Exits: Our best blueprint

Shai Gilgeous-Alexander's championship homecoming, our addiction to telegraphing success, and whether achievement has to be loud to count.

For him, they did fireworks in the daytime.

Red rockets shot up to the pale blue sky and behind him, fountains of gold sparklers streamed from the stage as he pumped the Larry O’Brien trophy over his head, grinning.

About a thousand people stood on the Tiger-Cats field, clustering close to the stage set up at the end zone. A thousand more were scattered in the stands of Hamilton Stadium. It was mid-afternoon on a Thursday in early August, the deep doldrums of Southern Ontario summer where cicadas clock in for their ceaseless sawing by 8 a.m. and the day stretches less full of promise than bucolic sameness. No blotch in the sky. Lake Ontario flat, placid. Shai Rally Day.

When it was his turn to talk, almost 40 minutes into the ceremonies and after being presented a street sign with his name on it and a key to the city, he picked up the printed page of remarks the wind ruffled and shoved it in his back pocket. He wrestled the mic from its stand and turned to the sound guy who’d started to cross the stage to the podium to help, “I got it,” he assured him. “No worries. You’re good, Joel.”

He recalled that growing up and competing, most of his friends, when questioned by people who didn’t know the geography of Southern Ontario, would default to saying they were from Toronto. It was easier for them, he explained, not to explain where Hamilton was on the map. Not for him, he said, he liked to do it. Liked, even, explaining the logistical specifics. That it was an hour’s drive away from Toronto.

It’s pride and joy to me, he said, to be able to be different. Steel city, Hamilton, he said, peering out from the dark sunglasses slipping down his nose, is not like any other city in Ontario. The quality of energy and grit, determination, different there. He took his sunglasses off, set them on the podium.

There’s a camera angle from the broadcast that then shifts behind him, looking out at the crowd. All those faces tilted up to him, a sea of people only breaking past the yellow goal post and beyond them, the low rise apartment buildings wedged between King and Cannon streets, the high school and the rec centre — both named after different men called Bernie who played for the Ticats — and rising up, the green wall of the Niagara escarpment, shrouded in the afternoon’s haze.

Plenty of the NBA’s stars came from small towns. Small American towns. This is the dream a panicked subset of the league’s most prominent voices told us was in danger this season. So, there is a specific pleasure I take in knowing that if Hamilton was an American town, its biggest star would be the NBA’s perfect story. A kid who didn’t make his high school basketball team in his first year, from an industrial city with a lifeblood of steel — quite literally — becomes MVP, Finals MVP, and Champion in the same season.

Here is the dream the league and its network criers want and it kills them, I bet, that he and it were born just under 50 miles from the border.

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How thin is the line between quietude and idleness? Or better, rest and sloth?

I think of this frequently now in the thickest days of summer, and the slump I find myself in. While my own idea of a perfect summer day is reading through its hottest hours, either beside an open window, under shade, in the temperate cheat of air conditioning, I feel the anxiety now as August nears its end. Not that I have run out of days to do this, but that I’ve nothing to busy myself into once these days taper. Grow short even as they are now, twilight inking down the sky a little earlier every evening.

How can something so routinely, seasonally, be too fast and also entirely expected?

Shai Gilgeous-Alexander is not a person I associate with either idleness or slumps, and yet his quietude has cast him firmly below the radar, I’d say, even still. He has the hardware: the ring to come in a little over a month’s time but he’s spent a summer hoisting the trophy over his head.

He is not ostentatious, not brash, not showy nor all that loud. His voice, even from a stage addressing thousands in an open-air stadium, pitched no different than in a press room talking to a couple dozen reporters. Steady, low-thrum, luxuriant even, in its pacing. When I interviewed him for a cover, SLAM Canada’s first, the shoot was in L.A. and our interview over Zoom. A laptop propped in front of him between looks and him, ducking down and smiling to greet me before taking a seat. His voice echoing through the studio set but resonant, unhurried, his attention total but relaxed.

This past season there was plenty of discourse around his candidacy for MVP — whether it was time, whether he was ready. All awards require a certain amount of legwork, PR, showboating, the media machine of the NBA no different than that of the film circuit. Yes, there are statistical benchmarks — Nikola Jokic’s career-best numbers this season made a complete numerical case — but the crux of MVP, the naming of it, has always hinged on the exponential. A feel.

Does achievement have to be loud to count? Can it stand quietly, a pillar, a column, foundation for the future, or does it need to be lauded, personally broadcast, to last? Gilgeous-Alexander has always broadcast his exceptionalism at a frequency dialled low, trusting that anyone interested will tune in. The implicit bias in this, as has become clear throughout the seasons, is that this interest directly correlates with aptitude. If you watched, if you really watched, then it’s likely you already knew. He didn’t need to tell you (side note: he wouldn’t have, the one time he did the air in the room contracted, cringed with the obviousness, the deigning to have him say it out loud).

If the last decade’s proliferated so dramatically the avenues we have to express ourselves, the apps and platforms we use to telegraph our days, the side effect has been a gnawing, ceaseless, yawning void of insecurity. The impulse to at once and always be populating these avenues with ourselves, our achievements, to the point where the achievements themselves have become so granular and stunted (I ran an errand, I called someone on the phone) as to be shared in sequence. We even announce the actions ahead of hoped for achievements (had a great meeting, hope to share more soon) like we’re naming the scenery en route to a destination really only important to us, maybe a handful of people we care about. Imagine calling out cow, stop sign, blue car to thousands of strangers — babies do this, but they mostly do it for their parents.

The logic we explain the impulse with is that we’re building a brand. And maybe you legitimately are, but more often than not the impulse doesn’t keep office hours, it runs rampant and wild-eyed over the boundaries of anyone it can. Within the NBA the lines get blurred the same. Athletes who are told from a young age — and to be sure, no current player younger than 30 will grow up or enter the league with a sense of personal separation they don’t have to aggressively establish and maintain — they themselves are the brand, that they exist in duplicate.

One entity is the public figure, the athlete, streamed through their social accounts off-court and broadcast on television on it. This entity is beholden to fans, to views, to engagement; to the endorsement deals those metrics reap. The other entity is the private self, but less and less is it allowed. If anything, it’s treated with distrust, disdain, aversion. A narrow-eyed look that asks, first, what does this guy have to hide before it (correctly) lands on, maybe that’s something they don’t want to share — if the logic even gets there.

Something I watched with curiosity this season was the aversion to Gilgeous-Alexander for his relative “unknowableness”, and the implication of that bias on his public celebrity, notoriety, and the NBA’s crude symbol of both: his candidacy for awards. Thing is, Gilgeous-Alexander is not hard to know. He’s shown us since he was drafted that he maintains a soft bearing, knifelike aptitude, and a competitive drive that exists as an unnerving steady-state, powered by something deeply, intractably internal. He’s not subject to the whims of discourse or public appetite, in other words, and is occasionally rejected for it. The funny thing is that Jokic, his rival for this year’s MVP title, thrums with the same stuff. The difference, maybe, that Jokic’s otherness is easily and more readily identified as “more foreign” to the average American fan and pundit. He talks funny, looks funny, takes glowing interest in very different hobbies off the court — if it walks and talks like a duck, it’s not like us.

For Gilgeous-Alexander to appear relatively same, but for him to not operate with the mannerisms of contemporary consumerist, individualized culture, it throws the model into a tailspin. At first glance the brain cannot compute and it may be so likewise offended (this is now the rote reaction to misunderstanding, it feels like) it doesn’t take a second look.

(Not to redirect too much into the geopolitics of the moment but he’s also Canadian. I’ll point out that for pretty much my entire life, and his too, the consensus view has been that we’re a quieter, nicer, unfussy extension of our southern neighbours. I can’t claim this has always grated, but the Canadian public’s acceptance for that assumption existed on a broad spectrum that was touched by everything from the Canadian to American dollar exchange rate to how well our sports teams were doing. Until recently, a threat to sovereignty didn’t vibrate that spectrum, but like a key struck on a piano the reverberations now extend across it, perhaps even through time. It seems there was a dormant protectionism, nationalism, certainly pride; a strength of otherness there all along if it only took one crude, ignorant jerk to set it off.)

It would be easier to separate our addiction for self-promotion if it hadn’t, in the same decade or so, grown intrinsically tied to worth. Or, the perception of it. We now tend to hold the loudest, brash, the most self-serving and congratulating our society has to offer as the most intelligent, impressive, successful, our best blueprints. Take one very cursory glance across tech’s billionaire class, you can even lump them all together at this point, and know this fact to be true. Their inspiring ideas and genius plans perennially require another five years and several billion more in funding to make it to fruition, in the process will churn through finite human and natural resources, upending the structures of our social and ecological worlds, but they are very good at talking repetitively and over everyone else.

On the Gilgeous-Alexander scale, I can’t think how many times I’ve heard or seen him be asked about success, how he measures it, his definition for it. What the line of questioning is trying to get at: what material symbol will mark success. What the line of questioning misses: there is no tangible object bought or accolade won that will serve as criterion.

He said as much in the brief media availability he had after his Hamilton rally. He’d spent some time at The Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto, he brought the championship trophy around while visiting some of the kids there. He said it was hard “to see the babies, and the kids, go through things like that” but he was glad to be a bright spot, offer a beat of reprieve. Moments like that, he said, were the most powerful.

“All those things — the trophy, the medals, the awards, those don’t go with you when you pass,” he said, “the memories and the things you leave behind, your legacy, stays forever. Those things will be remembered long after I’m gone. Those are the things I cherish the most.”

The weight of the word “legacy” was light, lighter than it usually comes down in the context of pro sports’ amped-up solemnity and obsession with imperishability, because he meant it in an active capacity. Small actions in the moment. It spoke more to the origin of the word, legacie, as someone who’s on a mission, or the Latin, legatus, an envoy. A conduit for somebody else. That his actions would be remembered by virtue of their happening, the impact of his gestures, on memory. In this case, young memory forming, even memory fleeting or cut very cruelly short. The celebration of him, his body, his ability to manipulate it in a way that’s beautiful, impressive to watch, just a vehicle versus a culmination.

Gleam of the trophy, in his hands because he’d won it but in his hands to swing low to reflect the very small, tired, smiling faces in their hospital beds back from its mirror-gold surface. The kids giggling, maybe, at how they warped in its warm curvature, how their teeth sparked in its shine.

For them, he held fireworks in the daytime.