Exits: In the teeth of heartbreak

Author Timothy Faust on Dame Time up close, summers in Milwaukee, and the Bucks busted season.

The mayor came out for Dame.

My friends, who are locked in to local politics, regard Cavalier Johnson as something of a guppy, but for a couple seconds in September I wished I were him. I could never imagine myself as Damian Lillard for the same reason I can’t imagine the afterlife, or how Dave Bowman was transformed by the obelisk at the end of 2001: A Space Odyssey, but the life of a mayor of a B-tier city is drawn in a hand much more comprehensible. Johnson stood before 5,000 Milwaukeeans in a leprechaun-green Batman-themed Milwaukee Bucks t-shirt to greet our new superstar as he walked into Fiserv Forum for the first time. 

It was a ravenous crowd, and one more representative of Milwaukee than you might find elsewhere. Milwaukee is an adamantly segregated city, and sports games (particularly Bucks games) are among the few actually-representative spaces on offer. Though even through the subsumptive power of fandom, you’re not guaranteed a good time — last year I watched a game at an American Legion in the suburbs near my dad’s place where some old drunk guy commented at me, multiple times, that his favorite Bucks players were Pat Connaughton, Joe Ingles, and Grayson Allen.

Dame walked through the “Deer District” — a deeply embarrassing thing to acknowledge aloud but an ecstatic and raucous place to have celebrated the 2021 championship — in sweatpants, carrying his kid. He didn’t address the crowd; just waved, shook some hands and entered the arena. Local internet gadflies grumbled about Dame’s unwillingness to give the crowd the pageantry it wanted. I don’t think athletes owe access to their fans, but I kind of empathized with the yearning for affirmation — it’s Damian Lillard, doncha know, and this is Milwaukee, and big names don’t come to Milwaukee, after all; at least, not while they’re big enough to go elsewhere. Outside of Reggie White, there has never been a better athlete than Damian Lillard to join a Wisconsin team mid-career. 

I wonder now, looking back at the end of a busted season, if maybe we got started on the wrong foot. Dame was coming in on the heels of divorce, leaving a recently-constructed home on the southwest periphery of Portland and fighting a bitter ex-wife for custody of three kids. I don’t have kids, but I’ve been in and out of relationships twice as long as Dame-and-Kay’La’s, and for months afterward I’d rather have died than have to talk to anyone at my stupid database job. It’s hard enough to mow the lawn after receiving a nasty text message from an ex; going out there and being one of the best basketball players God has ever created while someone you loved tries to take your kids from you is a Herculean effort.

Part of it is that Dame, like Steph and KD, is one of the NBA players my age who actually feels like a Millennial. Draymond Green, for example, was born in 1990 —practically a child — but I would swear to you that he’s much older. KAT is pushing 30 but has severe Zoomerface, unlike Nikola Jokic, who is legally the same age but who I think is about 41. According to the Social Security Administration, my cousin, the reason I got into basketball in the first place, is legally older than LeBron James, but that doesn’t make any sense; obviously LeBron is much, much older than both of us. Anthony Edwards, the electrifying Anakin-Skywalker-but-cool of b-ball, both looks and feels younger. Dame and me have nothing in common except our age and that we’re both right-handed. But within the deadly jungle of the heart we are naked, fearful, and equal. Who can be themselves fully in the teeth of heartbreak?

Photo by Gary Dineen

My girlfriend (now wife) and I went to Dame’s first game as a Buck. I won’t pretend I was too familiar with his deal; my relationship to basketball is primarily rooted in the ecstasy of sharing intoxicated vulnerability with a room full of strangers and my hereditary devotion to hollering. All I knew was that he was the generational player on an awful team for a decade; a high-performer stymied by God and management. The game, a clever rout of the Sixers, was a real treat. Tyrese Maxey hinted that he could be Philadelphia’s next big thing and Dame gave us some clutch-time theatrics. I tapped my wrist with the rest of the crowd and shouted “Dame Time!” and was happy.

Several months later, Dame changed my life. For Game 2 of the playoffs I scored the best seats I’ve had in my entire life for $120 and I have not watched basketball the same way since. 

It was some time during the second quarter. The arena had handed out those stupid “let’s all wear the same white shirt” t-shirts and shamed any of us who chose to forge our own paths — I have this great bootleg Thanasis hype shirt

(A brief interlude: Thanasis Antetekoumpo is undervalued, despite being one of the worst players in the league. Last year, on the heels of the Dame trade, Giannis signed a massive $180-million-something contract for  a three-year extension through 2027. He was due a $230-million extension this offseason. It’s a smart move for Giannis if he wants to dictate the shape of the team and thinks he can play well for a while longer, but it’s an immediate discount to an organization that is already facing tremendous luxury cap issues. The deciding factor? Thanasis’s advice. For a win-now team, especially one whose star player is exceptionally bonded to his family, Thanasis’s contract is an extremely shrewd $1.8 million deal.)

— which nobody ever seems to want to celebrate, because Milwaukee’s irony level is still a few years back; but at games I can play my role as a herd animal so I put on the whiteout playoff shirt and pouted. I was sitting on a corner, and the Bucks played toward the hoop nearest me. Dame took it up and I saw the whites of his eyes.

Well over a decade ago, my buddy Max was kind-of-not-really-maybe dating a woman whose father had season tickets to the San Francisco Giants. We got to take advantage of them, once; maybe 12 rows behind home plate. This is memorable to me for two reasons: one, in our broke 20s, this was unimaginable luxury, and I spent a lot of my time staring at the restaurants in the fancy-person concession area, unable to imagine what kind of person could, or would, order bluefin tuna sashimi at a baseball stadium without any hint of irony or shame. Two, I finally had an appreciation for how fast the ball goes in baseball. I learned that a 90-mph fastball is actually real fast and hitting an MLB pitch should be impossible. A tenth of a second to see the pitch and decide whether to go for it; a fifth of a second to swing — that’s it. If you think, you miss — perfected subconscious instinct must conquer the conscious mind. A series of incomprehensible athletic achievements totally flattened by the television; that’s baseball. 

It had never occurred to me that the same flattening effect of the camera would come into play in basketball. But it does.

I don’t think I could tell you what happened during the play any more than “Dame drove left, juked, and shot.” That’s how it must have looked on TV; proficient but unremarkable. I know a player can move a defender with their eyes, I know the great ones can see the whole court without looking. In person, up close, it’s terrifying. Intimate, the way a cornered prey animal must look at an advancing predator. To see the level of sublime thoughtlessness, biomechanical precision, and total mastery was religion; an encounter with an alien technology. Eyewitnesses are often inaccurate in the courtroom, the brain dictates what your eyes saw. Even in the moment I began to merge memory with myth. Damian Lillard has normal brown eyes, dark like mine. But in that wild memory I swear they were green or electric gray. 

I can’t remember if the shot landed. Does it matter? We’re out of the playoffs. Now I watch games from my couch.

The offseason hinges on whether Dame decides to stay in Milwaukee. The team PR squad (and Dame himself, a good team player) want to convince you that he’s happy here, but everyone I know with any connection to the team tells me he’s not. I hope he stays, but I wouldn’t fault him if he doesn’t. Obviously, this year wasn’t an amazing sample dataset, for plenty of reasons within (hiring Adrian Griffin) and beyond (Dame, Giannis, and Khris Middleton played six games together under Doc) team control. We don’t know what a full Dame-Giannis offseason with an established coach looks like; maybe that’ll make it work out. Or not. Give him six months to try to start getting his life together. Maybe GloRilla will fix him. They can go to Summerfest and be disappointed by the lineup, or they can go to the beach where people kept drowning — the city just reopened it and the county is running its bar. Milwaukee in the summertime is a charming, if perhaps not vibrant, place. Maybe Dame will like the Polka Mass at Polishfest. Who knows. 

From what I understand, if Dame picks up his player option we’re more or less bound to run it back with more or less the same team next year. The way the salary cap and luxury tax work now, we have no flexibility in roster construction — we need to trade direct contract for contract instead of making package deals or playing with time. Could someone out there take Pat Connaughton off our hands? Might we gently send Jae Crowder to the elephant graveyard where he belongs? Bobby Portis, absolutely and rabidly beloved by Milwaukee, isn’t doing his job on the court. Is he on the chopping block?

Will it work? It has to, or it won’t. We’re in the last year or two of something, and everyone is anxious.

And then what, a cycle of being a bad basketball team again? I don’t know. That’s what I thought would happen to the Packers, and it looks like I was wrong. Hey, I don’t work here. I’m just another stranger shouting at the TV. Go Dame. Go Bucks.