Entire universes, within the waiting

The intimacies, vulnerabilities, and hierarchies of waiting, in and out of the NBA.

In Spanish, espera, from Galician-Portuguese esperar — to hope — from the Latin spero, an anticipatory tense closer to “awaiting”, the sensation of it. In Italian, attesa, a feeling of expectation. In Japanese, the kanji radicals for “wait” (待) include soil (or earth, ground), measurement, and stop (or linger, loiter). The Norwegian vente derives from venir (come) and te (to you, yourself). The German word, warten, takes its origin from “to wake” or “to watch”. In Farsi, sabar kon, with sabar taken from the Arabic for patience, and kon, a present tense verb for “to do”.

We have, for a long time, considered what it is to wait.

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On the platform in Salerno we are staring down the tracks, willing the train to come. Dylan has jogged down the stairs to the tunnel that runs under each platform three times to get to the station entrance. The main monitor there is the only one displaying a chronological grid of arrivals information. The screens mounted to the concrete columns of the platform we’re waiting on only urge us to please, stand by.

Before we got there, disembarking our train into the unexpected chill of a morning several degrees cooler from where we started thanks to the Alburni mountains and the winds that roll down them to the sea forceful enough to keep the clouds away (and what keeps Salerno, I’ll learn later, one of the sunniest cities in Italy), we were stuck in a tunnel. A problem on the tracks ahead, the conductor informed everyone.

Was Salerno our final destination, the porter who’d checked our tickets asked. No, we were catching the Frecciarossa to San Giovanni. She pursed her lips and considered it, glancing to the windows where the three of us were reflected back. I think you will be fine, she concluded, but if you are late for this, come and find me. We don’t ask how we’d find her across the eight train car if we were late, and whether this moment of realization would come before we disembarked, or after and she continued on with the same train.

On the platform in Salerno, our first train has chugged away and there is no trace of the second. People all around us seem to be picking up their bags and moving to other platforms. I show the ticket on my phone to another porter. She puts both hands out in front of her, palms down, and gently pats the air. Just wait, she says.

We do as we’re told not because we feel confident the train, now late, has not come and gone without us, departing from any of the other platforms where trains have pulled in, exchanged a flurry of passengers, and pulled away, but because we are in thrall to the act of waiting. To the determined, immobilizing sensation that comes the longer you wait for something and the certainty that the moment you stop, when you give up and leave, the thing you are waiting for will happen. In our case, arrive.

I think how willing an outcome through waiting is a shoddy sort of manifesting, given all the possible outcomes that reel through your mind as you wait. I think of both porters. How in their instructions they wisely extricated themselves from the act of our waiting.

Without fanfare, the giant red Frecciarossa speed train silently pulls up to the platform.

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Working around basketball, you get used to waiting. Waiting for people, waiting for games, waiting for people to prepare for and finish games.

It was the first complaint I heard when I started to cover the sport and is still the one offered most, at times in the quality of pleasantry, an eye-rolling commiseration. As in, so and so isn’t out yet? In some cases, so and so is an entire team and you are waiting for them to wrap up shootaround or practice, for locker rooms to open.

The complaint can be made to a room of media, waiting for a coach to walk in, it can also be made in arena tunnels, on courts, standing around in a loose knot of bodies where a scrum will soon take place and tighten the formation up on invisible cue. It can be hushed, delivered just to you; it can be spoken loudly but in feigned secrecy, the hope being that someone might hear and hurry things along. It never hurries things along.