Can basketball bring us meaning?
Hanif Abdurraqib's exploration of life's biggest questions in "There's Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension"
There are two magazine covers I can’t forget and both have Sebastian Telfair on them.
There’s the copy of Sports Illustrated (RIP) from March of 2004 with Telfair on the cover with the words “Watch Me Now” across it. Telfair is a teenager in the photo. He’s wearing his high school basketball uniform, smiling, and dribbling a basketball while flying. The pier in the background never made much sense to me, but it’s there in front of the New York City skyline. The subhead reads: Can a 6-foot high school point guard from Brooklyn make the leap to the NBA? Yes, he can.
I kept a copy of the magazine for years. The story, Telfair and the cover served as a reminder that nothing is etched in stone. He was supposed to be the next great New York City point guard. Instead, Telfair became a journeyman NBA player at best.
The other cover comes courtesy of SLAM.
Telfair is there again. He stands with a basketball in his forearm, pressed against his head. LeBron James stands next time him. James is arguably the best basketball player ever. Again, Telfair is in high school. So is James. The headline reads, The Takeover: Sebastian Telfair & LeBron James are about to rule the world. Imagine that. A wonderful nod to Nas. A cover that then symbolized a future of possibilities for two basketball players about the make the jump. The talent. The skill. The promise. Today, only one player actually came to rule the world.
James has played for three NBA franchises and won titles with all of them. He broke the Cleveland curse. He has scored more points than anyone else. He’s the only player who could stand in the way of the mid-2010s Golden State Warriors dynasty. He’s spanned generations. He’s outlasted his peers, including Telfair, and played in various iterations of the NBA. He shined in the bully-ball of the early-2000s and has evolved with the sports push towards greater shooting and more analytic focused game we have today. He has a signature play. And now he’s now a symbol of our mortality because with every mention we hear how amazing it is that he is still doing this or that at his age. He’s become a marker of time.
He’s become a launching off point for hundreds of books. But none like Hanif Abdurraqib’s There's Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension, which is a series of essays broken up into moments in a basketball game. Well, timed like a game with four quarters, television timeouts and moments that seem to transcend the clock.
Abdurraqib blends his ability to write poetry and moving essays into something that mediates on his place in the world. It starts with his own basketball playing and seeing James as a freshman in high school who shocked gyms across Ohio with his skills and size. Abdurraqib went to those games. He saw the young LeBron and now he’s dealing with the older James and what has happened in the time since he first witnessed the King play. It’s a moving portrait of a city (Columbus, Ohio), of Abdurraqib’s own life and how we grapple with mortality.
Abdurraqib is the author of Little Devil in America: In Praise of Black Performance; A Fortune for Your Disaster; They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us; Go Ahead in the Rain: Notes to a Tribe Called Quest.
The interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Let’s start with this: where did this book start? Where did it come from for you and why did it start?
I was thinking a lot about time and mortality in relation to the career of LeBron James, who I have watched since he was a freshman in high school. We're around the same age, and we're both from Ohio, different parts of Ohio, but we have relationships to the changing Ohio landscape, and it struck me as fascinating to hear a lot of these conversations based around the immortality of LeBron James as a basketball player.
Of course those conversations sometimes dance around the question of mortality as a person, as a human, but I was interested in time and the passage of time and how much time one has left and the time in front of you. I think I'm realizing that statistically it feels like I have maybe an equal amount of time ahead of me as in front of me, if not less time ahead of me than I have behind me. And that got really interesting for me. So the book began as a meditation on mortality through the lens of LeBron James, who I remember as a very young person.
And hair, I think it's really interesting hair. And it's really interesting that you bring up hair a lot as a term for aging. It is something that we notice. So I guess, what was it about hair? Why focus on hair?
I got very interested in physical markers of aging because I began to consider how those physical markers arrive. For me, I have gray hair now and I don't feel necessarily old. I may joke about going to bed earlier, which I suppose I do sometimes, or I make the kind of hyperbolic jokes about the physical nature of aging, but I don't actually feel that old. I feel pretty good. I run almost every day and there are things that I'm physically capable of now that I wasn't physically capable of when I was younger, but that doesn't actually stop the aesthetic parts of aging — a wrinkle or gray hair or gray in your beard.
These kind of things fascinate me because our impulses are to run from them.
I think how beauty is manufactured and sold and packaged to us. It acts in opposition to age. When I think, for me, there is some gratitude in having survived long enough to wear some markers of aging at least somewhat proudly, which doesn't mean that I don't have my insecurities. I think we all have levels of insecurities that we wrestle with. But, for me, I was kind of curious about exploring writing about these unshakeable, natural signs of aging that we all are faced with if we are lucky enough to live long enough.
And basketball leads you to that perfect moment. A few months I played my first basketball game in eight years because my ankle just can't actually do it anymore. So it was a moment where I was like, oh my God, I'm taping it up, I'm putting a brace on it, doing multiple things so that nothing bad happens. And in the end of it, I was like, my arms are tired from playing zone defense.
Right? Yeah. Comes with aging, I think.
It's like a weird feeling. And the game changed too. What I was interested in doing physically. I was like, I just can't jump as high anymore and you don't do it as often, but I also can't attack the rim in the same way. Thankfully I've played enough basketball that I can kind figure it out.
Playing a sport as you age is one way to come to have a much more tangible relationship with your aging, particularly if you're playing with people who are younger than you because in some ways you're very literally watching time pass you by. But that does also mean that we get to kind of adjust to who we are now. I mean, for me, having a relationship with a kind of physical thing like running or when I play basketball, means that I'm always kind of taking inventory of what my body can do now versus perhaps what I could do when I was 18. There are some things I definitely can do differently and better now and some things I can’t. I think taking that inventory is not only humbling, but also an occasion for gratitude to have a body that speaks to you and a desire to listen back. That's something to be thankful for.
I think that relates to this book. You have now written a few books and know how to do it, and this book feels like one where experience mattered and helped, that a younger person might not have been able to do it.
I think there were some other structural questions about writing this book where I had to write other books to teach me how to write it. I wanted to write this book in 2017, but didn't know how. Some of that is definitely having a level of maturity to consider what I'm actually in pursuit of, or the questions that I'm actually trying to unfurl in this book, especially with regards to my own survival. Some of that too is just formally understanding how to complete this kind of sprawling, sometimes clumsy dream that I dreamed up for this book and then making it into something, not just settling for, well, I'll take a cohesive book and be satisfied with that, but something that is also fun to read.
While reading I was wondering what you were reading or thinking about as you were wrote this. This books does not fit in with what I’d say is an MFA-influenced writing.
That makes sense. I have no experience in academia really, and so I'm guided largely by instincts.
A lot of what I was thinking while making this was kind of writing through a state that felt dreamlike, which, for me is a very material sense, meant that imagery that could flow easily into other imagery so that it felt connected. For me, when I am dreaming, it feels like I am moving from one scene to the next, and I know how they're connecting, but I perhaps don't know how they connect until they do. Then when I look back to see the thing that has passed me by, it's gone. I'm onto another scene. That's kind of what I was attempting with this book. I was trying to attempt a haziness in writing about the blurring of faces or how faces are sometimes not as tangible to me as they once were and then offering real details to go with that.
These are real things that I was focusing on: attempting to create a feeling of drifting or floating, but not in a untethered way, not in a way where you're kind of like, I don't know what I'm reading anymore. I want people to always know where I'm asking them to go with me, but I do also want to provide a real sense of possibility that says, we are going to go to this place together, but I don't necessarily know how I'm going to get there, and I don't know what I'm going to find when I get there. So it will happen on the page and be a surprise for you too, or it'll have to feel surprising to you too.
I'm writing into a real sense of surprise. Oftentimes, this is how writing is for me. I map out a plan and then the plan kind of crumbles, and then I have to make something new of what I know I can do, not what I thought I would do.
You spend a long time talking abut enemies int he first section and move in and out of the topic and it’s interesting because when you start drifting, you're like, but listen here, listen, and it's an interesting and direct way to talk to the reader and bring them along. It's also having faith in them while making sure to remind them that you're there with them.
I mean, this book requires a lot of trust, but a lot of that first section is just teaching people how to read the book.
That's fair. That's really good point.
It's teaching people the structure of the book because there are plenty enemies present in the book. I just don't name them as explicitly because I've done it, or I've set the framework for how we are approaching the idea of what an enemy is already. So when I get to a section about, say, the police who murdered Henry Green here in Columbus, I don't actually need to point and say, okay, remember how we talked about enemies at one time? That kind of thing. So much of it is about just teaching people how to read what is coming
But you're not telling them straight up, which is one of my favorite things in writing, I don't need you to signify things to me. I want you to have faith in me as a reader.
I really trust.
I think that the thing with writing is that sometimes the more you write — I guess if you're fortunate — new people come to your work all the time, but I really trust the people who come to my work. I just do. This is my sixth book and I've got no reason, so far at least, to not trust people who are reading the book. I have a real high level of trust for all the readers, even the ones who are coming to my work for the first time with this book, which I think will be an interesting book for someone to come to for the first time with my writing. But, yeah, I'm required to trust people.
I think that comes from your poetry background. Poetry is all trust. You're working with words in a way that you're like, I expect you to find something here. A lot of people think poetry needs to be groundbreaking, but I always think of the imagist poets, who were writing about things they saw — and those poems are beautiful — and you have to have a lot of faith in the reader to figure that out.
Also, my earliest writing was writing in punk scenes about shows that people weren't at. I was articulating something I witnessed to people who were not there to witness it. And it's saying that, I know you weren't here, but I can build a world for you that makes you feel like you were here, and that is nothing but trust. That is a complete trust exercise. For me, as a reader, I appreciate trust, and I think a lot of readers appreciate a writer who treats them like they can figure out. I don't think the book is that overly complicated, honestly.
It's not, but you're not like every other writer. I read so many things and it's like, this is why this person does this. You don’t need that final sentence wrapping everything up.
I think it's a real delight to trust in a reader and be trusted as a reader. For me as a reader, it's a real delight to come across a writer who very obviously is leaving you on your own in trusting that you can find your way. I'm delighted by that, and I think it takes a lot. I think about Maggie Nelson, I think about Bluets a lot, about how that's just pushing the life raft off the dock and letting you go. I feel like it happens in fiction. Well, I feel like it ca happen in fiction when it's done well.
I turned back towards fiction a bit this year. I grew up reading nothing but fiction, and it's been harder for me to read fiction lately, not because fiction has gotten worse, quite to the contrary, I think it's gotten much better or at least more expansive. But I’ve been beholden to poems and nonfiction, but I am turning towards fiction and being like, oh, there's so much happening in here that a person is not demanding that they need to explain to me. And so I feel like it would be a betrayal of a reader's imagination, and I think that for me, to write is to hopefully ignite the imagination of people.
How long have you been thinking about writing about basketball? I mean you're a Minnesota Timberwolves fan, so that's a dark place to go to want to write about basketball. Actually, how did you become a Timberwolves fan?
Most of my family's from New York, so I grew up in a house with Knicks fans and so rooting for the Bulls was kind of out of the question. I loved Kevin Garnett when he came to the league. We didn't have cable often, but there was a way, if you lived in the Midwest, you could kind of get all the games of the NBA teams on just basic channels. So we got Timberwolves games and I loved rooting for this small upstart team with a high school player at its core, a former straight from high school to the league high school player. I began down the road of Timberwolves fandom that way. It's been somewhat tragic, but also thrilling. This year has been an incredible experience and who's to say what will happen in the playoffs of course.
But it's been fun to watch this team become gradually more exciting and it doesn't last forever and there's only one championship, only one team can win it. And so I'm just really trying to have gratitude for this moment where the games are watchable and the team is doing well.
Thinking about this book, you have this feeling that moves from page to page, section to section that’s similar to music that flows from one movement to the next. What’s the work that goes into that? It can't just flow off the page that easily?
I think I approach all this and I try not to valorize or glamorize the difficulties of writing, but I think I would be skeptical if a book like this came easy in part because the dreams I had were so large and my abilities at no point could live up to my dreaming. I knew that going into it. And that suggests to me that the work then to bridge that gap should be difficult. If it were easy, I think I, I'd be selling the book short and probably not achieving anything that I was setting out to do.
Can we talk about the breaks, the timing of the quarters, how they come? I was wondering, there's a few points where you just break in a sentence and I was like, wow, that's a really fascinating choice.
All those decisions were pretty intentional in terms of the clock.
Sometimes a sentence would flow into another and like so much in a basketball game, think about it as an offensive rebound where the clock moves on, but there's no change of possession, there's no change of mood or tone, linguistic style, idea. All of these things are actually literally mirroring what a basketball game can provide on the floor in real time. And sometimes the numbers were intentional, sometimes they were a little less intentional.
I would say there's a lot of intention in what the clock is doing and then other times it's kind of just moving along to utilize the form to get to the end of the logical conclusion.
What did you learn about yourself when you wrote this book?
I think, thankfully, I learned that I am probably more afraid of dying now than I was when I was younger and more apathetic about being alive. I think I haven't figured out what that means for whatever future I have, but I think I have a lot of gratitude for what I having come to that conclusion through this exploration of time running out.
What do you mean by being apathetic towards it before as opposed to now? What changed?
I don't think anything ever changes, right? I mean, for me, in my case, saying that when I was young, I didn't want to be alive all that much. The world certainly didn't change. If anything I think i has gotten worse. I do think that my interest in survival has perhaps shifted because I would like to, if I can, build something of a legacy or something of a life that is not only defined by grief or detachment. I'm curious, I would like to stay around to see how capable I am and that means that I'm also more afraid of dying before I can do that.