There's Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension

by Hanif Abdurraqib

All kinds of affection tucked underneath the talking of shit. Jalen Rose used to study his opponents, do real-time research on motherfuckers—in the no-internet early 1990s, no less. Just so he would have some shit to say to make sure a nigga was shook. And listen, ain’t that a kind of love? To say You are worthy of the time it takes to dismantle you.

There was an unspoken (and sometimes loudly spoken) glee when the Fab Five would lose. And this, of course, is where I came to love them more. With an intensity that led me to understand that anyone who did not love this team was my enemy. Anyone who might wish to pull apart their brilliance, to tame or temper their flourish, was my enemy.

The early ’90s—like the majority of American eras before it—had no shortage of panicked people who already feared young black folks, simply looking for anyone, anywhere to dress those fears up in an attire that the panicked might consider to be more publicly palatable than the boring racism humming underneath the dressing up of haphazardly assembled fears. But the targets of the panic know better.

The first way I felt myself operating on the other side of America’s fear was being young and idolizing the people America was trying to convince me to be afraid of.

and 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?

Athletes had been bald before Jordan, but his baldness was a signature, in part because he had the perfect head to pull off such a show of nakedness. Aerodynamic, some might say. Made it easier for him to be cradled in a tunnel of air when he stretched himself skyward, made it easier to believe oneself as impenetrable cool, even as you pulled strands of exhausted hair from your scalp during showers or woke up to dark hair on a white pillow. It’s okay, was part of MJ’s promise. There is a way to be cool on the other side of whatever befalls your scalp.

I propose that the difference between being naked and being bare is that in a state of nakedness, the end can be seen even if it hasn’t arrived yet. It has less to do with what one is or isn’t wearing or showing, and more to do with how poorly one keeps the inevitable hidden or how long a person can hold back the undoing (pleasureful or less so) that awaits them.

Smiling to himself like he was awaking from a dream—a good dream, a dream of invincibility, a dream where no one can kill you but you. Even now, I wish to touch the hem of that type of cool.

Convenience is also mistaken for something a little bit like love, or a lot like love, depending on what is at stake, and what part of a life is being made easier.

And in the hour that is our hour, a window opens and we can breathe out all the sad stuff.

We never spoke of what ailed them, what took them from us. I never asked about the wigs, and I never asked about the cancer. I never asked about the old coat of her mother’s that never seemed to leave the coat rack by the front door. I knew what it was like to keep something close, just in case there was some error in the universe. The people we love deserve to return to the places they left with the things they love intact.

There is a reality of loving ball in a place where people don’t have money. A place where sacrifices are made to keep the lights on, to keep food on the table. Sacrifices that, sometimes, don’t have your desires at the end of them. Hardly anyone I grew up around could play for the high-profile traveling teams, and so the training ground for the offseason was the neighborhood court.

But it was also here that I learned that there is nobility in a basketball that has faded, that has gone bald. And there is nobility in the person who carries it to the court. The shooter who has learned to shoot at a deficit, with a ball that slides around in their hand, or the dribbler who made a way with a ball that had endured seasons of being battered against the concrete. Your ball is your ball, and depending on how you and your folks are livin’, you might not see a new one for a while.

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. LeBron’s face was as bare as my own when I first heard his name. It is impossible to believe that any of us ever looked like children. I understand, of course, that we were once children. The cloak of time has yet to grow so long that I have surrendered my childhood.

I believe that I was a child once because I am afraid today. There are parts of me that might die soon, parts of my memory that might drift to a distance too far for me to get back, and because I know myself to be afraid of this, that is all I need to believe that I was once a child. But it is hard to believe that we ever looked like children. Even when the people I love, fresh from a trip back home, excitedly pull me close to unfurl photos of themselves when they were babies, or preteens, or even disaffected high school goths or punks or jocks or drama kids. Even when my best friend shows me a video of her toddler making the same exhausted and delightfully scolding face that I have seen her mother make many times, through many years, clearly a transference of the divine, it is still hard for me to believe that anyone I know now was ever physically not who they are.

And this barber told me never to pull the gray weeds from the dark garden, for they might simply grow back with a newfound ferocity. An anger at their removal, he told me. You don’t want to make an enemy out of the grays, he told me one day, while lining me up. Best to just thank them for showin’ up to the party. Lucky you got a party for them to show up to.

Let the hair turn its drab colors and, perhaps, slowly begin to depart down the drain. Let the pain in the knee linger as a reminder that movement might one day come with a price, if I am lucky enough to make it that long. Yes, Lord, I am thankful today again for every reminder of how I have outlived my worst imagination. I will walk slowly through the garden of all that could have killed me but didn’t.

When the world has grown weary with indulging our selfish living, I hope to not be alive for whichever apocalypse is the one that ends humanity. But if I am alive for it, I hope that it takes me out early. I do not wish to be alive in the aftermath of the world ending. The movies and television shows don’t make it look appealing, what with all of the scavenging and the hard surfaces and the need to be proficient with multiple forms of weaponry and alert at all times. Survival, sure, but when the world suggests it may be done with us, I have no interest in pouring myself into rebuilding it.

On the basketball courts, alone, there was nothing to contain the shattering echo of the ball’s dance with the concrete. I love a sport where even when I am alone, I am not alone. And I am a little bit ashamed to say that I also love basketball for the violence of its sounds. The way a ball sounds when it ricochets off of a metal hoop that has been worn down by the seasons.

The bullet that hit him wasn’t meant for him, but the bullet doesn’t apologize and isn’t especially discerning. The bullet only knows what is in front of it.

The floater, the most romantic shot in the game when done right, guided toward the rim with a heave and a wish, how the follow-through after the ball leaves the hand can look like an overeager wave, like saying goodbye to a person you never wanted to leave. The floater is beautiful for how it relies on height, how the shot itself turns the ball into a bit of a show-off, obsessed with drama, almost pausing in the air to make sure you get its good side before it begins to twirl downward.

The free-throw line can feel like an island when the lanes are clogged and crowded with limbs trying to carve out an inch of space, an elbow aiming for the softest spot in a torso. Without its accessories, the line can feel like a broken-off piece of metal one clings to while floating in the center of an ocean that seems endless, the kind where it is difficult to say where sky ends and water begins.

If you’ve played enough basketball, or watched enough basketball, you know there are some games that are over when they make it to overtime. You can see it in how the two teams carry themselves. The team that wasn’t supposed to be in the game at all, who got within a murmur of victory and couldn’t finish the job, walking to the bench, dejected, while the presumed victors bounce on their toes, grinning as if they already know the end of the movie and can’t wait to see your face while you watch.

they were still a group of kids from the city, like all of us. Their ascension meant something, even for those of us who were residue in the midst of their greatness.

I propose, once again, that 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.

I always loved this part the most, even if the mythology of the always-emerging younger sibling didn’t come to fruition every time (though, admittedly, it did bear fruit more times than not). I simply liked knowing that there was someone else arriving behind the someone I already knew. That there was another person to admire, a gentle toss away. A kind of magic in saying I am not sorry, there are more of us, you haven’t seen anything yet. A kind of magic in staying, too.

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. And just like that, the lens turns toward property, toward land. Toward the value of vacancy. Don’t play like you haven’t heard this one before.

Call it war, call it whatever you want. You wouldn’t know what to do with your face turned toward the blaring dawn, having survived another handful of hours that someone didn’t want you to. 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.

Early ’90s Nissan, a hideous shade of brown. Its muffler loud, but its stereo system louder. That part, of course, an intentional choice. In my neighborhood, most everyone only had so much money for a car, and then they only had so much money to take care of that car when it inevitably began to fail them. But a sound system was coveted. A way to reclaim some small bit of glory amidst the loudly coughing exhaust, or the passenger door that won’t open from the outside, or the window that won’t roll down all the way. Subwoofers encased in a box, weighing down the trunk, a kingdom of sound. People able to hear you coming in more ways than one.

Driving through the residential streets looking for parking during my first year of college was when my car transformed into something else. Forgettable in the sunlight, sinister in the darkness. Even when I turned my music down so that my trunk didn’t ping and rattle. There was something, I imagine, about the combination of slow driving and occasional starts and stops that had rotating police lights flashing into my windows on a semi-regular basis.

The whole setup was another border between what I could afford and what everyone else could afford. I couldn’t afford to park on campus, so I had to find another place, and in the process of that finding, I was in the clutches of the cops, of the “concerned” neighborhood.

2003 was the year of LeBron James driving a Hummer H2 to high school and all of Ohio being pulled to the edges of their seats, some in awe, some in anger. By this point, The LeBron Show was immense. Even if people hadn’t tuned in for the first two seasons, they were definitely tuned in now. LeBron was a figure of national interest. He was an Ohioan, someone people here still counted as one of their own, despite the national and global spotlight that had swept him up. LeBron’s movements were now news well outside of Akron,

You get what I mean now about the things people believe you deserve to have. It isn’t just about the car or the shoes or the platinum chain as objects, though it is a little about that, too. 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.

John Glenn visited my middle school & when I reached my hand out firm & rigid to shake his the way my father taught me John Glenn took my small hand in both of his hands & I asked him if he was ever afraid & he looked somewhere above my head somewhere beyond even the ceiling & he said I’ve never been more afraid than I have been curious

But for those of us who are from a certain era of Ohio, the place is unmistakable. The thing is, making this pilgrimage never felt strange for me and my crew, because LeBron James never felt like he was in high school, even when he was in high school.

Didn’t put any of the cheap hubcaps over the tires, the type dudes on the block got before they could afford real rims, the type that would lose their shine at the end of summer but if you caught them in June the beams of sunlight or moonlight or any light would sprint off of them, reflecting one hundred new illuminating vessels, sometimes splitting into a chorus of color, and so no one really cared that they weren’t real rims—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.

To stunt on those you live in close proximity to is also a type of intimacy. It requires a level of knowing—I know the heights that you cannot reach, the ones that I can barely ascend to, but can still ascend to, at least today. And I love you for your limits, I love all of us for what we do and don’t have in this beautifully unbearable container of heat, of sirens, of bike chains popping and black sneakers that have seen better days. The borders between the stunt and being stunted on are flimsy when the come-up happens in small, barely noticeable increments, until it doesn’t. I love the stunt, for how it opens the gates to dreaming, and I love anything that pushes against the door of reality and offers an elsewhere.

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.

Just like with Mike in ’85, a whole life can change if someone is in defiance of gravity for the right amount of time.

And yes, sometimes it is that unspectacular. The math of who makes it and who doesn’t, or what making it even is. All of it, a series of accidents. Who got caught with what, and when. Who did their dirt on the low, so low that it hums, indecipherable beneath the decoration of stardom. Someone catches a bad break, gets injured at the wrong tournament, gets pulled over by the wrong cop before the state tournament. And like that, there’s someone else collecting scholarship offers. It might be heartbreaking, but it isn’t spectacular.

What is rarely said about these people and about these moments in our lives is that sometimes the wrong crowd is simply the crowd that loves you the best. The crowd that sees you the clearest. Their wrongness perhaps not inherent but cultivated through a series of neglects or unresolved pains. But in the midst of that love, the love of the wrong crowd, dirt is sometimes done. And this, we were to understand, is what led my father to steal cars before he could even drive them. He would have been a promising athlete, we’d be told. Who is to say when trouble consumes a life.

Besides, there was something gritty about the landscape. It made us feel like it was our little slice of streetball heaven, here in the Midwest. If you played hard, you might come home and need someone to pull glass out of your knee. A small map of red where the skin on your palms used to be. You carried the pain of the court with you, often as a source of pride. To show that you cared, even if the games in the middle of the summer meant nothing. Barely even bragging rights, since they were played so often and with such a mixing up of teams that there were never any dynasties.

My pal Josh’s father kept a gray 1992 Chevy Corvette parked in the driveway, covered with a black tarp. He’d pull the car out at the start of summer and drop the top on it, mostly to drive around the block slow, as a reminder for those who forgot he owned it. The entire purpose of the car was for him to flex so hard that the flex might echo for a calendar year.

But I will say that as a child, I was foolish enough to not understand desperation. To not think I would ever be desperate enough to need to pray.

Tough for me to tell the difference between a prayer and a wish, though some might say a prayer is simply a wish that punches above its weight. A wish leaves the lips and depending on how it is spoken—its tone or the desire attached to it—it either gains wings or falls on the ears of the living. Though the living can certainly fulfill some wishes without an ounce of divine intervention. Someone pitches I wish a nigga would across a basketball court or a playground or a locker room and depending on who does or doesn’t believe you being about what you say you’re about, a nigga just might make that wish come true. So okay, this paper-thin difference defines itself by the cracks through which blood can exit. With enough ferocity, we are told that a prayer ends in mercy. Our wishes might not render us so lucky.

I ain’t the fastest but I sure am the most willing to survive in this scenario & there are some things that just don’t show up in the body until we need them to & when two cops turned into three & then turned into five & then turned into the apartment complex where I thought I could get lost among the buildings but couldn’t because the complex was no longer the complex it was once & half the buildings had been torn down for the sake of some boutiques & I have certainly been done worse by gentrification than I was in that moment but needless to say I’d have cursed it once again if I didn’t have a larger dilemma

There were times LeBron never looked all that comfortable as a king either, but the nickname fit too damn good to just let it slip through a city’s fingers.

Some might argue King James is not a nickname but a brand statement, which is fair, though I would say by the time LeBron came around, a nickname wasn’t always what you were known by all of the time, what announcers called out after you’ve orchestrated an especially scintillating play. The nickname is sometimes what you are called by and sometimes it is whatever encases you, whatever you are born into and then carry for a lifetime, and whatever comes after.

The mission was to lose, and to lose as much as possible. 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. The act of tanking still gets treated as clandestine, or something that teams shouldn’t outright admit to engaging in, even though we all see it.