LaVar Ball is 100% right.
You can critique the basketball aspects and even the business part of Big Baller Brand, but some of these guys have no right to say he is a bad father considering the skeletons they have in their closet.
LaVar Ball points this out accurately in an interview with SI.
“It’s OK. Sportscasters, they’ve got a job to do and like I tell them, ‘I’m controversial.’ You’ve got to say something about me, whether it be good or bad. Some folks like Charles Barkley, Cris Carter and others, I don’t talk to them anymore. So if they call me on them shows now and say, ‘Oh, LaVar, can you talk to me?’ No, I’m not going to talk to you. ‘Why?’ Because I don’t have to now. Like I tell writers and stuff, ‘Write what you want. I don’t care whether it be good or bad, but you’ve got to suffer the consequences.’ Like Jeff Goodman, I talk to him all the time, ever since he’s interviewed my boys when they were in high school. But he doesn’t do that stuff like Stephen A. Smith. I was cool with him for a minute until I’ve seen his MO, his, ‘Ah, I like LaVar, but I don’t like the fact that he does this and he does that.’ It’s like this: If I don’t want to talk to nobody, I don’t have to talk to them. And that’s what they don’t get. Here’s the thing what they’ve got to understand: Is it worth all that? You’re going to have to talk to me because I’ve got three boys and they’ve got all the same agent. So it’s better to be on the good side than the bad side. Like Charles Barkley, he’s been talking crazy. ‘LaVar is a bad father, this and that.’ And I’m just, like, ‘Don’t even talk about Gelo going to China because you’ve been in jail in Arizona. You have kids that you don’t even talk about. You have a daughter nobody knows about.’ A lot of things he’s done bad. I was a fan of Charles because of how hard he played. And now, he’s doing all this talking like Stephen A. Smith.
“All them guys are employees. They’re not like me. I’m a CEO. I get up when I feel like it. There’s a difference. If you have to work for somebody and you have to answer to somebody, you’ve got to bow down. I don’t. How do you exploit something that’s yours? Those are my boys. If they were somebody else’s, now I’m exploiting them. But mine? My boys didn’t just pop out and be good. I spent a lot of time with them, which a lot of fathers can’t do when you have a job. But see, that’s what they don’t get. They say, ‘Oh, LaVar has no talent.’ Guess what? If I don’t spend that time with them boys, they don’t have a talent. See, people got it mixed up. They say I wouldn’t be here without them. No, they wouldn’t be here without me. Me and my wife decided: let’s have some kids—not just to have them. Let’s make them superstars. Our game plan is so dead on.”
I think there is a fine line between being critical of some of LaVar’s decisions and calling him a bad father, that is where someone like Charles Barkley looks like a hypocrite considering all the bad things he has done in his life with infidelities and arrests.
The Big Baller Brand is moving forward, and if the media are talking about them, they have already won regardless of what is being said.