"Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Kevin Durant 2.0: the world's-my-oyster, body-adorning, liberated upgrade. It is this model he's taking, with his inimitable talents, to the Golden State Warriors this fall, leaving behind the team he built from splinters into a perennial title contender, the Oklahoma City Thunder. In so doing, he's knowingly placed in jeopardy his richly earned brand as the game's kindest star, opening himself up to a barrage of criticism usually lobbed by alt-right trolls. And why all this hatred for a guy who did things right, carried a franchise on his back for nine years while it tried to win a championship on the cheap? Because, for the first time in his life, Durant prioritized himself, chose to pursue his own joy, not his sense of obligation to millions of strangers. "All my life, I've been a pleaser," he says, "put everyone else ahead of me." He'd been a "basketball robot" in a "basketball trance," trudging head-down with his hoodie cinched tight, never asking for what he wanted or even asking himself that question for fear of hurting teammates and fans. Then suddenly, two seasons ago, the hamster wheel stopped when he fractured a small bone in his foot. Unable to play or get off his couch for months, he picked his head up, opened his big eyes wide – and loathed what he saw of his world. He was 25 and had never gone anywhere or done anything that wasn't in the service of his game. He needed to make some changes, and not the small-bore kind. No, what was called for was a top-down redo, a blank-slate reassessment of his soul. It would begin – and end – with one fundamental question: What are the things in life that give me pleasure? [..] "It felt like that whole thing was set up for me to leave," he says, "especially after they blew a lead in the finals, because I damn sure wasn't going there if they'd won. But after Game Seven, I called up my agent and said, 'Damn, dude, Golden State – what if?' " Until two years ago, Durant had never taken a week's vacation or been anywhere exotic for pleasure. Instead, he spent his off months doing exactly what he'd done since he discovered the game as a boy: refining his court skills in wall-to-wall workdays that bordered on self-affliction. [..] When sanity argued that he take a month off and go clear his head in Bora Bora, he'd instead put his gaunt frame through unrelenting hell – till, finally, it had enough and broke down. And so, two winters ago, he sat on his couch and began the mental accounting of full adulthood. For 20 years, his inner life had been in a cryonic freeze; almost every decision, big and small, was deferred for the sake of his craft. [..] When he wasn't playing ball – meaning, in class or home sleeping – Durant was literally racing from the drama in his town, where bad things happened if you slowed it to a walk. "I got bit by a pit bull jogging to the gym – I learned to run in the middle of the street," he says. He saw a neighbor get shot, saw a family member menace another with a gun, saw his Aunt Pearl keel over in 2001, gurgling blood from end-stage cancer. His chief respite, apart from travel games, was to hop aboard the Metro and ride it as far as it went, getting out in leafy suburbs and walking the streets. "It was all tranquil and cool there, and when I'd play pickup, nobody tried me or talked a lot of shit," he says. "I'd be like, 'This is where I want to be.'" He had formed no grand illusions about what he would buy if and when he made the league; wouldn't, in fact, let himself think such thoughts, for fear of offending the gods. But he decided if he got paid, he'd invest in some peace and quiet: get a place where he and his people could exhale. "My mom was so scared, she made us whisper when we came home. 'Shhhhshh!' she'd say. 'They'll hear us. Keep it down!' " [..] Even the gangsters looked out for KD, warned everyone on the block not to fuck with the kid who was lighting it up at National Christian Academy. But nothing is free, even kindness, where he's from. It's a loan that compounds daily and trails you after you've left. Don't forget us when you've made it and we're still here. . . . And so there he was two springs ago, still paying those psychic debts and putting off the hard calls left unmade. "I was in that trance so long, it was affecting my life," he says. "I woke up one day and made some changes." [..] The hood is a trap, man – you're born there and die there, with nothing in between but that," [..] What he's saying is that no kid should have to do what he did: put his life on hold for 20-odd years just to have a slim shot at getting out. "I've had my guard up all this time, never living my life," he says. "It's so hard to unlearn those traits when you get older.""
