Kyle Kover

• Where in Korver’s essay do you see strong ties at work? Weak ties?

Kyle’s weak ties are the fans and the other players who agree with him but choose not to speak out like he did. Kyle’s strong ties are his teammates and the organization he plays and his platform.

• What social habits is Korver working to shed? Which is he working to acquire?            He is trying to shed his personal habit of when Thabo got in trouble to immediately ask himself “what was Thabo doing out at a club on a back-to-back??” Instead of wanting to ask himself if his friend is ok and if he did anything wrong or needs help.  He wants to acquire a sense of responsibility in the world and to have people be held more accountable to what they are doing and saying. 

 

• How is he going about doing this habit-changing work? In what ways are his strong and weak ties helping him in his work to change?           

It’s changing his work in a way where he puts a lot of others first and makes into a problem to be fixed by the people.  His strong ties are helping by speaking up and addressing the issues after games and to hold the talks like the Jazz do. His weak ties keep sharing the information across to like a global scale so everyone knows what happened to Russ.

• How would sociologist Doug McAdam (discussed in Duhigg) explain Korver’s first reaction to the news that NYC police had arrested his teammate, Thabo Sefolosha, and broken his leg?

His first reaction was to ask why instead how and what. He immediately blamed Thabo before he even the new story and what Thabo did in the club that day and Kover said right away that if that was me at the club I would’ve been perfectly fine and I would’ve never got arrested or anything close to what happened to Thabo.  He was upset and also devastated because Thabo was more then a teammate to him and more than just a guy he works with. He says him and Thabo became “legitimate friends that year in our downtime”.  So this meant something to Kyle.