A very sweet spot of no return
The bar was dark. Lighting limited to a few candles on the table a server had come over and randomly reorganized without saying anything, streetlight glow from outside, all bouncing from the mirrors hung on the walls of the hallway-style space. Maybe that’s why this dude wasn’t getting the hint when I cocked my head pretty cartoonishly and went, “Huh!”, to his asking, “How are you even going to games?”
I couldn’t tell if he was being hypothetical, or if he really couldn’t figure it out. I was feeling good. I had 2 small glasses of sour cherry beer. At the same table across from me and to my other side were friends who were laughing at a distant conversation I longed to join, like when you see a bus you have to catch coming up fast a few blocks away but you feel like you are moving in slow motion.
He said something else and I felt like, don’t be rude, this guy is just trying to get started, at some point everyone is trying to get started. I explained a bit the process I have with editors but also how I write. He was leaning forward and leaning on a grin that kept physically pushing me back. He was both extremely interested and also not listening.
He went, “That’s really nice.” That’s really nice, I repeated in my head. He was also screaming. “You have an editor who is like, we trust this girl and what she has to say.”
I just stared at him. He was expectant. I was going to say something worse. I turned my whole body sideways in my seat and repeated what he had said to my friend beside me. I took out my phone. I texted Martin, who was the editor in this case, and told him what had happened.
All to say please bail me out for murder
What in the hell, he wrote
Yes I’m your first call
To get from grabbing my nerves like they were reins and making myself go up to Doris Burke, standing courtside in what seemed like her first break all night since she’d stepped onto the pregame court and the air in the arena I swear started to shimmer, to just over 24 hours later and those words in that order from this guy?
He wasn’t being malicious, I know that. But there is something a bit worse in the way that he wasn’t being anything. He just figured, this is the thing I’m going to say. I should also, not exactly thank, but acknowledge that he did make me think about the relationships I have with the places I write for. How yes, they do trust me, sometimes to just run with something and find what I’m looking for halfway through it. Or else the times I’ve pitched something and basically implied Trust me and they do. But, I don’t think he meant it as the result of work. He kind of speared that notion through by beginning, “That’s really nice.”
It is nice. And I do feel a kind of crazy luck in it. But I am also trying to make myself better at acknowledging that the chances I’ve caught I’ve kept by care, consideration. Trust is, after all, establishing a result that thrills the air between two people again and again.
After the Raptors-Clippers game I was standing in the tunnel. Postgames were over and it seemed like everyone had hightailed it back to the media room to write, one of the new rhythms I am still trying to get used to, for it to go from mobbed to deserted, especially after that game. There were a couple cops hanging down the hallway, and a few people on Clippers staff collecting up team luggage—giant duffle bags and rolling suitcases and Rubbermaids with shoes in them—throwing whatever straps and handles they could over their bodies and trying not to topple under the weight.
I was checking to see that I had got all the audio recordings from the night when I felt an arm press my own. I looked up and saw only black sweater, but I recognized the sweater. A pattern of interlocking Fs, Fendi. I looked up some more and there was Kawhi. He was staring down the tunnel. He looked lost. Not like, he didn’t know his surroundings, because even someone as esoteric as him who I’m sure does not pay close attention to all surroundings he moves through would still remember which door led out after using it for a year. He looked lost like he was out of step with time. He stood there, staring down the tunnel in one direction like he was sure something was going to materialize there.
It did. His family. He smiled and the expression felt so sincere, so intimate in how specifically directed, that I lurched forward and away and passed his family with surely a very strange and apologetic smile of my own, wanting to give them their moment alone after a day of people jockeying to get close, basically right up on top of them.
I saw a pronounced uptick in the expression “blood boil” leaving my mouth this week. As in, “It makes my blood boil”, or, “My blood is boiling”. When Vivek told me he’d been laid off from Yahoo and I had a chance to sit with it, from when he told me to when I saw him later that day at the game, way up in the press gondola as he gave me more details and I caught myself clenching my actual fists and telling him how it made my blood boil. Mostly, how arbitrary. How Vivek, encyclopedic when it comes to sports knowledge but not stiff in his delivery, instead conversational, always generous, was seeing that as any kind of understandable outcome for himself.
There are people who have an energy like very low, warm, stable light. Who draw you out just by virtue of being there. When I first met Vivek I was honest to god entranced by his eyebrows. We were on stage at the Rec Room in Toronto doing a pre-season Raptors panel for The Athletic, and I didn’t even realize or find the time to be nervous of the floor to ceiling jumbo screen behind our stools and the dozen or so huge screens scattered out in the audience our close-up faces would be on, because of how he furrowed them just slightly in concentration when I spoke. Of course, his kindness is the most definitive thing about him, after his eyebrows, so too is how fast he’s ready to laugh. I couldn’t tell you what I said that night but I remember the considered look on Vivek’s face after I said it, it was a look that made room for me and the better I’ve gotten to know him the more I’ve realized that’s what he does.
Trust is a crucial and invisible ingredient to most things, to basketball for sure. You could argue that a ball is only to get moved along as far as trust extends within a team. That it stops at where the person holding it is sure. That goes for passing and shooting. A hot-potato scenario where the ball is getting flung around in a semi-circle loosely lining the paint, pauses, goes back the way it came while the clock runs down, or else aimed with cross-hairs to an open pair of hands with an even more open look and that shooter stops, stalls, has the person guarding them come down on ‘em like a crumbling wall as chance evaporates.
Trust is why, why not, you hold yourself to things. Trust is a little antiquated when we have all these other ways to assign value but it’s also the only one you will physically feel in your gut, some holdover sixth sense from when it really was life and death to walk around for a day.
To trust yourself to know what to do or say when you can’t picture the outcome of something, when you are essentially behaving “live”, is practice. It is also dissociative and a little bit freeing for how unhinged it can make you feel.
I got that way standing behind the projection screen on stage at the Rivoli with my friend Freddie this week, while we listened to ourselves being introduced for the first ever BASKETBALL FEELINGS LIVE. Freddie looked at me and was like, “How you feeling? Good?”
I looked at him and grinned and said, “Sure, I’m totally disassociating right now.”
“That can be good,” he said.
By now I am comfortable on stage, but there is a different thing in a panel, or with a prompt, when you are mostly responding and the framework, rhythm, all that, is clear. This, while we had a loose idea of what it was going to be, had talked it out, I’d made slides as a visual cue and had written out, by hand so it would be more assigned to memory, everything I would say, was different. We were, I was, driving.
The newsletter live turned out to be almost exactly like the newsletter itself, how I write it. There’s some planning but eventually I let myself loose. The difference of course was hearing people’s reactions in the dark. Laughing, honest to god little gasps, a more austere silence which I chose not to take and truly didn’t feel was the lack of something but rather something sinking in. I am still so surprised and happy that people showed up, that almost every other panelist that night shyly told me the feeling they were going to shout out when we asked for them, but didn’t. That people came up to me after the show to talk about their favourite feelings.
I can’t wait to do it again.
Because there’s a very sweet spot of no return that I think is underrated, associated more with nerves or the fear of being shot down, turned away, with the perceived bad outcome you can always imagine over the good, or even perfectly neutral one.
With Doris Burke it was like that. Seerat took me and physically stood me close enough that I could be there to seize a moment should it come, but where we were was somewhere I could have walked to myself, but I was waiting for permission. When I saw, like physically saw it in strange slow motion, the moment crack open to go up and introduce myself it was clarifying and scary and overwhelming at once to see that permission, out in the world like that, is a barrier we use like a sign. In that, if I am given permission to do this, then I will.
Cut yourself some slack when you are learning the ropes of something, but realize that in learning the ropes you are also expecting things to follow a prescribed order, that experience is always formulaic. Trust that just because you don’t always know what the next thing—motion, direction of a conversation, reaction—is, doesn’t mean you wont be ready for it.