There's Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension

by Hanif Abdurraqib

It was all about momentary suffering, which is only suffering if one doesn’t think about the benefits of what awaits on the other side. Even if all that awaits on the other side is a chance at something better than what you have now. A few more lottery balls with your team’s logo tossed into a machine. A little more money in your pocket than the money you spent on a ticket, scratched off with one of the last coins you have to your name.

I could definitely put some cash aside to blow on tickets at the corner store. I can’t explain this except to say that it is seductive, to feel as though your luck might change in an instant, that you don’t have to work your way through or toward anything. Just that one day, the numbers will fall in your favor, and your problems will be held under the raging waters of newfound wealth. And yes, of course, this cycle preys on the poor and on the desperate, but if you’ve ever been poor enough and desperate enough, there is no open mouth you won’t blow a prayer into, hoping that it is blown back out, one day, wherever your darkest hour descends.

My lucky numbers never crawled across the bottom of the screen, but I still called them lucky, and I still called them mine. Luck isn’t always about what wins and sometimes is about what you can keep close. What doesn’t get you glory but what has also never done you wrong.

I admit, I believed that if I just lost enough—if I just kept losing and kept struggling in the face of an all-seeing and all-knowing divine entity—maybe I’d be broken off a slice of something sweet. At the end of my suffering, there might be a window, cracked just enough to gently lift the curtains like the bottom of a dress on a person you love, twirling to a song you didn’t know but will never forget. The breeze through the window making a way for some unbreakable light spilling over and creating a path, just for you, beckoning.

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.

Heartbreak itself is a primary color. Stagnant without a series of secondary colors to activate it. Longing is an activator. Loneliness and heartbreak are not the same. I have been heartbroken and preoccupied with any number of pleasing but ultimately foolish pursuits, just as I have been lonely with a heart at least mostly intact (though it can be said that my heart, and perhaps yours, hums at the frequency of a low and ever-present breaking). But longing is the engine, dropped in and speeding me to all of my most pointless ponderings.

Migration is sometimes a requirement, an act of survival.

Of course this is absurd, but so much longing is steeped in absurdity. Sometimes, people want someone back just for the sake of having them, despite what both parties know and have known about their failures and how, when paired together, those shared failures were insurmountable.

A heart, sometimes, breaks slowly and without ceremony.

It’s all about what you’re willing to forgive, he tells me. You have to choose what to ignore every now and then, he tells me. Sure, there are things that begin to grate on you, he says. But there is beauty in even that—being so intimately familiar with the nuances of a single person that you are comfortable even with their encyclopedia of small annoyances, even as those annoyances snap at your heels for years, and then a lifetime.

the mind, the body, the heart, all have microscopic limits. And who are we to deny the consistent, ongoing testing of those limits? I am meant to love someone only for a small burst of time, he says to me one night, sitting on the hood of his dad’s old truck. The argument, when presented this way, is that love itself is not linear, not necessarily defined by the clock or the calendar, as so many have assumed it to be.

the reality that the early moments of falling for anyone or anything are so seductive, and can rarely be captured again.

What my happily committed pal is saying, I think, is that one must become content with shedding a version of oneself that one might only vaguely remember but not be able to touch again. While my other pal has accelerated this process, shedding so frequently that there is no past self that can even stick around long enough to be remembered. Just a constant scroll of new selves to revel in and then discard.

love as a feather that just hasn’t found the wind to carry it away yet.

And sometimes people leave because they have to survive. Sometimes people leave because staying has run its course, a course littered with failures. I know what it is to leave in hopes that whatever has failed me isn’t a part of my own internal makeup, that

He didn’t laugh much because when he did laugh, he’d break into loud coughing fits that seemed painful. I often wondered if he found many things funny but simply chose to not endure the pain it would require to give in to the emotion.

But by the end of the 2010 Cavs season, when they walked off the floor after losing to the Celtics in six games, I knew LeBron was leaving. I knew he’d had it. He’d given all he could to the hard path, and there was no reward. No rings. A city that bowed to a king with no jewelry.

The people who ignored LeBron’s obvious exit knew they didn’t have any control over what LeBron James did or didn’t do. But they were in complete control over when and how their own heartbreak arrived. And yes, when it arrives in this mode, it might come all at once and render the broken-heart holder a bit more breathless than it would if they were to take the former approach, acceptance that lets the ache through in small manageable portions. But I appreciated those Cleveland fans who, like I have in the past, let their denial lead to some torrential damage.

the song’s emotional engine relies on an expression of what could be offered, and—like in so many of these kinds of songs—what can be offered ain’t much. Look, the song says with a half-shrug, no one will love you like we can. Yes, the wide world has more to offer you than we’ve got here. The coasts are more beautiful. There is a shortcut to glory that does not run through Northeast Ohio. But no one will love you like we love you here. How can we get you to believe that’s enough?

The lone bird on the lone branch sings a pretty, lonely, effortless song, and no one runs to its side. Because how could they? There is no sweat on the notes. The sound is too clean to suggest that its maker has ever known pain, has ever longed for anything but a sky as clean, as empty, as blue as a perfect note from the lips of someone who has just made peace with the fact that they might die lonely.

what most commonly haunts my memory about this era of Ohio heartbreak, and it is that everyone circled around the flames was white. Everyone having their smiles illuminated by the sharp orange pushing into the otherwise darkness of a late summer night was white. So many of the people with microphones pushed into their faces in the aftermath of The Decision were white, and so much of the language affixed to that moment, out of those mouths, revolved around death, around burial.

like the person at the site of the burning with an exhausted bottle of lighter fluid in his hand would say, the idea was that LeBron James was dead to them. He served a purpose—though if you let them tell it, he wasn’t even good enough at that—and then he did something displeasing, and so he no longer existed.

How quickly can we get past the part where we feel everything and cross the other threshold, gasping and numb.

the question is always about how a people could do this to their own place & there are many answers & most of them are about how none of this shit is ours & you have mistaken being in a place for having control over it, a mistake I’ve made before but certainly did not make with a brick in my hand & a bandana over my face & it is harder to sell this on the evening news but the fire is a baptism, the fire says Get gone & we can start clean & so then what isn’t your own can become your own if it is all some vast & empty burned-down nothing at the end of a long night & I know this isn’t generous to the shop owners & the elders who have lived on a block for decades & wanted to die on a block that was at least close to how they remembered it, but what can I do to convince you that fire is not the villain & the person who lights a match isn’t a villain & the people cheering while a building burns aren’t the villains & there are villains, surely, but they aren’t here, not among a people seeking deliverance & the villain is an invention, our enemies, the ones I promised we’d leave behind, those are inventions, but they are inventions born out of a heart’s 6:00 breaking.

I am no fool and I do not roll with fools and so no one I rolled with thought Cleveland would actually win a championship before LeBron James, paired with two other All-Stars, would win a championship. Cleveland win an NBA title—with what? The shell of a team left behind by its once-savior? It wasn’t ever about that. It was about dreaming through the brutality of leaving, of being left. What I didn’t mention when we began this examination of the subtle nuances that come along with heartbreak is what is humming underneath this specific delusion: I need anyone who has ever hurt me to know that I am doing more than just surviving.

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.

I used to talk about “growing up poor” as if it is something that left me, no longer hovered over my life well into my twenties. A better phrase is that I grew into poverty and simply learned how to navigate it as efficiently as possible through various disasters. And because I grew into poverty, my needs, by this point, were simple and constricted.

The first year of the post-LeBron era was especially bleak, but also sometimes comical, if you were the type who found yourself laughing through waves of anguish, or if you were, like me, a somewhat neutral observer, overwhelmed by disbelief. Even removing a player of LeBron’s caliber, it was still a little stunning to watch a team fall so sharply from grace within the same calendar year it was seen as a serious contender in the playoffs.

There was pleasure in watching this aimless disaster of a team. Veteran castoffs who had been given up on, young players who seemed, mostly, bewildered by the pace and intensity of the games, forced to play minutes because someone had to, after all. At a certain point, it seemed anyone who could run up and down the court would do.

Boobie got his name from his beloved grandmother, who would lovingly tease him with the nickname, as such things begin. Boobie kept the moniker in the family until his grandmother passed away just before he went to college. And then he wanted everyone to call him Boobie. Said he felt his grandmother in the air whenever people shouted that name out. If that ain’t a God-given name, then I don’t know what is.

Boobie was also slumping horrendously. Nights where he’d shoot 3 for 12, 3 for 10. I remember these games because of how puzzled he seemed to look by his own temporary ineptitude. In sports, there are few things I find more painful than watching a frustrated shooter. Someone who knows the shots should be falling, someone who hit ten in a row during warmups and came into the game feeling good, only to be betrayed by the realities of the moment under the lights.

It got to the point where, even on the good nights, Gibson looked pained, like he knew with every made basket, expectations would return.

Find a view of a tree and watch its leaves curl in on each other, one hundred browning fists, bursting with a rage that refuses surrender, until they do.

Collectively, it was a group of people showing up every day and just trying to get from one buzzer to the next. I was comforted by this, as a sort of inverse of my life. This team that was once great in a city that was once hopeful, now doomed to a future devoid of promise, beyond the promise that whatever was coming it was going to be hard. It was good, for a moment, to watch people, a place, a team, fight to come to terms with that reality and then eventually make peace with it, which is probably easier to do when the stakes are a game and not a life, or a place to sleep, or a person you love walking back through a door they walked out of. A ball goes in, or it doesn’t.

I suppose I love the dead, in part, because they are no longer here to ask anything of me. To be dissatisfied with who I’ve become. There’s a mercy in that, though I would take at least some of my beloveds back across the threshold of living if I could.

I love the dead because we cannot let each other down anymore. I cannot fail you. I am thankful for a leaving that is permanent. It is one thing to be haunted by a life gone and another to be haunted by a life that spins on, happily, without you.

time is a currency. Silence is a currency. Any currency that can be interrupted can be the source of a hustle.

the hustle requires a type of knowing. A knowing of oneself, of course. But also a reading of another, rapidly, before they can realize that you are acting upon that knowing.

viewer might have wanted him to be the whole time. This is the part of the movie that turns

Whether or not it is openly admitted, it appears, often, that there is a hunger for a white, American-born basketball star in the NBA. Among the media, among some basketball fans. And I don’t mean just a good player. I mean a great player. It is the Great White Hope syndrome, baked so firmly into the DNA of American culture that there are people unaware of when they’re bowing to it. When a white player emerges who might fit this mold, words like “swagger” start getting bandied about.

To make a myth of a country is a misguided extension of kindness, but it is also a hustle. People who believe so richly in the inherent goodness of whiteness that they believe empathy alone will grow the hearts of fascists are both hustlers and easily hustled.

Glitter had affixed itself to small patches of my skin, though I don’t know from where. (Though, with glitter, isn’t that so often the way of its arrival? It comes, and it stays, its origin point a blur of a memory, no matter how recent.)

The phrase Ball don’t lie is one way of saying You get what you deserve. You, who knows what you’ve done but still might hope to benefit from some reward for your misdeeds, even (or especially) the ones of microscopic proportions. In a professional basketball game, lorded over by officials in their black and whites, someone drives to the rim and throws up an out-of-control layup, contorting their body, tumbling into a defender leaning back with their arms straight up, leaning back. The offensive player flails and shouts, and a ref calls a foul, despite minimal contact. The defensive player, the opposing team, the opposing coach all shout toward the sky in disbelief, get in the ref’s ear, to no avail. The driving player smirks. This is where the trick turns. The player gets two free throws. Misses the first. Someone at home, someone on the floor, someone in the stands shouts Ball don’t lie! Which is to say That’s what you get for that bullshit. Which is to say You ain’t slick.

Celebrating a championship on the home floor of an opponent is not the way it is supposed to go, but I imagine if you are the team that just won the championship, you will take whatever you can get. And besides, in the throes of our brightest, loudest celebration or anguish, anyplace can be anywhere.

It isn’t always lying to make the city you miss out of the city you’re in.

A raccoon, overjoyed with the gift of cotton candy, takes its bounty to the water, to wash the food off before consuming it. The raccoon, of course, does not know what any viewer knows. That the ball of sugar will be overtaken by the entry into the water and dissolve into nothing. When this happens, the raccoon becomes frantic and puzzled, feeling around the puddle of water, seeking what was lost, only to be greeted by its own reflection.

The moments immediately after waking from a rapturous state of elsewhere can be the harshest mirror. One in which you reach for what you just knew your life to be, even as the concrete memory of it slips away with each passing second. And still, the remnants of that sweetness dance along the periphery of a sometimes painful living. And so do you then regret the dreaming itself? Or do you return to sleep each night, hoping to get back to that same place, knowing how impossible that might be?

There’s something about that kind of losing, the kind of losing where you are close enough to touch and taste the finality of being sole victors, but never actually holding it. That can drain a fan base in a way that might feel similar to perpetual losing—in a way that might make one crave the familiar eras of hopelessness. At least in the bleak times, there’s an honesty about the reality of everyone’s circumstances. The excitement that opens a season, when there are no wins or losses in anyone’s columns, and the excitement that fades as a record becomes weighed down with L’s, but with that weight comes a new hope: There’s always next year. This moment is lost, but soon there will be another season, another blank slate. Possibility awaits. If you can believe in it long enough, destiny rotates, tilts its wild and colorful feathers toward everyone eventually.

I watched the dying moments of Game 7 of the 2016 NBA Finals in some Connecticut sports bar surrounded by strangers, and the fourth quarter felt like five lifetimes, all of them hard on the heart, even if one had no direct rooting interest.

In sports, the clock can oscillate between the minutes feeling eternal and then rapidly tumbling away at a pace that cannot be grasped by anyone who might reach for a few precious seconds that they wish to get back even while they dissolve. While watching the clock during basketball games, I most love the moment when the end of a game turns itself from minutes to seconds. I like to see the anatomy of a minute, the fractions of a second peeling themselves away. Fractions that we do not get treated to when the countdown clock is still concerned with the slower math of minutes. But once we dive into the suddenness of seconds, there is an urgency that begins as a hum and grows into a scream.