Burning up on beauty

How basketball in winter feels like cheating the season, and, beginning to feel the mood of the season.

Most basketball associations I have are in winter. Not strictly holiday, but the NBA season plays itself roughly over six months and four and a half of them in Toronto — which still feels like an aspirational low-ball — are winter.

Before I started covering games, which was a much longer period of time, there was the universal fan experience of de-layering in your seat. Everybody already packed like sardines and trying politely to take off their gigantic puffers and parkas, strip off knits and hoodies, jam a toque down your jacket sleeve without knocking the person next to you, synchronized, doing the same. Cloistered in on both sides by shed layers of your seat-mates, trying to balance food or a drink if you had them in the third of a foot of space you had left to yourself. Something very affable, very snug about it. Any time I’ve gone to a game somewhere warm over the winter months, I’m shocked with all the free space around me. No idea what to do with my arms, sitting completely rigid since I’m able to feel the entire hard plastic shell of the seat against my legs and spine.

In school, the short window I played “competitively”, basketball was a winter sport. Warm months were for track, soccer, kick and handball, warm months were for getting kids outside. The still cold air in a middle then high school gym against bare legs and arms hugged to my body against the chill, before being sprung into suicide drills, my blood and lungs then basically elastic.

The long stretch of slow weeks coming home over the holidays from school, and then after school, when friends who moved away came back in warm rush. Getting dressed up or down depending on the onus of the night but doing both to trudge through slush and crunch over rock salt, pile into worn down wood booths under dim lights, stand pressed up against walls to take a breather around a humid dance floor, or to pull tables together at Hurricanes and pump way too much money into the jukebox with the Raptors game on the TV screens in the background.

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A stray holiday memory (I’ll try to ration these out, for the people who take this season on endurance): Our old apartment on Dovercourt. The top two floors of a skinny west end brick house with a toppling chimney that crumbled more into itself every time we touched it (good analogy for that time, for sure) but provided enough borrowed rubble for us to rest our roman candles and expired fireworks in — the ones we bought, usually expired, from the convenience store around the corner — and set off from the roof, nearly every night in summer. No stranger to bodies crammed cheerfully in beyond what was comfortable, that place. And this time, a Christmas party. A photo wall Greg spent hours making with dollar store decorations in the kitchen. Holographic and shimmering silver and red wrapping paper taped floor to ceiling and affixed to that, tendrils of garish red, green and gold garland, clumps of tinsel thick as wigs and in one corner, roughly taped and still in its plastic packaging, a felted plastic deer figure. Bunting lurching there in the nacreous field that sloped and shouted M-E-R-R-Y-C-H-R-I-S-T-M-A-S. The smell was mulled wine, the base of which was three bottles of $7 Fuzion Shiraz and a navel orange Greg took the time to jam clove nubs into, plus whatever spices we pilfered from Julian’s, a chef then, seasoning drawer that gave off “warm”.

The apartment filled, the smell of spice rising. Arriving guests added whatever booze they’d brought to the simmering pot so it never depleted and stayed glued, attracted like moony, purple lipped moths to the holiday wall installation, and Greg and I put ‘Rockin’ Around The Christmas Tree’ on repeat, turning it up incrementally as the rooms filled, until people noticed the song wasn’t changing. It took hours. When either of us realized the song had changed we’d creep in, change it back, laugh maniacally and run out of the room.

In the morning there were filaments of garland everywhere, our fingers stained plum.

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Of course, the Christmas Day games. A tradition my family never had and I was happily folded into when I went for my first holiday with Dylan. Sandwiched between his two brothers and idly eating, drinking, dozing, speculating, a lot of laughing, interest waxing and waning until the two mid-day matchups pique it, then pretty much dissolving by the marquee event because of dinner or fatigue or both. It was also, if I’m being honest, the first place where my opinion began to feel honed and specific to me, something I could take, and was also always taken, seriously.

Now, at games, the sauna of the media room with everyone’s coats and jackets piled on the long tables down the room or stacked in chairs. The cold still clinging to people as they trickle in for the night and drop their things, switch their shoes, gather their interior selves from the exterior elements of getting there. The awareness of being unclad in this way as the crowd comes in, softly ping pong off one another in the concourse, the rising white noise of constantly swishing and sirrushing wool and nylon drowning out game-ops and music from the floor.

Winter is like, the polar opposite condition for basketball. Its layers and encumberments eradicating the languid flurry of limbs loosed and exposed. One of the joys of basketball is that it’s so bare, that we can see the flinch or strain of a muscle at work, or maintain the illusion that they’re barely at work for all the flowing and easy skill deployed out there under the lights. I wonder if there’s something in colder climates that ratchets this especially up, the sense of a stage in front of you that you, tucked down in the hamster nest of your bulky layers, are so far and separate from. Basically a world away instead of a dozen to tens of dozens of feet. An excuse to turn fuzzily detached from your body and almost dozy, soporific in your attention with eyelids lowered and a satiated smile spreading across your face. You might as well be at a movie, or in the dark of a theatre watching dancers spin across a floodlit set, but for two beautiful hours and 20 hazy minutes — watching Anfernee Simons dart and slip tethers meant to trap him, Klay Thompson roll to his heels and send the ball and your spirit smooth from his arms, Devin Booker lift like the ground has hoisted him, Hermes’ wings flitting from his sneakers, to flick a wrist in a gentle “see ya” at the perfect and exact point of his jump shot’s surge and the rise, the rise — everything turns into the eye test.

It’s just a theory, but as it snows outside and my eyes wend in and out of focus on the way it drifts around a streetlight, some from the visual, some from the wine I had at a holiday party I just got home from, it pulls me to the same place. To move in cold places is survival, but to watch such movement, the torque and curls, bends and sweeps, flourishes and feints from what amounts to the backseat of reality is like cheating the entire mechanism of what it is to weather. Gorging on vitality and guts, burning up on beauty. Wearing shorts to games (the dream) is one thing, but when I can idle and still thrum hot, like my entire body is one of those crack for warmth winter glove inserts and it’s been split all the way open, that’s wholly another.