There's Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension

‘Hold whatever sweetness you can in your mouth for a little longer. Ignore the glass, dropped to the floor, fractured into an army of shards. This is how we begin the other story.’

‘A dunk contest is where one goes to execute some far-flung dream of what the body is capable of. It is where one goes to fail, often spectacularly. I wish all failure could be as beautiful as the failures that arrive to us midair, a reality setting in that we are incapable and yet still in flight. And still, there was no way Kenny was going to miss this dunk. We knew, crowded around a television, palms sweaty even before he took off, sprinting from seventy-five feet out. Even before he launched himself, toe touching just above the foul line (though who needs such specifics when miracles are afoot), even before the frozen moment, Kenny with his arm stretched straight up, heavenbound, the basketball an offering to the sky, but only for a moment. When Michael Jordan took off from the foul line in Indiana back in 1985, still with faint traces of hair on his head, all of us boys had been born, but barely. We mostly remembered the dunk in stillness, not in motion. Just like with Mike in ’85, a whole life can change if someone is in defiance of gravity for the right for the right amount of time.’

‘With enough repetition, anything can become a religion. It doesn’t matter if it works or not, it simply matters if a person returns. It is hard to watch a team you know has dedicated itself to intentional atrocity, knowing that they still have to at least try and put on a show for the dwindling crowds in the arena. Even if the crowds, themselves, are also rooting for that team to lose.’

‘‘The Leaving Song’ is the mother of a petulant, sometimes loud and unruly subgenre of song that is among my favourites: ‘The Begging Song’. It is a true but sad fact that this subgenre is most commonly dominated by men, some no-good motherfuckers who swear they might do right this next time around if you could just / if you would just / if you could find it in your / baby please don’t / and so on.

And shit, I ain’t always been above being some form of that no-good motherfucker myself, but what I’m saying is that I have at least a little dignity and plus I can’t sing all that well, so you won’t catch me down on my knees, pleading, trying to bend a single note through the closing eye of forgiveness. But lord knows I love to be a spectator to someone else’s mess every now and then, since my own is so frequently unappealing (and relentlessly immovable), and so I do love a song where someone is doing some begging.’

‘It should be made clear that begging and apologising are two different things. They perhaps live in the same apartment building, and when done at the right temperature, they can be heard through each other’s walls. Sometimes one may invite the other over, but the invitee can very easily either outstayed its welcome or leave far too early. Apologising is for the humbled; begging works best if the humility has yet to set in. This is, often, what makes begging such a unique vessel for this brand of song and—I must admit—why it makes sense that men have the most prominent hold on the genre. This can be a tender, thoughtful, self-reflective mode of tune, but so often, the begging is about both refusal and entitlement, which I suppose seems nefarious on its surface, though I am committed to seeing the usefulness in this type of refusal, at least to a point.’

‘In the magic of the commercial, they can all hear LeBron, though his voice has numbed to a near-whisper inside of the arena. Fans outside nod along with his voice. They lean in and furrow their brows, affixing looks of determination to their faces. And yes, this might be the point where you understand—or can at least be swayed into believing—that what is being discussed here is destiny. Finally, the pin is out of the grenade. LeBron James, making clear what was already assumed. Not just I came home to win but We will win together. My god, the greatest lies are told in the name of sports, in the name of teams and cities and the people in them. People who do march from the docks to the doors of an arena. People who do save up some coins to get seats in the highest corner of the rafters, closer to the kingdom of heaven than he who would be named King. The greatest lies are told in the name of what people believe they can reach out and touch. How the idea of winning in a place where no one believes you to be a winner can summon the heart to leap from the edge of a cliff, praying to land in a sea of outstretched hands. There are worse lies than this, ones that I’m less prone to be seduced by in a moment of weakness, in a moment of dreaming.’

‘Whether we know it to matter in the larger tapestry of our lives, or have washed it down with the accumulation of years, so many of us have left someone or somewhere. So many of us have built a chamber of suffering for someone to lock themselves in. I have been the face in a picture frame, turned over and then eventually discarded. Though it might not be the best time for this revelation, now, as we will momentarily leave each other, it must be said that leaving is the unspectacular part of this emotional math. Once this ends, once we hit zero and we depart, you will turn a page, and I will have returned to you. Different than I am right now, but a return nonetheless. And what happens in between is where the magic trick turns on itself.’

‘There is a video that breaks my heart that you have perhaps seen. 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? I hope you get it now.’

‘I don’t know how to explain this to anyone who hasn’t spent a large portion of their life betting on losing teams, betting on a city people foolishly consider to be a losing city. I cannot explain this to anyone who hasn’t stumbled their way into some undeniable beauty only to set it on fire at their arrival because they felt too close to that which they weren’t sure they deserved. I cannot explain this to anyone who hasn’t prayed in a church for something they weren’t entirely sure God gave a fuck about.’

‘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 colourful feathers toward everyone eventually.’