There's Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension

by Hanif Abdurraqib

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?

In 1992, Michael Jordan was a bad man, but he wasn’t a Bad Man. Feared on the court, but mostly beloved in the world outside of it. Wasn’t a hustler but could sell damn near anything. Smiled for every camera once the game ended. Only had enemies between the lines, or at least it was easy to believe that for a little while.

Mike was never as cool as he was in ’85, when he hadn’t yet begun to take a blade to his scalp. When he started at one end of Market Square Arena in Indianapolis and ran, catapulting himself from the free-throw line (yes, the actual free-throw line!) and remaining, suspended and extended, for what feels, even now, like a glorious hour. Your finest hour. The hour you’ve dreamed of living again ever since the final grains of it kissed the mountain of sand at the bottom of the hourglass.

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?

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.

you know forever is a hand dealt by an uncertain dealer, you may wear the signs of your aging like thick, heavy gold, weighing the body down, but still stunning—unavoidable in its shine.

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. But one thing I would crave is the silence.

I love a sport where even when I am alone, I am not alone.

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.

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

A child coming home from war, beating the folded flag to the doorstep

Sometimes there are funerals, and sometimes there is nothing. No portal through which grief can be passed, no housewarming for the new grief that furnishes the ever-growing tower that we carry, that we are responsible for, whether we want to be or not. Both landlords and tenants within our own sadness, and sometimes it just happens. Grows while you sleep. Death isn’t the only way to die, though it can be argued that it is the most merciful. If enough things crumble, if enough things turn to ash, I cannot convince you that there was anything better here once.

so here we go & 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

all I had going for me was that I wasn’t gonna get tired or at least not tired of running shit I made a life outta running from all the things I was tired of

With enough repetition anything can become a religion

I 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.

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 dilemma for me has always been the reality that the early moments of falling for anyone or anything are so seductive, and can rarely be captured again. They can be manufactured, but never fully sung back to life by the same effortless chorus. They appear, and then they drift away.

You must hear Otis Redding sing “My Girl.” If you have already heard it, you must hear it again. Through the entirety of the tune, he is always just a half-step behind the drum beat. He enters this way and never completely catches up. The all-too-familiar bassline builds the doorway, the guitar runs a fresh layer of paint over the door, and then the drums rush through the entryway, all breathless and blazing.

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. There is a shortage of imagination when it comes to the pleasures of simplicity.

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.

This story ends the way you might write it if you were writing it for a child, still young enough to be faithful in their pursuit of a possibility so florescent, anyone older might call it feverish, something to be read out loud while night closes in on a bedroom, with a small person breathing in your arms, for that brief moment of wonder that might exist when we enter the world of youth and remember ourselves as young.

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.

every sunset you’ve ever seen is a trick.

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.

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.

nostalgia is a relentless hustler.

I haven’t found many things I love as much as I love the sound of a basketball game in a park going down to its tense and silent closing moments with a sky just beyond sunset. Players on the court too worn down to even talk shit anymore. Nothing but breath and the echo of flimsy metal, bending as a ball spins off the rim, signaling a game that, mercifully, won’t end just yet. Parents who came to the park swearing that they’d drag their children home now at the edge of the blacktop, as in awe as everyone else, becoming children again themselves, praising the heavy legs that leave the shots flat, praising the fouls that don’t get called through a forest of swinging hands, praising the rebounds that slip through fingers and the passes that don’t twirl off the hands with the same joyous shouts that they did just a few hours earlier.

Tell me if you have ever built a heaven out of nothing, and then tell me what it would take for you to look for a new one somewhere else.