LOVE IT OR LEEVE IT: Garnett’s Apology Just Not Enough

On Monday, someone famous said, “It’s for all the marbles. Sitting in the house, I’m loadin’ up the pump. I’m loadin’ up the Uzi. I got a couple M-16s, a couple 9s. I got a couple joints with some silencers on them. I’m just loading clips, a couple grenades. I got a missile launcher with a couple of missiles. I’m ready for war.”

Alright, you say, sounds like a soldier getting ready for battle. The speaker, you think, must be preparing for the worst, for no one would jest about war in these troubled times.

So who is it, you ask?

You’re told that it was Minnesota power forward Kevin Garnett.

The war he refers to?

Tonight’s game seven of the Timberwolves-Kings Western Conference Semifinal series.

Say what?

Garnett’s comments took hyperbole to a new, repulsive level. Comparing sports to wars and battles isn’t anything new, but to go into such detail about guns, grenades and missile launchers is idiotic. Garnett seems to have missed the memo: Violence isn’t to be taken lightly in the world we live in today.

One day later, Garnett apologized, saying yesterday, “I was thinking about basketball, not reality.” The NBA does not plan on disciplining him. His coach Flip Saunders said Garnett used poor word choice, but it just shows how competitive he is. His point guard Sam Cassell said that fans would know that Garnett didn’t mean any harm.

I didn’t think he meant any harm either. But I still think he screwed up royally. That he’s getting off the hook so easily points to a serious problem in our society.

Guns, violence, blowing things up, ripping things apart—we’re inundated with all these images in our movies and TV shows. Not the news, not documentaries about war, but media made solely for entertainment purposes. We’ve been desensitized to such violence as it crops up in both action movies and comedies. Violence has been made larger-than-life, while in reality kids have to walk through metal detectors to get into their schools.

Garnett’s comments and apology show how wars and suffering around the world haven’t yet sunk into his minimally educated head. He can exist in a comfortable little bubble in which he earns $36 million a year on just a high school education—the fifth-highest athlete’s annual income according to this week’s Sports Illustrated—and plays a game for a living. Meanwhile, people around the world are dying real deaths by the very weapons he so easily rattled off his tongue.

No, he didn’t mean to disrespect anyone or to perpetuate the casual regard for violence in our society. His easy dichotomy of basketball and reality shows at least some recognition of the flighty nature of his job.

But he didn’t realize, when he calmly listed his weapons of choice, that he was crossing a line at the time. That those same weapons are being used to protect his millions and material possessions, his chance to play basketball, his life as he knows it. That those weapons’ very existence is one reason why such protection is necessary in the first place.

I’ll bet that the apology he issued wasn’t his own idea. It was the public relations department of the Timberwolves, his agent, maybe even his own family. They understood how crass his comments were, how he managed to offend some of his fans while the others glided over what he said without batting an eyelash. As a public figure with a huge influence over kids, he should have realized that his comments were wholly inappropriate.

I obviously don’t know Garnett, so I have no idea what sort of violence he has been exposed to in his life. But I do know that if I could, I would make him watch footage of both soldiers and civilians dying and see if he ever made light of war again.

—Staff writer Brenda E. Lee can be reached at belee@fas.harvard.edu. Her columns appear on alternate Wednesdays.