Ball in the time of coronavirus
On the phone with my dad, every time I think I’ve gotten it across to him what is happening here at home, how serious, how affecting it has been, how everyone is moving within two worlds — one is the routine of everyday, the other where everything now feels heightened, constantly shifting, a live current — and that the constant navigation between the two wears you down over and over in waking hours, he interrupts, starts giving me the nautical coordinates of where their boat is, chugging slowly away from the Falklands where the South Atlantic cools its toes against Antarctica. We’re on the same page in very different books. Isolation done two ways.
I can’t believe it was Rudy.
It was someone before it was Rudy, to be fair, and tens of thousand people before that in now a global lineage, but I still can’t believe it was Rudy.
The numbers will flatten you, while ratcheting up your pulse. Your general anxiety. Every day, on every country’s government website, around noon but usually delayed, the new totals. Italy, 17,750; Canada, 244; 2,951 in the U.S., but, with the question of testing still being posed hypothetically, as in, how; China, hovering around 80, 995, a welcome first flatline in this context; Japan, 780; International conveyance in Japan, 696; Spain, 5,753; Sweden, 924; Cuba, 4; Iceland, 138; Ecuador, 28; Mongolia, 1; Holy See, 1. You try to think of the people but you think of landmarks, geographic features. Mountains shouldered in mist, pale pink beaches at dawn, cobblestone streets smoothed down by so many steps over time slick with spring rain, it is easier to picture these places empty.
Rudy touched the mics, yeah.
Both sides were good points. It’s important to take situations with such far-reaching, virulent impacts seriously. It’s important to make light where you can while you still can. Rudy ran his palms along phone screens and pocket recorders, broadcast mics in snug holsters, and went virulent two ways. But one you could argue was already in his blood.
I emailed the travel agent when things felt like they were starting to speed up. When a day’s breaking news alerts felt like a week’s worth. The cruise had packages for wifi and I knew my dad would not pay for one because the last message I had gotten four days before was,
We just got to Montevideo Urigaeay (Uruguay)
Getting a coffee @ Starbucks
The agent is on the same boat and passed the message along because that evening my dad started to send me photos. First of his leg under a deck chair but then,
He called on WhatsApp, begrudgingly informed me he’d sprung for the $12 social media package. Good for 24 hours. When I started to yell at him, surprised at the escalation in my voice, I realized how long the anxiety had been there, muscles bunched like a horse at the gate, needing only for a narrow door to fling open before it exploded its body out, went flying down the turf. It’s weird, the things you decide to use as shining examples to get your point across, pieces you’ve picked up in a day with each headline bigger than the one before, like a magpie just going for glint. I rattled off the people in isolation — Trudeau, the Mayor (the Mayor?) — rattled off the museums that were closing, tried my best to explain the slipstream of information from where I was standing right in it, told him that two days after they’d left the government of Canada put out an alert to avoid all travel on cruise ships. But that was the wrong thing to say because he answered, “Really?”, pride ringing in his voice like a bell.
I feel bad for Rudy. Less now than the night it all happened, when everything flowed so fast that first it was a game delay, then it was Chris Paul going over to the Jazz bench to ask what was wrong with Rudy and being waved frantically off, told to Get Away Get Away. Then it was two teams being hustled back into their respective locker rooms and the doors slamming shut, Rumble the Bison taking backward shots from mid-court to a lurching, energy piqued crowd, the halftime show getting bumped to what would have been tip-off, no one watching, everyone woozy with what they already knew was happening. The OKC announcers coming on and saying the game was over — “You are all safe” — and to be sure to check the Thunder website for information and ticket deals while you can hear a few people’s screams in the background, amidst the boos and confusion.
Updates from beat reporters milling in empty tunnels that a testing team had arrived and been hustled into the Jazz locker room. Updates from the Jazz that Rudy had been tested that morning for influenza, strep throat, upper respiratory infection, that he felt “fine”. If you were watching you already knew where it was headed, where this night was going to collide into the larger story creeping border to border, over oceans. But if you were like me, when you heard, when the NBA released the memo, you were still like, “But Rudy? Really, Rudy?”
Rudy’s going to pay. $500,000 specifically, spread (not the best word right now but) between arena workers at Vivant Smart Home, health teams in Oklahoma and Utah, and France, very generally. He’ll probably keep paying for this, depending on the way the season either starts up again or quits, depending on the way COVID-19 keeps spreading. It will, probably, become the thing he is best known for in his career, at least referentially. It is funny and it isn’t, and it’s fine if you’re landing on both sides equally whenever you think about it. It’s funny and isn’t that it took an NBA player getting sick and making a joke and accelerating the league suspending the season, something it was in one way or another on its way to do but was dragging heels on, to make a country sit up and get a little bit scared. It’s not funny that to get the Jazz tested, 58 people on the team and on staff, it took 60% of Oklahoma’s peak daily capacity for COVID-19 tests that day. It’s not funny that there is still very little clarity on the accessibility of tests for most Americans. It was funny when Evan Fournier assured everyone that Rudy was doing ok.
Since the boat skipped its stop in Ushuaia it comped everyone internet. Since the boat skipped its stop in Ushuaia the Canadian Minister of Foreign Affairs advised that all Canadians abroad return home while commercial means were still available.
Ushuaia, Argentina, is a little town with snow covered mountains to its back and glaciers to its front, out past the fishing boats bobbling in the Beagle Channel. My parents would have loved it and I feel as sad for them as I am continually suggesting it might be a good idea to look into earlier flights home, picturing them looking out at so many kinds of blue and houses in bright, primary colour creeping up the hillsides while the people inside look out and wish the boat diverting back out to the ocean an emphatic good riddance.
I had thought of the Raptors right away. All of them out that same night Rudy became the destroyer of basketball, team split between two charity events. I thought of how close Rudy had gotten to OG Anunoby, to Lowry, to Ibaka. How Ibaka always kisses the ball before his free throws. Picturing them enjoying their individual quarantines. Selfishly thinking it would give them extra time to get healthy.
It isn’t glib to not be as worried about basketball players, ok? They are at peak physical health, they are going to have everything they need brought to them. Ibaka posted a video of him dragging five large Amazon boxes into his apartment, then later of the gym he’d set up in his living room. You can enjoy this kind of thing, take it as levity, while taking the rest as both hands kind of heavy.
Lately I’ve been thinking about their season. How they have made diamonds out of pressure, repeatedly. It’s only basketball, but it’s also how their bodies have handled it since October, have broken, recuperated, bounced back, busted again. A team of grifters, essentially, who have worked out the best ways to win with the rationed health they have. Five months of how can it get worse always turned into something better. If we lose this season writ large across the league, I get it. If we lose this season, closer to home, it will feel harder to reconcile the rough magic of what it’s turned into with where it was going, could have gone.
Donovan Mitchell warms up with his big, wireless headphones on. He watches what the trainers are doing and moves around them, toward them, away, without anyone saying anything. Aside from whatever other sound is booming around the arena pre-game, it is silent. His sneakers, at least the times I’ve watched him, hardly even squeak on the floor.
It’s the first thing I thought of when I saw his video, live from isolation. A PSA for the NBA about how he was holding up, thanking his fans, urging everyone to stay safe, stay healthy, that he couldn’t wait to see everyone again. It’s so weird, professional athletes as the first public cases of quarantine. NBA players who are so largely public, down in front of thousands every night, televised to hundreds of thousands more, who travel in groups where every guy has his own individual orbit — managers, agents, trainers — in the team’s larger solar system, are still, at the core, isolated. They arrive to arenas alone, come down the tunnels alone, dress and move to the court, play their positions, do media, get back on the bus or else go home. They move through worlds catered to them, made up of handfuls to dozens to hundreds, singular points with ebbs and flows around them, extreme cases of isolation in plain sight. With all of that barred by mandate of the league, public health, Mitchell on a recorded FaceTime call in his sweats, you get the sense he is not used to this type of seclusion. The abruptness of it is what’s striking. You understand because, if you’re doing this right, you’re there too.
The numbers are the only things lagging in this. Every country handling its testing, its reporting, its eventual triaging differently. Some with care, some with urgency, few with both. How tenderness goes out the window when desperation is driving. Waiting to see how things are climbing every day as if cases go by the hour, as if contagion clocks in for its shift. Sitting at home just feels like sitting at home until you remember why, what time it is, how long you might have to do this. To feel lucky to be in a country taking it too seriously while trying to get people back into it who left it before things felt sparking, permanently imminent, who are vibrating a few notches below and hard to get through to because of it. To feel worried, all the time, abstractly, so turning to the numbers again for an even more abstract proof. Countries on a world map being colour-coded for severity in different shades of pink, deepening, or else blue, powder fresh to bottom of the ocean dark.
The numbers, if this season does not bear out, will be a lot of what it is based on. Win records to determine East and West, hypothetical seeding, MVP, Most Improved, more cases that will likely be confirmed, 8 and 24, however you felt about him. Trying to figure out how this season ties to salary, free agency, how many months in an off season where the on never hit past regular. We’ll look to numbers to reconstruct what could have ended up happening, archeology across empty courts.
This morning the boat was barred from Chile. Had turned around again and was headed back toward a rising sun and the tip of Patagonia. They were at anchor off Punta Arenas and waiting for permission to disembark, get off the boat for good, to start their way home. The updates are frequent and my anxiety is hovering steady as I picture this stupid boat to be, adrift in the Strait of Magellan.
Friday, when my dad first got the social media package, what feels like weeks ago, he said, “So it was just one guy that got the whole season shut down?"
“Wow”, he said, after I had affirmed what he’d seen on the channels he’d already assured me they had — FOX, MSNBC, HGTV — and how they were getting their news. Then, “Do you have a pen? Do you want to take these coordinates down?”
Numbers and dashes, dots scattered like the icebergs they were sliding by, silent and looming in the water. Whole halves of my heart, out at sea. Numbers that meant nothing to me and translate to him as a shared point of reassurance between us.