sneaker company to pay big money on a licensing deal, but turned into something much greater when the bigger, baller-er brands didn't bite. The Ball family unveiled Big Baller Brand's website in May of 2017, and with it their first signature sneaker: The $495 ZO2, priced as such because LaVar "liked the way it sounds."
The initial rollout also included $220 flip-flops, which LaVar justified by comparing them with sandals from Gucci and Prada.
MORE COLUMNS: Read more commentary from FTW's Ted Berg
MARCH MADNESS PREDICTIONS: For the Sweet 16, Elite Eight
He's not wrong! There is no mass-produced sandal in the world that costs a company $220 to make, and there's probably no mass-produced sandal in the world that costs a company more than, like, $2.20 to make. People pay for labels and if you're ridiculous enough and outspoken enough that people are going to keep putting you on TV even after you've claimed you can beat Michael Jordan in 1-on-1, you might as well try charging people $220 for some shower shoes.
There's a sucker born every minute, like P.T. Barnum said, so people actually showed up when the Balls launched a Times Square pop-up shop to hawk Big Baller Brand's outrageously expensive merchandise. After the company got a failing grade from the Better Business Bureau for its inability to fulfill online orders in a timely matter, the Balls reduced the price of the second generation Z02s to $200 to make them "accessible to kids" and added a very subtle disclaimer to the website stating that the shoes would take four months to ship.
But as it turned out, the people charging up to $500 for sneakers that may or may not ever show up were themselves being defrauded. A recent ESPN report revealed that Alan Foster, an ex-con and LaVar Ball's close friend who owned a 16.3 percent stake in the company, took Big Baller Brand for $1.5 million.
That development led Lonzo and younger brother LaMelo to scrub their social-media accounts of all references to Big Baller Brand, which is how people indicate breakups in 2019. Then Dmo symbolically dropped a pair of ZO2s down a garbage chute with the hashtag #dumpurmerch, which really only makes sense in the warped contemporary reality that Big Baller Brand — intentionally or otherwise — skewered with its very existence.
If I paid $495 for some sneakers last year, why am I going to throw them out just because some dude stole money from the company? Do I get my money back if I do? If they no longer have the endorsement of Dmo, do they no longer protect my feet from the ground?
LeBron James Himself weighed in on his teammate Lonzo Ball's split with Big Baller Brand, and sadly, the sneaker game is lousy enough to make LeBron James himself sound like kind of a stooge. The whole thing is a racket, obviously, and while presumably some sneakers really do provide better support than others, there's probably little to no correlation between cost and quality in an industry practically built upon conspicuous consumption.
And nothing has ever really satirized that better than Big Baller Brand, as spoken into existence by LaVar Ball. Some things are just too perfect to last. We'll always have the memory of that Christmas sweater.