There's Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension

by Hanif Abdurraqib

listen, ain’t that a kind of love? To say You are worthy of the time it takes to dismantle you. Yes, do not waste language on our enemies, but an enemy, to me, implies a permanence. A thorn that cannot be removed. An opponent is different than an enemy, even if you see that opponent twice a year. If you know you’re good, an opponent is a temporary roadblock, something to be taken apart and moved out of your way.

isn’t it funny the lengths our enemies go to in order to say I am afraid I am being left behind, and then who will love me?

Find the point where you are unkillable and jump toward it if you can.

Fear is one thing that can carry an unassuming heart to the gates of love, or at least gates that might be in the same neighborhood as the gates of love. Something that has been denied until it is undeniable, like a slightly out-of-focus photo colliding with a bath of irresistible sunlight, which says What you have imagined seeing has always been real.

praise to the person who made a way with a bald rock, and a little path of concrete that was their concrete, and a rusted rim with no net. Those be the noblest of hoopers. The ones who, back then, you had to keep an eye on. Cuz they’ve done all the hard shit already. Once they get a little bit of a grip on something new, it’s lights out.

It is a strange miracle to be able to trace your own aging, your own mortality through someone who is living alongside you, someone who has survived eras at the same time as you have, in some of the same places.

you are, in part, who loves you. Who might step outside of themselves to find whatever will heal you, return you to a place where you are loved.

The heart doesn’t break all at once. It would be easier that way, cleaner. The process of breaking begins somewhere many of us can’t even recall. It accelerates in bursts throughout a life; sometimes it hums along at its steady pace. But with the accumulation of enough pain and the promise of more to come, we can only carry ourselves so far. The joyous weight of trophies and medals is nothing when compared to what the heart must endure, how it shields us from what it can, for a little while, before falling to its knees.

A community learns how to manage on its own. Gangs also exist to keep a neighborhood safe from outside threats, after all. That has always been a part of their history. There are codes to be followed and punishments for not following them. The hood becomes its own city, governed by no one, governed by everyone.

When a city names a place unlivable, it suggests that there is something wrong or damaged about the people who do live there. It suggests that their lives are expendable, down to the homes or apartments they live in.

There is no language I can find for the affection of repeated survival. To know you haven’t been caught just yet. That with some luck, you never will be.

it is true that none of us will live forever & the mere existence of that knowledge suggests we all have to pick a thing we might die for if the opportunity arose

LeBron James never felt like he was in high school, even when he was in high school. It’s hard to understand this unless you were there and also in high school yourself.

what is real and not real is sometimes simply a matter of who is witnessing the miracle and who can be tricked into a suspension of disbelief at the altar of light.

A dunk contest is where one goes to execute some far-flung dream of what the body is capable of. It is where one goes to fail, often spectacularly. I wish all failure could be as beautiful as the failures that arrive to us midair, a reality setting in that we are incapable and yet still in flight.

a whole life can change if someone is in defiance of gravity for the right amount of time. Even if it isn’t happening where you are.

I love the homecoming because I have known what it is to leave. I have seen the city I love from the sky just as I have seen the city I love from the cracks in between metal bars. Cherish the homecoming, because you know what lasts forever and what does not.

My most hopeless years all blur together, surely as some kind of defense mechanism against memory—if it all feels like a blur, I can convince myself that it was over quickly and I hardly suffered.

sometimes you lay hands on a city & sometimes the city reaches toward you to keep itself afloat

prayer is the only cloak that can never be torn from the shoulders of anyone it is placed upon.

If there is anything to throw your life in front of, it is probably freedom. Not your own, even.

Tanking is an act of fascinating calculations. One must lose but still look as though one desires victory, even though everyone is already in on the secret.

I know of no good fortune that I haven’t had to chase. The bad fortunes are going to show up whenever they want, whether you invite them or not.

It is one thing to lose by way of simply seeming to surrender and another to lose after pouring all of yourself into the game, only to be outdone by someone better.

Someone who is beholden to a place. Who loves that place, who wants to be in the place. And still, it just can’t work. It has less to do with wanting to explore or take risks. It’s not even a firm rejection of the place itself. It’s the circumstances, which have become so unbearable that it serves someone to leave even their most familiar comforts behind.

As much as I hate to summon the good brothers Boyz II Men into the room, they made quite the habit of falling to pieces within this very specific container. Rolling around on the ground, falling to their knees in the rain, fucking up coordinating silk outfits and whatnot.

The thing about the “come back to me before you’ve even ever left” song is that it is only barely about the song itself and more about the catharsis of the song’s narrator, who knows they have done wrong and is preempting whatever might be said about them around a table they are no longer present at.

An obsession with suffering on the path to triumph is not uniquely American but does manifest itself in uniquely American ways. It’s the lie we’re told about what success truly “counts” and what doesn’t.

The politics of place aren’t necessarily always linked to the politics of staying as much as they are linked to the politics of knowing. I do dirt here because I know exactly where the dirt can be done, I know the shelter I can run toward when the dark city bathes in a silent siren’s rotating lights.

What it comes down to is that some of us would rather live a long life of what some might consider failure, but do it in a place that will catch you, every time. I will take that over a triumph in a city that doesn’t touch me back.

I would never take to the streets looking to watch something burn if my heart were not broken. If, through its breaking, I did not need to invent an enemy.

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 have seen enough and I prefer the path of least resistance.

People at least claim to know that Ohio is shaped like a heart. A jagged heart. A heart with sharp edges. A heart as a weapon. That’s why so many people make their way elsewhere.

I don’t understand the science, but I know that time itself is a hustle.

hustling is easiest when you are in a room people don’t believe you belong in. All you have to do is show up and refuse to give the people what they want.

I lie to myself about the places I love, even when I don’t want to. Even when the places I love don’t look like the places I love anymore.

I don’t know how to explain this to anyone who hasn’t spent a large portion of their life betting on losing teams, betting on a city people foolishly consider to be a losing city.

Cleveland is a city that is overwhelmed by a desire to believe in something beyond what people outside of the place have ascribed to it. This is illuminated in many corners of the city and its people, but the way I’ve known it best is through its sports fans, who have infiltrated my life, much to my pleasure, even if that pleasure is a bit self-serving, allowing me to both playfully revel in their misery and be somewhat in awe of their resilience.

I say I was happier in the past because the pain of the past is a relic. I speak of it but no longer feel it. I do not know what pain is coming, but I know it is coming.

In any sport where one can be chased, one of the first things they teach you is don’t look behind you. In any corner of living where one might end up being chased, the message is the same.

The game, for a little while, had turned away from who could or couldn’t score and turned firmly to who would let the other team score, which is the same dilemma, but not. Not if you’ve been there. Not if you’ve been in any fight where you can tell the difference between wanting to win and simply not wanting to fall down.

I have lied to myself to keep loving a city, to keep myself fixed in the place I am because I’m afraid I know the truth about America, that nowhere is forgiving, and so the unforgiving familiar is better than anywhere else.

There is some mercy in being an underdog and then thriving beyond anyone’s wildest dreams of what you were capable of.

My god, the greatest lies are told in the name of sports, in the name of teams and cities and the people in them.

I haven’t found many things I love as much as I love the sound of a basketball game in a park going down to its tense and silent closing moments with a sky just beyond sunset.

Tell me if you have ever built a heaven out of nothing, and then tell me what it would take for you to look for a new one somewhere else.