NEWS AND EVENTS

Luke Kornet Has Something to Say

Luke Kornet is a thirty-year-old backup center for the San Antonio Spurs. Last Monday, he became one of the week’s big stories in basketball, after he posted something new on his blog. The Atlanta Hawks had announced plans to commemorate a legendary, long-standing strip club, Magic City, at an upcoming game, and Kornet objected. “Allowing this night to go forward without protest would reflect poorly on us as an NBA community,” he wrote, “specifically in being complicit in the potential objectification and mistreatment of women in our society.” His statement was debated on the airwaves and online, and covered in outlets ranging from TMZ to The Hill, a website ostensibly devoted to Beltway politics.

Some commentators offered their support—ESPN’s leading talking head, Stephen A. Smith, had jokingly praised the promotion at first and then said that Kornet had persuaded him, for one—while others complained that Kornet had no connection to the team, city, or culture; that he had failed to call out players who were investigated for domestic violence; and that he had ignored the fact that the event would highlight Magic City’s role in Atlanta’s rap scene and the club’s lemon-pepper chicken wings, not its dancers. Kornet’s statement misrepresented stripping, the Warriors’ Draymond Green suggested on his podcast. “It’s actually an art,” he explained. There was also a different reaction to the post: Luke Kornet writes a blog?

He does, on and off, and it is surprisingly charming. It began as a tour of the Catholic churches that he had visited during the 2022–23 N.B.A. season. With jokes! The jokes weren’t about the churches—he was serious about those. His faith and his sense of humor had got him through a long, difficult stretch when, after signing a two-way contract with the New York Knicks, as an undrafted but promising sharp-shooting big man, he weathered a series of injuries that hampered his shooting form. Kornet bounced from team to team and nearly out of the league, desperate to recover the sense of satisfaction that came from sinking shot after shot. During a last-ditch stint with the Maine Celtics, Boston’s G League affiliate, he accepted that he would have to give up the thing that had defined him—his shooting—and play a more supporting role. It involved “a lot of suffering,” he told me over the phone, a few hours after he had posted his Magic City statement. He had to let his ego go.

He became a key contributor on the Celtics’ championship-winning team, in 2024, and then an important part of the team’s rotation. He also became known, in and out of the Celtics’ locker room, for his quick wit and on-court celebrations. When he left Boston for San Antonio last year—the Celtics, shedding salary, decided that they couldn’t afford the kind of contract he could command now—many of Boston’s players and fans talked about how sorry they were to see him go. In San Antonio, Kornet quickly established himself again as one of the funniest guys in the locker room, as well as a valuable teammate on the court. (He backs up Victor Wembanyama, the Spurs’ otherworldly young star.) After a game-saving block at the end of a win over the Orlando Magic, in December, he raised his arms in a tribute to Vince Carter’s famous 2000 dunk-contest pose, and Kornet’s teammates put the image on a T-shirt. “It’s a lot of weight, being an icon,” Kornet told the press a few days later. “This is how Helen of Troy felt, I think.”

When Kornet started his blog, he imagined a practical guide, for fellow-players who sought succor on the road: Catholic churches in N.B.A. cities. But after a post about the Notre-Dame Basilica in Montreal (“Don’t Pass the Rock Episode 1: Montreal”), the blog abruptly ended. Another attempt, the following season, lasted two posts. “I was reaching the ends of my reflections on church design,” he wrote later. “Let’s just say that if I had to put all my money on my ability to consistently write about architecture, I’d be baroque.”

While his blog was on hiatus, Kornet spent time writing jokes and refining concepts for skits and sketches for the team’s platforms. “Those things would run in my mind so much that it would start being disturbing,” he told me. He put them down on paper in part just to get them out of his head. But through the process of returning to them, cutting and unpacking the stream of consciousness, he’d discover a structured thought. It was exhilarating.

And the sketches made people laugh. It reinforced his idea that writing, and particularly humorous writing, was a way of connecting with people. He still needed a subject, though, and ultimately turned, as many writers do, to the one he knew best: himself. It wasn’t a bad one, as subjects go. He had a lot of stories about the less glorified aspects of N.B.A. life. Kornet is not, of course, the only N.B.A. player who’s had this thought. Most players, these days, share those stories on podcasts. But a podcast is a record of only the mind’s “current moment,” Kornet pointed out. He wanted the chance to revise.

He wanted to try to figure out what was true and what was tangential, what was his best effort and what he could leave out. Kornet had taken A.P. classes in high school, and there had been a lot of English papers; his mother, who is a news anchor in Nashville, had given him feedback. She had a lot of patience, he said, and a sense for stories and how things flowed. Mostly, though, he learned to write as writers do—by reading. As he grew older, he found authors whose voices had begun “living” in his mind. He read Dostoyevsky and funny books about basketball players. His tastes were catholic, but also Catholic: Tolkien, Stephen Colbert.

At the end of January, the day after a loss to the lowly New Orleans Pelicans, Kornet relaunched his blog. “Although I’m a big fan of A. Catholicism B. Its Churches and C. Mike Conley off-hand floaters,” he wrote, “I think a more sustainable method of writing for me is a general, comedic account of my experiences, understandings of faith, and reflections on the world around me (with the occasional Taylor Swift lyric Lectio Divina, of course).” In the ensuing weeks, he praised the leadership of the New England Patriots’ coach Mike Vrabel, wrote a sermonesque chronicle of how hard and rewarding it had been to give up his sense of identity as a great shooter, and recounted the trials and tribulations of the team’s departure from Charlotte, North Carolina. He wrote about life as a player on the end of the bench, recalling a morning when, barely hanging on to an N.B.A. job, he had written a song to the tune of Billy Joel’s “Uptown Girl,” which ended with an account of taking the court in garbage time. “Missed my two shots, no I blew my chance / Do they pay well in France?”

Kornet didn’t plan to write about the Hawks’ Magic City event when he first heard about it. But days passed, and no one else expressed public disapproval. Privately, he found many people across the league who felt as he did, but they didn’t feel able to criticize the Hawks. Finally, he figured he needed to be the one.

It took him a few days to craft it, working mostly in hotel rooms on the road. At one point, after a game against the New York Knicks, a reporter spotted Kornet on his laptop in the locker room. He discussed the matter with people whose views he wanted to represent, and sought advice. He didn’t try to be funny, because he didn’t think the subject was funny. He didn’t point to the Bible as the basis for his objection, or make it personal. He adopted a careful tone. He was in a new position, he recognized—the position of a public writer.

I asked him, a few days later, if he saw a new role for himself, one that was more serious, more actively invested in the events of the day. He wasn’t planning on it. He liked making people laugh. But there was something profound about the sense of connection and engagement that all kinds of writing gave him. It reminded him of meditation or prayer, a process of sitting with yourself and “finding that thread that’s holding it all together.” It reminded him a bit of basketball as well. “Those are places where you’re just completely present,” he said. And then you have to look at what you’ve done, figure out where things went wrong, and get a better sense of what’s good. And when other people read one’s writing, maybe they’ll feel that, too