Big No-Thank-Yous and even larger Nopes
I don’t stand on cruelty but I have gotten better at standing up for myself.
Getting comfortable with being hostile, hard, ungenerous, saying no, pushing, letting your edges stay sharp, not shifting yourself as you move through the world so those same sharp edges catch, snag, occasionally slice—mean.
And staying standing after I’ve allowed myself to bend, be bent, made malleable, to be sold a little bit upriver on false promises, down one oar, spinning in circles with only sizzle, nothing to chew or get me through the lean, cold, known to be cruel months. We have too much of our own best intentions at heart, sometimes. If it sounds too good and we believe it, it doesn’t make us fool or foul, it only means there is still a deep reservoir of trust in us.
So to refuse the hand that has had one in forcing your feet out from under you when it’s offered to lift you up, or to do one further, to snarl and bite it, is less malicious than it is a measure of self-protection.
I got into it, accidentally, with somebody this week. Accidentally in the car crash sense. Where you’re the one driving and you don’t see this thing coming, at velocity, right at you. Standing in the wreck of the moment after it came, there was mental whiplash but also something else—a sharp tang of ire and the telling vibration of your boundaries being stepped on, twanging like snagged tripwire.
When you have been wronged, rightly, you know it. When you know the insult was intentional, or the hit too cheap to miss, when you have stood on polite ceremony, on the rules of walking around in the regular world, but the veneer of that has just been scorched away in front of your face, you are allowed to recoil. Square your feet and level your gaze. Say the thing you might regret or don’t say anything. If the first person who loses their temper loses the argument, then hold by the head the snake writhing up your throat once it arrives, full of venom enough to kill.
Which block in basketball is like slamming the door of your room shut when you were a teenager, which is Rihanna putting up the car window? Which one is walking out of a job or leaving something—person, habit, both—doing you harm? Which is revenge and then out of those, which one is the long game, and which the instantaneous roast?
Cinematically, for how dramatic, there is not much that matches LeBron James’s signature chase down block no matter which of the two ways it unfolds. First is when James materializes out of air to ether a guy who thinks he is free and clear, in that split-second magical moment of flight. There is no sound, there is only LeBron like a bolt that splits a clear day and then the thunder of how hard the ball is crashed against the glass. The guy comes down, dazed, the ball could be in the rafters along with his sense of what happened, all of it while James is still, somehow, landing. A gymnast’s dismount from uneven bars not of regulation height.
Second is when the guy can hear him coming, can hear James’s feet hitting the hardwood in what might a well be death drums. James’s breath against their neck as they go up on legs looking to fold but hanging by some thin thread of hope he isn’t behind them like the Reaper with his scythe already on the downstroke to shear it. They go up because the human heart knows no limitations. They come down because LeBron James already knows what theirs are. I can’t say which of the two is worse for the player, but we are so lucky to have them.
A good stuffing block will soothe you. It will make you unclench anything in your body that is doubled up, even without you realizing it. Because you can feel the sensation of what that is like, maybe the closest you can get to it on a daily basis is by jamming the bathroom or kitchen garbage down some more to buy you an extra day before taking it out. There was an immovable object and now there is space. The ball goes back from where it came from or else down onto someone’s head.
There are days when I can’t tell what would feel better, dunking or blocking like this, causing someone’s entire trajectory of hope to collapse, going so far as to even hand it back to them, hard.
My heart’s own tenderest hope, Jarrett Allen, has a knack for this. But the kind where he faces, head on, the biggest—physically and by name—in the league with both feet firmly planted and the understanding that no one is going through him. Not that they will try and won’t, just that they were not ever going to.
JaVale McGee delivers these by hand on occasion but he adds to his not only a personalized note, but a follow up. He stuffs the shot and the shooter and stays standing over or just near enough their splayed out body to deliver his thanks for helping him get there. He did it to Clint Capela this week and what might be better than seeing it the first time is watching the replay, in slow motion, while ‘What I Like About You’ plays as accompaniment in the arena.
The other version of this is from any other angle, but coming from behind the guy whose game is going to be ruined. Is it as brave as what Jarrett Allen does? No. But it is too intentional to be cowardly.
Then there are the blocks that happen so far out from the rim, interceptions of good intentions that effectively take them firmly in hand and crumble to dust. I like to believe that basketball is capable of righting its own ecosystem when it begins to go awry, bringing it back to centre from being too far out in a particular direction. The 3-point game can seem untouchable, guys way far out in the field watching the clock count down, toying with teams, until someone comes along like a combine machine and erases not only the shot, but any designs on it ever happening. The history is gone, seed and chaff vaporized.
There are snagging blocks, guys meeting in the air like planes passing near enough to see from your window seat, an arm loops around another, the ball trades hands like a baby being handed back to its parent from their awkward friend. There are spiking blocks, game suddenly on a beach somewhere and everyone’s thighs to feet covered in a sheen of sand. Blocks that unravel like plot, antagonist waiting until life has finally turned in the protagonist’s favour before spoiling it all with a slapper. Goal-tends you want guys to get away with. Swats like the sting of a wasp. Big No-Thank-Yous and even larger Nopes.
Blocks are distilled reproach. An argument accelerated to its conclusion where the two outcomes are either right or humiliated. They are the ideal way we all wish we could pick our battles and win them, done with the kind of finesse and intention that imprints well after, like looking too long at the sun and blinking away with a trailing circle of negative space. The perfect confrontation because all it takes is every single muscle measure of self-control.
I left the room. Said let’s come back to this when you can talk to me like somebody who is trying to. But in the attempts that came after to smooth over, to preen, to act as if they were on the other side of concession—either person’s—without picking around the mess of it, I didn’t move my feet. Not forward to meet or back to defer, just stayed standing, squared up, on my own resolve.
I skew tender. It is hard for me to be rough, harsh, to bear down when it’s warranted, but the emotional intelligence you often need to flex are the parts that feel most uncomfortable. It is muscle memory as much as anything else and it is worth finding a comfortable way for yourself to be unyielding, temporarily, when you need to.
There are a lot of ways to block, you might as well put your stamp on one.