That line in full — If a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound? — is often misattributed to George Berkeley, an Irish bishop and founder of immaterialism, or subjective idealism. Berkeley never really made a great case for the theory, one borrowed from Mahāyāna Buddhism, but the gist was that to be was to be perceived; that things existed if they were seen and understood in the same way (“The Existence of an Idea consists in being perceived,” A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge).

Think how fast Berkeley, or any monist thinker, would’ve had their head spun watching pro basketball. And the fabric of their intellectual and spiritual worlds torn asunder watching Victor Wembanyama.

Or maybe Berkeley would have considered it an ecstatic truth, sitting in an arena alongside tens of thousands of other people so eager to perceive; and perceive one specific person. Who watched him fall, hard, to the hardwood just minutes into the second quarter of Game 2. Fall hard and stay down. Thousands of people who all wrestled with Berkeley’s key concept, that they saw Wembanyama quite clearly, his outline stark against the shining court, but could perceive no movement. What they could perceive — flurries of fear, anxiety gripping their chest, seized breath, sudden and nauseous dismay — felt too real but were of course intangible. Imagine though, Berkeley trying to argue that to them in the moment?

There’s a few brief seconds, once Wembanyama’s body has slid to a slow stop, that he appears to flicker from consciousness. His jaw unclenches, brows relax; his head softens against his right hand with its fingers splayed out on the floor. His forehead rolls against the supporting right hand and his mouth opens slightly, his shoulders sink a little more liquidly down. It’s the face of a person who has just slipped from sentience, dropped their guard into sleep or another gone state. It’s nearly imperceptible but the change in his features, his body, flashes a glimpse to a much younger Wembanyama — and he already is young.

Watching, I felt an intense wave of vulnerability for him. Like you would watching a child sleep. The perception of that bare sliver of a moment replayed over and over as the broadcast was fed other angles and finally stuck on the main replay, filmed from the perspective of the camera person whose feet Wembanyama toppled at.

Replay is one of the strangest components in basketball. Replay in general and replay of injury, certainly. The ability to stop and revel in time — I do it often. Studying footwork, where and how the body moves. Zeroing out to parse the people around whoever is central and how they react, hinge on the action of that central axis, then zooming back in to trace up to the person’s face, fixate on their features, follow where their eyes go. Whether it’s ever possible to pick up on intention watching this way, I’m not sure, but I’m sure that’s why I’m watching. To discover the exact split second a decision is made, to see the brain fire.

Replay of injury, and I’ve written about it, when I’m feeling generous I think of it as a way for us to process grief in small glimpses. To see a person’s pain and mete out our own response, decide how we’re going to feel as we watch what’s happened again, now from another angle. It’s an anaesthetising way to grapple with the unknowable full spectrum of emotion the person we’re watching, in brutal slow motion, is experiencing.

When I’m feeling less generous I think of it as blunting. As a way to neatly package injury into something that happens “in-game” by showing it from so many angles, within the bounds of a basketball court. That way when the person is removed from the floor, by their own power or at the hands of other people, we cease to think of all the time now unfolding in front of them — of how they are even going to grapple with the concept of all of that time — that they must manage on their own. Road to recovery is a quant euphemism when really, it is a wilderness.

Wembanyama travelled with the Spurs to Portland. He’s in concussion protocol, which was clear to anyone who watched his fall and how he took the brunt of the impact with his chin, and then watched him jar awake and roll over, attempt to stand up only to groan and sit with his head hanging. When he brought his knees up to his chest and held a hand to his eyes, rubbing them gently, willing his vision steady as the crowd began to chant his name, I felt — maybe not for the first time but drawn in a different, sharp relief — how vulnerable a game this is.

Bodies, bare limbs, in motion, tangled and in flux; it’s what makes basketball so captivating to watch. Faces and expressions exposed, defeat and triumph flashing in every possession — in playoff basketball at least. The shakiness shot through Wembanyama as he tried to feel his way back into his body, his usual stolidness, stripped away. It’s confessional, this level of perception into another person, their body showing us what they don’t yet know. Wembanyama’s right then is swooning, but even under full faculties we’re handed revelations.

As he gained his feet — not letting any of his teammates help him up, choosing instead to stand under his own power and jog to the tunnel and out — my mind kept flashing back to that short, secreted glimpse of peace slipping over his face. How transportive, one shifting second and a person’s features relax, the decades drop away. An awareness of a life, of life, untenable, precarious, precious, too huge, so small, balancing at every second on a breath.

My father, like most people, was a series of contradictions. He was an upstate New Yorker who came down to North Carolina to attend Wake Forest. He somehow loved both the Jets and the Giants. He hated the Yankees so much that he became a Red Sox fan. The sport I remember us watching the most together was golf; we never missed a Sunday at Augusta. But for all that, he loved college basketball. I’m sure a large part of that was because he attended a university in the ACC.

Growing up in Greenville, SC, we were in close proximity to Wake Forest. We’d drive up for all kinds of games, whether it was sitting on the hill to watch the football at Groves Stadium (I know it’s the ‘Allegacy Federal Credit Union Stadium’ now — but my god what a mouthful) or Lawrence Joel Veterans Memorial Coliseum.

It was there, in the LJV, where I remember seeing Duncan play for the first time.

I don’t quite recall the particulars, but he left an impression. I begged my father for his jersey, getting one that looked quite similar to this practice penny instead. I think he knew I wouldn’t wear it that much and opted for a cheaper version. Ultimately, he was right; it hung on the back door of the bathroom I shared with my two younger sisters as a shirt I’d wear to the neighborhood pool as my interests shifted away from sports and toward video games during my middle school years.

I was more obsessed with Wake Forest basketball than I ever would have been with the Hornets. Logically, our proximity to Charlotte should have meant I claimed that NBA franchise as my ‘local’ team. That’s certainly how I ended up as a Panthers fan. But Duncan’s dominance meant that when the Spurs eventually drafted him, they became my team. Texas, and by extension San Antonio, might as well have been Mars to me. Yet, they had Duncan, and therefore, were the only NBA team for me.

We didn’t have cable growing up, so I relied on my Dad to tell me when they’d done well or won something. I remember hearing about the ‘03, ‘05, and ‘07 championships. But as I moved into college at the University of South Carolina, SEC football became my sporting passion, and I devoted my free time to that instead.

In 2011, my Dad passed away from a brain tumor. It was a quick decline. He told our family at the end of January of that year. By early October, he was gone. I was 21. The same drives we’d make to North Carolina to watch Wake Forest games were now replaced with treks to Durham to some of the best oncologists around. Dad definitely gave all the Duke doctors a hard time; I wish I could remember some of the more specific jabs, but I compartmentalized so many of those hospital visits away. To this day, I still hate going into a hospital. It’s never good news.

It’s June 15, 2014. I’ve started to come out the other side of this seismic loss. Things are still hard to process, but I do feel like I can breathe again after years of feeling like I’m drowning. I’m a year out of college — I took a victory lap after changing my major from business to public relations — and I’m still hanging around Columbia. I’m with my buddy Joey, and we’re at an anniversary party for a local recording studio called The Jam Room. At some point, he and I wander across the street to Lavanderia Wash World. A handful of televisions hang from the ceiling as Game 5 of the finals is well underway. Joey glances up and quickly remarks that he wants the Spurs to beat the Heat to stop LeBron James from getting three straight. We make our way back and forth across to Lavanderia a few times throughout the night as the team battles back from the early deficit. Kawhi Leonard puts on a clinic as that classic, Spursian ball movement allows the Big Fundamental to lift the Larry one last time. I think about my Dad as the seconds tick down to their victory.

A few months later, I moved to DC for a change of scenery. On my first night in town, I head to a now-defunct bar that’s the first in a rotating series of South Carolina bars. But this one, named Red Light, is in the shadow of what’s then called the Verizon Center. It dawns on me that seeing a professional sports team is much more accessible than it’s ever been. I start paying more attention to the sport, taking in a few games from the Warriors’ dominant 2015-2016 season before committing to watching basketball more consistently.

I remember the exact temperature of the heat inside the Mega Bus that carried me back to DC the July Fourth weekend when I read a story about the Warriors landing Kevin Durant. The Leonard injury is still looming large as I realize the Spurs won’t be competing anytime soon. The Claw’s eventual trade shatters. I watch him hit the shot in Toronto after falling in love with how consistent a midrange artist DeMar DeRozan is. I’ve started to become invested in a way that I never had before.

It’s June 30, 2022, and I’m on my way to see a press screening for Thor: Love and Thunder, a movie that I try to talk myself into enjoying more than I actually do. Seconds before I get in the car to drive to Silver Springs, the Spurs trade Dejounte Murray to the Hawks. I get to McGinty's Public House, where my buddy (and Celtics fan) Chris is waiting for me. He asks how I’m doing. I immediately yell an expletive. I look at my Twitter mentions, and someone tells me to keep an eye on the bigger picture, that Victor Wembanyama is the grand prize that may await at the end of this pain. Losing Murray after trading away Derrick White feels like too much. The next season, I watch Gregg Popovich trot out lineups that include Romeo Langford and Blake Wesley. The team goes 20-62.

The season comes to an end, and I find myself in a similar place. It’s June 22, 2023, and it’s not only my mom’s birthday, but the night of the NBA draft lottery. My stomach is in knots. I intentionally attend a press screening, once again in Silver Springs, for the live-action The Little Mermaid remake. Outside of The Jungle Book live-action remake, I hadn’t brought myself to see any of these other blatant cash grabs reimaginings. I decide to see it as a 10% professional obligation (so I’m not talking out of my ass when broadly assessing these sorts of movies), and 90% as a reason not to stress about the lottery. I tell Chris that he can push through my do-not-disturb if we make the top three.

About a quarter of the way through the movie, I stand up to go to the restroom. No texts on my phone, which immediately disappoints, but puts me at ease that I don’t have this hanging over me for the rest of the night. Only, I quickly realize the draft hasn’t even started yet. Now I’m keenly aware of what’s happening. I go back into the theater.

Eventually, my phone buzzes. I stand up and try, as quickly as I can without disturbing my fellow critics, to make my way down the stairs so I can look at my phone. I round the corner to a text from Chris that says we’re in the top three. Before I can even respond, he tells me we’ve won. I step out into the hallway, and my body curls into a silent scream not unlike this moment from A Star is Born.

The first person I want to talk to is my Dad.

I miss a lot about my Dad. I think the thing I’m saddest about is that I never got to spend time with him as an adult. Not having him here for the big moments of my life is, of course, extraordinarily difficult. But what’s almost worst is not being able to talk to him about the most mundane things in the world. And there’s nothing more importantly unimportant than being able to talk about sports. I wonder sometimes whether he and I would have connected more about the Spurs over the last 15 years if he had been around.

My journey into basketball and the Spurs has been a tremendously rewarding one. I remember watching highlights of those Duncan teams and how beautiful the ball movement was, or how heartbreaking it was to watch the Ray Allen shot. Sharing all of that with him could have been so exciting and brought a new depth to our relationship. We didn’t talk much about sports when I was a kid; I had more of a passive interest, and I wonder what might have been if we’d had a chance to connect on it.

I wonder what he would have thought about this Spurs team. Would he have loved Keldon Johnson’s tenacity? Luke Kornet’s admirable goofiness? Devin Vassell’s sharpshooting? Julian Champagnie’s steadiness? Castle’s defensive prowess? The way Dylan Harper drives through traffic? How De’Aaron Fox pilfers the ball away from an opponent like he’s Danny Ocean? How everything Victor Wembenyama does reshapes the landscape around him? Mitch Johnson’s leadership? Would he have come to visit in DC to catch a game with me when the Spurs were here? Would we have taken a trip to San Antonio together? Hell, would we be at one of these playoff games together, getting a chance to share in that experience?

One of the things I learned early on after his passing is not to play the what if game. If you spend too long doing that, it will consume you, dragging you into the water until you’re completely and utterly submerged by grief. I can’t help but wonder what he and I might have said to one another about how utterly special this team is, and how poised they are to contend for (hopefully) a long, long time. And how introducing me to a generational talent some thirty years ago now puts me in a position to watch a game I love with a team that’s on the verge of something magical.

In the immediate aftermath of his passing, I received a lot of my father’s possessions. His watch, some of his ties, a few of his sport coats (I was too tall for a lot of his stuff), and more random things. At a certain point, those gifts dry up, and you’re left with the past.

It’s rare to receive something new from someone long gone. In these last few weeks and months, I’ve thought a lot about how this Spurs fandom — and all passions, really — are some of the last gifts I received from my Dad. Perhaps that’s an overly romantic way to consider it, but why not?

I think of him when my (now) wife surprised me with a trip to a Spurs game for my thirtieth birthday, and when one of the concession workers hears my story about us visiting and decides to generously gift me one of the Fiesta medals she’s wearing. I think about him throughout those fledgling Pop years, when we win the draft lottery, when we draft Wemby, when he has his first home game, when I finally see him in person — on and on it goes. I’m thankful my Dad introduced me to this sport, to Tim Duncan. Saying that my Dad lives on in every Spurs possession sounds insane, and yet, it kind of does.

That’s the thing about what sports can do. It can create these ethereal, otherworldly connections between you and people you don’t even know. There’s no need to play the what if game here; I know Dad would have been beyond excited for what’s to come with this Spurs team, and how surreal it would be for us now, thirty years after first learning about Tim Duncan, to be on the verge of watching history possibly repeat itself.

Sports are just life, it’s just intertwined. You get to ride the highest of highs with the guys when they make their first All-Star team and everybody’s so excited, and then the next day one of your stars tears their meniscus and everybody’s grieving. It is the emotions of life, and I’m one of those humans who wants to feel as much as I can every day.

On NBA TV this season one of the features we used most during our shows were live look-ins. These are what they sound like: cutting to a broadcast of a game underway and the local crew calling it. We’d linger, at most, for two to three minutes, oftentimes less if we got caught with a dead ball or timeout. What I came to enjoy most was getting familiar with the cadence of the local broadcasters, some better than others.

There are broadcasts that make you pause because you wonder whether they’re watching the same game, or the game at all; there are broadcasts with bias piled on thick. There are crews that thrill because of the way they work so symbiotically, and because they always manage to make the listener feel like they’re on the inside of what’s happening. There are voices that resonate and voices you tire of. I never got tired of listening to Kate Scott.

Kate is the Sixers play-by-play announcer alongside colour analyst, Alaa Abdelnaby. Her steadiness and humour make for one of the best listening experiences a fan, any viewer, can have. She is generous, forgiving, knows when to dial in and pan out. In a word, she’s seamless.

We talked about her start in media as a radio producer for traffic in The Bay, and how asking “Can I fill in for Larry?” one day changed her life. We talked about sports radio as a form of therapy, the intimacy of radio and why it perseveres, and what she’s taken from radio and applied to her jobs on television. We also talked about her move to a single sport, team, and new city with the Sixers, how difficult her start was there.

Plus: Katie’s preparation process, knowing what to tell and what to leave out in a broadcast, still working like it’s your first game, the best things about learning the rhythm of a team when you’re attached to and alongside them all season, how Philly fans are adjusting to feeling hopeful about the future via Tyrese Maxey and V.J. Edgecombe, the frustrations of media as monolith, the relentless lack of routine of the NBA, Kyle Lowry appreciation, and the side of athletes fans don’t see.

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I can’t blame him. Everyone is inside already. I watch the mayor, who stepped out a few seconds earlier on the opposite side, head for the open door flanked by her security. Her staffer hurries after her and I trail them, spot Crina inside the doors and wave, she motions for me to follow. The mayor and her team veer one way and Crina and I go the other, she directs me through the curtained chute down to the arena floor, to a couple dozen folding seats angled to face the court. I walk as fast as I can, but this is why I was late in the first place. My steps are more clipped than I realised they’d be, shorter and slower with my still sore back dictating the limits.

It’s a little wild to see a hardwood court laid in the basin of the arena. One, for its glowing newness, practically thrumming. The Tempo logo stretching over centre court, the lilac arc around either key set off by the deep plum framing at the base and sidelines. The club’s first ever players will set foot on it in a matter of hours for their first scrimmage and it will radiate with a different kind of energy, given life the way all courts are when sneakers squeak and scuff over them, when the energy of bodies working and in motion vibrate down from legs slicing over the surface and feet connect. But just then there’s a hallowed quality to the court, hushed, even the many camera operators setting up their rigs, gathered reporters, and city staffers seem reverent.

The other reason the court takes some time for my brain to orient is that for the bulk of my life, as early as I can remember, this was where I came to watch horses.

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The Sky have spent the ensuing days attempting to stop the mass exodus of fans with a flurry of splashy free agency signings. Since Reese’s departure, Chicago has acquired Jacy Sheldon, Skylar Diggins, Rikea Jackson, and DiJonai Carrington. These additions are a needed salve for a fanbase smarting from years of organizational ineptitude. If nothing else, the team should be competitive, a welcome reprieve from its 23-61 record across the past two seasons. These new players, especially established vets like Diggins and Carrington, bring a sense of legitimacy to an organization that has struggled to consistently attract big names in free agency.

What these players cannot fix however, is the structural issues of an organization that often feels less like a professional sports team and more like a well funded rec team. In this era of exploding WNBA popularity and (now CBA-required) improved working conditions, the Sky as an organization seem to relish blocking their own progress and wagging a finger in the face of their fanbase.

The blunders are cartoonish. The firing of head coach/WNBA legend Teresa Witherspoon was rationalized by the assertion that the team needed to be playoff contenders — they finished the following season 10-34. The team has also traded away years worth of first round draft picks, leaving less to show for such a humiliating effort.

Fans have criticized Chicago’s in-arena experience, which feels semi-pro compared to other franchises. Most notably, a practice facility that was the promised end to public training sessions won’t be ready for the season. The Sky’s lack of proper training facilities has been the subject of criticism by players and ridicule by fans for years. The team used a public rec center, sharing space with anyone who happened to be working out at the same time.

They’ve been called the worst organization to play for. Numerous former players have stated with no uncertainty that they’ll never go back.

That talent includes — or, included — Reese. Perhaps we should have known her tenure in Chicago was never meant to last when the video of her welcome to the aforementioned public training center was shared. Despite having premiere talent in the past, the Sky seemed unprepared for the Moment of Angel Reese. The league as a whole struggled through the growing pains brought on by Reese and Caitlin Clark’s draft class, but Chicago seemed particularly ill-equipped to handle the influx of new fans.

It’s no wonder, then, that there was quickly conflict between the organization and Reese, a bonafide star before she ever played a minute of professional basketball. Reese was vocal about her disappointment in the decision to fire Witherspoon, who coached Reese to a double-double average rookie season. In the middle of the following season, Reese was suspended for half a game for “conduct detrimental to the team” for her comments on the Sky’s need to attract premiere talent.

With her departure, the story of Reese as the future of the Chicago Sky ends. In reality, the Sky struggled to ever make her part of their present. It’s tempting to look at the drama of the last two years and call this a clean start for both parties. And it’s true, on the surface the relationship between Reese and the Sky seemed irreparably broken. But that narrative is at odds with public statements from both player and team who both went on record saying they were working on rebuilding trust. Of course, it is impossible to know whether the relationship was ever repaired.

Even for fans who claim Reese wanted out, it’s important to take one more step in the thought process to consider why one of the most popular players in the league, on a rookie scale contract, would be so eager to leave. It also begs the question of whether this new team, with its roster of big names and bigger personalities, is worth investing in. Afterall, it was only five years ago that the Sky were on top of the league. The seasons since have done little to reassure fans that Chicago is ready to handle the talent they’ve secured.

Looking at the Sky’s offseason moves (including the surprise selection of Gabriela Jaquez in the draft), it’s still unclear exactly what the organization is trying to accomplish in the short- or long-term. Jaquez was a breakout star in the NCAA tournament, but many Sky fans were perplexed that the team took her ahead of players like Kiki Rice, considered more league ready. Free agency action suggests a win-now mentality but the team — outside the projected starters — is largely composed of underwhelming performers, yet-to-be-developed young players, and now, a first round pick who will take some time to find her footing in the league.

Perhaps the Sky feel a sense of urgency to win back their fanbase by signing as many popular players as possible. It’s reminiscent of the ubiquitous landlord special; the past two years have been hastily covered up with a refreshed roster, but there’s no hiding the flaws within the organization. With the season just around the corner, Sky fans will have to wait and see if this team can find the space to grow through the cracks in the foundation.

If it burns, he says.

It is burning, I say, craning around best I can to look at my lower back in the mirror and see whether the skin around the adhesive bandages is flushing red.

If it hurts, he says. Want me to take them off? He offers.

They do hurt, I say, pausing. But maybe… it’s good?

The package warned, I read, that a small percentage of people experienced severe burns from the bandages. I start to swing my arms in slow, ragdoll rotations, half wondering whether this will accelerate the heat.

Floppy, ungraceful arm swings are the only movement that’s brought me any relief over the last few days. First, just in the relative dark of the kitchen after wincing my way out of bed, self-conscious, but quickly uncaring, in the aisles of the grocery store, or standing on camera between the host’s ad reads doing a podcast; in the waiting room at the doctor’s office, and carving out a bubble of space for myself on the shared city trail we walk the dogs on, making cyclists and joggers veer away.

I stood to do them every 10 minutes working through rounds of edits on a giant story I wrote for The Ringer, joking with my editor both the pain and the swings were a good analogy for the editing process. I’ll do them during commercial breaks later tonight, on the last regular season segment of NBA TV I’m scheduled for.

I did them watching Artemis II drop like a stone down through Earth’s atmosphere, nervously speeding the swings the longer it seemed like it was taking for the capsule’s parachutes to deploy.

I should back up a bit.

I hurt my back, the jury Dylan was on got sequestered, Donald Trump threatened to annihilate Iran — 93 million people — ostensibly with nuclear war, and I wondered, not for the first time, how to care about the convolutions of NBA playoff seeding in a time of existential threats as proxy and posturing. Not morally, though there is that too, but just how, in the brain, to line those two up.

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Luckily, the young Buck already had a highly abridged alias, which Jack gladly embraced: here was “Mamu.”

But, I thought — how hard could it be to get the full name right? Once you have mah-moo, two simple syllables, there are only four more (rather musical) beats in it. Kel. Ash. Vee. Lee. They might be weird siblings in a very large family. Lost Kardashians, perhaps.

Delicious bits of language like this, I tend to repeat in my head. And why not, I thought, for Mamu? Even back on the Bucks, with whom he only logged one season, he brought to the court an undeniable energy and a unique sincerity. So, I started following Mamu’s career, and once I had mastered the syllabic structure and pronunciation of his name, I built a little song around it.

Although this song only exists in theory, I can describe it to you pretty well. It is in brisk 4/4 time, based on a simple electric guitar downstroke pattern played in a vaguely anapestic rhythm, the same you might clap in: one-two, one; one-two, one. The snare drum doubles this. The tune has the crisp, new wave bounce of the The Knack’s “My Sharona.” The only words are “He’s my Mamukelashvili… my Mamu.”

I could go on, but the point is, the song exists in my head, it rips, and I sing it (silently or out loud) whenever Mamu comes onto the court. Or sometimes when I’m cooking or doing dishes. Sometimes just because it’s the kind of thing I do — and not the only song I have.

Alexander “Sandro” Mamukelashvili came into the world on U.S. soil, in New York City, in May 1999, but his Georgian family moved to Tblisi when he was still a baby. He comes from basketball; Wikipedia tells me his grandmother, Ira Gabashvili, was a member of the Soviet women’s national basketball team. It also says he was in Chicago visiting his famous pianist aunt when the Russo-Georgian War broke out in 2008. At 14, he went to Italy to pursue basketball. At 17, he moved to the States, to play for Florida’s Monteverde Academy in high school, and went on to play college ball for Seton Hall.

Mamu was selected as the 54th pick in the second round of the 2021 NBA Draft — the same one that got the Raptors NBA All-Star Scottie Barnes, who now plays alongside Mamu, a Raptor since the 2025 offseason.

After thin stints with the Bucks and the Spurs (and their respective G-League teams), this season the Georgian has become one of the Raptors’ two go-to replacements for often-injured centre Jakob Poeltl. He’s averaging around 10 points, 5 rebounds and 2 assists per game, with a field goal percentage of 51.5. On good nights, his three-point shooting can space the floor for the Raps. He’s plucky on defense, big but fluid.

Mamu’s best attribute, however, is his effort. He brings a jolt of energy to the court that comes partly from having had to prove himself as a legitimate and valuable NBA role player (right now, there are only two Georgians in the league: Mamu and the Orlando Magic’s Goga Bitadze).

But some of it just comes from Mamu being, abstractly, a little different. He’s one of the NBA’s few heavily tattooed white guys. His beard is ungainly. He needs a more loving barber. In interviews, he is among the Raptors’ more polite and normal-seeming spokespeople, but he has the tendency to make goofy faces for the camera, which always make him look a little embarrassed by himself.

In the NBA, “different” has a specific context. Players with unfathomable talent are called “different” as the ultimate form of praise. A “difference maker” is someone who can change the tenor of a game. In an NBA context, the phrase “Steph different” would only ever be taken to be a statement about Stephen Curry’s preternatural basketball skills. It would not be interpreted to mean, “Steph Curry is weird because he never stops chewing on his goddamn mouthguard.”

That iffy kind of difference has haunted a handful of NBA players who didn’t quite fit the Be Like Mike mold of the superstar model. Dennis Rodman? Too colourful. Dwight Howard? Too thuggish. You can see the same dynamic at play in the current aura clouding the future of Ja Morant, who, even before the gun thing, was maybe just a bit too flashy for the NBA’s comfort.

Sandro Mamukelashvili isn’t different like Rodman or Morant or Metta “World Peace” Sandiford-Artest. But he has his own kind of difference, an endearing awkwardness nicely encapsulated in his name — which, in Georgian, looks like this: ალექსანდრე მამუკელაშვილი — and, in my head, sound like “My Sharona.”

For years, I never thought much about my little songs, the tendency to fix on phrases and privately vocalize them into easily repeated patterns. I first noticed the habit more pointedly during the COVID-19 lockdowns, when the whole world was in an accelerated state of stress. I built songs using random Korean words, common names and funny animals (horned grebe, etc.).

Then, one day I came across a post on social media, in which the poster “shouted out” those, like them, who listened to particular songs endlessly on repeat, had obsessive compulsive leanings, and — using a term with which I was unfamiliar — did “vocal stimming.” Those, in other words, considered neurodivergent.

I grew up in the 1990s, when depression was a trend. Nobody was neurodivergent except Dustin Hoffman’s character Raymond Babbitt in the Oscar-winning film Rain Main, and we called him autistic. Autism, of course, existed as a complicated experience for anyone managing it in themselves or a loved one. But the larger cultural conversation was much more binary: autism was a kind of disability (unless you were gambling).

I have never been Raymond Babbitt. In high school, I knew my brain worked differently than a lot of people’s — but whose doesn’t? We all live in our private cells of perception and consciousness. True understanding is beyond reach. It took me years to ask my doctor for an anti-depressant prescription, and since it turned out to be a helpful and successful intervention, I figured my tics were just part of being “generally fucked up.”

This new information — that my difference might fall into a recognized category that didn’t really exist in my youth — though admittedly inferred from an anonymous social media post, became more relevant when, not long after, my daughter was similarly assessed.

It also offers a possible explanation for the songs. Vocal stimming is any self-stimulatory behaviour that involves the use of the mouth, lips and vocal cords. It is often triggered in response to stress or excitement. In Rain Man, Raymond Babbitt’s release came out in muttered calculations and misinterpretations of his own name.

For me, the answer comes out, in part, as Sandro Mamukelashvili — my Mamu.

“Difference” is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it can mean brilliant, or fascinating, or diverse. On the other, it can be a brutal agent of separation.

That matters nominally in the NBA. Most of the athletes who make it to the elite tier of professional basketball are, by definition, successful. Dwight Howard judged this year’s three-point competition. Ja Morant is being given indefinite chances to be better at everything. Mamu, for all his syllables and Sasquatchian grooming and goofy faces, will be fine, even if he spends much of his career coming off the bench, or ends up on the Wizards.

Away from the basketball court, difference matters urgently. The fascist project is to cleave a rift in the public consciousness, creating a gulf between the accepted and the different. Accounts from across the United States say that ICE’s project in Minneapolis was to detain anyone with brown skin. The current assault on Iran is bolstered by endless statements on the basic inhumanity of Iranians. Here is the most sinister use of difference: the racist project of white supremacy. It is rooted in an ugly ideal of conformity and groupthink. The perfect citizenry of the new right looks like a vast army of faces made indistinguishable by blind service. The same spirit fuels the boom of large language models and other generative AI tools that promise to enable the making of anything, but all pump out visual crap coloured by the same giveaway plastic sheen. The geometry of absolute power is a funnel pushing everything toward sameness: a processing machine that turns diversity into bland, nutrient-bereft sausage.

It is, perhaps, a stretch to get from here back to the NBA and Mamu and what it means to be typical in anything at all. But I think I can get there by putting on a few jerseys.

It’s easy to love or hate the superstars. Steph Curry is a generational phenomenon; Steph Curry needs to stop chewing on his goddamn mouthguard. As long as Steph Curry is playing, and longer, his #30 Golden State Warriors jersey will always be a bestseller. Because, as we all know, Steph different. Same goes for LeBron James, Kevin Durant, probably Victor Wembanyama. The big-difference-makers live forever.

Sometime in January, I went searching for Mamu jerseys on the official NBA shop. For the Raptors, the options included the obvious choices: Scottie Barnes, hometown favourite R.J. Barrett, good old #1 (Gradey) Dick. I had the option of ordering the jersey of Mo Bamba, whom the Raptors picked up for maybe seven games this season before waiving.

Mamu’s name was not on the menu.

I think sometimes about when Pascal Siakam left the Raptors, and published a heartfelt essay in the Player’s Tribune. He wrote of the first time he ever saw his number in the stands:

With some rookies, they come into the league, it’s a lot of buzz. But with me, when I got drafted, my agent went to the team store to buy a Siakam jersey…. and they didn’t even have it for sale!!! I definitely wasn’t on fans’ radars, you know?? And I’ll admit something to you now. I would do this thing as a rookie, during the anthems, where I’d look around and try to spot my jersey in the crowd. Obviously you can’t be doing that during a game, you need to be chill. But during the anthems you’re looking at the crowd anyway, so it’s less bad. It’s crazy, though: I’d never see any. I swear, every night I looked. Nothing. Then finally, this random night, I’m doing my usual scan — I SPOT ONE. RAPTORS 43. I’ll never forget that feeling. I’m going, YESSSS!!! on the inside.

Turns out, you can buy a Sandro Mamukelashvili jersey through the Raptors store (of course, you can; assuming otherwise in this psychotically consumerist environment is, in retrospect, very dumb). But I’d wager it’s a relatively small club that has made the leap — a group of fans who are drawn toward something a bit different. At any rate, this is my mission for the rest of the 2026 season: I will acquire and don my Mamu Raptors jersey. I will become part of a club for which I have already written an anthem that, aside from my wife and child, no one will ever hear.

I will wear number 54 with pride, as an expression of my love for a utility guy whose name is a beautiful sound that has given me an anchor. If I, and the Raptors, are lucky, I will wear it to a playoff game. And, during the anthems, I will wonder if Mamu can see up high enough to notice it, and think to himself, YESSSS. That guy? He’s different.

Talking with athletes in the quiet blue of early morning, or in an arena tunnel in two folding chairs pulled aside, or apologising for the noise of street construction that starts outside my office windows exactly when our call does.

I’ve had calls from athletes at home, where in the beats of silence as they consider a question I hear their weight shift or the deep thrum of a Hmm vibrating down into their chest; from the padded quiet of their car sitting in a parking garage, voice tired but clarified, the controlled clamour of the practice they’ve come from still ringing in their ears and limbs.

A call from an athlete on the other side of the world, their day ending just as mine was beginning to churn. Funny that even in the commonality of this, our modern mainstay of connecting with people wherever you both find yourselves, there’s still a little thrill in confirming the distance.

Each interview, as all interviews are, a brief portal into that person. At the immediate level of the questions I’m asking and their answers but beyond that, the secondary glimpse given by body. If I’m there with them: facial expressions, the hitch of a breath, legs stretching out, relaxed; hands working the air expressively or perhaps kneading a bicep, rubbing their neck. If I’m not: the soft chuckle of recognition, a pause for thought, an intake of air and the speed the next sentence comes with.

Sometimes I find myself reeling my brain quickly back, that I’ve unspooled too far into an answer. I blink hard to snap myself to focus or physically press my feet down against the floor, grounding to the present. Other times questions can feel like pressing on a wall, looking for a notch or groove to get a grip on a person, paired with a rising panic the longer it feels like it takes.

Every time I finish an interview I come away with a rush. Sometimes it’s spent adrenalin and a good, solid feeling of understanding. Maybe there’s been a shift from where we started to where we wound up, a jog of mental recalibration. There’s relief on the other end too. Not like a Thank god that’s over (at least, I hope) but a wash of return, settling back in the moment. It can feel, when it’s going well, like time travel. That a half hour’s passed with no recognition.

And there’s always an awareness of having glimpsed into another life, the sensation of my own coming back into focus.

Spring, with all its false starts and impatient glimpses into what’s coming (the relief of what’s coming), is a good parallel. Every extra minute of evening daylight, the pull of wanting to be outside again, a portal into a dormant version of myself. A cheat, maybe, feeling myself open up in the returned focus of other people. Who’s the flower and who’s the sun. I guess it doesn’t matter.

Except when it’s Mike Conley, then there’s no question of who is bringing the life-affirming warmth.

What was it Geno Auriemma meant to say when he answered, Nothin’. Nothin’.

In the time since his presser following UConn’s loss to South Carolina, since he stalked over to South Carolina coach Dawn Staley as the buzzer sounded and got in her face with words startling and strong enough to cause Staley (no cooler, tougher customer) to jerk her head back, as if struck, Auriemma’s released a statement of apology. But it’s the body language around that first answer — Nothin’. Nothin’. — that gives the most away.

When an AP reporter kicks off the presser asking Auriemma what exactly happened with the postgame handshake between him and Staley, Auriemma is perfectly still until he hears the name Dawn. Then, his eyes shift from the reporter to the right of the room, he begins to shake his head, lips pursed into a caricature frown.

“I said what I had to say,” Auriemma says.

A few questions later and it’s clear Auriemma did not say what he had to say, because he says more. It was about the handshake, that Staley didn’t meet him at half-court for the customary pregame ritual. That he waited there “for like three minutes.” Immediately after the presser several outlets including ESPN shared footage of the two coaches shaking hands before the game.

In the press conference, Auriemma asks the room if they understand what he’s referencing.

“I’ve been in 25 Final Fours,” he says, “and the protocol is before the game you meet at half-court — anybody ever see that before? Two coaches meet at half-court and they shake hands. Correct? You ever see it? They announce it on the loudspeaker.”

His rapid-fire questions are meant to draw support. So is his prefacing with experience, of being there for 25 Final Fours. It’s a hypothetical meant to open a window to what he’s saying did not happen — the handshake — to a real-time marring of tradition. Made up, it would turn out (and as a reporter pointed out mid-presser, only to be dismissed by Auriemma for “missing the point”), but so clear just then in Auriemma’s mind.

There’s a cloying quality to this method of hypothetical questioning I can’t stand. Donald Trump does it a lot. It’s never meant to actually probe the person or people it’s being posed to. The person asking doesn’t care what anyone else thinks, or if they agree, because it isn’t relevant to reality the person thinks they’re in. It’s pure construct; scaffolding around an imagined sleight. It immediately offloads the responsibility for what happens next, at least in the mind of the speaker, because they have outsourced confirmation to whoever’s around. Confirmation and obligation. It’s so boldly petulant that it doesn’t automatically register as such, there’s no whining tone. It can seem almost authoritative, which is the whole point.

It’s difficult to tell if, with each revisiting Auriemma makes, he believes he’s clarifying his position. He certainly seems to believe he’s drawing people closer, giving them a clear view of what, in his mind, happened.

“The true test is how you handle yourself in this moment,” Auriemma says later, alluding to losing. “No one’s won as much as we have. When you’re part of that, be gracious in your losing. I never wanted to be anything other than that, and treat people with respect.”

A student reporter nervously asks what keeps Auriemma motivated, this being his 25th Final Four. “Well, after tonight I don’t know that I want to continue coaching,” he answers, grinning.

He wasn’t finished.

The question comes of whether Staley’s interactions with the refs — challenging calls, visibly and emphatically disagreeing with officials’ decisions — fuelled Auriemma’s end of game frustrations.

"I just want to make sure there's not a double standard. I'm of the opinion that if I ever talk to an official like that, I would get tossed,” he says, gesturing with a wide open palm like, Hello? “So I just want to make sure there's not a double standard, that some people are allowed to talk to officials like that and other people are not. That's it."

A small aside but one I got stuck on: though Auriemma’s asked several questions about Staley, reporters calling her by full name or first name, he doesn’t respond with either. Once, he rolls his eyes at the mention of her, and her name is not included in his written apology. It made me think about the coaches I hear from most — NBA, admittedly — and that they will refer to fellow coaches by first name when they talk about them. How names bring to the listener an instant mental portal to that person, an empathetic flash.

Auriemma’s strange point of a double standard, referencing the behaviour of a Black woman, the implied notion of Staley having more latitude to assail the refs, is a bizarre lever to pull. For it’s obvious historic inversion, and because Auriemma dishes discord to the refs with the best of them. For that, he and UConn’s men’s coach Dan Hurley are two peas in a particularly volatile pod.

Lindsay Gibbs wrote about the exchange, and enitre night, really well:

This is a man who had his ego bruised, who was personally outcoached during the game and who melted down in a stew of his own self-pity and victimhood because of it. His players played a poor game, there’s no getting around it… But none of that comes close to excusing his behavior. After a season of blowout wins and Big East dominance, Auriemma collapsed at the slightest hint of hardship and challenge.

We’ve not been faced with such public, bold-faced grasping and grifting in our daily lives as we have been in the past decade. It becomes difficult to parse which windows we’re meant to squint through to better understand a person and situation, which are actually worth our trust and time, and which we should quickly turn away from.

Auriemma has coached so many legends — Diana Taurasi, Maya Moore, Sue Bird, Breanna Stewart — that it’s hard not to view them as extensions of him. To view through them. This can be a helpful impulse with hard topics, and has brought many fans clarity or even closer to subjects they were averse to or confused by. I think back to Brittney Griner being detained in Russia and her teammates and WNBA colleagues speaking out, agitating for her release. Or in late-January, when the NBPA released a statement against the ICE shootings in Minneapolis. But there are limits to the way we should parse the world through other people.

Our public figures, in politics, sports, and self-made celebrity, share so much on a daily basis that even for a voyeur, this is a nightmare of observation. Fitting that some of the first results that pop up when googling “people as portals” are warnings of demonic possession.

“I apologized afterwards.”

“She said ‘no’ and ‘stop’ several times.”

Those were statements made by Cristiano Ronaldo to his legal team in September 2009, as part of an internal questionnaire regarding accusations of rape against him. His accuser, Kathryn Mayorga, claimed he raped her in a Las Vegas hotel earlier that year. Mayorga initially settled with Ronaldo for $375,000, but in 2018 filed a lawsuit seeking a far greater sum while claiming Ronaldo’s lawyers had taken advantage of her fragile emotional state to coerce her into signing the settlement and a non-disclosure agreement (Der Spiegel also reported a number of disgusting details on how Ronaldo’s team attempted to smear and discredit Mayorga during initial proceedings, including shadowing her with a private investigator who went so far as to pull the number on her marriage certificate).

The documents containing those Ronaldo quotes never made it into Mayorga’s lawsuit claim. A judge found they were leaked illegally by the whistleblower portal Football Leaks, and that subsequent reporting from Der Spiegel could not be used. The case was eventually thrown out.

But Ronaldo said those things. He admitted to raping Kathryn Mayorga, whether the admission was “legal” or not.

And it didn’t matter at all.

Ronaldo continued his rise and became one of the world’s most famous and well-paid athletes, with a Bloomberg estimated net worth of $1.4 billion as of a few months ago. He’s been the subject of dozens of fawning media profiles and has, at publication, 672 million Instagram followers. It’s as if his admission to a horrific crime simply never happened.

I found myself thinking of Ronaldo recently when Bam Adebayo unseated Kobe Bryant for second on the NBA’s single-game scoring list with 83 points, kicking off a new round of Kobe Discourse. A senior writer at the New York fucking Times crying that Adebayo should have stopped short of 81 out of some sort of historical respect would have simply been comical in most other settings; Bryant being the one who held the achievement in question, though, made it nauseating.

Bryant, for those unaware, was accused of felony sexual assault in July, 2003 by a 19-year-old woman who alleged he raped her in his hotel room in Colorado. The criminal case would eventually be dropped when the accuser decided not to testify; a civil case was settled out of court.

Bryant’s case isn’t identical to Ronaldo’s. The NBA star never admitted to anything non-consensual, whether on or “off” the record, unlike Ronaldo. There is no firm proof.

As is often the case in these situations, though, the burdens of legal proof are at odds with basic common sense. The woman’s blood was found on Bryant’s shirt; one of her high school friends, a bellman at the resort in question, said she appeared shaken and crying, and told him “that Kobe Bryant had forced sex with her” in the immediate aftermath. But inconsistencies in the accuser’s testimony, plus her unwillingness to testify, led to the case being dropped and Bryant effectively being fully exonerated in the public eye.

As anyone with even passing knowledge of sexual assault cases is well aware, though, those sorts of inconsistencies don’t remotely qualify as proof no crime occurred. Traumatic events often lead to hazy recollections as the brain prioritizes survival over detailed memory. Numerous studies, like this one, put the lie to “she changed her story” as evidence of a false accusation. It’s also not remotely uncommon for sexual assault victims to avoid parts or all of the legal process for reasons ranging from fear of retaliation to publicity, fears of believability and several others.

These realities, combined with ineffective legal and societal burdens of proof, play a key role in RAINN’s estimate that 98% of sexual assault perpetrators walk free.

Tolerance for men committing sexual crimes is sadly back on the rise after one of its only brief lulls in modern history. Even at the height of the #MeToo movement, many big-time athletes still seemed impervious to any accountability. Society’s willful amnesia has always felt especially strong when it comes to our favorite players. Multiple parties are to blame in this erosion of simple morality.

Leagues and teams, always motivated by dollars above all, regularly buttress their athletes from consequences for sexual assault or abuse. The NBA’s track record is especially embarrassing, from Bryant to Derrick Rose to Miles Bridges. Jaxon Hayes got a longer suspension for pushing a mascot (1 game) than for violence against his then-girlfriend (0 games, following an investigation in which the NBA never even spoke with the alleged victim).

Failures of modern media are also on display here. Ronaldo is perhaps the most egregious example; his case has been shockingly under-covered relative to his overall profile. I’ve had multiple professed diehard soccer fan friends tell me within the past couple years they had never even heard of the accusations against him. That shouldn’t be possible for such a serious incident involving such a famous person.

Bryant’s case was well documented, which in a way makes the two-plus decades of fawning coverage he’s received since all the more maddening. Some of the sport’s most successful journalists helped sweep Bryant’s transgressions (admitted and otherwise) under the rug 20-plus years ago. Many of the same folks and outlets then spent years tripping over each other to help us conveniently forget about Bryant’s ugly side, papering it over with glowing profiles of “Mamba Mentality” powered by access they could only get by being on his and his camp’s good side.

In the end the fault really lies with all of us collectively. Ronaldo’s case has absolutely been under-covered, but millions of people still know about it — certainly including some high percentage of his fans. Anyone age ~35 or older distinctly remembers the Bryant case. What makes us so eager to selectively forget, to allow these men to continue their lives of fame and fortune at the expense of innocent women?

The horse I’m writing this from isn’t (quite) as high as it sounds. I’m no shining beacon of the right way to approach this stuff. As a high schooler who wasn’t especially into basketball during the Bryant case, I never read any of the details; even when I became an NBA diehard years later, I never bothered. All my more informed friends, and all the journalists I followed, seemed convinced Kobe was in the clear. Why waste my time?

In my early years cosplaying as an NBA journalist, I even contributed in incredibly minor ways to the running Kobe whitewash. I posted clips and quotes, debated his place among all-time greats, the works.

I even subconsciously justified Byrant’s admitted infidelity to his wife. He’s a famous athlete! This is par for the course. He’s just an entertainer. I can separate the art from the artist.

I wish I could implore my younger self to think about what those excuses really mean.

“Separating the art from the artist” implies some inherent right to their art, no matter the cost involved in creating it. That’s especially true with the Michael Jacksons and Kobe Bryants of the world; why should all of society be deprived of their culturally massive work due to their individual transgressions? The premise sounds reasonable until you spend a solid 20 seconds thinking about it.

For one, these are not singular representations of any culture. Michael Jackson was not the only pop star; someone who wanted to listen to some great 80s/90s pop that helped define modern music would have dozens (hundreds?) of other choices even if they swore off his catalog entirely. Likewise, LA Lakers fans have multiple other top-15 players of all-time among their franchise ranks. Kobe wasn’t the only legend who donned the purple and gold, it turns out.

That’s not even the most flawed element of the logic. By presuming we can somehow separate these men from their performances, we’re turning their actions into victimless crimes. Imagine walking up to Kathryn Mayorga and telling her that actually, the pain and horror she’s endured over the last decade-and-a-half since that night in Ronaldo’s hotel room — and the fact that he’s gone unpunished for it while becoming a billionaire in the process — are all worth it because the world got to experience Ronaldo’s athletic feats.

That’s fucking insane, right? But that’s what we’re saying.

And it’s time to stop fooling ourselves.

What are you reading? David asks, his thick Australian lilt more or less familiar to me by now.

I flip the cover up to show him and he tosses his hair from his eyes and squints, shakes his head. Who is it, he asks, then asks whether it’s a good novel.

Not a novel, I say first, thinking of a succinct way to describe hooks. How to condense history both finished and still in motion.

He’s editing a story he showed me, something he wrote off the last one of these hosted trips because, as he scrolled through, I caught lowercase names of cities and mis-formatted versions of the property’s name.

You could do it, he feigns turning his laptop toward me so I can copy edit. I say I’d have to take a cut from what we won on the slots the night before, up til too late questioning strategy for a bank of NFL machines.

The palms rustle and bend, shifting clouds reflect on the blue glass of the hotel tower. Over the breeze and shriek of children scattered over the sprawling compound of the pool grounds, top 40 songs from the last three years flicker. Cowbirds cut around, flashing in their iridescent black, looking for leavings; pineapple rinds and french fries. It’s the fifth day we’re here and the first we’ve spent in the sun, at the pool. Everyone else in our little ragtag group of hosted media flew out as the sun broke over the Atlantic.

You can’t write about any of this, can you? David asks with a laugh in a moment of such startling clarity I feel like I’ve been thinking out loud.

It’s funny and heartbreaking in equal measure when the qualities of people you know and love better bring out flashes of warm familiarity in people you don’t. And in some of the people you don’t, the sense that they’re doing the same, drawing parallels to mannerisms, references of the body like time signatures that set you exactly into a place, another moment, tracing habits like something under delicate paper.

Banking in from the Atlantic, a hex of highways and housing developments inlaid over swamp. Patches and pockets of water deep and dark, glass smooth with no reflection of the sky overhead. I know the land, made of porous limestone, breathes like a sponge, but it seems an awful lot of trust ceded to water in a state that’s sinking back into the ocean. Then again, maybe it’s the smarter position. Realizing you have no power to relinquish to nature in the first place, and certainly over a land’s pining to return to original form.

When I thought of the kind of story I could write about South Florida it was one of push-pulls. The relationship of betting to college basketball, of historic land theft and persecution of the Seminole and the Seminole’s subsequent reclamation and repurposing of undesirable land into profit centres and manicured paradises; the backdrop of always-encroaching swamp against sprawling development. The pressures, from afar anyway, seemed apparent. Up close, the strain shifted.

To draw a line between what’s undoubtably good and what’s neatly nefarious, the opposing points need to hold firm. There has to be tension. Here, points warp depending on skew of light, time of day, draw of a card, angle of perspective; changeable as South Florida’s weather. The tension, quite often, going slack.

The heady murk of it hits you the second you feel the air — deep, damp, green — get down in your lungs. Humidity softening the outline of everything. A state where permitless conceal carry means you’re free to shoot yourself in the foot in flip-flops and book bans have looped back to come for the Bible.

Where cars with watch for children and pro gun bumper stickers do 80mph on the freeway shoulder, passenger side wheels riding the drainage ditch. Where a guy in a red DeSantis cap eyeballs me and my piña colada warily from his deck chair, picking up on a whiff of pluralism but something decidedly outside of the state’s own make. Or touring a private gaming room on the 36th floor, where the table minimum is more than I can picture so I drift to the tall windows and see the turkey vultures I’ve watched lazily circling the pool for days, this time noting the sleek, brindled dark of their wings from above instead of squinting at the tawny wash of their bellies from below — their sole purpose in life, as predators, abiding from any perspective.

You don’t come to Florida for clarity.

Saturday night, watching Oakland and Jack Gohlke lose in overtime and feeling kicked in the gut for Gohlke, who would have to to go back to class on Monday like nothing had happened. Not grasping how rapid my projection of a Cinderella story dashed onto him was until I saw clips and read quotes that embarrassed me back to context for his sensibility: “I'm not going to be an NBA lottery pick and I'm OK with that. That's just not how it works all the time,” Gohlke said.

The Fort Lauderdale airport runway’s a sandy white, save for the landing strip which at first glance, bouncing along it with the breaks floored, looks like it’s paved with a different material, black as tar. Burn marks, I realize as we slow, from all the plane tires screeching to a stop.

Wandering around the casino floor in my swimsuit, hanging at the edge of a cavernous sports book clutching a paperback from the library, trying to pick which of three concurrently broadcast March Madness games on which of three enormous screens to clamp my attention onto. Realizing the groans and cheers going up from all around are not for effort, or surprise in the action, but whatever is edging them closer or moving them farther away from the bets they have on any or all games. Tinged with the eagerness to watch brackets begin to pull apart, to bust.

More than a few times I forget I’m in Florida.

Flood warnings and itinerary limit the first few days indoors. I get bits of news from the incredibly kind and patient people who are responsible for our PR trip’s small group, mostly about the things they did after they left work, sometimes about the small dramas happening around the hotel. I start to feel like a kind of resort itinerant. Less a Quasimodo because he had a job, more like one of the small, sandy anoles skirting around, left to watch and wander. It isn’t an unpleasant sensation, intensified by being delivered to and from restaurants and clubs, or by the noise and smoke when crossing or pulled into the orbit of the casino floor, a sense there like everyone is, for a while, transmorphing their statehoods. The times I’m alone I lose most of any idea what to do with myself.

One morning, after a prescheduled massage has turned my muscles pliant as my brain, I sit in the spa’s crystal room and lose my focus on the tall wall of glowing dune bricks, wondering if the pulse I pick up when the light subtly waivers is my eyes shorting out or a natural gas station somewhere, chugging along. Somehow, 10 minutes pass.

I never grew up with one shining moment, the song or the concept.

(The song got its inspiration from rejection, but not within college basketball. David Barrett wrote it after he played a bar show in East Lansing, Michigan, and tried to hit on a waitress finishing her shift. He was watching a Celtics game and, without looking at this woman, said something he thought was poetic about Larry Bird on a fastbreak. When he looked over to gauge her reaction, she was gone.)

Asked multiple times over the weekend whether I watched American college basketball, and its culmination of March Madness — going on everywhere, all around us, at all times, whether in direct line of sight or in sensory periphery, including at the Miami Open as Coco Gauff lunged and swung and bested Océane Dodin and I glanced away from the action for a second down to the phones beside me to find college basketball, muted and in miniature — I admitted my interest in it wasn’t low for its quality of play (I love frenetic basketball) but to guard against its quality of heartbreak. There are too many teams, too many people, who aren’t going to win. Who are in their last chances to win and will lose badly. Who might win big and then lose, not even badly, but lacklustrely, in the most regular way you could picture. Who might even win the whole thing and then be faced with the reality that they want more than the one moment; they want this as routine but aren’t going to get it.

I have to steel myself to watch college basketball in a way I don’t for the pros, especially the early games when the field is fresh, not riddled and pocked with upsets, expectations palpable and vibrating like individualized frequencies you can tune to. With the pros there’s something about knowing, barring injuries or a franchise imploding, there will likely be another shot. There’s a sense of a clean reset every season, a rhythm, of gathering stakes. With men’s college ball it comes down to one single configuration of a team per year. With 16 names on a roster, say, by the time the tournament gets to 64 teams that’s 1,024 people, all who spent 18 years in some mix of effort and focus getting there (taken cumulatively, that’s 18,432 years), and it could all be done in 40 minutes. It’s the programs that get to enjoy longevity, get to settle into their names and notoriety, get to entertain the concept of rebuilding years.

It’s why I find women’s college ball a bit of a relief and more compelling, too. Most athletes you’ll get four years to know, whether they stick with the same school or hit the transfer portal. The churn, that conveyor of bodies as it can sometimes feel, offered up to the Draft as if in sacrifice, slows down.

But they get that one shining moment, would inevitably be offered in response and I could try to start again at explaining myself or just repeat, There are too many teams.

There is one welcome, naive reprieve, though, that offset nearly every big loss or close win in the first round. David, who did not watch basketball before this, turning to report to me the score of any given match and earnestly ask, Can it be done?

Could a team catch up, could a gap close, could an underdog come out on top. Partially because there was a bet in play he wondered if he was about to lose, and then because it turned into a good bit.

For a team down by 20 with less than five minutes left I’d usually say, Not really. Then, he’d double down in urgency and shout with cinematic relief, So there’s hope!

Under a giant, mirrored diamond suspended on a wire from the casino theatre’s ceiling, I asked Jonathan what it was he loved about playing football. He raises his eyebrows so high that he physically rolls back onto his heels. That’s a loaded question, he says in his Staten Island accent, the cadence of which tends to frame everything up like a question.

Is it? I ask. I might need a minute, he says. A man in a head to toe white suit and cowboy hat cuts between us and toward the theatre’s exits, transformed into diamond-shaped glittering chutes. I glance over to one of the huge projector screens that flank the small, temporary stage on either side, displaying the real-time countdown to Shakira’s album releasing here, tonight, her 12th, as the smiling MC has just finished telling us again. Paciente. Whoever set the display up and opened the music platform’s desktop app to appear on the screens left the arrow of their cursor hovering over the ticking down minutes and seconds, a detail I happily fixate on even as Shakira takes the stage with seconds to go and thanks us for coming.

Well, Jonathan says, both my brothers played in college so at first it was my way of following them. But he played a different position, he tells me. Can you guess what it was? He asks, then adds apologetically, I mean, it’s obvious.

The game isn’t ruined for me because, as I tell him, I’ll literally never guess. Tight end! He laughs. I’m not huge, but I’m fast. The DJ switches to reggaeton and the influencer in the all white suit goes by us again and tips his hat, pink LED lights glinting off his sunglasses. I ask whether he was sad to stop playing. Geeze, he chuckles, and pantomimes pulling at his collar in duress. I’m gonna need another drink or we have to change the subject, he says.

The MC is back and asking us whether we’ve ever had our hearts broken. Cheers erupt. The cursor hovers over the countdown, the numbers do not relent.

Stone crabs sold still moving out of the backs of spray-painted trucks pulled into auto body shops, giant iguanas drowsy from cold and looking for heat from the pavement planted in parking lots so people have to watch where they walk at dawn and dusk.

On the Sprinter van’s radio en route to the Miami Open, the host can’t believe it’s already Palm Sunday.

Giant banyan and feathery tall Australian pines, silvery green buttonwood shrubs and leaning fan palms, crabwood and pigeon plum, all in great lustrous clumps along the highway.

My driver from the airport, once a diplomat, talking about the crisis in Haiti and the pull of being from a place you’re not sure you can ever go back to. My driver to the airport doing air drums to the saxophone solo in ‘Just The Way You Are’.

Expectations can bear hard over something only forming. Stamp it out before anything can happen. It’s hard not to hold yourself to what you consider your compass, made up of experiences and understanding, tuned to the shape of your world. Brandished as a tool — a sieve, lenses to look through forward or back, a hammer — expectations limit.

In Hollywood, Florida, we were talking about Paris syndrome because of Japan. 

Specifically, the letdown some people who go to Paris experience because it doesn’t live up to how they pictured it. Bill is surprised, he loved Paris, really all of France, so much that he and his wife are going back for Christmas but not to the beaches of Normandy this time, he chuckles. He mentions it when I say how Japan was the only place I’ve been so far that bore out in everything people had ever said about it to me.

There are places that pull to the front of your mind, urgently, and others that serve as backdrops. There are places that shift easily between the two modes and let you make your own pace. I look around and think about all the cities we’ve come from around that night’s long table — almost all those cities via other cities — and how this place worked as the fourth thing, an accelerator, for our happy collision.

Curling the toes of my red cowboy boots into the plush carpet of the Heat’s locker room, listening to Bam Adebayo and Patty Mills get changed behind me, trying to tune out their hushed conversation out of politeness. It’s so quiet that every time the door to the showers opens the squeak of the hinge rings in a soft call and response to itself.

During the game, when I first noticed the flag-sized jerseys hanging from the rafters, I was struck by how close they seemed. Same with the court, right there, barely a two person width of a walkway ringing the floor. The seating, shooting straight up from the floor so even without people in seats it felt compact, immediate.

Watching the Finals last season, or Chris Bosh’s retirement ceremony where I went back again and again to look over expressions on his face (for the book), the space seemed cavernous, giant. A wonder, how moments can warp — the big turning regular into resounding; the small and quiet, offhand details you notice inside a moment, shrinking the immediate way down.

Tucked into the lip of Adebayo’s locker, a laminated card:

I am alive so there’s hope
Whatever needs to be done CAN BE DONE

I’ll set the scene: it’s 4:30pm Monday, at Louis Armstrong Airport in New Orleans. I’m at the airport hours before my flight and covered head to toe in Washington Wizards team gear. As I’m putting my things in the bin for screening, I see the bulky bulletproof vest with the words “POLICE ICE” stitched on. The man this vest is strapped to has a big smile on his face and says, ”You a D.C. guy?”

I take a beat to consider my options. First off, the TSA screening line is not the place for small talk bro, tighten up. I’m at the airport early out of fear as it is. Second, do I really want to chat with this fool? No, but on the other hand, did I wear Wizards apparel in the hopes that somebody would want to talk about them with me?

I decide to engage with, “Oh, uhh yeah.”

His grin widens as he says “Hey sorry, well they might be good this year,” to which I reply, “Maybe next year, we’ll see,” Then he goes, “Oh well, I’m a Philadelphia guy,” then I say, “Sounds like we’ll be down in hell together.” Federal agent man chuckles.

I’ve officially never wanted to go through that weird wind turbine thing more in my life.

A day has passed and that interaction is still velcroed to my brain. An ICE officer apologized to me… because I root for the Washington Wizards. To be fair, pity is a common reaction to seeing Wizards merchandise. It’s right up there with disappointment. Either of these tends to lead me to anger. Being a fan of a bad basketball team should not be so polorizing yet here we are, and I have reached a breaking point.

This season has been a very oddly constructed roller coaster for Wizards nation. A couple of very minor ups, surrounded by the usual downs, with a few loops that lead to some even bigger downs. The team just tied the franchise record for losses in a row and the Wizards podcast community keeps oscillating between that being great and being awful.

In case you weren’t aware, Washington’s first round round draft pick this summer is fully tied to us losing. Which is something we’re pretty good at, historically. I’ve tried my best to avoid the term tanking here. It’s a trigger for me now. Mainly because the NBA’s definition of the term does not match the dictionaries. Oxford’s says tanking is to “fail completely, especially at great financial cost” and that’s not what these Wizards are doing. When we paid Ian Mahinmi 16 million dollars a year to open a Steak ‘n Shake in France? Now that’s tanking. These Wizards are losing games intentionally with a minor financial cost, that’s different.

According to CNBC, the Wizards were worth 4.25 billion dollars in 2025, which places them above eight playoff teams in that category. They also hit 111 million dollars in profit. Which is pretty damn good for a team that you have to sign up for a Patreon to watch, and the main reason I don’t understand why the NBA fan at large looks down on the Wizards. We’re getting money without even actually trying, that’s sick to me. I’m always hearing about the business of basketball, but nobody ever brags about it, you know? Which is a strategy I implore all of my people to consider going forward, for real.

Why do we, as Washington Wizards fans, have to be held to the unrealistic standard of being a winning franchise? What if we never won a game again? Wouldn’t that be interesting? I’m serious. The Wizards made more money than the Thunder last year. If this was rap music it would be the only thing that mattered. I say we lean in even harder, win the last ten games of the year, ensure the Knicks get an extra 1st round pick, and never win a basketball game again. Imagine. If the Knicks won a title because of the Wizards, maybe I could rep my city on the 4 Train in peace for a change. Maybe people would stop talking to me as if rooting for a bad team is beneath me. Maybe putting a Bam Adebayo statue in front of Capital One Arena would get us a game on ESPN every once in awhile.

That nut-ass 83 point game almost sent me into tailspin. I couldn’t take the volume on the “Washington Wizards are a joke” amplifier getting cranked up to 11. The amount of texts I got about that mess, you would think somebody on my team scored 83. It took me some time to see it for what it was: A well-timed Wizards PR move.

Ok, follow me here. Half of those points were against the Capital City Go-Go, that’s giving the Capital City Go-Go a lot of exposure. I’m always getting paid in exposure when I do shows, so it must be good. Next, since Mr. Adebayo made the mistake of scoring more than Kobe, a lot of casual viewers are actually turning on the Miami Heat because they think that was mean of him. Any new Miami Heat haters are great for us.

I have appreciated the team’s response to this all-time lowlight as well, to be fair. Bilal Coulibaly got so mad at the jokes he hit a three the other day, and seeing Justin Champagnie get into a scrap with the broke-ass Oklahoma City Thunder was downright heartwarming. Whenever we let that guy play basketball he always shows a winning mentality, which is why we don’t let him play often.

Despite everything this organization has ever shown me, I do see the vision. It feels like the first time they’ve had a plan in a decade, but the fear that our fate is already sealed will never let me fully “believe” or “be happy”, whatever the right term would be there. I’m honestly to the point where I think higher powers have decided that the Washington Wizards can’t win meaningful basketball games, and yes those higher powers are being overseen by David Stern’s ghost. The Wizards exist like those babies in The Matrix and mid-level soccer teams do. Our sole purpose is to develop players for them to move on and win titles elsewhere. This used to hurt me deeply until I saw the Wizards books — they’re making so much money off of this. Which is very cool. I know capitalism has been having a rough few months, but getting money is still cool as far as I can tell.

Now the owner says he’s done with losing and points to his other property, the Washington Capitals, as proof of this, but I say he doesn’t know how to try in the NBA. If you disagree with that stance, just take a look at the Wizards social media. At everything about the Wizards presence online. They’re hell-bent on letting us know the team is young and don’t seem interested in making them look cool or intimidating or none of that. We’ve relied too much on the phrase “Wiz Kids” for one. I know it rolls off the tongue, but the ideas don’t align fully. Are we dangerous warlocks with mystical powers? Or are we going to math camp in the summer? Which one is it? The first photo they posted of the 2024 draft class was them eating cake, I’m not joking.

This season, over half of their content was shot in what looks like a really smart child’s bedroom. Now I know they’re Muppet Babies for real, but that doesn’t mean you have to keep reminding us.

Next year, the fans need something different. Let Anthony Davis prank the young guys bad, like extra devastating. I want to see them use curse words. That is, if you’re serious about winning. The next time an ICE officer tells me he’s sorry, I want it be sung by him in court, not because I support the Washington Wizards. The fans have been through enough and every year there’s less to hold on to, but we want to believe, dammit. Show us you’re serious and buy a damn wedding ring already. For all of us. It’s not as many people as you’d think.

Think of the way breath will tell us, often before we register it, how we’re feeling. Think of all the exercises we’ve developed to corral breath, to urge it deep into our bodies, and how when we really focus on it breath can feel like ferrying light into every cell and in a way, by adding oxygen to blood, we are.

Think of how for granted we take breath, how subconscious, automatic. How we tend not to really notice it unless we’re short of it, or its intake becomes muddled, or when we’re pushing our bodies and the temporary bereftness of being without it can feel so absolute, like we’ll never get it back, that I think half the joy of any new, physical triumph is reuniting with the breath again. Think of how many illnesses, or troubles in the body, begin with shortness of breath as the first symptom. A wonder how we ever forget it at all.

The most common symptom people suffering a collapsed lung report is shortness of breath. Though they tend to describe like a vise clamping on their lung, or that each attempt to draw a deeper, full breath results in the lung tightening further, losing even more capacity. Less a shortness than an outright seizure of breath.

Imagine Cade Cunningham, one second drawing a deep, preemptive breath, the breath preparing his body to dive for a loose ball, and a fraction of a second later feeling his left side fold like an accordion. Cunningham who, maybe more than any other active athlete in the NBA, seems to have a preternatural sense of breath as it lends to rhythm. Namely, his ability to upend it.

Shame there is no close replay technology available that makes possible a studied review of Cunningham’s breath as he hops back mid- forward step, or springs suddenly out of a downhill cut and skips, lightly, to his left, or lithely weaves, snaking through traffic. If there were, or if we were able to colour-code breath in something akin to infrared, a sense that it might even lag behind him, hitching itself with a curling, loving tendril at his hip or coil, covetous, around his neck.

Instead we have Cunningham leading up to his dive, using his body like a pinion to keep Tre Johnson of the Wizards close, snugly notched to him. So snug that when Cunningham removes the pressure of his body, its magnet of gravity in motion, Johnson goes tumbling to the court. As Johnson falls he shoves his hands out in front to catch himself against hardwood, freeing the ball. It goes unguarded from bounce to brief ascent, already hounded at its apex by a gaining Cunningham, who’s pivoted on a half-step from running backwards guarding Johnson to full-throttle sprint forwards and Johnson, recovering himself, springs up from the floor like a track runner will from their starting blocks. The pair each put out their right arm, hands reaching, both sets of fingers grazing the ball. Less than a full second has passed.

Cunningham’s momentum against his speared out right leg, like a javelin, casts him forward and he bends low to recover himself and the ball. It’s there, with both his arms above his head in a swimmer’s diving pose and his entire left side exposed, a dozen ringing bones going from broad to narrow as they notch down from the true ribs, to false ribs, to floating ribs, that Johnson’s left knee springs up in a sharp, explosive 90-degree angle to connect, along with Johnson’s flexed quad.

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A Well-Planned Basketball Community

When speaking with league organizers, it’s clear that there is no shortcut to building a community with the level of continuity and closeness that the San Francisco Gay Basketball Association now enjoys. What it comes down to is people like Tony Jasinski, Chris Johnson, JJ Suddreth and countless others that choose to dedicate their time to keeping the league on course.

The willingness to repeatedly perform the annoying or mundane tasks of organizing — making sure referees are paid, dry mopping the court between games, creating schedules, sending reminders and planning fundraising events — is a bedrock of the league’s success. To convince people to routinely dedicate a portion of their free time to an organization, especially the over-worked, screen-addled and socially isolated contemporary American adult, you need to make it worth their while. To this end, creating a smoothly running, reliable operation, with all the requisite legwork it entails from league organizers, is nearly as important as the SFGBA’s uniting principles of diversity and inclusion.

For a majority of the league’s existence, Jasinski was its sole officer and commissioner, with an informal but dedicated cast of helpers who assisted with everything from recruiting to gameday operations. This arrangement eventually met its expiration date, with Jasinski passing on commissioner duties to Pete Myers in 2007. In the period between Jasinski’s resignation and the onset of the COVID-19, the league’s leadership structure slightly shifted, adding a treasurer to assist the commissioner with administrative and fundraising duties.

This setup, too, had its shortcomings, as the league cycled through eight different commissioners in a little over 14 years. Of this time, Jasinski recalls, “I was trying to find someone to take charge, and what you find in our community, especially in the sporting community, is people are there to play basketball, they’re not there to organize and volunteer and do other things.”

For a team of two, the burden of handling organizing, recruiting, administering and fundraising duties was simply not sustainable — a testament to both Jasinski’s unique capabilities as an organizer and the increasingly harried nature of contemporary life. When the league returned to action in late 2021, it adopted a 10-person leadership board with responsibilities ranging from gameday operations to community engagement. All SFGBA teams now have captains, who meet monthly with the executive board and act as liaisons between players and the executive board.

The task of administering the league, and crucially, ensuring that it runs at the level that participants have come to expect, is now divided into more manageably-sized chunks.

“Operations-wise, we set up the scorer’s table and the basketballs and all that, but we also update the league’s mailing list and website. We talk to the gym to get time reservations,” Newman says. “It’s not a ton [of work] day-to-day, but there are tasks like publishing stats and things that keep us busy and doing stuff on Wednesdays and Thursdays during the season.”

The league’s new decentralized approach to administration seems more befitting and of the frantically-paced, over-worked and stressed-out tenor of contemporary American life. The aforementioned 2024 Harvard School of Education Study cites feelings of over-work, work-related exhaustion and general busyness as major drivers of social isolation and loneliness. In 2025, very few people may be able to singlehandedly run the league like Jasinski managed to do for so many years, but when the requisite tasks of doing so are divided into many different parts, the job becomes more palatable within the strictures of modern life.

The Connector

Raised in South Bend, Indiana, Chris Johnson was one of the youngest in a large family filled with high-level basketball players, coaches and trainers. Though he had no shortage of potential basketball role models in his midst as a child, he cites his grandmother as having a uniquely strong impact on him during these formative years. Compared to the other adults in Johnson’s family, his grandmother “gave back to the community in a way that was different,” he recalls. She spent most of her career working at the Logan Center, a South Bend-based and University of Notre Dame-affiliated organization that serves adults and children with intellectual and developmental disabilities.

At age 11, a life-altering tragedy would ultimately bring him closer to his family and to the game of basketball. In the summer of 1991, when Johnson was about to enter the 7th grade, his mother suddenly and unexpectedly died. Far younger than the rest of his immediate family, he recalls feeling trapped at home in the wake of this tragedy, confused and distraught.

“I didn’t have anything because I couldn’t really go out. Like, my older brothers were out doing what they wanted to do, in the streets, with girls, they were having fun,” Johnson says of that summer. “So all I could do was play basketball, and that’s all I did.”

He describes how he would “zone out and play basketball sun up to sun down,” occupying his mind and his time by repeating drills and moves he’d seen on TV. Perhaps without even knowing it at the time, he was turning to basketball as what he describes as “my therapy… my remedy for depression and suicidal ideation.”

Johnson’s family, noticing both his need for guidance in the wake of his mother’s passing as well as his growing aptitude for the game of basketball, stepped in to take more active roles in his personal and athletic development. His grandmother worked to provide him with access to the gyms, leagues and gear he’d need to take his game to the next level, while some of his older cousins, themselves standout basketball players, began training him.

This outpouring of support both on and off the court both spurred Johnson’s’ development as a basketball player as well as his interest in building community through the sport. In 2000, immediately after moving to California, he began working at a community center in the South Bay city of San Carlos, where he led youth sports programs and organized a weeknight adult basketball league. It was around this time when, in hopes of finding an even deeper level of community through basketball, he found out about the SFGBA.

One night after a shift at the community center, Johnson recalls typing the words “gay” and “basketball” into a Yahoo! search, which produced the SFGBA’s website as the top result. Shortly thereafter, he attended his first Sunday open gym at the Eureka Valley Recreation Center. Now, nearly 25 years after that fateful Yahoo! search, he remains a fixture in the city’s Gay Basketball community.

Aside from his current day job as a healthcare professional and his role as SFGBA’s vice president, Johnson dedicates a portion of his free time to providing free-of-charge, one-on-one basketball training to friends and community members. He attributes this inclination toward community service to his grandmother, and the example she set through her life’s work stewarding inclusive education and community building through her work at the Logan Center. He also wants to get the SFGBA more involved in community service, citing plans to eventually sponsor basketball clinics for local youth and neighborhood cleanup events.

Such involvement wouldn’t necessarily be new for the SFGBA. Throughout the late 1980s, Jasinski organized a number of exhibition games and events to raise money for the AIDS Emergency Fund, once even teaming up with legendary queer and drag nun troupe the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence.

When asked about his inspiration to continue teaching and building community through basketball, Johnson points to the example set by his family members.

“That’s why I really got into basketball training, because I knew what it did for me, so I want to give that back to the community now,” Johnson says. “I come from a family that gives back, from my grandmother giving back to the community and watching other people in my family give back. I also want to give back in any way shape or form.”

(Barely) Staying Connected

Like countless other groups reliant on regular in-person gatherings, the SFGBA’s operations ground to a screeching halt in March 2020, as COVID-19 shelter-in-place ordinances came into effect.

“I honestly didn’t think the league would survive,” Jasinski recalls. “We saw so many other leagues not make it through that year.”

JJ Suddreth, the league’s commissioner at the time, estimates that about 65% of regular players either left the league or moved out of San Francisco altogether during this period, along with nearly the entirety of his executive board. With playing games or gathering in any meaningful way completely out of the question, the SFGBA leaned on one of its own longtime players and board members for guidance.

In his role as a nurse with the San Francisco Department of Public Health, Johnson was dispatched to work in the City’s COVID-19 Command and Response Center.

“I was working on a team doing contract tracing logs and sharing information with the public, and it just so happened that Eureka Valley fell inside my jurisdiction,” Johnson says. “It was serendipitous and pretty beautiful. But, to be honest, the first thing I thought about after I was dispatched was how we were going to re-open the gym.”

Though the league’s home base in Eureka Valley would remain shuttered for the better part of the next year and a half, Johnson and his fellow board members helped keep the league afloat through a regular stream of reliable, clear updates on county COVID protocols and honest insights into when returning to the court would be feasible.

With their usual meeting place closed and other opportunities for in-person socialization limited by safety concerns, county ordinances or general inconvenience, the SFGBA, like countless other communities, increasingly relied on technology to stay connected in those isolating, confounding times. Most of these updates came via the SFGBA’s Facebook Messenger group, which quickly became the league’s de facto online meeting, socializing and organizing space in the height of the pandemic.

The SFGBA had long utilized the internet and social media as a means of record-keeping, promotion and communication (Jasinski was a particularly shrewd, early adopter of the internet, securing rights to the URL “www.gaybasketball.com” in the late 1990s) but the COVID-19 pandemic marked a new era of deeper, more direct reliance on technology to keep the community connected. They also created a server on Discord, a social networking platform that skyrocketed in popularity during the pandemic’s initial phase due to its capacity for customization and facilitating multiple forms of communication including instant text messaging, voice calls, video calls and media sharing.

Since 2017, SFGBA has used Instagram as its main outlet for promoting and chronicling its week-to-week happenings. Scrolling through the league’s posts, one can find “Player of the Week” awards with top performers’ full stat lines, league standings updates and reminders about registration and other administrative deadlines. Every Wednesday night during the season, the account provides real-time video highlights of each game, from the first game’s opening tipoff at 7 p.m. to the third game’s final buzzer shortly after 10 p.m. This level of detail and coverage week after week is, again, the product of league administrators’ consistent effort and attention, all in the name of keeping the community feeling engaged, included and celebrated.

These communication channels, indispensable at the time, are still regularly used by league administrators and players, although in a much more utilitarian way. Now, they keep league members informed about upcoming events, administrative deadlines, social engagements and opportunities to play in tournaments.

Crucially, all of these outlets are only useful to the SFGBA insofar as they amplify and supplement what goes on at the Eureka Valley Rec Center on Wednesdays and Sundays. They were temporarily utilized to bridge the social gaps that COVID created, rather than replacing the in-person connections that the community was built upon. In the years since the league was able to resume regular operations, its recovery and re-establishment as a social hub has come from two familiar, time-tested sources: dedication to inclusion and a meticulous, thoughtful approach to administration.

A Lasting Legacy

As the final buzzer sounded on the first game of the night on October 8th, the environment inside Eureka Valley Recreation Center was its typical mix of excitement, exhaustion, elation and some frustration — “Every Last Drop” had just lost a tight contest against “Sake Slam” in the game’s final minutes. A few moments into this intermission, Johnson and Communications Chair Justin Seiter silently walked to center court. Johnson kindly but authoritatively called the room to his attention, and the crowd immediately hushed. He had an important announcement to make — JJ Suddreth just played his final league game ever and was leaving San Francisco within the week.

News of this league fixture and former commissioner’s imminent departure sent shockwaves through the gym, and it immediately became clear that this was brand new information for nearly everyone in attendance. Just minutes earlier, Suddreth had almost singlehandedly brought his team to the verge of its first victory of the season, tallying 18 points and 6 rebounds in a gutsy effort. Seiter, standing next to Johnson with a canvas bag in his hand, motions for Suddreth to join them at center court, presenting him with a commemorative plaque recognizing his dedication to the league.

“People who are just getting into the city that are just coming out, you know, they’re young, maybe they’ve lost family, lost community, the league was something, for me, that gave me community right off the bat,” Suddreth said while sitting on a ledge in the Eureka Valley Rec Center’s brightly-lit lobby on the night of his final game.

“[The league] has helped me really be successful in San Francisco, coming from a small town. I always wanted to cultivate that and help as many people as I could through the years. That’s what has kept me driven to do this.”

After all the quibbling about intentional fouls tarnishing the high shine of the number, that he was cheating the game by breaking its unwritten rules, or that Miami Heat coach Erik Spoelstra should’ve taken him out when he hit 70 points, that’s the through-line of Bam Adebayo’s 83-point scoring performance this week.

All of the criticism against Adebayo’s record — even the blowback I’ve seen from people by calling it a “record” (Wilt Chamberlain holds that at 100 points, its lore and ubiquity equally present given that scrawling a number on a plain sheet of paper is the first thing any player who notches a high score does) — is rooted in it. Everything from the game itself, against an actively tanking Wizards team, not being competitive enough to make 83 points meaningful, to the wish that it should’ve been someone we associate with more with shooting, like Luka Doncic (funny but predictable, I have seen no wishes for Shai Gilgeous-Alexander).

Of that nostalgia, I’d say about 80% of it is rooted in lore for and of the late Kobe Bryant.

It’s where the calls for Adebayo to stop before he hit 81 points, and where the criticisms of the way Adebayo got his last nine to 13 (no one can agree, because it’s arbitrary) points come from. It’s also in complaints about the competitive dearth of the matchup. It’s why people wanted it to be Doncic (a Laker), and it’s unmistakably why Lakers fans, watching their own game at home, booed when their in-arena announcer delivered the news, calling it a “melancholy footnote in NBA history” in the same tone you’d deliver the most tragic news imaginable. The Lakers have a house band, I’m surprised one of the horns didn’t start bleating out “Taps”.

It’s impossible to have a normal conversation about Bryant amidst NBA fans and media (and the latter because their fandom, however latent, is what contextualizes the discussion). The nostalgia is so heady, so emotional, so pressingly present — both in that it has never diminished and feels perpetually fresh — that it doesn’t function the way normal retrospection does. Less than reminiscing, it’s a nostalgia that actively seeks to freeze a section of NBA history as-is and views any encroachment to one singular collective memory, one version of history, as a threat. Regular basketball nostalgia can be annoying, but it’s malleable, morphing to absorb new feats, records and names. Bryant’s brand is brittle.

It also overlaps with the contemporary game at many more junctures.

Everything from “the right kind” of competitive mindset, to players treating themselves as brands, to footwork (even the shoes the majority of current players wear when doing that footwork), to our notion of root for-able villains, and the wilful amnesia by fans, media and the NBA to the bodily and psychic harm inflicted by athletes off-court when they happen to be entertaining to watch on it — it all stems from Bryant. He’s in the water, air, atmosphere; the very framework of the league down to its bedrock.

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Inside, players stretch, shoot and strategize in preparation for tip-off; referees, huddled in a corner of the gym in folding chairs, lace up pitch black patent leather athletic shoes and slide braces over their knees; a team of two operates the scoreboard from a folding table along the sideline.

Those scoreboard operators are flanked by two statkeepers, feverishly logging the games’ every development on a laptop. There’s a professional photographer roaming the court’s perimeter, documenting jump shots, steals and rebounds. A few dozen onlookers, ranging from friends and family to former players and fans, sit among the three rows of bleachers. Instead of exchanging half-hearted handshakes and pleasantries as the final buzzer sounds, players and observers descend upon center court, chatting, laughing and hugging. They ask about each other’s families, pets and significant others; they make plans for postgame drinks and weekend get-togethers. It’s all part of a little known but quintessentially San Francisco institution, the oldest gay basketball program in the world: the San Francisco Gay Basketball Association’s (SFGBA) Castro League.

When SFGBA founder Tony Jasinski first had the idea to organize an open-gym pickup basketball program for gay San Franciscans in 1986, all he wanted was a safe, casual and welcoming place to play.

“I was frustrated,” Jasinski recalls, sitting on a bench outside the Eureka Valley Rec Center on a windy evening this past October. “I wanted to play some basketball, and I’m not a really great player, and [public] gyms like this are often OK, but relatively hostile. You get a hothead or two and it’s no longer fun.”

What started as a casual weekly pickup game has grown and formalized into an inclusive, multi-generational basketball community. It draws dozens of players from throughout the Bay Area every week, is operated by a 10-person board and remains deeply embedded in the Castro community, all while running solely on volunteer labor. In 2026, getting dozens of people to show up anywhere on a weeknight is a feat. The SFGBA’s ability to do so for 40-plus years through its culture of inclusivity and operational dependability, and despite the inevitable waves of personal, logistical, financial and societal struggle, warrants a closer examination. It may even impart some lessons on how to deal with a societal landscape that is rapidly drifting toward isolation, loneliness and technological mediation.

Since the COVID-19 pandemic, there has been a growing cottage industry of work discussing and reckoning with the rise of loneliness and social isolation in contemporary society, with writers and researchers analyzing the issue along generational, gender, racial and class lines. The pandemic may have gotten people talking about these issues and, in some ways, exacerbated them, but their origins stretch much further back than 2020.

A comprehensive study by University of Rochester Professors Viji Diane Kannan and Peter J. Veazie in 2023 found that over the past three decades, the amount of time American adults spend alone has increased by 24 hours per month, while time spent socializing in person with friends decreased by 20 hours per month. According to the American Enterprise Institute’s Survey Center on American Life, we also have fewer friends than we used to — a staggering 49% of those surveyed in 2021 claim to have three or fewer friends, a 22% jump from those surveyed in 1990. These seismic social shifts became known, and, in 2023, officially recognized by the Surgeon General of the United States as the Loneliness Epidemic.

A 2024 study sheds more light on what exactly is causing all of this loneliness and disconnection. It identifies a wide variety of sources, ranging from technology’s tightening grasp on our collective attention spans to the rise of telecommuting and a general societal shift toward individualism. These factors are closely tied to the COVID pandemic, which temporarily turned social isolation into a public health requirement. At COVID’s onset, telecommuting became the norm for many white collar workers essentially overnight. Hundreds of millions of Americans holed up in their homes, avoiding all unnecessary social contact in order to ride out this novel and incredibly deadly virus.

In its own way, the SFGBA has proven rather successful at combatting these socially deleterious trends. It’s a carefully planned, smoothly run, unflinchingly inclusive and decidedly offline community that, with a bit of buy-in, can become home for just about anyone.

“You’d be amazed at how many people throughout the world have put those two words ‘gay’ and ‘basketball’ together and have found community,” says SFGBA Vice President Chris Johnson. “If we have it, we’re going to give you the shirt off our back. There’s so many people [in the league] like that.”

A Place to Play

In 1982, Jasinski travelled from his home in Boston to San Francisco to participate in the inaugural Gay Games, where his team earned a silver medal in basketball. Little more than two weeks later, he moved to San Francisco to take a job at Wells Fargo. Having participated in some gay men’s pickup basketball runs in Boston, he decided to get involved in his new city’s rapidly growing and formalizing gay sports community. By the time the second Gay Games rolled around in 1986, Jasinski recounts that the competition in the basketball tournament had reached “near collegiate level,” casting casual players like himself aside in the process.

In search of a safe and welcoming environment for gay men to play basketball, Jasinski approached recreation centers and church gymnasiums throughout the city, ultimately agreeing to a weekly rental of a basement court at the Earl Poltenghi Youth Center at 1525 Waller Street.

“I put up my own cash, put up some signs in the Castro and an ad in one of the local papers at the time,” Jasinski says. “That first week 10 people showed up, and some of them stuck forever.”

The Friday night pickup games lasted on Waller Street for about a year, until the youth center was remodeled into the city’s first family homeless shelter. Jasinski moved his group — still very much a DIY operation at the time — to the Eureka Valley Recreation Center, a city-run facility in the Castro District. But the nascent gay basketball outfit received a surprisingly cold reception in the Castro, which, by that time, was firmly established as the epicenter of the city’s LGBTQ+ community.

According to Jasinski, the Eureka Valley Recreation Center, which he chides as the “last bastion of straighthood in the neighborhood” at the time, initially denied the group’s venue rental application without cause or justification.

“So, I went on the Channel 2 news, because they’d heard that I was being denied access to the gym, and I was filmed on the court and was basically saying discrimination, discrimination, discrimination,” Jasinski recalls, a slight glint in his eye. “And the very next day the head of Parks and Rec called me up and said, We’ll fix it.”

Though they did eventually reach a weekly rental agreement for the Eureka Valley Rec Center’s gymnasium, the relationship between the San Francisco Recreation and Parks Department and the gay basketball program would prove to be consistently rocky through much of the 1980s.

Differences came to a head in August 1989 when, during one of the weekly runs, a group of teenagers entered the gym and rushed the court mid-game, forcing the action to an awkward, contentious pause. As reported at the time to longtime local LGBTQ+ newspaper the Bay Area Reporter, the incident did not turn violent, as the basketball players were able to usher the young intruders back outside, subsequently locking the gym doors behind them.

It’s unclear whether this specific incident was a targeted anti-LGBTQ+ act, but the Eureka Valley Recreation Center was known among local LGBTQ+ advocacy groups, like Community United Against Violence, as a hotspot for anti-LGBTQ+ activity and even hate crimes, pointing to a larger-scale issue at hand. In the wake of this nearly-violent encounter, the rec center’s superintendent, Joel Robinson, wanted Jasinski’s group to pay for additional security presence at the facility on nights they played, which would’ve raised the weekly rental rate from $64 to $104.

Faced with this untenable price hike, a looming threat of discriminatory violence and an uncooperative local administrator, Jasinski turned to his strongest talent: organizing. Not only did he circumvent the Recreation and Parks Department’s security fees by deputizing two of his own players for the job, he turned the situation into a referendum on gay sports in the Castro writ large.

Jasinski rallied his fellow gay sports league administrators around the cause of creating a more welcoming environment at the Eureka Valley Rec Center, leading a series of strategy meetings throughout the summer of 1989. At the time, Jasinski alleged that the center held only two gay sports events per week - his basketball group and the Golden Gate Wrestling Club — a disproportionally low number given the neighborhood’s demographics and reputation. The group drafted a multi-pronged proposal aimed at better integrating gay sports leagues into the Recreation and Parks Department’s programming and operations. Gary France, a member of this coalition and head of the Golden Gate Wrestling Club, described the proposal to the Bay Area Reporter as “a first step in involving the gay sporting community in the use of the facility at Eureka Valley and in establishing a successful and meaningful working relationship with Recreation and Parks.”

When the group’s calls for reform and acceptance were initially disregarded, Jasinski again sought out the local media to amplify his group’s message, securing coverage on local television station KPIX. The television spot caught the eyes of a few City Hall power players, including Parks and Recreation Commissioner Connie O’Connor, who proved to be a strong advocate for the group’s cause. With Commissioner O’Connor’s assistance, Jasinski and his counterparts were able to schedule a series of meetings with the City that established a more open and collaborative posture from the Parks and Recreation department toward the gay sports community. Jasinski’s basketball group, in all its permutations both casual and formal, has called the Eureka Valley Rec Center home ever since.

Jasinski’s advocacy for equality and acceptance translated to his on-the-court philosophy as well. Early newspaper advertisements for his Friday evening runs often included the blunt line: “There are only two rules: no hostility is allowed and everyone must try their best!” He echoed this sentiment when asked about the group, stating that its focus “was always drop-in ball,” recounting the early years.

“Whoever shows up, plays. We’d divide up teams and I was always trying to make them even and make sure everybody got as much time as everybody else, whether they were good or not.”

In 1996, SFGBA started its Wednesday night Castro League, adding a second event to its weekly calendar.

The Castro League

To watch the SFGBA’s contemporary iteration is to witness Jasinski’s philosophy applied to a new generation playing a decidedly modern style of basketball. The league currently hovers around a half dozen teams per season, with annual spring and fall sessions. This regular, consistent schedule — games are always at 7 p.m. and 8 p.m. on Wednesdays, seasons occur over the same time spans each year, all events take place at Eureka Valley — affords the league a crucial level of continuity on the court as well as the development of strong relationships off of it.

The SFGBA, like any other large, raucous and fun-loving extended family, takes advantage of every possible opportunity to break bread together. Sometimes that comes in the form of postgame drinks at The Mix, a local watering hole just across Castro on 18th Street. On the weekends, there’s Jock Sundays at famed Market Street bar The Lookout, where a portion of sales go toward various LGBTQ+ sports leagues. Every June, volunteers from the league run a beer booth at the city’s world-famous Pride festival, itself in its fifth decade of existence. Between these recurring events are dozens of informal get-togethers, from gatherings at Jasinski’s home around the corner from the Eureka Valley Rec Center to impromptu nights out in the Castro.

These connections shine through on gamedays, as each team has a distinct style of play based upon their players’ blend of skillsets. Some teams, like To Be Continued, are led by fleet-footed, ball-dominant guards who push the pace of the game to tire out their opponents, pestering offenses as they cross half court for all 40 minutes of game time. The team’s ball-hawking backcourt consistently forces turnovers, turning hard-nosed defense into easy fastbreak opportunities on offense.

Teams like Every Last Drop, on the other hand, base their gameplan on their height advantage, focusing on getting the ball into the paint with crisp interior passing between the team’s many talented forwards.

Generally, players seem comfortable with and even relish the opportunity to slot into whichever role is best suited to help their team to victory. Long-range specialists linger around the three-point arc, awaiting a kick-out pass from a driving teammate or a long rebound to come bouncing their way. Larger players repeatedly crash the boards, jostling for position and possession. Hierarchies do seem to emerge on each team, and the best players spend the most time with the ball in their hands, as is common among longer-standing and more organized leagues.

This isn’t to say, however, that the SFGBA is a fleet of perfectly-oiled machines. Knees creak, players double over in exhaustion toward the end of games, balls careen off dribblers’ feet, wide-open layups are missed. These kinds of miscues, which are all common sights in gyms the world over, seem less important than what happens immediately after one of them occurs during a SFGBA game.

Take, for example, the first half of an early November matchup between To Be Continued and Nooners. To counter the size advantage and post scoring ability of To Be Continued big man Ryan Briggs, Nooners defenders began double-teaming Briggs whenever he’d get the ball. Instead of responding to this defensive tactic by attacking the open space left by the second defender and cutting toward the basket, Briggs’ teammates hovered around the three-point arc, waiting for their big man to pass the ball back out to the perimeter, a response that defied both Briggs’ on-court pleas and conventional basketball wisdom. This misalignment between Briggs and his teammates caused the team’s offense to stagnate and the early lead that To Be Continued had built to quickly evaporate.

During a subsequent, much-needed timeout, tension didn’t boil over, nor were any fingers pointed. Instead, Briggs and his teammate Tristan Davis used the time more constructively, explaining offensive counter-strategy to some of their less experienced teammates.

Uncommon among rec leagues, SFGBA includes players with a wide variety of skill and experience levels. Every week, players with obvious high school- or college-level experience suit up alongside relative newcomers to the game, and remarkably little tension results. This is no coincidence or magical confluence of incredibly understanding individuals (although everyone in the league that I’ve come across has been delightfully kind); this consistently inclusive and supportive environment is by design.

Sitting at a tiny two-person table tucked in the corner of a cafe on a particularly noisy part of Geary Boulevard, current league Vice President Chris Johnson speaks frankly about the league’s approach of being stern and upfront with those who cross lines and jeopardize this carefully-crafted environment.

“We want to honor every person, as well as to honor the game,” Johnson explains. “People are not coming here to get hurt, to be abused. We’re coming here to really kinda gel, build chemistry, have fun, get a workout, release endorphins of course, and build community.”

Key to the league’s sustained success, it seems, is a commitment to inclusivity along all lines, not just to players of different skill levels.

Jasinski and his fellow league administrators did, however, have to contend with teams circumventing a well-meaning but unpopular rule that they established at the league’s founding. To assure a worthwhile, inclusive experience for all involved, Jasinski instituted a 10-minute-per-game minimum of playing time for every player in the league. Some teams voluntarily abided by this rule, while some worked to find loopholes around it. Others openly defied the rule, forcing Jasinski to either punish the team or let their indiscretion slide. Eventually, Jasinski recalls abandoning the rule, as he has found it easier and more productive to promote a general environment of inclusion and acceptance than to engineer inclusion via hard-and-fast rules about playing time.

Connecting the Bay

Despite what its name implies, SFGBA’s community spans far beyond just gay, cisgender men. It has long welcomed players of all gender expressions and sexualities, and its mission statement names diversity and inclusion as its two primary guiding principles. Amidst the Trump Administration’s (and the American right wing writ large’s) ongoing efforts to discredit, vilify and defund all civil organizations that hold these exact same principles, particularly those serving marginalized groups like the LGTBQ+ community, the SFGBA’s continued embrace of diversity and inclusion is itself a community-affirming and community-building act.

“The league is more about helping people versus shaming people,” Johnson explains. “I mean, we can get that just by stepping off the Muni wearing rainbow, so why would we ever discriminate within our own family?”

The league is a collection of longtime San Franciscans and newcomers, of commuters from the East Bay, Marin County and San Jose, of those firmly planted in the Castro District and those who have moved in and out of San Francisco multiple times. There are also relatively recent San Francisco transplants like Tim Newman, a league member since moving from the East Coast in 2022, who turned to SFGBA as a way to integrate himself and find community in a new, unfamiliar city.

“When I first moved to San Francisco, the first night I was in the city, I decided to go to a local gay bar because I wanted to meet some people and make some friends,” Newman says. “And it just so happened that the first person I met was JJ [Suddreth], who at the time was the commissioner of the SFGBA. He and I became really good friends and he invited me to join the league and I said, ‘Absolutely, that sounds like a great idea.’”

Though he had never played organized basketball before then, Newman recalls going to his first SFGBA Sunday open gym shortly thereafter, “I met Ryan Briggs and Justin Seiter there [at the open gym] and they taught me a lot about how to play, how to move, all that kind of stuff. And they were super nice to me. So then I signed up for that next [SFGBA] season and kinda went from there.”

“I’ve played in a lot of different sports leagues — some gay, some straight, some basketball, some not — and I have not really found a social scene that matches what SFGBA does,” Newman says. “I’ve met a ton of my closest friends at games, and even people that don’t play in the league anymore still come back pretty often to watch games or just say hi. I’m also doing a Volo [basketball] league right now and there’s, like, no one around in the stands. It’s a different environment.”

Some players become close friends, some date for a while, some find lifelong partners through the league, but the overarching relationship between all who’re involved with the league is one of mutual care, acceptance and, when necessary, aid.

“The different generations and people who actually give a fuck about you, and care, we go the extra mile,” Johnson says. “But it’s not even an extra mile, it’s just normal, like breathing.”

Johnson recalls a specific experience during COVID that exemplifies profound bonds that exist within the SFGBA community. At the height of the pandemic, one of Johnson’s fellow league administrators was temporarily experiencing homelessness. Remarkably, few within the league knew of this person’s circumstances at first because he continued to perform his usual league duties, both on and off the court, without incident. When Johnson eventually caught wind of this, he immediately offered to house his fellow league member until he could find a more permanent arrangement.

Through the work of people like Johnson, Newman, Suddreth, Jasinski and countless others, the SFGBA has become an exemplar of “social infrastructure”, defined in the Office of the Surgeon General’s 2023 advisory on the Loneliness Epidemic as “programs, policies and physical pieces of infrastructure that promote social cohesion and gathering.”

The SFGBA combines all three of these defined elements: it utilizes a physical piece of infrastructure (the Eureka Valley Recreation Center) to operate its program (the Wednesday night Castro League and Sunday open runs) and implement its stated policies (inclusion, diversity and acceptance), all in the name of creating a space for positive social interaction and community building. The Surgeon General’s advisory also includes “strengthening social infrastructure” as the first of its “six pillars to advance social cohesion.”

Social cohesion and community are examples of “social determinants of health,” or external conditions and circumstances of a person’s life that impact their physical and psychological health. According to a 2022 study by the United States Centers for Disease Control (CDC), social isolation and prolonged stretches of loneliness can cause a variety of severe health effects including increased risk for heart disease, stroke, dementia, type 2 diabetes, depression, anxiety, and premature mortality.

Loneliness and social isolation are experienced at different rates among different demographic groups, and as the Loneliness Epidemic becomes more pronounced and widely discussed, the amount of available research about these differences also grows. The abovementioned CDC study contributes to this body of research, with its survey finding that feelings of loneliness were “significantly higher among [surveyed] adults who identified as gay (41.2%), lesbian (44.8%), bisexual (56.7%), or something other than gay, lesbian, bisexual, or straight (50.7%), than among those who identified as straight (30.3%).”

But constructing a piece of social infrastructure that’s sturdy enough to withstand the test of time and all of its requisite challenges requires more than just a strong unifying ethos.

Part II publishes next week.

His urgency with the word on point for a toddler, his perception of the world being immediate and largely enthusiastic. But his invocations — kore, kore, kore — how rapid and pressing, each a little slipstream for us to step into and see beyond his wants, glimpse at his impulses and personality.

Kore… to? I ask playfully, moving my finger from where his own small one presses against pictures of french fries or karaage over to anything green. This… and?

Nai! He giggles, gaze shifting between my face and watching for where I’ll point next, the terms of this new game set. The terms a little more changeable for me, knowing there’s a line where fatigue will overtake him and the suggestions I’m making are interpreted as serious instead of playful.

Kore becomes instructive. I say it and point to the parts on his toy excavators and cranes where I want him to show me how they manoeuvre and extend. It also becomes a question while playing songs in the backyard one evening to see which he likes, asking Kore? when he starts to sway or bop his head, or in the Iya Valley at a river we climb down to, crouching and choosing which jade-hued rock on shore he’ll huck into the milky green mountain water.

Kore comes whispered, shrieked, tearfully, and with deep concentration. It becomes punctuative, telling, a place to meet in the middle, a comfort. It won’t be until I get home that I’ll consider completely the way he and the word kept us locked in a steady-state of present. Beyond the way just travel, or being with a young child will, the times we drifted — talking about Japan’s place in current geopolitics with Ryoko as he dozed in his carseat, reviewing logistics with Carl and my mom for the next day as he dumped blocks out to build with — he would soon bring us back with kore. He knows the word’s past-tense partner, sore, for “that”, but preferred to set it aside, opting for the linguistic now. For all those days he freed us up to do the same.

Russell Westbrook used a postgame availability this week to call out a Sacramento Kings reporter. First one, then broadly, vaguely, the room.

Context was central to Westbrook’s umbrage. That the reporter did not have the correct context to make the observations they had in the past. That they did not know him, personally, and were not present in practice or film sessions. For context, media isn’t invited into team film sessions and practice only opens for media as it winds down, when a player or two might linger on court or drift over to gym equipment. For context, to be an objective journalist — an objective observer of anything — personal, intimate knowledge of your subject is not advisable. Founded, intelligent, clear consideration is, and is what it means to contextualize a subject, an athlete.

The contextual takeaways were expansive, and prickled different nerves. Concerns that this was another sign of the erosion of media, that gutting of coverage and beat reporter jobs meant less trust between athlete and writer, or media at large. That Westbrook should have taken that particular media member aside earlier, or after he stepped away from the podium. That expectations for the Kings set by media were unrealistic this season. That Westbrook was protecting young teammates from unwarranted criticism. That this was Westbrook behaving in the context of a career-long pattern. That Westbrook should not be prescriptive about how other people do their jobs. That trust between athlete and media (monolith) needs recalibration.

All of it, to some degree, true. But that’s the many-faced prism of context.

I watched the clip through a haze of jet lag and felt contextually removed. Parachuting back into something I had not clocked my mental distance from until right then. My context also warped by what else I was catching up on — two weeks of a new American forever war, this time with Iran and rapidly expanding throughout the Middle East, underway. With that in mind I only had one thought, that maybe Westbrook hit the same wall I had, that I’ve seen a lot of people reckon with over the last weeks. That it feels impossible, stupid, gross or all three to take the habits, routines, and interests we engage in and try to force the context they exist in to be the same as they were a month ago. That if we’re being honest that steady-state of passive context ceased to exist as far back as — well, take your pick of conflicts: Ukraine, state-sanctioned genocide against Palestinians, Sudan, the United States’ heady, eager rush back into (open) continental and global imperialism.

Is this too much context to offer Westbrook, this exchange? Probably, maybe, but then we do so determinedly, persistently draw that thick line between the context of “NBA basketball” and “rest of the world”, as if the former could covertly exist in the margins for much longer. As if it ever did at all.

There’s a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart that you can’t take part. You can’t even passively take part. And you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus — and you’ve got to make it stop. And you’ve got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it — that unless you’re free the machine will be prevented from working at all.

— Mario Savio, from his Sproul Hall speech, December 2, 1964

I don’t really care about tanking. It feels radical, taboo, to write that. Or that if I dared say it out loud some Bloody Mary-esque figure, a joyless nerd in a quarter zip, would appear and revoke my status as basketball authority.

Adam Silver talked about the league’s tanking issue this week at MIT’s annual Sloan Sports Analytics Conference. In a conversation led by Sue Bird, Silver floated different solutions: Divorce the Draft and lottery from team records, so all 30 had the same odds regardless of season outcomes? Remove all playoff teams? Just the conference finals teams? Look at the record of a team over two seasons to determine their lottery odds, like the WNBA?

Silver mentioned the “arbitrary lines” drawn over the years, all designed to tweak and more efficiently hone the system in place, which is exactly where my concern wanes. The arbitrariness and forced calamity of what is essentially invented, folding.

I can admit that my reasons are personal in the sense that the largely held context of tanking, its would-be direness and bellwether of what’s wrong with the league, does not hold for me. It does not hold because if I were to present the average fan with the choice of tanking or the league’s response to its athletes who are perpetrators of intimate partner violence and assault, say, or the league’s many ties to Jeffrey Epstein, or its ongoing entrenchment with gambling and the erosion these platforms present not just to the game but our perception of the world around us, and asked which is worse for the NBA, nine times out of 10 the answer would be tanking.

So yes, I can admit what moves the needle for me is personal in that it’s what affects people. That the choice of a team, its billionaire ownership class, is not. Moreover that I’d argue that same class lost its grasp on what’s personal, in the context of what’s affecting for the average person, well before they got their hands on an NBA team.

Not lost on me the impulses of this American administration being in the same range of impulse as a toddler. The difference that where a toddler’s demand of action-reaction, their desirousness of the world around them and the urgency with which they communicate that appetite is out of a hope of expansiveness and understanding, Trump et al. operate from the opposite impulse. Theirs is a fear-driven need for annihilation. Denial or outright destruction of anything other. To reduce the world down to one, funhouse reflective likeness.

What’s clear is the best and easiest way to stay ahead of their rhetoric is to keep your own context current. When everything someone says is revisionist it requires you to exist in the past, which is redrawn by nature. To see the moment clearly and put your whole body in it, dumb molecules vibrating no matter the mundanity of it — impossible to be dragged backwards from that excruciating present.

Something less reported on from Silver’s Sloan appearance was his flag that beyond analytics, beyond any advanced technology like A.I., even beyond athletic feat, the thing that draws people to sports is human connection. That the connection sports offers — in its triumphs and errors — is difficult to find in other aspects of our lives given our growing disconnect, and the deepening individualised moats around us brought on by more screens and less human contact.

He also talked about refs. That while the NBA is using A.I. tools to build out its officiating, there’s no real substitute for the sixth sense referees have. He said it feels as if some of them have “eyes in the back of their head” or that “they’re feeling vibrations on the floor, feeling bodies.”

Aside from how intimate, or poetically tactile — the thrum of reverberations on the court coming up through your legs is a very distinct, grounding feeling — both these thoughts, though offered in different interview tangents, show that while it may be considered by some to be the crudest, or most volatile context of basketball, the human element is inescapable. Should be inescapable, given the fact of the game being played by people (though people are broken down into numbers very quickly), but in these seemingly small, easy to miss or take for granted ways we’re offered the reverberations of other people, of life, and offered them in ways that force us to the present.

The thrum of a thousand some-odd voices buzzing in your ears and vibrating through your chest at a game, turning to a stranger in the seat beside you to confirm some incredible thing you just watched happen, see it in their flushed face clearer than a mirror could show. To watch a game in person, no matter how much you see on screens or in replay, is to remind yourself of how difficult because how human. A voice in your head enthusiastically confirming, synchronously with thousands of others watching around you, This, this, this.

The preceding emperor for most every incoming Roman emperor. The cows Catherine O’Leary was milking and the Chicago Fire. Older, typically single women society had no use for and the witch trials. Leon Trotsky for Joseph Stalin. My dogs for a small longhaired dachshund that lives in my building named Brunello.

History wants an other because others are easy conduits between action and outcome. An other, whether specific person or group, crises or cow, delivers us a bridge that spans over decades or more of complicated, multipronged precursors to zip across. That and we’re lazy.

Here’s where the cowards come in.

We grow especially lazy when we’re angry or scared. When, even if we know in our logical minds that nothing is ever caused by just one thing, out of hurt, fear, doubt, and powerlessness there is an overwhelming desire to lash out. Better yet, to direct that hostility toward a target.

History has its fair share of cowards, people who were willing and happy to throw their family, friends, really anybody, under the proverbial bus in order to get ahead or else pad themselves with a sense of security and control. Through a contemporary lens, this kind of person has been rebranded as resourceful, a self-starter. Driven. But whether classic or modern, cruelty has always been the coward’s favoured tool.

The NCAA banned trans athletes from competing in women’s sports this week, a policy change that spits in the face of Title IX and came less than 24-hours after Donald Trump signed an executive order declaring the same. To say that the NCAA’s total capitulation was swift is not accurate enough — the reaction was practically knee-jerk, premeditated. It’s easy to fold when it’s never been clear you had a spine in the first place.

There are fewer than a dozen athletes who identify as trans within the NCAA’s 530,000+ student-athlete population. A number, you’d think, given the organization’s $1.3 billion in annual revenue (and climbing) that would not pose much of a financial risk to support. Especially considering that the career of any student-athlete can be as truncated as a year, four years at its zenith.

It’s callous to point to the money first but that’s always where the NCAA’s lizard brain goes, and Trump’s order dictates the Department of Education pull funding from institutions deemed non-compliant.

For dismantling decades of tireless work, protest and action by student-athletes who demanded equity in recognition and pay, NCAA president Charlie Baker’s statement was brief, but reading it you can still hear a visceral sigh of relief, maybe even the susurrous sound of piss running down his leg.

We strongly believe that clear, consistent, and uniform eligibility standards would best serve today's student-athletes instead of a patchwork of conflicting state laws and court decisions. To that end, President Trump's order provides a clear, national standard.

Baker ends by affirming, in an arm’s-length sort of way, that he and the NCAA “stand ready to assist schools as they look for ways to support any student-athletes affected by changes in the policy.”

Can you imagine looking to this craven collection of selfish, greedy stiffs in active retreat for help? After they just sold you out to a megalomaniac who signed this executive order surrounded by young women and girls, some barely taller than the desk he was sitting and grinning at, giving institutions express permission to forcibly examine girls and women for biological proof of gender?

That’s the glaring contradiction I’ve yet to see mentioned in any of this, either the NCAA’s cowardice or the clarion clear hypocrisy of the order itself (titled “Keeping Men Out of Women’s Sports”) — this only targets women. Trans women absolutely, but for cis women this is antiquated protectionism. It springs out of the belief that women are inherently lesser, that they need to be secured from a boogeyman lurking in the shadows (or in this case, some steamy locker room with the overhead lights flickering on and off for effect) as much as from their own agency.

Trump said he and his administration won’t stand by and “watch men beat and batter female athletes”, but he and his administration will bar and limit women’s control of their bodies while flaunting then vaulting to power men who assault women. This is not about giving power “back” to cis women. It’s about enforcing the same old virgin-whore trope of preservation and women’s bodies existing as some fantasy, revisionist ideal, and that cis and trans women’s assertion over their own bodies is a threat to patriarchal systems of dominance and oppression.

The only reason this order and its outcome are framed as empowerment, or a whiff of autonomy for women, is because it falls within the bounds of an already restrictive and predatory system like the NCAA. It’s the arena inside the Colosseum, it’s not and never will be the wider world.

Though it’s an exercise in futility because it assumes the people who view this order as necessary, or a win, or both, use logic in their day-to-day thinking, I wonder whether any have taken their Cro-Magnon thought experiment all the way through.

To hypothesize that a Division I athlete, fiercely competitive and brought up in a cultural and competitive system that demands and lauds singular dedication and perseverance above all, would wake up one day and decide transitioning would be, actually, easier. That it would give them a smoother field to win on. No matter the complete overhauls required in training, nutrition, recovery and more brought on by hormone treatment, or the logistical adjustments in training (staff, equipment, schedule, an open roster spot on a new and just as competitive team) brought on by going from, in this moronic exercise, a men to women’s program.

None of this includes the mental impact of making such a life-changing decision. The familial and social fallout, the optics, the pointed hatred one would willingly take on in choosing to become the other of this contemporary moment. To become vulnerable, marginalized, relentlessly policed — even when you make up less than 1% of the population in the U.S. over the age of 13 — all for the benefit of winning one race, one game, one title?

It is so hard to become a professional athlete in any sport, to make the jump from high school to college athletics, then a jump further into a corresponding pro league. This also assumes a pro league of said sport pays a living wage, or is in geographic proximity, and is not so steeped in the same regressive waters of this moment that it would not balk at the prospect (by which I mean having backbone enough to stand up for and support) of rostering a trans athlete.

What I’m trying to point out with this exercise in futility is that it takes a coward, someone who has their whole life benefitted from cheating, undercutting, taking the shortcut and happily harming others in the process, to think of this as an attractive or even viable route to success. To think it’s what athletes brave enough, with the mental and physical fortitude, the talent, ability and resiliency would choose on a whim rather than feel in their bones is not a choice, but their reality.

The problem with assigning such an obvious charade a logical thought exercise is that you soon realize there is no end. Not to the cruelty Trump’s administration wants to inflict, or the cruelty lackeys like Baker permit with their inaction; not to the number of boogeymen they’ll invent or the problems they’ll have those phantoms produce. The point is for this to be endless, not rational.

An endless war against an ever-expansive other, if one is vanquished the next will be named. When you keep a country in fear, when you extend the reach of that fear to neighbouring nations, you have the opportunity to turn everyone into cowards. Bloated on fear, starved for logic, eager for a scapegoat, hungry for more.

These are kids, is the underpinning thought I keep coming back to. Kids and such a scant number of individuals, made out to be an existential threat for Baker, with his palpable fear of losing donors and money, and Trump, in his fear of losing his handle on chaos to manipulate through. Beyond them, I guarantee, are people in no way directly affected by this order or these athletes, who had barely given it a stray thought before they were told to. People who prefer to be terrified for the false power it lends them, so have chosen this as a line in the sand, their triumph, their due.

I wonder if they know paths of no return aren’t labeled. That they look the same as any other fork in the road. That history holds plenty of bridges to be thrown off, in retrospect.

I’ll level with you: I planned to pre-write topical newsletters for sending out while I was away, but with All-Star Week travel and life that did not happen (for the same reason, guest essays and The Basketball Feelings Podcast will be paused too). So, I’m resharing what I consider to be evergreen posts, un-paywalled. Actually now that I think of it, both this and next week’s newsletters are on subjects I wish were not evergreen, but they’re necessary.

Looking forward to getting back to writing but in the meantime thanks for your understanding, and I hope you enjoy these revisits or in some cases, first reads.

— Katie

What does culture, disintegrating, look like? Personally, I think it’s the ready conversion of art, or work, into Content. I was going to say the sublimation of art into content, but that suggests the intrinsic instinctual impulse remains intact from one form to the other. Art isn’t made to be shared — it often will be, but that isn’t its driver at inception — Content is.

No matter how online you are, when you read the word Content your brain conjures something specific: a tweet, a meme, an NFT (hopefully not, but those were the perfect example of Content considering itself a sublimation of art), maybe a blog. We’re post-Content now in the sense that beyond what you picture, the word presents a prompt of engagement, one you probably follow every day.

It’s the conceit of Content I’m against. What the rise of Content as form has done to our habits, our memories, how we interact with art and culture, with each other. The speed it promotes, the sheer volume it promises, that we use the word ‘consume’ as a preface for it because by nature, it’s disposable. To consume Content starts off feeling easy, innocuous, but the associations with the verb give away pretty aptly the sensations that follow: drain, exhaust, waste.

Vivian Gornick said she was able to write the way she wanted to, in what became her signature style of personal narrative, because The Village Voice gave her the space and money to do it. She credits the writers around her working within the style of personal journalism, and the specific time and place, for nurturing the form she found:

The time and the place—New York City in the 1970s—were propitious: it was a moment when “everyone” seemed to be writing in the first person. By “everyone,” I mean people like Tom Wolfe, Joan Didion, Norman Mailer.

It’s not a new complaint to point out that writers of subsequent generations have it harder, stranger, worse than writers who came before. But it does seem new to note that not only are we losing the places to write for and the financial incentive to do it — we’re also losing the writers.

It can be a bucolic thing to picture, looking back on magazine writers who made enough to live in cities like New York and Los Angeles, adjacent to their peers and knit into the fabric of a subculture forming, who could travel for perspective or take time off to idle and replenish their ideas. Journalists who were free to roam between subjects, to recognize the necessary overlaps in art and politics, or politics and culture, and trace them to their shared roots to make sense of a greater whole, a larger moment. Or reporters at papers who covered just one beat instead of being tasked with the job of propping up the whole section. But gradually, retrospectively, those heydays don’t seem as halcyon as they did a decade ago, they seem impossible. More than that, without contemporary examples to draw from because no working writers live like this and more and more writers aren’t working, they’re becoming unimaginable.

We’re going through some of the worst humanitarian, ecological and existential crises in history and it isn’t just journalists, writers, and artists we look to for closer comprehension of what’s happening to us, they’re also de facto record-keepers. As they jettison out of crumbling industries or have their livelihoods yanked from under them, huge gaps are going to result, gaps we can’t be aware of until years down the road. These are also the people who excel in finding tangible and emotional connections from present to past, oftentimes to help our future selves process life and improve existence overall. This isn’t grandiose, if anything it’s been a happy side effect of people good at their jobs, but as we surge ahead hellbent on making everything more insular we stand to relinquish it, along with essential connections to who we were, are, and could be. We don’t misplace possible realities when we stop being able to picture them, we lose them.

I’ve always been interested by people who recognize themselves as belonging to a specific stretch of time, of a subculture or movement forming. Mostly because to feel it around you, there has to be a certain press of gravity, formed by enough people or energy in that growing configuration. Unless somebody has the wherewithal (or ego) to name it, the recognition comes retrospectively. Whether in movements of art, music, writing, and the politics that ran in and out of them, there was an urgent condition for the world before to drop away, to be necessarily shed. The propulsion forward came out of the belief that there was something to be made new. Something better out in front. Hope as means of cultural terraforming.

What is it to recognize the conditions that came before were obliterated before you got there, to feel the press of gravity, but in yawning absence? Every movement must have felt theirs was the last, but the collective propulsion in this one seems mostly to be scrambling.

It’s a tarnished silver lining but panic, as a bodily response, is piquing. If people in the past weren’t always aware of what was forming up around them, we can’t really be heedless about what we’re losing. Ignorant to how personally unaffected for a time, maybe, but not oblivious.

There are models that work, writer-run sites like Defector, newsletters. I hesitate at naming any publication, even if they’re legacy and/or subscription based and helmed by people who value writing and the space it creates (or more importantly now, takes up), because we’ve seen how they’re not immune to cuts or outright dissolution.

The irony isn’t lost on me that I started Basketball Feelings, on an even smaller platform (Tiny Letter, I guess pun intended), to keep a space for myself to write in the way I wanted that would remain concentrated as I necessarily adapted my work within the wider world of basketball publications, in order to write more. I thought this would stay the adjunct, even secretive, outlet. The reverse happened. Where I was worried I would lose what made me stand out by working my way in, that influence, concentrated here, spread — there’s a handful of basketball podcasts and properties now that cite being safe spaces to delve into the emotional elements around the game itself, that use ‘feeling’ or a synonym of in their titles; at All-Star, a major, national reporter found me at the back of a press conference to tell me something I wrote changed the way he writes. Basketball Feelings is now the most consuming, but also the most stable, place I’ve written for — then or since.

This isn’t meant to point out that I’ve found the way forward, or a path to creative sustainability, in sports or any critical writing. I’ve waffled between paywalling this newsletter entirely and not, partially for me (this isn’t financially sustainable — I do a lot of other things), and partially because I would like to be able to pay other writers to write here. To not just rely on camaraderie when I ask people to contribute, but to help support them, if only a little.

I’ve looked to bigger newsletters, like True Hoop, Good Morning It’s Basketball, The Stein Line, thinking because of their history, how they’ve established themselves or what they offer, people are more willing to pay to read them (also recognizing the conditions they had to establish themselves and a history, then transplant it all, no longer exist). Thought that what Basketball Feelings is, a blend of criticism, reporting and personal narrative, isn’t concrete enough to be paid for. That to grow, it has to be available, referable. I also like that it’s accessible, that’s important to me (the irony also isn’t lost on me that I find it easier to share deeply personal experiences here than asking people, straightforwardly, to pay for my work if they enjoy it).

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I also don’t want to only read newsletters from writers I love and admire, that would be hell.

Most crucially, what I’ve gained here is what’s being lost. Like Vivian Gornick, I’ve adapted an existing form to fit the work I want to do. Unlike Gornick, this form isn’t secure, or “profitable”, because it can’t be Content. It takes too long on either end, the writing and reading. The crux is that if everything has to be Content, how will form evolve? Sports — like culture, like art — can’t exist in a vacuum, because neither can people.

Will we have favourite sports writers, culture writers, political writers, writers who exist in the middle ground between authors and working writers — or working writers, at all — in 10 years? In five? What happens when all the news we get, in basketball or beyond, comes from AI instead of the voices we look forward to and stow away for later, or drop what we’re doing to read?

What will it mean for conversations, for the way we trust certain writers and artists to translate moments in time and meaning from moments, to mine from the compounding layers of everyday life the rare parts we’ll remember best, when they’ve all been made redundant (another way: when we’ve been told they’ve been made redundant)? When the people coming after have a fraction of, if any at all, of the same translators to emulate?

We don’t just leave the things we read on the screen or the page when we put them down, we take them around with us. These tender little tide pools in our heads for the facts to bubble around in, hot houses of the heart for ideas to sprout from. We use critics, artists, writers as lenses for the world, for how we hone our own curiosity, and I don’t just mean it figuratively. Growing up, I felt the cadence of my favourite writers like a metronome. I heard them clearer sometimes than my family or friends. Necessarily, too. These are the voices that push us down new paths, carry us onto roads otherwise foreign. My friends were doing the same and when we all came back together we’d dissect: assert what we aligned with, test what we didn’t, share passed-off perspectives merged with our own, making something new.

The urgency changes as you get older, you’ve found your bearings, your fixed points, you look less for things to fill you than for what you can or want to accommodate. It’s tempting to think you’ve outgrown the need for what might upend you which is why, if anything, we need it more. The everyday translators of experience who you trust, and the lighting bolts of form that jolt us at an emotional, spiritual and intellectual level. Singe us back to our senses.

Sportswriting has come to feel safest for the common denominator — and even then, not really.

Writing that offers the play-by-play of what happened, and if it offers opinion, or perspective, it’s the type that’s been so widely hammered through the machine of social media groupthink that it’s already accounted for any loose ends or rough edges. It preempts the what-ifs, the sure-buts, has sanded away anything that could prompt a question or reply. Streamlined to project the farthest in SEO return, so smooth that nothing sticks. A boxscore as blog.

I write a lot about the acceleration of time within an NBA season, because it’s a warping that touches everything and it freaks me out. Trying to remember sequences or specific plays from games, when trades or injuries happened, being consistently shocked when I double check and my timeline is way off. The warping, I’ve come to realize, also touches careers. I don’t consider myself a veteran in this industry, partially my own bias and probably said-warping. I’m often sought out to give career advice and have taught classes in sports media. Some of the people I’ve given advice to have started careers, doing a bit of everything (writing, podcasting, broadcast) because that’s now the minimum. It feels strange to say that homogeneity is the most striking feature in all of it. Part of that, I realize, is the pressure to drive engagement to stay employed. Most new jobs are coming from gambling properties but no outlet is immune to aggregation. Part of it, is emulation. Form wants to find form. What I wonder and worry about is when it’s perceived to only be safe to work, to write, one way, it stops being advantageous to push forward, to stumble or strive into the next thing. In streamlining, the world and industry we lament for shrinking grows that much smaller, that much faster.

When JJ Redick complains that people don’t want to be educated about basketball I don’t agree with him, but I understand the point of his frustration. What he wants, I assume, is not to offer up whatever’s best for rote aggregation, but what he wants, at least what he says he wants, is still just one thing. One way of interpretation, one form.

Certainly, fans want facts. But the point that plying unanimity misses is that what these facts are varies from fan to fan. Some people trust their eyes, others look to numbers, some fans don’t want to know anything outside the orbit of their team, some outside a single player. Some fans want backstory, the history more essential than the variability of the present, some have no interest in a person beyond their immediacy — in a season, a series, a game. Some do want to understand the actions Zion Williamson being the primary ballhandler for his team have led to, others do not care, would rather be moved to tears by Williamson dunking and trust that to be fundamental.

One way as the only way has never led to anything good, or lasting, in human history. A big statement to set up alongside a complaint of forced uniformity in basketball media, but at a fundamental level all writing exists in relation to the world it’s trying to reflect. It seems a crisis of ourselves, existentially unnatural, to stop looking.

To borrow again from Gornick, “To make larger sense of things is life’s fundamental pleasure as well as obligation.”

These picturings might be memories — unless it was too soon for memories. The moments would not say which of them might be remembered.

— The Transit Of Venus, Shirley Hazzard

The desert went on for hours.

Fiery red, blistering mesas split down ancient seams in the rock that dropped into blackness, heaped hills of baked brown. Stretches of sand lifting into towering, shimmering cyclones. Shapes in the sand, a giant impression of lungs pressed down into the side of a giant dune. Deep rivets hewn by the wind, dwindling rivers — it was like the land below had stretched an extra airborne hour since the last time I flew all the way west.

Who is this going to be, Shanon murmurs, rocking up onto her tip-toes. I follow her gaze across the hotel lobby, neon light from a sculptural cube placed, contextless, in front of the elevator bank reflecting off the marble floors, giving everyone’s faces a lurid glow — including Kawhi Leonard, beelining for the elevators.

I see the small van she’s clocked, its back door sliding open. Nobody cool is showing up in a van, I joke, just in time to see Steph Curry step carefully down from the backseat to the driveway.

The smell of petrichor down in the Lakers tunnel, drifting in from the bus bay. Somewhere up and outside the dark clouds threatening the city all day must’ve finally broke.

Postgame, Victor Wembanyama walks around barefoot with his feet wrapped in tensor bandages, idly chatting. In his presser he’s asked about the All-Star Game, its impending competition, his answers considered but the feeling that it is a long ways off and not just waiting there, across town, at the end of the week.

Up in the media gondola I wander past the broadcast rooms down to the other half, where the lights are off. There’s a whiteboard of the night’s schedule and leftover water bottles from the production meeting that clearly happened there. I stand in the dark while the American anthem is sung, feel a very strong wave of displacement.

It’s why the smell of wet pavement, Wemby’s bare feet, will stick out to me so much. Grounding.

Staying downtown through the week, no sense of the city and its unhurried, extending sprawl. With all the bank towers, the new low-rise condo clusters, the endless light of Los Angeles can’t penetrate this part and drape, thick and golden.

The most visible signs of life are the giant crows circling overhead and robot delivery vehicles, persistently cheerful and wholly out of place. There’s no sense of horizon, either. That out beyond the jagged teeth of the mountains lift, hem it all in.

Only on my last afternoon, evening coming on quick and crossing the wide pan of South Figueroa with Jerome, Will and Alex does a glimpse of one of the peaks come. The sky so startlingly clear, haze lifted, that the patchwork green and gold of the mountain’s face presents like a patchwork quilt, its upper outline stark against powder blue sky. It looms there so large between the rise of towers to either side that it looks like its come down to meet us.

In the backseat of a car going from Inglewood to West Hollywood, idling at a light, not clueing into location until the thwack of a ball drifts in through the windows. The Beverly Hills Tennis Club there under floodlights. Startling, for how quiet the world got. Over the next series of volleys I strain, swear I can hear the whine of racket strings wound tight under the thwap of a ball getting hit, until the light changes and traffic roars forward.

The first person I spot when I get off the elevator at Intuit Dome’s event level is Robin Lopez, and he looks as lost as I am.

The charm of an arena tunnel are glances into its secret or forgotten corners, the piled up scree of games and seasons past. At an All-Star Weekend this is amplified triple, maybe more. There are so many people rushing, idling, hanging around that the normal metrics of high-visibility invert. No one stands out. I’ve found myself stuck behind Jerry West, trapped in a dance line beside Michael B. Jordan, being followed by Rumble the Bison, sharing a tired look with Nikola Jokic, all of us caught in the snarl of democratised chaos. You really never know which legend you’ll trip into or share a freight elevator with.

At Intuit, maybe because it’s so new, tunnels fresh drywall instead of old concrete, the nooks and crannies don’t exist in the same way. There is lambent LED lighting and bland aesthetic patterning on the walls, lots of greenrooms with closed doors instead of locker or storage rooms you catch fragmented voices and snatches of conversations drifting out of.

Everything felt very controlled, to the point where the most hectic thing I witnessed was Chuck the Condor running to catch an elevator, breathless voice of the person inside pleading, WAIT, WAIT, HOLD THE DOOR.

Rob walks with a paper-bagged tiger tail donut in hand, shades perched low on his nose. He’s easy, sun slipping down his shoulders. I think how quickly this climate, its probing light, has staked its claim on him and how well he wears that prospect. He starts to tell me how you’re never very far here from turning a corner and finding a person filming themselves — lighting, mic, a small production. He turns toward me to emphasise a point and finds I’ve got my phone up, ready to take his photo.

We go down the wide sidewalks, turn broad corners, stare up at gleaming sandstone towers carved in blocky Deco, listing lightly into each other at stoplights like the tall, skinny palms planted at random. I take him to the cathedral-like Los Angeles Central Library, a building I stumbled into a few days before while I was out for a walk between teaching classes.

For a few disorienting minutes I can’t get my bearings through its ornate entryways and echoing halls, but we find ourselves tripping into the Grand Rotunda and I feel a swell of pride for finding it, showing it off. What an easy softness, murmuring in the quiet and cranking our heads back to take in the murals, thin wash of light trickling down from the windows high up and the air tufted by the must of old books, old timber, wafts of green from the garden outside.

Roman reliefs, Egyptian hieroglyphs, faraway traffic, our sneakers against the smooth marble floors; very gentle realisation of memory sketching the moment in all its tactile notes, going from tremulous to solid, cool to warm.

I will think in the car later, Rob driving me back to my hotel, what a privileged perspective to be passenger beside the people you love. Especially when you feel covetous, considerably, of the time between you. To turn in your seat and watch them react to the road, the music, to you. To see the seconds slip over their features. Pocketing the pleasure of an unfettered staring problem, stealing time.

I get so into bowling at a PA party that I don’t notice Jaime Jaquez Jr. pop up in the lane beside me until he’s hucked a ball, in a low-slung variation on shot-put, down the narrow length of hardwood. I don’t know if he hits a single pin but he does it with such confidence that I immediately rethink my form.

Back the next night, I mention wanting to bowl about five or six times in the hopeful and desperate way of someone waiting for a person they have a crush on to show up but everyone I’ve stopped in to see is, in fact, working. I’m encouraged, perhaps in consolation, to take what I want from the PA’s hospitality room. I grab single-serve collagen tubes, a Snickers bar, chapstick and a Kit-Kat; put on a brave face and cram it all into my bag.

An honest to god cowboy browsing the short story archive at the 100-year-old library, giant ficus trees perfect and shining green, growing up out of concrete. Crying in the MOCA to a tinny “Nice & Slow” coming from a rigged up old personal radio that’s part of a sculpture. Crying in The Broad to an Ed Ruscha tucked away in their storage, visible from a playful cutout window in a stairwell. Crying when the exact, perverse weight of luck, timing, and effort hit me, huddled under a borrowed golf umbrella with Howard as we weave around flash-flooding puddles.

Emaciated rose bushes stubbornly alive and blooming in sidewalk dirt pockets. “Manhattan” playing as the car coils from one freeway to the next toward downtown L.A. Freshly power-washed, elaborate mosaics outside of abandoned buildings. The security guard at Crypto who ducked out of frame so I could take what turned out to be a very mid photo of the Lakers chute; talking to him for 15 minutes about his double security gig there and at Dodgers Stadium, about the World Series, about his apologetic knack for getting in the background of other people’s photos.

Ron Harper Jr. at his postgame Rising Stars podium, happy and breathless, surrounded by a handful of media in a room meant to hold hundreds. Wembanyama’s form during warmups, his long, tapering hands resting like a swan will coil its head back over its body.

The strangeness of getting home and watching the Dunk Contest via replay, less than 24-hours after doing speed laps through the same building. The pendulous feeling of being away for nearly a week, for All-Star, but not staying through All-Star Weekend; less fomo than frozen in the familiar beats I know to be happening: waiting for players, waiting for pressers, waiting for shuttles, waiting for friends with warm wine at media hospitality.

The only glimpse of the Pacific I got over six days comes through the plane window after taking off. Quicksilver bright around the profile of the person sitting next to me as we banked and turned back east.

Dan across the low table of a hotel lobby bar; outside, pouring buckets. Behind me a knot of drunk men on their work conference tab bragging about women they’ve treated badly. I make a face and Dan wordlessly, expeditiously, picks up our game detritus, laptops and bags, and shifts us over to the next comically low table.

The wind in the five minute walk from Crypto was so strong it staggered us. We leaned into it, laughing. I forget to ask what he and Denzel Washington talked about all through the second half when he came over to sit in media row.

I think Dan’s good at what he does, and at working this professional microcosm we’re in, because his face is a wide-open window. You see the interior world and you want in. His questions perceptive — traceable back to beats in a game, past games, always a scratch below surface level — but exposed enough that a terse response feels bruising. As if the person he’s asking has overstepped. He toggles between reference points of an athlete and their professional outline; traces the boundaries without treating them as rigid. They feel cared for, in confident hands.

Dan’s open happiness at seeing me for the first time in a dim arena tunnel, again out on the floor during warmups, after a game waiting in a media workroom where he knows I’m waiting for him but nevertheless, like it’s a small wonder how everything can line up. Perceived that way it’s no wonder, whether it’s LeBron James or me, we crack ourselves open.

Perhaps you initially mistook this as a description of Jesus Christ. I can hardly blame you. The parallels are certainly there. Their stories are virtually indiscernible from each other — Jesus, too, had to leave his “team” (the disciples) for reasons beyond his control. Yet one of these men is hailed as the Messiah while the other is smeared as a fatsuit-clad diva.

Last week, the Los Angeles Clippers traded Harden to the Cleveland Cavaliers for Darius Garland, shattering the illusion of a slow trade deadline, and making “Nothing Ever Happens” theorists look like complete fools. The trade was finalized just hours after the rumors had begun festering. And, even as very reasonable explanations emerged from both the Clippers organization and Harden himself, a narrative rapidly materialized — the same one as always: that Harden, faithless and unreliable, had quit on and failed yet another team, moving on to his sixth team in 17 years and his fifth in five years.

But riddle me this: If a woman has a high body count (or, in other words, changes teams quite often), she is celebrated as “sexy,” “confident,” and “free.” Meanwhile, the reaction to Harden’s latest trade shows us that when a man has a high body count, he is a “diva,” “ran through,” and “his legacy as a superstar is tarnished” — a grossly misandrist double standard. Six different teams have all wanted Harden, rendering him one of the most desirable men in not just the league but on planet Earth — I’d wager quite a bit on FanDuel that most of Harden’s detractors can’t find even one person who wants them. After all, most women are looking for the exact same thing Donovan Mitchell reportedly was: a man who is “6-foot-5, durable and comfortable as a pass-first point guard.” Can X users like @BrickCenter_ or @HaterReport say that they meet this standard?

Never mind the very understandable reasons that Harden, in the final years of his NBA career and hoping for a real chance to compete in the postseason, and the Clippers, clearly on the brink of a sweeping overhaul, have specified for the trade. Never mind that Harden clearly wanted to remain in Los Angeles, his hometown, or that Harden carried the entire franchise on his back for 2.5 years. Nuance is reserved for a privileged few within NBA fandom, and sweepingly withheld from wrongly maligned league villains like Harden. Social media users and even prominent sports media talking heads time and again refuse to acknowledge the complex, extremely obvious reasons Harden had no real choice but to leave his past teams — reasons that I could spell out in great detail in my sleep. I’ve actually done this quite a few times.

Was he supposed to squander the prime years of his career with a 2020-2021 Houston Rockets roster offering less help than a ring of traffic cones? Was he supposed to stay on a Nets team with a part-time teammate in Kyrie Irving? Was he supposed to stay on a Sixers team after his relationship with the team’s general manager was unfixably shattered? As for his departure from the Clippers, this hardly seems to have been a case of Harden forcing their hand: While, obviously, losing James Harden is the worst thing that could ever happen to someone, in some ways, the trade appears to have been beneficial for everyone involved — Harden, the Cavs, and the Clippers.

I am something of a James Harden fan myself, though I’m fairly quiet and subtle about it. I’m often falsely accused of doing a “bit.”

Alas, I have never been more serious in my life when I pose this question: What’s wrong with simply not wanting to work somewhere anymore?

Even if all the “worst” narratives about Harden — that he forced this trade for no reason, simply didn’t want to be a Clipper anymore, or “greedily” demanded more money — were true, would that really be so wrong? Surely, there are NBA players or other men in general more deserving of this widespread shame and derision.

Nevertheless, the narratives took off — “If he’s left this many teams, he must be the problem.” The jokes abound — namely, memes insinuating that trading for Harden hadn’t “worked out” for the Brooklyn Nets, the Philadelphia 76ers, and now, the Clippers. But this relies on an infuriating definition of what it means for something to “work out” — a definition borne of the societal sickness that is “ring culture,” regarding success exclusively as a championship.

Harden’s Herculean efforts in Houston are the reason the franchise remained set up for success after his departure, and has stayed relevant to this day. The Brooklyn situation was a bit of a fiasco, that I’ll grant you, but look what happened during thanks to his short tenure in Philly: an MVP for Joel Embiid that would have been impossible without Harden’s facilitating, and a superstar in Tyrese Maxey, who attributes his massive leap since 2023 to Harden’s mentorship. As for the miracles Harden performed for the Clippers, last year, he took a team that wasn’t even supposed to make the playoffs to the 5th seed, elevating all his teammates and, himself, playing at a level that we hadn’t seen since his Houston years.

My fight for James Harden’s honor — a lifetime struggle, a holy war — is inseparable from a much larger fight: a crusade against ring culture, against sports fandom’s infantile obsession with championships as the sole metric of success, as the foundation of a superstar athlete’s “legacy.” Ring culture reminds of a toddler’s inability to grasp object permanence, it is a perversion of the sport of basketball itself. There isn’t a single NBA player of teammate, past or present, of Harden’s who wouldn’t characterize him as one of the greatest athletes to ever touch a basketball. But the perennial obsession with championships frames Harden’s tenure on each of his past teams as a failure, and his departures as “quitting.”

Having been raised in the church myself, I think I speak for everyone when I say: Never in human history has a legendary, bearded man been so crucified.

The other day I encountered a tweet that states, “Being a James Harden stan gotta be such a miserable experience, genuinely don’t know [how] someone would look themselves in the mirror.”

This is, personally, how I do so:

When I was a little girl, for better or for worse, I fell in love with James Harden watching him come off of OKC’s bench. The years have not been kind. I have suffered greatly. There have been days — especially in May 2018 and August 2023 — when I wondered if life would ever get better. It didn’t. But that’s OK. Why?

Because when you’re a true believer, as you mature in your faith, you gain enlightenment: It is an honor to suffer for the things that matter to you. As the Bible tells us in this verse specifically about being a James Harden fan: “For it has been granted to you that for the sake of [Harden] you should not only believe in him but also suffer for his sake.” (Philippians 1:29)