There's Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension

by Hanif Abdurraqib

Of the many things I love about basketball, I most love to consider it as a duel of angles. A defender and an opponent locked together in a lightless chamber, both seeking a window, cracked and begging for them to slide through.

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

I don’t care about anyone’s regular season unless there’s some jewelry swinging from the neck of it.

I am not sure what it is that fascinates me about the death of Scalish, or the many people like him—people who live salacious and high-stakes lives, awash with power and control, being forced to surrender to the heart. Not the bullet or the knife or the rope in a prison cell.

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.

I prefer being accelerated to the front row of my undoing. Spare me the slow march.

Columbus had yet to have a moment that mirrored this one, in part because of those magnificent lies that some in cities tell themselves. That these things don’t happen here, don’t happen to us. Yeah, our cops aren’t great, but they ain’t just killing folks in the street (even before Henry Green’s murder, this was, of course, untrue—from 2013 to 2016, Columbus police shot twenty-eight people, twenty-one of them black).

I came home an optimist, or perhaps I came home a fool, but I came home. I wanted to run to the doors of the police station with whoever else would join me. I wanted to arrive, breathless with rage. I wanted to look toward anyone who was still on the fence, still wrapped in the arms of mythological comfort. I wanted everyone to know. There hasn’t been a city built yet that is incapable of burning down.

The optimism of a child’s mind knows no boundaries, which is the first taste of how one becomes obsessed with the underdog. When they don’t outgrow the simplest realities of a circumstance.

if you are a champion once, you are a champion always. No one can strip you of this. If you are a champion for a day or even for a few moonlit hours, you get to call yourself a champion, no matter how long you hold on to the belt, no matter if your fingers only graze the trophy as it gets passed along to the next victor.

praise be to the underdogs and those who worship in the church of slim chances. I haven’t fully let go of the childlike simplicity that pulls me away from the odds and whispers to my most cynical corners that anyone, anywhere can win.

I grew weary of any conversation that returned to and landed on his appearance. How he looked, if he was big for his age. No one bandying these debates around ever really specified what rested on the other side of them: what it might mean if he were, in fact, “big for his age.” I suppose the reality is that no one had to say what many of us already knew. People were looking for a way out, a way to feel all right about the murder. Sure, it looked bad, but if he was large enough or dangerous enough, then what could anyone be expected to do, really?

It strikes me now that a part of why I cannot retreat comfortably back to any era when I looked like a child is because there were so many years when I wasn’t a child to the people around me. The teachers, who said I spoke too grown or the cops chasing me and my boys down for shoplifting a candy bar, the older homies on the bus or in the halls who would try to accelerate me and my crew into what they—still children themselves—imagined as adulthood. No, I have no use for innocence beyond the dead. The dead are innocent, departed from the treachery of the world.

I had never woken up to the sound of water before, and I remember the first few nights of sleep, I had dreams that I was drowning. I’d wake up gasping, the sound of the waves trickling into the dark of the bedroom, cackling with laughter.

Endings can be more romantic, but beginnings are the only honest thing.

a good court is not defined by infrastructure but by who shows up to play on it.

this rim was where the kids played. The younger siblings, the cousins, the friends of friends, all of us too small or otherwise not yet ready to play on the full court with the older kids but still in love with the game enough to want to fire the ball toward an unkempt halo of rust.

there were Michael Jordans on our block. There were Michael Jordans walking among us. Jordans four houses down, Jordans at the bus stop. If I haven’t made it clear yet, this is all about the good fortune of who gets to make it out of somewhere and who doesn’t. Who survives and how.

I never wanted to be anywhere other than where I was, my two feet planted on concrete that was breaking, but satisfied to still be of use. I never wanted to stray far from the shitty speakers weighing down old trunks, the symphony of bass and rattling metal, the smoke that drifts from an open window, an arm swinging from it, a wrist dangling out the side, a gold bracelet on that wrist, the sunlight running its fingers along the links, the shine of it, echoing for blocks.

The gangs were never our enemies, but the people who look upon where we stay and see gangs in every gathering certainly were our enemies.

Some of us carved our names into trees, into the wet concrete of new sidewalks. Some of us took small knives to metal and wrote our names into the death traps of the playground. And so we stay, one way or another. We never make it out, and we never disappear. Permanence is the greatest stunt of them all.

LEBRON JAMES, AKRON, OHIO (1984– ) Believes home is wherever / you land / wherever holds you / after you take flight / it is better this way / you cannot be a king / to everyone / you cannot be a king / forever / no ruler is unkillable / but goddamn / praise be / the executioners / have yet to find a weapon / that will do the trick

HANIF ABDURRAQIB, COLUMBUS, OHIO (1983– ) Never dies in his dreams / in his dreams he is infinite / has wings / feathers that block the sun / and yet / in the real / living world / the kid has seen every apocalypse / before it arrives / has been the architect of a few bad ones / still wants to be alive / most days / been resurrected so many damn times / no one is surprised / by the magic trick / anymore