There are insights here in this competent, ghostwritten autobiography, as the reader gets to see how DeRozan navigates various transitions from where he came from to where he now is. We may not all end up in the NBA, but we all will have the opportunity to make certain major transitions in our lives, hopefully learning and growing as we ourselves go from where we come from to where we end up.
The reader watches DeRozan grapple with the early challenges of emerging from youth: figuring out what to do with his first paycheck, buying his first car, learning what a mortgage is. Later we see him grapple with more and more adult problems: how to handle the media, how to be a professional, how to manage and protect his family. And so on.
He talks helpfully about what it's like to go from being dominant at something at one level (in his case high school and college basketball) to discovering he's initially only "pretty good" at the next level (when he arrives to the NBA). It's instructive for the reader to see how he transmutes the initial setbacks and defeats into motivation. Most of us aren't elite athletes, but we've all had that feeling of thinking we're pretty good at something, only to later learn we're nowhere near as good as we thought we were. And then comes a choice: we either work to become more competitive at that new level, or we don't. I've had this process give me humblings in at least three separate domains in my life: music, academics, and in my career in investing. There are levels to things: we tend to think we're better than we are until we move up a couple of levels.
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DeRozan also deserves credit for his openness about his depression, although it was accidental how he became open about it: he tweeted late one night "This depression get the best of me..." and then shuts his phone off and goes to bed. The reaction--from the public, other players, even the NBA league office itself--was instant and overwhelming, and he became, literally overnight, the face of the league for mental health.
There are insights here on media consumption, and why it is not good for your health in any way. DeRozan can't help but pay close attention to what the sports media says about him and his team. Imagine: if it's unhealthy enough reading media about politics or global conflicts, imagine how unhealthy it is to read media literally about yourself! Likewise, imagine what a superpower it would be to have the ability to shut it all out.
Once again, DeRozan and his ghostwriter produced a readable book. But one gets the impression that this autobiography is incomplete: that the author will have more to say and more to offer readers after a few more decades of life.
Notes:
1) Since I've been thinking about neo-feudalism and the many forms it takes in the modern era, I can't help but look at a place like Compton California, where DeMar DeRozan grew up, a place divided up by gangs and by ethnicities, and see it as just another example of this cartoon:
...in other words, build a system where you import populations who can't stand each other, and then encourage the groups to fight among themselves. Such a situation will never lead to a unified people resisting, changing or overthrowing the unfair system under which they live.
2) DeRozan starts watching old tapes of old school NBA games [reminiscent of Mike Tyson, who couldn't get enough of old boxing footage: note there's something about how the old school players perform their sport--it hardly matters what sport--and if you can see it you see it. Honestly, the same thing happens with investing, although the videos aren't as exciting]. Like most elite athletes DeRozan was pretty much great at every single sport he tried. He starts to understand moves and counter moves in his sport, all at a very young age.
3) His father was rough on him, critical, would always point out his mistakes, rarely compliment his successes, etc., but then he stepped back from his basketball development when DeRozan became a teenager.
4) Interesting ideas here on the problem of knowing you have a shot of leaving your world behind, but getting out of Compton means you also have to leave many of the people in that world behind; DeRozan may not frame it this way exactly, but he has an intuitive sense of the idea that we are the average of the five people we spend the most time with--and this fact, if we think carefully about it, has tremendous implications, some sad.
5) "I used to be so intrigued when I was around successful people that I rarely even said a word. I just paid attention. People used to think I was shy. Nah. I was too busy listening."
6) On Compton and the expansion of turf wars in the mid 2000s there, during DeRozan's last two years of high school.
7) "I started paying attention to the differences in people--those who wanted more, and those who didn't have the willingness, care, or imagination to improve their lives. It almost made it easier to grasp why I was losing people around me." [Again: we are the average of the five people we spend the most time with.]
8) He does one year at USC then opts for the NBA draft, gets chosen by the Toronto Raptors. Also: "Nothing bad can come from this": a mantra he repeated to himself when he started out his career in Toronto. Tremendously insightful for a young guy, and quite a self-fulfilling mantra too.
9) Interesting comments about his self-confessed naivete about money: he gets a $5,000 check as an appearance fee at a basketball camp and can't believe it; he didn't even know what to do with it; On his rookie contract, for $1.9 million dollars: he gets a $200,000 advance on it after signing, and he tells readers, "I promise you, I thought I was good for life. Literally forever." He had to learn about mortgages and how people finance homes. He buys Cadillac Escalade but doesn't have a license, etc. When people are beginners with money, 200k or $1m sounds like "a gazillion." It's a number without context, without meaning. Note this video from back in the day from the old firm ING Investments.
10) He loses his starting role on the team [impressive enough that he was starting as a rookie], gets extremely upset when benched late in the season despite the team's reasons; another player tells him, "Shit like this happens--you better not let it break your confidence."
11) He consumes too much sports media about himself and gets worked up about it. [Once again, media--all media--is best avoided. It is not healthy to consume it and the purveyors of it knowingly make it unhealthy.]
12) He begins experiencing some of the physiological effects of depression: he can barely find energy to sit up or get going [it's interesting how his symptoms appear to manifest mostly as physical fatigue]. He stumbles onto a video of Jim Carrey talking about his depression on YouTube. The reader will see DeRozan's journey toward therapy, at first rejecting it early on in his life when offered it, but eventually coming to appreciate the value of therapy as a tool. Also on his viral tweet "This depression get the best of me..." which results in a huge reaction from the media as well as from the NBA head office. Before he knows it he becomes the face of the league for mental health, and this opens the door for other players like Kevin Love to open up about these issues as well.
13) The Raptors keep running into LeBron James and the Cleveland Cavaliers in the playoffs, getting dissected by them. He can't seem to get his team over the hump, he can't seem to make a deep run at a championship. He then gets traded from Toronto to San Antonio, a total shock to him. [He would go on to play for three years in San Antonio, then three years for the Chicago Bulls, and then most recently last season for the Sacramento Kings. This is a very, very durable player, still highly productive after 16 years in the league.]
14) He then begins a therapy process for real and has a lot of a-ha moments.
15) On the irony of the Toronto Raptors winning a championship the exact following year after they traded DeRozan.
16) Various discussions here about the COVID era, the NBA "bubble" in Orlando where the league finished the playoffs; also sadly his father had to die alone in a hospital after having a stroke: the family couldn't see him at all except for zoom calls--yet another manifestation of medical totalitarianism that was totally unnecessary during this period.
17) He's got a real "Modern Family" home situation too, as he's separated on and off with his wife Kiara Morrison, but they work out a compromise to co-parent their children from the same house while he's mostly on the road; they have a third daughter; then he has a son with another (unnamed) woman, then he has a fourth daughter with Morrison six months later.
To Read:
Jeff Foster: The Deepest Acceptance: Radical Awakening in Ordinary Life
Jim Carrey: Memoirs and Misinformation