There's Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension

by Hanif Abdurraqib

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.

In criticisms, steps are always skipped. America relies on making the soldier both an inspiration and an aspiration. It relies on making war and surviving war a part of the American fabric by making the aesthetics of war cool. And then makes those aesthetics available for the public to buy. And it is one thing to map those aesthetics onto the suburbs, a Hummer parked in a garage with an American flag affixed to a wall or swinging from a post in the front yard. It is one thing for people to romanticize the violence of sports and compare game to war. It is another for athletes to call themselves soldiers. It is one thing to create conditions under which survival seems unattainable for some, but it is certainly another thing for hood niggas who have never enlisted in anything to call themselves soldiers. To wear the uniform of soldiers as fashion.

It’s about a history of America selling dreams back to its people for so long that they stopped knowing what to do when someone they wanted to keep at arm’s length also got to buy into the fantasy.

One way sports works is because of the fact that many of us do, in fact, survive on the miracles and mercies of others.

what good is a king if they are not, at the very least, sacrificing themselves at the altar of violence that their constituents must fight, must endure.

It is hard to watch a team you know has dedicated itself to intentional atrocity, knowing that they still have to at least try and put on a show for the dwindling crowds in the arena. Even if the crowds, themselves, are also rooting for that team to lose.

time slows when a landscape doesn’t change. Like in Pennsylvania, where one might mark time by the dead. A deer who, it seems, almost made it safely to the median’s waiting grass, stretched out now on the side of the highway, its hooves brushing the green.

I love a Game 7. The sun sets for someone, and the sky remains a parade of colors for someone else.

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

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.