There's Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension

by Hanif Abdurraqib

Wanna fly, you got to give up the shit that weighs you down. —Toni Morrison

But we know our enemies by how foolishly they trample upon what we know as affection. How quickly they find another language for what they cannot translate as love.

Let us consider, again, what it means to have a place as reprieve, a people as reprieve, somewhere the survival comes easy. Should there not be a language for that? A signifier not only for who is to be let in but also who absolutely gotta stay the fuck out?

I do not waste time or language on our enemies, beloveds. But if I ever did, I would tell them that there is a river between what they see and what they know. And they don’t have the heart to cross it.

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.

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.

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.

The cloak of time has yet to grow so long that I have surrendered my childhood.

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.

Yes, there are moments I have spent and will continue to spend in a mirror, massaging products onto my skin and slowly washing them off, if not to delay the very things I am now welcoming, at least to make them as luminous as possible.

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.

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 way that a ball, when it rips through a net, might sound the way a thin leather belt sounds being lashed across a child’s bare skin by a parent who might sometimes have been one of our enemies, but only sometimes.

It didn’t matter if you played for him or not. It didn’t matter if you even played varsity or played basketball at all. If he saw you enough times, he remembered you. Might not have been great with names, but he’d remember what you looked like. If

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.

And still, there is material impact to these declarations, that a place is unfit for anyone to enter. That it is so violent that it might as well be left to collapse on itself. It doesn’t matter what magic exists inside the borders of a place neglected by those in power. They wouldn’t be able to recognize it even if they could walk through the hood without fear, which they couldn’t. It’s all part of a larger mission. 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. When you create the conditions of war, you get to name the places it happens.

one of the most enduring lines of an era of ’90s hip-hop that was defined, in part, by young black men attempting to retranslate the idea that had been pushed upon them that they were all living in war zones, destined to be casualties, that it was either death or prison.

The powerful call things “war” because it’s hard to sell the plain horrors of terror, but it is not nearly as hard to sell the materials.

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.

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

One might grow up loving Michael Jordan or Allen Iverson or whoever else would come along. But none of us could ever touch those players. We could fantasize ourselves into their worlds, into their league. But they weren’t one of us. There isn’t a Michael Jordan in every neighborhood, but I had the Michael Jordan of East Columbus just four doors down from my house, sometimes with his car pulled up on the grass of his front yard, shining up the fading beige exterior, drowning the block in warbled bass.

Every spor has someone local like this.

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.

What matters is belief, I suppose. Belief in the unseen, a being who might care for you, despite their hands being full.

What good is a witness in a country obsessed with forgetting? But I’m talking about history now and history ain’t nothing but a whole bunch of shit a lot of witnesses don’t wanna speak on.

I still cursed that fool as he lingered over the soda machine on the days I wanted something sweet to drown myself in & water alone would never be enough but the trick was to pretend to push the water tab which hung down from the lemonade dispenser like an exhausted tongue & cover the transparent cup with your hand while filling it with lemonade & if you were feeling risky enough, a layer of sprite certainly wouldn’t hurt & these were the only times I felt like I had any power at all I am not satisfied with what I am given I can fuck around & turn water into anything

JOHN BROWN,

Any change is a good change when you’re losing but want to make it seem like you could be winning if the chips fell in the right order.

I started to believe that I wasn’t returning to the corner store every day for a chance to win, just for a chance to dream myself beyond my circumstances for a few hours, before succumbing, again, to the wide, sharp grin of reality.

I have never been innocent, but I have tried to be good. Even when I robbed, I was good. It is good to survive, after all, if one is to be sentenced to living. All I know is a door closed once, and even when it opened, there wasn’t enough light to find my way out of the room that consumed me. Forgive me for committing to suffering. I thought it might be the answer. That if I suffered loudly enough, for long enough, I would be owed something from somewhere holy. And isn’t it funny, also, to imagine that the only time God judges us is after we’ve died?

believe that misery doesn’t need company as much as I believe that misery is company. Damn good company too, if you can get it honest enough.

Apologizing is for the humbled; begging works best if the humility has yet to set in.

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. This, too, prioritizes a type of staying. Fighting it out where you are until where you are is the place you win, and in doing so, you endear a place to you, eternally, without interruption.

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. When I am lovesick here, I know where there is a bar with a jukebox. A place where one quarter gets you four whole songs and no one asks why you’re alone, because they’re alone too. There are few things more intimate than the history made when a person touches a place, runs a hand along it for decades at a time. Few things more intimate than the history made when a place touches you, too, if you are open to it. Every repeated turn toward the familiar is an act of that touching.

training. 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. I could, for example, survive for a week on a large pot of Kraft mac and cheese, if enough supplementary items were added to it.

Even with an understanding of direction, I am known to fuck up the order of the Dakotas. I’ve been known to point at a great many square-like landscapes while weakly mumbling “Nebraska?” and so I get it, we don’t have it too bad. 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.

God, who, despite an alleged track record of miracles, has no interest in the pardoning of grief through resurrection and who, I imagine, grows weary of the unbearable questioning shouted out, piercing the middle of a night.

One thing about a hustle is that if you are in too deep for too long, it is possible that you might gain a misunderstanding of your limits. If you make a life around the rush that exists at the end of the trick, it can be easy to lose yourself in that feeling, in how people must see you, walking off on the shoulders of your victories.

nostalgia might be the most relentless hustler of them all.

And yes, I am rebuilding the interior of a dream that I had once, its beauty still stitched into a quilt that slips gradually from the shoulders of my memory.

Possibility awaits. If you can believe in it long enough, destiny rotates, tilts its wild and colorful feathers toward everyone eventually.

Nostalgia is only for the brokenhearted.

It is another example of time and distance misaligning. It has been ____ years since I lost someone, but it feels like ____ because I need it to.

But what we know to be true, by now, is that I have no shame in looking over my shoulder. And I have no shame in taking you with me, reader. To take your hand and run it over the wooden picture frame, inside of which I can convince you that my mother is living. I can convince you that I survived well, even when I survived hard. I can convince you there’s nothing to be afraid of. Love alone is not enough, and yet the love of people I buried helped carry me here. And so I do not fear death, the only thing promised. The steady breath I have felt growing heavier with each year I survive again and again.

We don’t know what we’d do with ourselves if we won here. It is romantic to be cursed, to feel like the world has it out for just you. That there is a deity bored enough to disrupt your ecstasy. We had a good run, but it’s not like any of us know what we’d do with a sky turned to gold. A child, shaking their head and filling a carpet with an entire solar system of wishing.

And I’m from Ohio, which means everyone I roll with from this godforsaken state dreams themselves an underdog. Me and my whole crew embrace this flyover shit. The narrative that might say we only matter during election years, and even then we gotta lie about who we really are just to get the country to give a damn. Fuck is a swing state that swallows the residents at its most vicious margins. But I’ll embrace that lie too if it means I gotta fight my way up and out of something, even if that something is pulled from the depths of my imagination, a mirage of an opponent, like shadowboxing, dancing in the backyard while the sun pulls your dark shadow taller along the concrete.

There is some mercy in being an underdog and then thriving beyond anyone’s wildest dreams of what you were capable of. I know Buster Douglas got his ass kicked by Holyfield, but no one I know gives a fuck about that. The history of an underdog can be distilled down to their brightest moment and then held on to forever.

The bruised and weary fighter grinning in the face of the juggernaut, too arrogant to realize that it was always a trap.

What I believe to be true, and what absolutely must be true here is that 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. History might not ascribe the same gravity to every champion who has ever won anything, but history is hell on so many of us, and I am feeling generous, today and always. I have felt like a champion before, even having won nothing but the desire to be alive in a day I woke up not wanting to be alive in. I deserve something for that, even if it is a parade of my own making. An invention, which is all the spoils of winning are anyway. Breathtaking inventions, to be sure. But inventions, nonetheless.