Bury your monuments

JuJu Watkins' dream of Troy, interrupted, and grief's game of lost and found.

It happens like most of the very worst basketball injuries do, invisibly. One minute, a person is running, flying fast down the floor with hardly a hope of pursuit, lagging defenders trailing and desperate. The next they are falling, legs suddenly uncooperative.

As observers the best we have as an indicator, still, is the look on an athlete’s face. Where it lands on the spectrum of shock and sharpness of pain’s contortion.

With JuJu Watkins the first flash of her pain lights up your spine, watching. The fall seems initially like a stumble, Watkins ricocheting from a brief collision with a Mississippi State guard. Once she hits the floor Watkins slides, coming to still on her back, clutching her right knee.

She rolls from her back to her side repeatedly. The movements automatic, the movements of a person searching through pain, looking for its end or at least a cooler edge to its searing bite. Her right arm and hand, pinned under her, never leave the hurt knee but her left hand flies from the knee to her forehead, knee to forehead. Her coaches quickly come, still her and send her teammates away, shroud her from view.

Watkins never looks tired in games, her ability to draw kinetic energy from contact and seemingly store it up to deploy one of the traits that make her so magnetic to watch. Now, helped to a seated position with her legs splayed in front of her, she looks exhausted. Her head lolls, eyes distant. Her grimace as she’s lifted by six of her coaches to her feet will tense your muscles in response. She’s carried between two coaches into a tunnel, the last glimpse of her face comes as her head rolls back, her mouth open and her eyes closing on the arena.

Watkins has said that every practice, her eyes drift up to the rafters. To the double championship banners Cheryl Miller and her Trojans won hanging there. ‘84, ‘85. Their red and gold pull a heady undertow, an institutional current.

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The anterior cruciate ligament — anterior for front, cruciate the Latin for cross. Its squat bundle of collagen and elastic fibres crosses the posterior ligament in more of an ‘X’, but how to resist sparks of the divine when making sense of our bodies?

Like a rope bridge between the femur and tibia. Not the longest, not the most prominent — those are the patellar tendon and the lateral collateral ligament — but the ACL, how to explain this? The ACL has mechanoreceptors inside it. Tiny sensory receptors, like pressure plates and traffic cameras, that detect changes in speed, acceleration, tension, direction. These happen in all sports, they happen outside of sports just walking from your bed to the kitchen in the morning to fumblingly pour a glass of water, but they happen every second of play in basketball. Every movement in basketball. Running, cutting, jumping, pivoting, switching pressure lightly from leg to leg while dribbling in place, those mechanoreceptors are firing to the brain, instructing it how to move the tendons, the muscles around the tendons, and the bones tethered to both, hauled along for the ride.

Agnostic as I am, I understand why someone thought to lend flourish to this workhorse of a tendon; turn it holy, mystical. Cruciate. You come to want to cross yourself every step you take, just knowing what it does.

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An injury as devastating as Watkins’ goes down like a house of cards. So bad that it’s possible to shift to slow motion and torturously examine each element in the collapse.

There, ace of spades, the prodigal length of recovery time, starting with the speed wobble that vibrated up her right leg when she planted that reaching foot and extending up to a year, maybe longer, into the future. Each and every one of those days a trial to get through.

There, queen of hearts, think of her parents watching. Both former high school players that never went as far as their daughter but must have sensed when she picked up a ball in the park at age seven how she’d eclipse them. Think of their grief, confusion and gut-wrenched surprise as grim reality locked its jaw on their girl.

Spinning away, two of clubs, Watkins sophomore season suddenly ending on the lowest of notes, octave a bottomless pit. In a tumble goes jack of spades (Watkins’ ability to slip around the floor into any position, shapeshifting her size, strength, speed and skill to suit), five of diamonds (Watkins’ endorsement deals, callous, but know there were people whose minds went there first), and queen of clubs (USC’s hope of winning the tournament).

A red nine of spades, fluttering down in a loop-de-loop, I know I shouldn’t single them out but watching replays my eyes snag on the Mississippi State cheerleaders sitting at the baseline a few feet from Watkins, writhing, fidgeting with their pom-poms and snickering. Two of hearts, two athletes on the Mississippi bench when it happens. One starts to roll her hands in the sign for “travel” when her teammate puts one hand on the rotating motion to stop it and the other over her mouth like she’s about to be sick because she saw the bulge in Watkins knee, the way the bone and muscle suddenly warped from taut to liquid under her skin.

Somewhere face up in the collapse, the joker — the timing and stakes, the jinx of it, history’s parallels, idiot fate or idiot chaos, take your pick.

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I heard it in the hall. A faraway and urgent Hello? Hello? Hello? Each word drawn out, lonely and lost.

Sensing something not quite right, the dogs trailed me to the other room where I went fast to find Dylan and ask whether he’d heard it. This sudden haunting. We stepped into the hall, shut our front door and listened. It was fainter now, coming from the elevators.

Dylan pressed the call button and one of the elevator doors juddered open immediately on an older man, hunched and gripping the railing inside.

Hello? He called again, this time right in front of us, tinge of relief flooding his voice. Are you okay? We asked. He was having trouble staying upright, his breath coming in shallow heaves. What floor had he come from? He couldn’t remember. Where was he trying to go? Downstairs, he gasped. Could we take him to the lobby, where there was a bench? Yes, he agreed. He was wearing soft layers, no shoes, shock of long white-grey hair pushed back around his ears. One of his eyes a milky-blue and the other clouded over completely. He held tight to our arms.

On the bench, once he caught his breath, he asked if Islington was far. It was, we said. He seemed discouraged and confused. He just had to get on a bus, he explained.

We were starting to sense the impulse of his escape, his energy erratic and also, a little desperate to be talking. While we stayed with him a few delivery people came through the lobby, he had sunny hellos and questions about how they’d arrived. Dylan stayed with him while I canvassed the floors of our building, the parameters of the situation unfolding in my head. Mostly, how few the options. We didn’t want to call an ambulance, he wasn’t dressed to be outside and told us he had no keys or wallet on him. What if paramedics wanted to admit him, how would he get back or explain where he’d come from? Toronto’s crisis line would take hours. It was Sunday.

When I first heard him I’d been thinking about how thin the boundaries between found and not — not lost, but dormant, absent. Walking around the cemetery earlier that afternoon I explained to Rachel’s kids how some of the smaller Egyptian pyramids had been buried under sand and uncovered. How temples and monuments in the Roman Forum were dismantled for materials and how the nearly five acres of the Forum itself, over time, became a dump and then cow pasture, forgotten. Maybe one day someone will trip over the tip of the CN Tower, I said. They were incredulous. They ran ahead into the afternoon’s cold bite and quick shifting sun, laughing.

We were there to visit Nick, to gather around the small monument that marked his life but didn’t keep any part of his body. Rachel read a poem, the kids left their tokens and drifted around under the trees, poking at the thawing ground. I had steeled myself for what I thought would be a sombre time but there, seven years passed and his niece and nephew having become small people, their ability to meet that moment with one foot already in the next, and my friend’s ability to corral and acknowledge them and still read, I mostly felt — how fleeting. How natural and wrenching this collision. Levity, grief, flickering sun, scudding clouds. The kids glancing at our faces to see if we were crying, us dramatizing that it must be the wind, them laughing, us realizing the slapstick routine of it was such a Nick-ism, how he would’ve played it up for them the same.

The day for us so different than it was for them. They learned that people tend to forget their proudest monuments. We remembered Nick by forgetting to turn solemn in the face of his.

Back in the lobby, Dylan found out the man’s floor, that someone might come looking for him. But they won’t be happy! The man chuckled.

Then, someone came in the front door wheeling a suitcase. The newcomer paused, looked at us. George, he said to the man on the bench, who smiled with recognition. Are you supposed to be out? He asked then looked to us and said, He’s not supposed to be out. He’s my neighbour, the new man confirmed.

We slowly got George into an elevator, then to his front door. George invited us in. Along the only wall I could see were boxes and boxes piled up, haphazard stacks leading down a hallway. A voice called from the end of the hall. George’s neighbour told us it was George’s sister, that they lived together, that carers visited a couple times a day.

We told George we couldn’t stay. I felt simultaneously relieved and sad, also like a coward. I met some great people! George called, moving down the hall as Dylan gently closed the door. What a thin line between accounted for and cared for.

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The brain is inclined to find patterns. When I heard about Watkins, Cheryl Miller was the first person I thought of.

Watkins and Miller are the same height, both shot up to 6’2 early. Both grew up in Los Angeles, undulating scrape of the snowy San Gabriel peaks a comfort in their periphery. Both broke USC scoring records in their freshman years — Watkins just happened to break one of Miller’s.

Both felt an identical pop in their right knees, felt their bodies turn suddenly unruly.

Miller was an early champion and fan for Watkins. Before Watkins started at USC Miller offered Watkins her phone number, in case there was anything she ever wanted to talk about. It was the same thing Anne Meyers did for Miller.

In all their interviews together, Miller’s made a point to centre Watkins. She’s never spoken too long about the history of her Trojans or her storied place in the program, her interest fixed instead to the present, to Watkins. The only time I’ve heard Miller indulge is when comparing their games in the paint. Then, Miller leans her body this way and that, gets expressive, explains how good they both are at absorbing contact, less reliving glory days than heeding to muscle memory. Otherwise, Miller’s only thanked Watkins and her teammates for letting her, Lisa Leslie, Tina Thompson, the other alumnus of her Trojan antiquity be part of this, “their time”.

Last year, when USC fell in the Elite Eight to UConn, the consolation was the team had another year ahead to gel, compete, improve. To win. Now, they’re back in the exact same place less one unimaginable detail — facing the Huskies without Watkins.

In her time Miller had all four years as the glory of Troy but fell, and never went further, never turned pro. Is the consolation that Watkins can have another two years, two more shots at a national title, if she wants to? That she can defer her WNBA Draft by a year?

The brain is inclined to find patterns, it doesn’t mean they’re particularly helpful.

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Watkins is a physical player, but fastidiously clean. She played all 34 of her freshman games last year and the game she went down in this week was the 33rd of her sophomore season. Her expenditures — in energy, effort, diamond-sharp efficiency — have been managed and micro-adjusted in each of those 67 contests through inevitable contact. She doesn’t shy from the knocks, tumbles, reverberations of the game, but every nudge, she recalibrates.

I watched Watkins in her McDonald’s All-American Game, trailed her and her peers throughout that weekend. In the match, she’d push off for a downhill layup, easily splitting defenders, and the next time she’d rotate her driving shoulder just so to slip through rather than draw contact. The next time, knowing she’d be preempted, she wouldn’t make a run at all, just pull up and shoot. In the weekend, she hung back from the loudest jockeying at practice or pressers and saved her attention for the kids waiting to glue glittery plastic jewels to t-shirts and deftly place sprinkles on cupcakes with her at Ronald McDonald House.

We like to present young athletes, especially those that go on to be unequivocally the best, as having an air of inevitability around them. With Watkins what I saw was an observant, headily diligent athlete, strong and impatient in her body like most teenagers are, with a pull toward, if not softness, then readiness for commiseration. What felt most inevitable with Watkins and with the other high schoolers in her McDAAG class was their proximity to the kids, in some cases just a few years younger than they were but made smaller and vulnerable by illness. Their pull to them was a pull to memory, some of it muscle — tedious motions like threading string through beads to make bracelets or carefully penning the same hearts and flower doodles over and over on fabric — and some of it bright in their eyes, wide in their very fresh faces.

I remember Watkins playing basketball with a girl no more than seven, her small body bundled against the warm Houston spring. The entirety of the exercise was Watkins rebounding the ball from a standalone outdoor hoop in the small courtyard and gently passing it back to the girl, tentatively waiting. The point of the morning was to rotate stations but Watkins stayed put. The repetitions seemed the most natural, rooting thing for her: reach, scoop the ball from the air or up from skittering along concrete, still it in her hands, close the distance between them, hand it back. She moved, the girl didn’t. Time fell away.

For those young athletes, their pressing inevitability was the promise of college, the lives just then unfurling out in front of them; so juxtaposed by the unknowns in front of the kids in the House’s care. I watched the realization hit the athletes the same way it did me — with a physical, emotional force. Then, I watched them double down on the attention and effort they were already giving.

It’s a thin line between accounted for and care, a gulf between care and attention.

To tie this neatly and say Watkins will use her injury as a way to recalibrate is easy, but follows the flattening impulse of turning a mess of pain, disappointment, even a loss or questioning of identity into the tidy sum of a “setback”, a summit of eventuality. Watkins has to define her own borders, pick up her cards, bury or uncover her own monuments. All we should offer is understanding that the dissolutions, collapses, the excavations — all hers.