Exits: Basketball at the end of the world

Colossal cuts to U.S. Medicaid, the thrill of a haunted house, and Giannis Antetokounmpo as the Atlas holding Milwaukee — the city — up.

I knew it wasn’t going to be “our year,” but I didn’t realize how not “our year” it was going to be.

Two hours after I write this at 1:30 AM in the back of a bar in Milwaukee, the House of Representatives will likely vote to take away Medicaid from 14 million people, prohibit the program from covering trans healthcare, and punish states for covering undocumented people—about as ghoulish a healthcare package as is politically feasible in service of a massive upward wealth transfer.

That’s not related to basketball or the Milwaukee Bucks but it’s what’s going on in my life right now.

Thinking about this stupid fucking bullshit is both my hobby and time-and-a-half job. For the past few months the only thing that has brought me consistent delight, apart from hanging out with my wife and dog, is watching basketball and talking about it—with strangers, with friends, with my very beautiful and very patient wife, and especially with my bball group chat, who at this point make up 25% of my off-the-clock social interaction. Sometimes you go to a haunted house or whatever—I’ve learned they call them “haunted attractions” in the biz—and if it’s not especially tightly run, if it kind of sucks at being a haunted attraction, you can catch a glimpse of a gal in a scary clown costume blasting a cig out behind the bar.

That’s how basketball feels at the end of the world; like glimpsing a clown babe furtively smoke a Marlboro Red: surrounded by inhuman horror on all sides, uncomfortably cognizant of how shitty everything is at being what it purports to be—the haunted attraction barely keeping it together; the timber frame of society chewed up by termites—and still seeing something pleasant if entirely inaccessible. It’s a scene of meager beauty, but you gotta dance with who brung ya.

Who brung me, for the past few months, was a playlist of YouTube videos of gigantic asses. A local bar that I watch games at—Mothership, in Milwaukee; if you ever come through town I'll take you there—does “Bucks & Butts” nights some game days: Bucks games followed by videos of twerk and pole dance contests. It’s cute, a satisfying level of irony in a city that very much doesn’t find funny the things I find funny. It also means that I spent at least a half-dozen nights this year drinking my $2 Hamms and feeling grumpy about how the Bucks were absolutely fucking incapable of beating any top-3 teams while looking over a friend’s shoulder to see five, ten, twenty minutes of nearly-nude women fluently commanding the lascivious language of butt.

Tyrese Haliburton—a different kind of asshole on TV—hasn’t taken that from me. He’s sure done his best for two years in a row now. He went to high school fifteen miles from me; the second most loathsome man from our area code since Joe McCarthy. When the Bucks lost the first round to the Pacers last year, I was at the ‘Ship hooting and hollering and slobbering with thirty or sixty other Milwaukeeans who believed despite the Giannis Antetokounmpo and Damian Lillard injuries, it still could have been our year again.

This time I was in Denver, Colorado, in an SEIU hall preparing to give a talk about—what else—Medicaid.

I still get jittery before I give talks, even though I've given hundreds by this point and am generally un-afflicted by "stage fright," so I was pacing around the room trying to balance making small talk with strangers, going through my pre-performance personal optimization routine (listening to Ronnie James Dio’s “Rainbow in the Dark” and drinking a white Monster), and staring at ESPN on my phone. Like five minutes before I had to start talking about how Medicaid cuts will decimate this country I stupidly and inexplicably love, I learned that the Bucks season had ended.

Let me undress the rumors: Giannis isn't leaving this summer.

I'm no trade machine guy; I don't know shit. I just bark at the TV and read jokes about Nikola Jokic and his horses on my phone, so I say this with a confidence entirely unjustified: there's no team in the NBA that can do better with Giannis next year than the Bucks could. Any Giannis trade—and there has never been in the "modern era" a trade for a player of this caliber in his prime; not even the brain-melting Luka Doncic swap—would require such a volume of assets or capital that it would take the receiving team a season or two to rebuild. Bucks GM Jon Horst (who, to be clear, I think should be drawn and quartered for saddling us with Kyle Kuzma) cut Khris Middleton to give himself a surprising amount of financial flexibility after stranding himself following two consecutive failed win-now seasons. He was in a similar position of precarity five or six years ago and, through the various machinations of how NBA contracts work which I don't understand and have no interest in learning about, managed to pull it off by grabbing two of our championship starters for like $5 million a pop, plus a couple of key role players.

Giannis loves Milwaukee. I love Milwaukee. Milwaukee kind of sucks. Not because of the people, or even the weather. Milwaukee has been made to suck—following Scott Walker and the Republican Party’s Koch-headed ascension to a near-decade of hegemony in Wisconsin politics, Milwaukee was punished for being a Democratic stronghold and a Black city.

Wisconsin has a strange method of funding its cities; all cities send a bunch of tax revenue to the capitol, which redistributes it through a shared revenue program. About twenty years ago, shared revenue reimbursement rates were frozen, which means that the amount of money Milwaukee receives hasn’t been adjusted for inflation; under Walker, the formula was changed such that Milwaukee lost about $500 million a year while the rural areas that composed Walker’s electoral stronghold received a disproportionate share of shared revenue. Unable to levy taxes of its own beyond a property tax (on which this city is more disproportionately dependent than any other of its size), Milwaukee has been asphyxiating on decreasing shared revenue while shouldering the burden for load-bearing pillars of state infrastructure, like the court system: a huge share of statewide legal proceedings run through Milwaukee’s courthouse with no local remuneration. The state passed a bailout a couple of years ago in exchange for Milwaukee hosting the 2024 RNC, but we’re on the edge of bankruptcy again; Milwaukee very realistically could crash in the next few years.

As a result, the roads are terrible, social services are constantly gutted, our mismanaged poverty relief agency closed last year, and half the city—you can guess which half, given Milwaukee’s worst-in-the-country segregation—is both economically abandoned and wildly incarcerated. So we cling to our little joys where we can get them, Bucks games being among the few integrated spaces in the whole town.

Giannis is the Atlas holding up so much of this shit and keeping it from shattering. He knows it. Billions of dollars have been made off his contributions to this city. I believe we have an obligation to tear the entire thing up from the roots—package local landlord Pat Connaughton and domestic abuser Kevin Porter Jr. and send them to Hell or the Pelicans—if it keeps him here.

The thrill of a haunted house is in its impermanence. You know you’re not actually trapped in the Hellraiser pain dimension, just pretending; you get to go home afterward. There is no such thrill here.

We’re looking at up to a quarter million Wisconsinites losing Medicaid over the next decade if this budget passes as written. Our Medicaid program is more restrictive than it is in 40 other states, but it still covers a hell of a lot of people—1.2 million, a little under half of whom are kids—with everything from home health care for disabled people to physical therapy for children with developmental disabilities to job coaching programs and transportation for medically needy people.

I was on Medicaid once; not here, a different state, a different lifetime, when the border between me and total medical bankruptcy, always thin, threatened to collapse. The only reason I have a life I like today is because Medicaid cut me a break and gave me a little help when I needed it. We'll see what happens tomorrow morning, and there's still a lot of Government Process yet in play. But it doesn't feel good; nothing really has, not recently. The Bucks did, for a while.

When the TV blinks out I hopelessly pray we all make it home safe.

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Editor’s note: On May 22nd, the United States House of Representatives voted to make the largest cuts to the American Medicaid program in history, jeopardizing healthcare for millions of people who need it most. When Tim sent his entry for ‘Exits’ to me, very early that morning and just before the vote happened, he noted it was “barely about basketball” but thought I would be cool with it. I am. More than that, I’m proud to have that association with this newsletter, and very proud and grateful to publish what he wrote. You can and should read more of his work on healthcare here.