There's Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension

by Hanif Abdurraqib

I don’t trust people who don’t love a place to understand how that place remembers its dead. The living who throw an item the dead once cherished toward heaven, wrap it around the highest wire. So high that it looks like the shoes are swinging from the sky itself. Like two legs are hanging down from the edge of a cloud.

What good is a witness in a country obsessed with forgetting?

Heaven was here, and it is exactly what you’d imagine it to be if you could touch it, for a moment, before it drifts elsewhere and vanishes, like the embers of white chalk that would explode from the hands of LeBron James before Cavaliers home games, when he’d grab a handful from the scorer’s table, rub his hands together, clap, and then throw the remains skyward, creating a small white cloud bursting from his fingers. Eventually, people began to mimic this even in their homes. Children watching the television, dipping their own hands in something white and powderlike, and waiting for their moment to ascend, temporarily, with their savior. Living rooms and the thick air of arenas and the skies of downtown filled with the residue of white powder, tributary clouds, hovering and then becoming another memory. This is how you know a city has started to become your city. When it moves alongside you, a dance partner who you can never out-step.

It wasn’t long ago that I was a high school athlete in awe of a high school athlete. It wasn’t that long before my desperate clocking in at a hellish job that I reached my hand through a crowd, seeking the hand of LeBron James, walking off the floor at the Coliseum in Columbus, Ohio, after Akron St. Vincent–St. Mary took down Brookhaven High School, the heroes of our beloved city. There is something about witnessing greatness before the rest of the world fully arrives to it. The witnessing can make you feel like you, too, have access to anything and everything.

With enough repetition, anything can become a religion. It doesn’t matter if it works or not, it simply matters if a person returns.

I am of a particular emotional makeup, and because of this, I believe that misery doesn’t need company as much as I believe that misery is company. Damn good company too, if you can get it honest enough. By this I mean that I get it. The sun dances from behind the gray, and I want the warmth. The trees are trying to fight back to life, and I root for them. But then, I think, what will become of this misery that I’ve held? That I’ve kept for myself, that I’ve made my own? I know my way around this. I want to keep the familiar as much as I want to run toward whatever newness arrives. I want to wallow in the memory, in the reality of what I know. What can only hurt me as much as I allow it to.

Here I am reminded of another dear friend. Who, in the midst of a jersey burning on his street, carried his old LeBron jersey out to the center of the flames and nearly threw it in but then pulled it back at the last minute, held it close to his chest, and slowly backed away from the fire. When I asked why he didn’t throw it in, he shrugged. I’ll keep it in case he comes back one day.

I didn’t grow up in the church but have spent enough time aligned with both religion and sports to know there is no gospel richer than the gospel of suffering, of living through large stretches devoid of pleasure for the sake of reaching some place beyond your current circumstances and feeling as though you have truly earned a right to be there.

I don’t trust anyone who isn’t from where I’m from, who doesn’t live where I live, to report anything as “suspicious” or “not suspicious,” and yet this is the ecosystem that I’ve known and had to rely on, that people I love are subjected to. Tourists wandering through areas they don’t have any connection to, speculating on people they couldn’t care less about. Life and death, determined by the haphazard tourism of people who believe they are eternally at war with everyone but themselves.

Tamir Rice did more than just die in a park in Cleveland. I promised myself that if a black person died here, in these pages, I would remind myself—and perhaps remind you—that they lived a life where they did more than just die, more than just march themselves into headlines and endless discourse. In photos, Tamir’s smile is slightly crooked, sometimes uncertain. In the photo that most commonly circulated after his murder, he’s smiling with tight lips, looking like he’s resting at the border between a smile and outright laughter, as if in the moment someone was coaxing him into the smile with a joke that finally landed. I have been, and remain, steeped in gratitude for Tamir’s mother, Samaria Rice, how she has refused to let her son’s legacy be only that of a child who was murdered. And still. The burdens that are placed on grieving parents, specifically black mothers, to continue to do this, to refuse to let their children vanish after those children are consumed by the many-armed violences of the state.

I remember one of the announcers mentioning a tragedy in the city, but the tragedy itself was never named. It was just spoken into the air, and then, like that, there was a fast break. There was a layup or a dunk or a foul. It is unclear to me, even now, how death can become a footnote. I have seen the names vanish, I have grasped for them in the wind. I suppose it begins with people understanding that something is a tragedy but not knowing exactly why.