Breathing in the dark
Cade Cunningham's collapsed lung, NBA award eligibility, and a brief history of thoracic intervention.
Think of the breath, its steadiness and rhythm. Think of the breath’s capacity to soothe, to regulate, to ground, likewise its giddy way of quickening, to leave us describing its loss — breathless — as sudden theft initiated by our other senses.
Think of the way breath will tell us, often before we register it, how we’re feeling. Think of all the exercises we’ve developed to corral breath, to urge it deep into our bodies, and how when we really focus on it breath can feel like ferrying light into every cell and in a way, by adding oxygen to blood, we are.
Think of how for granted we take breath, how subconscious, automatic. How we tend not to really notice it unless we’re short of it, or its intake becomes muddled, or when we’re pushing our bodies and the temporary bereftness of being without it can feel so absolute, like we’ll never get it back, that I think half the joy of any new, physical triumph is reuniting with the breath again. Think of how many illnesses, or troubles in the body, begin with shortness of breath as the first symptom. A wonder how we ever forget it at all.
The most common symptom people suffering a collapsed lung report is shortness of breath. Though they tend to describe like a vise clamping on their lung, or that each attempt to draw a deeper, full breath results in the lung tightening further, losing even more capacity. Less a shortness than an outright seizure of breath.
Imagine Cade Cunningham, one second drawing a deep, preemptive breath, the breath preparing his body to dive for a loose ball, and a fraction of a second later feeling his left side fold like an accordion. Cunningham who, maybe more than any other active athlete in the NBA, seems to have a preternatural sense of breath as it lends to rhythm. Namely, his ability to upend it.
Shame there is no close replay technology available that makes possible a studied review of Cunningham’s breath as he hops back mid- forward step, or springs suddenly out of a downhill cut and skips, lightly, to his left, or lithely weaves, snaking through traffic. If there were, or if we were able to colour-code breath in something akin to infrared, a sense that it might even lag behind him, hitching itself with a curling, loving tendril at his hip or coil, covetous, around his neck.
Instead we have Cunningham leading up to his dive, using his body like a pinion to keep Tre Johnson of the Wizards close, snugly notched to him. So snug that when Cunningham removes the pressure of his body, its magnet of gravity in motion, Johnson goes tumbling to the court. As Johnson falls he shoves his hands out in front to catch himself against hardwood, freeing the ball. It goes unguarded from bounce to brief ascent, already hounded at its apex by a gaining Cunningham, who’s pivoted on a half-step from running backwards guarding Johnson to full-throttle sprint forwards and Johnson, recovering himself, springs up from the floor like a track runner will from their starting blocks. The pair each put out their right arm, hands reaching, both sets of fingers grazing the ball. Less than a full second has passed.
Cunningham’s momentum against his speared out right leg, like a javelin, casts him forward and he bends low to recover himself and the ball. It’s there, with both his arms above his head in a swimmer’s diving pose and his entire left side exposed, a dozen ringing bones going from broad to narrow as they notch down from the true ribs, to false ribs, to floating ribs, that Johnson’s left knee springs up in a sharp, explosive 90-degree angle to connect, along with Johnson’s flexed quad.
