There's Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension

by Hanif Abdurraqib

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, together, consider any neighborhood or any collective or any group of people who might otherwise be neglected in the elsewheres they must traverse for survival, be it school or work or the inside of a cage.

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.

The sweat, I believed, was a signifier. This is how I knew my father was somewhere beyond. Blown past the doorstep of pleasure and well into a tour of its many-roomed home, an elsewhere that only he could touch. One that required such labor to arrive at, what else but sweat could there be as evidence?

What else to do, then, but to imagine every gesture toward flyness as an affront to their own monochromatic living?

They look mostly like teenagers. Certain of their own invincibility because no one has come correct enough with anything to make them uncertain.

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

And listen, ain’t that a kind of love? To say You are worthy of the time it takes to dismantle you.

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.

In the fall of 1992 and early 1993, when announcers sometimes talked about their black socks and baggy uniforms and bald heads and trash talk and the music they listened to and the clothes they wore before and after games and the way they walked into arenas, with a lean and a slight dip, 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?

How long have you been suspended in a place that loves you with the same ferocity and freedom as the ground might, as the grave might, as a heaven that lets you walk in drowning in gold might?

It is probably best if this someone is a someone who also carries your last name, or some kinship, so that there is just a touch of extra incentive to not fuck your head up.

I have been better than I have wanted to be at giving in to the foolishness that allows us to sometimes mistake the desire to not be lonely for love.

And in the hour that is our hour, a window opens and we can breathe out all the sad stuff. Find a closet for our tapestry of aches. Both of our mothers had died, which might bond us in another world, if we were considering falling in love and not simply pouring ourselves into what would otherwise be vast, lonely gaps of living.

In all the time I spent with Leslie, our mothers never entered the room. 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.

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. And so, of course, praise to the person who made a way with a bald rock, and a little path of concrete that was their concrete, and a rusted rim with no net. Those be the noblest of hoopers. The ones who, back then, you had to keep an eye on. Cuz they’ve done all the hard shit already. Once they get a little bit of a grip on something new, it’s lights out.

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.

I don’t trust people who don’t love a place to understand how that place remembers its dead.

I propose that above all, you are a reflection of who loves you.

It was a salve in a sometimes vicious place, to have a respected adult, a pillar of greatness, look at you and remember your face enough to want to say hi, to ask if you were staying out of trouble. To, in so many words, say I will not let you move through this city and be forgotten.

It is one thing to experience death and another to understand it to be possible on its own terms. To grasp the certainty of its arrival but still cling to a hope for that certainty to come in a very specific way, at a very specific time, after a life has fulfilled all of its promise.

Geography and pride and rivalries aside, what also made City League basketball special was that it was an expression of lineage.

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. In building a tiny kingdom in a corner of a city that some folk talk on but don’t have the heart to ride through. It is a gift to resemble someone who has already done something memorable.

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.

When you create the conditions of war, you get to name the places it happens.

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.

The space between what you can get and what people think you deserve to have is sometimes a crack, but sometimes a canyon.

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.

I wonder what his dreams must have been like in the years between ascension & I’m saying that once you’ve seen the impossible how can you ever stay earthbound for 36 years knowing what’s up there & it is true that none of us will live forever & the mere existence of that knowledge suggests we all have to pick a thing we might die for if the opportunity arose

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.

There is so much to lose, and even more to be taken. To stunt is also to know what you have, which is also to know what everyone else doesn’t have, which is also to know what can be lost. What can be taken. I don’t know how someone decides what they’ll kill for, or what they’ll spend years locked up in the name of.

Kenny landed and began to skip down the court, something he’d do at Independence when he caught a good groove, if he’d get a couple of dunks in a row. Kenny wasn’t averse to talking his shit, but his best bit of showing out came in this mode: I’m having so much fun, this ain’t even work.

there is no blueprint for what to make of an entire life when you’re a legend by twelve, thirteen years old.

Don’t talk to me about any version of making it that ends with someone like Estaban Weaver being described as a failure. Not if you weren’t here. Not if you don’t know what it’s like for a city to make you into a savior before you finish ninth grade. Not if, despite that, you survived.

I close my eyes and I fall back into the ocean of our past selves. It is a warped image in a bent frame, as all dreams are.

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.

What Jake seems to be playing for is respect—something that is so often denied the father who returns,

The idea that is presented is one of conquering. The father not only as a nuisance but also as a haunting.

For anyone who grew up in a home where there was a belt, unleashed from the rings on a parent’s pants, or where there might have been a switch pulled down from a tree, you know that some punishments can have an expiration date. Some of us grow too large or too accustomed to every kind of pain for our parents to physically punish us in the same way.

Home isn’t a choice one makes; home is a set of circumstances.

My most hopeless years all blur together, surely as some kind of defense mechanism against memory—if it all feels like a blur, I can convince myself that it was over quickly and I hardly suffered.

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.

Look, all I know is that be it the spiritual or the legal, the work of the witness is to not only be a watcher but to evangelize, to spread the word about what was seen.

In the in-between time, the city became my own, the way a city can bow to anyone with nothing but time and the need to survive.

The greatest engine within the machinery of deception is mercy. The mercy visited upon you by those who know something is amiss but don’t say shit. Who know the machinery is what is keeping you going, granting you a little bit of dignity.

“Miracle” is another word for deception. Who or what can make someone believe anything that would be otherwise unbelievable. I have no money for rent, but something will come through. I go to bed hungry but will wake up in the morning, and something might fall in my lap to keep me full. A team is losing until it isn’t. Until an architect of the miraculous takes over a game, and the deception becomes real. This is really happening. All of the good you believed would arrive, suddenly has. All of the bad that is coming, certainly will.

Let some of my own beloved elders tell it, and prayer is the only cloak that can never be torn from the shoulders of anyone it is placed upon.

If there is anything worth killing for, it is probably whatever might unlock a chain from around someone else’s neck.