Luke Kornet Has Something to Say
When Kornet started his blog, he created a practical guide for players looking for relief on the road: the Catholic churches in NBA cities. But after an article on the Notre-Dame basilica in Montreal (“Don’t Pass the Rock Episode 1: Montreal”), the blog abruptly stopped. Another attempt, the following season, lasted two shifts. “I was coming to the end of my thoughts on the design of churches,” he later wrote. “Let’s just say that if I had to invest all my money in my ability to write coherently about architecture, I would be baroque.”
While his blog was on hiatus, Kornet spent time writing jokes and refining skit and sketch concepts for the team’s platforms. “These things kept coming back to me so much that it started to get disturbing,” he told me. He put them on paper partly just to get them out of his head. But by returning to it, cutting and unpacking the stream of consciousness, he would discover structured thought. It was exhilarating.
And the sketches made people laugh. This reinforced his idea that writing, and particularly humorous writing, was a way to connect with people. But he still needed a subject and he eventually turned, as many writers do, to the one he knew best: himself. It wasn’t bad, as the subjects say. He had plenty of stories about the less glorified aspects of NBA life. Kornet, of course, isn’t the only NBA player to have had this thought. These days, most gamers share these stories on podcasts. But a podcast is just a recording of the mind’s “present moment,” Kornet emphasized. 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 AP classes in high school, and there had been a lot of English homework; his mother, who is a news anchor in Nashville, had given him feedback. She had a lot of patience, he said, and a sense of stories and how things unfolded. But above all, he learned to write as writers do: by reading. As he grew up, he discovered authors whose voices had begun to “live” in his mind. He read Dostoyevsky and funny books about basketball players. His tastes were Catholic, but also Catholic: Tolkien, Stephen Colbert.
In late January, the day after a loss to the lowly New Orleans Pelicans, Kornet relaunched his blog. “While I’m a big fan of A. Catholicism B. Its Churches and C. Mike Conley floats,” he wrote, “I think a more enduring method of writing for me is a general, comedic account of my experiences, my understanding of faith, and my thoughts on the world around me (with occasional lyrics from Taylor Swift’s Lectio Divina, of course).” In the weeks that followed, he praised the leadership of New England Patriots coach Mike Vrabel, wrote a sermonic column about how difficult and rewarding it had been to let go of 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 his life as a player at the end of the bench, remembering one morning when, barely clinging to an NBA job, he wrote a song to the tune of Billy Joel’s “Uptown Girl,” which ended with an account of his taking the court at garbage time. “I missed my two shots, no I missed my chance / Do they pay well in France?”
Kornet hadn’t planned to write about the Hawks’ Magic City event when he first heard about it. But days passed and no one else publicly expressed their disapproval. Privately, he found many people across the league who thought like him, but who didn’t feel able to criticize the Hawks. Finally, he figured he had to be the one.
