Blood and bluffing
NBA fights and how it is to have a brother.
Before my brother met us Dylan and I parked at the end of his street and walked down to the lake. The wind was up and the waves were wild, crashing in long cross-hatched swells of froth, sky overhead wreathed with thin patches of cloud and going a gloomy periwinkle. The moon was only a half but hung so low and bright, fuzzed out with twilight and the plumes of cloud pushed across it, clarifying one second and winking away altogether the next.
I had my glasses on. Since I got them I’ve never worn them out at night, or in that gloaming time between the last burst of the day and night. The glasses are for distance. I use them mostly at games. But on the beach they delivered to me the Toronto skyline, outlined in flaring red and gold to the west and clear as a postcard while my immediate surroundings all but dropped away in the bruised pastel light. Nothing was refined, nothing clear. The dogs ran happy and unfamiliar down the beach and my boots sunk in the sand every step. I took pictures on my phone of the water, the sky, the moon, nudging my glasses down my nose to try and refine my focus but the pictures all came out hazed, blurred with dusk, waves the clearest where they were breaking but otherwise the whole thing like a dream.
I felt shaky walking back to the car, my brother texting he was home from work and coming down the block to meet us. George tugged me to the grass and we kicked through the leaves coming down in wide cyclones from the trees. I opened the door and sat in the car, muffled quiet ringing with the rush of wind and waves still streaming out of my ears.
We were very happy to start, I would remember that later. The lifeguard towers empty, the wood and chicken wire snow fence already unspooled down the beach to cut its width in half between the water and boardwalk. The sight of my brother coming solid around the corer, his gravelly voice in the dark of the car as he got in, a relief.
But I pull at threads. So sure I can wind them tighter, neater, better able to withstand all the certain unravellings of the world. Sure I can hand them back refined, spun into something with promise.
It’s the hesitation I’m most interested in. When you can see Nikola Jokic pause, consider if he will override the sound and steady judgement he typically governs himself with. Once he does, there’s another few calculative seconds but they come when he’s already in motion and have to do with the physics of launching Markieff Morris from half-court to beyond the arc — how he’ll have to drop his shoulder, how he’ll hoist up as he connects with Morris’s back.
A part of me thinks he understands intuitively the math of his body, understands how to deploy it and the bonus surge his frustration boiling over will bring, not because the use of it is his job, but because he has brothers.
Brothers who loved and bullied him with equal ferocity and focus, who held a young Jokic down and threw knives around his head because he wouldn’t climb a tree, and who, after the shove and Morris’s sprawl and Victorian era faint out of Tyler Herro’s arms, made a Twitter account and a three posts — two the same thing — in a way that’s clear they’ve never before and will never again use that website (they definitely did not get the app). Which makes it almost more menacing.
Some people have said those brother are intense, those brothers are crazy. But those brothers are just brothers.
Most NBA fights are a feint. Can have a funny to gleeful undercurrent because they feel controlled, feel, regardless of how they start, within seconds from stopping. There have been exceptions, bad and big ones that loomed ruinous and large over careers but mostly, like watching Myles Turner and Rudy Gobert strain to see who could grapple the other around the waist harder and longer, a sense that escalating beyond the initiations of the fight would be fraught and not at all physically worthwhile.
When the Heat went and lingered in the tunnel outside the Nuggets locker room after the game, adrenalin of the moment settling to something like an exhausted sharpness in them so they look determined, but bouncing your eyes across each of their faces it’s unclear what the collective resolve is. Bam Adebayo looks disappointed, but hurt, Kyle Lowry steady, and Jimmy Butler seems intensely aware there’s a camera on him.
A bluff can roll to action with the barest nudge, the force of a breath. It’s an apt name considering the real things are sheared, steep and looming, and drop away into nothing, usually at height. But it’s still kind of amazing that five guys in an open doorway who haven’t changed out of their uniforms yet, in lighting pitched way down for the picture, can still look like they really just came to have a conversation.
Even broadcasters, as they watch scuffles, shoves, tangle-ups and twists unfurl on the floor, keep their commentary neutral, their voices light.
With Turner and Gobert the camera had panned away in transition so you hear what’s happening before you see it. A trailing, “And nooooow we’ve got a problem,” before two uh-ohs in a tone that matches the same one you’d make dropping something soft off the top of too many things stacked in your arms, like a double roll of paper towels thunking at your feet.
When Jokic shoves Morris there’s a dramatic, “Oh no!” then a long few seconds of silence before a, “Keep the players on the bench” like a separate thought floating in space. There are another few beats of silence, then comes, “Not sure what set Jokic off”. The whole string of it calm as a haiku.
Even Malice started slow. A steady and abstract, “This has potential to be serious if they don’t get between—” The end of the thought hanging stray. There’s a sense the announcers don’t know how to track or translate the implications of what they’re seeing and instead square the blame on Ben Wallace, assuming in that containment the game will soon right itself. The tonality of a fight framed in pitch and how conversational. This sense of a moment never losing control so long as we are able to keep our voices even, as if we’ve ever been reliable narrators all of the time.
The Morris brothers are just brothers too. But Markieff and Marcus live in a world formed and bound by their brotherhood. That is, there’s nothing beyond it. Not nothing like oblivion, but nothing more or less like that because to them, there’s nothing else as worthwhile in the world.
At the dining room table I know I’ve gone too far when my brother’s face falls like he’s gone careening off a cliff, and he has, because I’ve pushed him. I hear myself digging in, like I can send a line over the edge I’ll be able to hoist him back up with. What it sounded like was you don’t know what you’re doing. What I meant was I can help you. What it sounded like was you’ve got no reason to be upset. What I meant was I want you to be happy.
We laughed earlier how bad it was last Christmas Eve. The ballooned gland in dad’s neck and his fever cast in the loose tinge of a Covid scare, like everything had then. My brother’s own dark mood blooming around what would become a long and eventual breakup. Dylan trying to cook through it and my mom shepherding around everything. I didn’t place myself in the repurposing of that day when we sat together for my mom’s birthday dinner this week and promised a better holiday do-over this year. I remember I fell asleep on the living room floor as Die Hard exploded around the room through my dad’s DIY surround sound, body calling my bluff.
There I was though, holding the present night so tight I couldn’t see the oxygen going out of it. Calculating badly the force of my frustration against the target of my worry, my concern, my brother. In the low words and low light, nobody’s footing ever got square enough for an actual fight.
If brothers are meant to shield you from certain parts of the world, then they also blind you to certain aspects of yourself. They throw knives at your head but they teach you what fight is. It’s why it feels so foreign then, like you’ve moved past any reliable point of reference, when you see the fight go from them. You feel an inversion, a shifting of roles, realizing you’ve grown past what you once considered it was to be older and who got to be. You see your brother adrift in the world, not unrecognizable but someone different. Making you crazy, making you mourn a little the loss of what you hadn’t realized you’d pictured this part of your lives to be like. Making fun of your glasses as you make sure he gets back home where the lake has settled and so has whatever it was between you two, at least at the surface. You send him a five second video of Patrick Stewart screaming the next day and he says don’t worry about the day before, admits how he’s been feeling. Nothing is fixed but things shift to focus. This is just brothers.
Hey, thank you for writing this! It was a great read. And beautiful too!