Rajon Rondo will not tolerate plot holes in movies
It is well known that Dallas Mavericks point guard Rajon Rondo is not the easiest guy in the NBA to play with or coach. He is famously demanding, like many of the greatest athletes in the world, but also committed to doing things his own way and improvising away from the prescribed game plan when he deems it necessary. People who work with him are not shy about expressing these frustrations, and Mavs head coach Rick Carlisle has butted heads with Rondo this season both somewhat controversially and as a matter of course.
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Baxter Holmes digs deep into Rondo’s methods in a new feature for ESPN.com, providing new examples of Rondo’s long-established analytical acuity and relaying various stories of how he has frustrated and benefited (sometimes simultaneously) his coaches and teammates over the years. Buried in there, though, is an anecdote the likes of which we have not heard before. Rondo really, really hates plot holes in movies:
Rondo maintains a close circle, but during his eight-plus seasons in Boston, he was as close with [Celtics strength and conditioning coach Bryan] Doo as anyone. Doo always sought activities to keep Rondo engaged — golf, tennis, a home run derby with softballs, pool, pingpong, throwing footballs off the wall into a trash can, unorthodox workouts, printing out math equations and racing to solve them first, trying to top each other in Lumosity brain games, designed to improve cognitive abilities. “If you can’t keep up with him up here,” Doo says, pointing to his head, “he won’t listen to you.”
Provide him with bad information? “Your credibility is shot,” Rondo says. And if he doesn’t buy the narrative, even off the floor, he’ll bail, he’ll disengage, as he does on movies whose storylines stray from logic, even for a moment. His last theater walkout: The Equalizer, starring Denzel Washington. “I didn’t understand how he got the cop’s number,” Rondo says, referencing a certain scene. “It was just too much.” He recently watched the movie again to see if he could stomach it. He couldn’t.
I assume that director Antoine Fuqua and screenwriter Richard Wenk could not be reached for comment.
“The Equalizer” received mixed reviews (57 on Metacritic, 61 on Rotten Tomatoes), so Rondo’s decision to walk out does not appear especially extreme even if the Denzel Washington action movie canon is full of plot holes. (I mean, that’s pretty much all “Deja Vu” is, and it’s awesome.) Plus, you cannot claim that Rondo does not bring fairness along with his toughness — he gave it another chance, even if it was too much to bear.
That last point is what comes through most clearly in Holmes’s article. Rondo may be difficult, but he is that way in large part because he sticks to his point of view, not because he dismisses others out of hand. At its worst, this quality manifests as stubbornness. Yet it’s also a form of integrity that can be quite admirable, particularly when a team needs a strong voice. Rondo would be easier to manage if he gave ground more often, but he’d also lose a lot of what makes him a special player and figure in the NBA.
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Eric Freeman is a writer for Ball Don’t Lie on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at [email protected] or follow him on Twitter!
