Hell hath no fury like not meeting other people’s expectations.
We set the bar, mind you, however high we deem appropriate. Whenever someone doesn’t meet the goals set for them, no matter how lofty they might be, we deem them failures. It is the endless cycle of building people up, only to inevitably tear them down. This has become a mainstay of sports culture, very much including the mainstream press.
The most obvious solution to the problem is not setting people up to fail. Although, to be fair, that’s like asking Liam Neeson to stop hunting bad guys or suggesting to Vince McMahon that bulky superheros are no longer the rage. It is in our DNA, much like theirs. We can’t help but want to assign projected roles for people, no matter how many times we are wrong to do so.
Instead of taking the blame for being uneducated or lacking the proper foresight to predict such things, we blame the person who failed us. That’s right… they somehow failed us. Magically, we blame others for not living up to our own impoverished viewpoints, much as we consider certain draft picks busts, while ignoring that the teams who selected them were wrong. The player wasn’t a “bust” so much as his team greatly overvalued him to begin with.
It is seemingly always that player’s fault. It has to be… but that’s mostly because we lack the self-awareness to acknowledge we are the actual failures.
Today’s example: Houston Rockets center Dwight Howard.
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Howard came to the NBA as a highly-regarded high school prospect. At the time the banter was about Orlando’s decision: him or Emeka Okafor? That’s right. There was a time when people, just like today, thought they were so smart that they put Okafor ahead of Howard on their mock drafts and fictitious arcs of projected greatness.
It was rather obvious, almost instantly, that Howard was going to be the better player. It wasn’t even close. While Okafor was a very good defensive player, Dwight Howard was much more than that. He was not only capable of displaying Okafor’s defensive prowess; Howard also showed a crazy ability to rebound, create points without the basketball, and alter games with his mere presence.
Therein lied the problem. Dwight Howard was so good, so young, that people wanted more from him. So much more. It was as though people used all his positive abilities at such an early developmental stage to set such unrealistic goals for — or more precisely, against — him.
This is where we need to circle-back to hell having no fury like unmet “goals.” Yes, the quote marks are quite intentional.
Goal-setting might seem to be positive on the surface — sometimes, it certainly can be — but much as people will sometimes give us unwanted or unrequested “gifts” in certain situations to convey the hidden message that they want something in return from us, fans and pundits sometimes set goals not in a spirit of encouragement, but to deliver an early-career ultimatum to a player.
“Goal-setting,” when done by a columnist or talking head, is often little other than an attempt to set up the big, loud “I was right — BUST!” column when said player doesn’t become the next legendary player in the sport’s pantheon.
People projected Howard to be the next great NBA center. Many wanted to liken him to a poor man’s Wilt or a more modern, athletic version of Shaq, but all those claims were merely wish-projections, the types of projections that set Howard up to fail. Rarely do our lazy “Player X will be the next all-time superstar” comparisons ever pan out.
This, apparently, becomes Howard’s fault. He is to blame for not being everything projected upon him when he was just entering the league. Despite being a true career double-double monster, Howard is considered not that good because he hasn’t become a world-beater, eater of worlds, or a center who has redefined the position for generations to come.
Howard does happen to be:
- One of the best rebounders in the NBA.
- A player who can score without having plays run through him.
- A still-solid shot-blocker.
- A player who alters opponents’ offensive sets by merely being near the rim.
- A near 60-percent basket-maker.
- A mostly unselfish player on the court.
Those sound like some terrific traits, right? I guess not, though. Not if you are one of the people continuing to bash him, or say how unimportant he is to Houston, on the mean streets of Twitter. 
It doesn’t help that people dislike Howard. I get that. His antics while trying to leave Orlando, only to have utterly failed alongside Kobe “Jelly Bean Jr.” Bryant in Laker Land, have made him as a beloved a figure as Lori in The Walking Dead.
He has become one of the NBA’s least-liked figures, and rightly so, but using his off-the-court behaviors to render verdicts about his on-court abilities is rather strange. It is, moreover, a flatly misguided effort to put down another person’s talents by way of using his personal characteristics to make a point.
Would you discredit Michael Jordan’s talents if you knew he gambled all night before games? Wait, you already knew that… but you still like him. So none of your opinions on him have changed. If anything, it only enhances his legacy.
Maybe this is less about Howard’s actual talents and more of our inability to like him in the slightest. History favors the people that are liked by the widely-acknowledged writers of the historical record. It could simply be that simple.
Howard is a very good basketball player. An all-time all-timer? Nope. One of the best centers ever? Not even close. Has he lived up to his full potential as a player? The heck if I know. Moreover, the heck if anyone knows. His potential was never what we said it was. It is, inevitably, what he ended up becoming — there are no tangible measurements to determine something as nebulous as potential.
As we should try to do with every NBA player we love to watch out of appreciation, or out of hate: Let’s try to start enjoying Dwight Howard for what he is instead of what he hasn’t become. After all, the only thing he hasn’t become is everything we projected for him. And really, who is to blame for that — us or him?
