A blueprint for going forward
The last time I was in Tampa it was just as close to Christmas. Lights wound down the long fronds of palms so in the dark the trees bloomed white and red, skeletal and festive. Neighbourhoods had their holiday light displays synced to a radio station so no one needed to leave their cars to listen as they idled, crawled slowly past. Open air malls with fake snow pumped in via canons, temperature in the mid to high-seventies with crowds padded down in puffer coats, a lot of eight-lane roads on the way to anywhere. I stayed in a low, four-storey condominium complex at the fringes of new development, all around scrubland and groves of myrtle oak, twinberry, blooming flatswood plum waiting to be uprooted, ground turned over for suburban density. There was nothing but a pool permanently gleaming tourmaline and I was the only swimmer, small brown lizards running to the puddles that gathered under my deck lounger I’d watch through the chair’s vinyl strips as they drank and fled back to sunny spots to heat their blood, same as me.
The last time I was in Tampa, outside of Tampa, driving slow down the Gulf Coast of Florida, stopping in towns named after other places (Venice, Memphis, Naples), every long stretch of beach had retirees bundled in winter jackets and blankets parked on folding chairs, watching stonily from behind sunglasses as I ran headlong from the car pulled into an empty public parking lot into the water, my shorts and t-shirt hastily jammed into my shoes so they wouldn’t fly away plus a soft pack of cellophane wrapped Marlboro Reds gone water-logged with humidity I smoked maybe two of, wind buffeting the sand against my body, tiny bits of shells, sun-dried chunks of sargassum seaweed, pin pricks of smoothed sea glass all hurtling at my legs and arms, everywhere the water had touched turning pink with remnants of the red tide algae blooms. This place is for packing yourself away in, for sitting under the sun swaddled enough to stand a climate that has heated your blood until it thins, runs a little colder. For choking mangroves and the slow, skulking reptiles that sink into the brackish water around the roots, waiting. For a patina of turquoise where the sky melts into the Gulf, of rose gold, florid lime green duckweed, of bedazzled, declarative shirts boldly naming the very place you are in. For a crane the height of a child plucking bait fish out of fisherman’s buckets as they pick their way out to the farthest water on manmade jetties, unaware of the stark and ghostly figure at their backs reaping and swallowing whole the wriggling benefits of circumstance, exploiting opportunity.
The Raptors are in Tampa now, my memories of the place somehow more fully formed than my memories of what keeps me, kept me, so close to the team.
There aren’t too many remote places possible to get to now, not from our immediate understanding of things and not in the past nine months. Pressing a tentative foot down at the edge of the lake that had frozen overnight, hearing the crack that came when I pushed hard enough run across the bay and echo up the snowy hill across, into the bare trees all shivering close together, felt the farthest I’d been from anything in months. The dogs paused from where they were nosing at deadfall along the rocky shore, cocked their heads to listen to the eerie popping twang as I pressed somewhere else and did it again, the sound like a thick steel wire pulling taut.
When Dylan and I got there the lake had been wild, loose and cold, a birch that tilts precariously over the water out at a point I swam to every day I could in summer now bare and straining to the choppy surface, familiar, still far. That morning, early enough so the sun shot haphazard through the mess of pines and birch, spilling a spotty light out onto the new ice, the water was dormant. That lone birch pulled closer by the possibility of soon just walking to it, of following the tracks of deer when they cross solid ice from one peninsula to the other, the tracks of wolves where they follow the deer.
I felt tired and dragged out, weirdly suspended, like I couldn’t find a thing worth or wanting to clamp to, dig in around. I’d woken in the night to what I thought was a bright light out over the water, cutting through the pine boughs as they swayed with the wind. Lifting out of sleep enough to realize it was a clump of stars before slipping back under. All the nights we were up there I woke up to nothing. To the kind of silence where you think the sound of your own blood in your ears is something roaring outside. In the mornings mad at myself that I couldn’t succumb to the quiet.
We couldn’t remember if we’d ever been up there to watch the water turn, the season fully change. Only in the before and after, and the after so far past that there was already a crisscrossing of snowmobile tracks like a highway on what used to be water, the locals liking it better to go that way then on the winding cottage roads piled up with dump after dump of snow. It was December, all of a sudden, and all I could think was March being three months away. March and a year of “since everything”.
The last conversation I had with a player, at a game, who wasn’t a Raptor, was Kyle O’Quinn. When he sat in the visitor’s locker room smiling down at a card he was opening, lifting it up for Tobias Harris to see. We talked about yoga. I was working on something I wanted to be cumulative, counting on all those middle months of an NBA season before April when things slow, to talk to players, guys like O’Quinn who get minutes here and there but whose importance to the team is marked more by what they bring off the court, in steam-logged locker rooms like the one we were in, about how they stay present, keep their heads in it if their bodies aren’t really. The visiting team schedule was stacked, the story half written in my head. O’Quinn was the only one I got to talk to.
To feel tired now, when you really let yourself consider all the time that has stretched between seasons, whether marked by water shifting solid or the sun spanning different sections of sky, isn’t just sleep-offable fatigue. It’s a dense, cumulative drowse and drain that blurs to you even the edges of yourself. It’s hard to know where to grip to pick yourself up by the shoulders and shake when the level of sameness, no birthday cards in locker rooms, stretches past where you can see forward even if you squint, hard. I replay that short conversation, wish I wrote the story just so I could have it for myself. A blueprint for going forward.
For a minute my hope was snagged by DeAndre Bembry, his easy, impish smile as he sat before the Raptor’s new hanging vinyl waiting for questions, small red dinosaur wrapped around and gnawing a palm tree behind him. His face open, his head tilting back, eyes a little alight with post-practice endorphins.
It wasn’t hard to see the way toward the new iteration of the team, a fresh start, through what piqued beginning Bembry could bring. It’s been like this before. Every year a team that has undergone some change since you last saw them asks you to recommit, and however overtly or privately, you do it. You feel a stirring, an interest, a psychic leaning toward. This is the contract of fandom.
When Fred VanVleet got his first floor minutes in an NBA game I stood up in the nosebleeds, screaming. When DeRozan left before Kawhi even got here, when we heard collectively that Kawhi maybe did not want to get here. Knowing that it was good but not feeling it, almost cajoling myself into believing it, emotion such a heavy component into acquiescing toward renewed conviction.
Or how closely my memories have been tied to place. All of them, but basketball specific, especially. When I went through customs at the Hong Kong International Airport and my phone came alive under a new provider, one message chiming in after another from friends telling me that Greg Monroe was gone. When J.V. was sent to Memphis, I wondered from a comfortingly dated hotel room in Mexico City what Marc Gasol could bring so late in the season as the noise from Juárez drifted up through the open window in a calming clamour. Both times worrying the news thin enough that I could return to where I started, nothing obstructing the way, ready to buy in again, ready to believe. I watched the start of the championship run from mornings in Tokyo, then Osaka, or not at all and acutely aware of missing games while taking trains in between.
But these were lucky, very lucky, parallels in living as much as in a life to basketball balance, and the absence of travel, even easy movement, as the season begins is, if anything, less of a distraction from what’s really keeping me at arm’s length.
“It’s really just been a fresh start for me,” Bembry said about the team, about not having played in nine months. The words were offering a door swinging open. “There are good people on this team. And I feel the same way about myself. I think it’s easy for me to mesh with this group and try to get better and learn from this group.”
I looked up from the screen, outside, it had started snowing. We were packing up to go back to the city. I listened to the familiar beat of questions, Bembry’s considered responses, felt a rhythm that would be easy and fluid to set a step back around to belief. I closed my laptop, went outside. The cracks still ricocheting somewhere deep.