Exits: The dualities of Dallas
To win it all in a place that's always been both, the Mavs have to embrace their whole nature.
Just north of the I-30 and west of downtown Dallas, a dozen steps to a former gravel pit flipped into the manmade Fishtrap Lake, there’s a sparse graveyard. It’s all that’s left of a failed utopian society founded by French, Swiss and Belgian socialists in 1855 — La Réunion.
The main source of income, they thought, would be from wine. The vineyards they’d plant would roll, teeming, away from the Trinity River. They were artists and tradespeople, none were farmers, and the bluffs around the river were mostly dense with chalk. By 1857, unequipped for the labour or day to day trivialities of running a town, all 400 inhabitants had left. Limestone deposits were eventually discovered and the town, pitted into quarries, was shipped out to build, basically, Texas.
The dualities of Dallas come larger than life in its NBA franchise’s favourite son, Luka Doncic. At once full of braggadocio, too big for his boots, as he is Greek tragedy mask for the governing of the game. Doncic with his grinning volleys, his step-backs, his fades, his knack for testing the bodies of the defenders in front of him with his own, less clumsily hurling for contact than staccato prods to work out an angle the whistle will like. How acrobatic he is when his body, stout as a tumbler’s, doesn’t seem it should grant him the marked grace of someone who stutter steps around the practicalities of speed, footwork a gearshift.
Doncic can be the heady showman, smirking and eye-rolling, shooting without hesitation from spots only he knows, running backwards with his arms up and out for the crowd and in the next transition, a deadpan engineer, working out the formula for those spots. There are moments his volatility, or how pained he appears when pleading with the refs, makes you wonder whether this is what he should be doing but then you watch him barely look and toss the ball for a perfect lob, or hardly wind up on a shot a couple steps from half-court that sinks, eager, in the way time is greedy to subsume all relics. You realize the scourge is a part of the show.
The one time I drove through a fraction of Texas the low and reaching fields on either side of the highway were flooded. It was the summer after “Ridin’ Dirty” came out and we were probably listening to that song, driving along that highway, because it felt like it was on every other radio station, every other song. I remember thinking, Texas, some long fostered, childish concept of the place cast out over the water on either side of the blacktop, unreachable. I saw longhorns, but they stood, stubborn, on the high knolls of plains. Stubborn, not stuck.
Stubborn, not stuck, strikes me as a resting state for the Mavericks. A franchise of perpetual oscillation, neither up in a standing so high they’ve found themselves removed from the league’s weather, nor down too deep in the mud of its reality. Theirs is the high ground in a flood, hard sought. But the thing about that kind of footing is if you get too committed, there’s no other place to go. You’re out of the flood, but still stranded.
The Mavs got stuck because their two gears, attack and defend, had no traction against the Warriors. Jason Kidd, and this team, talked a lot while in the West’s finals about running repetitive sets of the same drills, mainly defensive. To commit the patterns, the rotations, into muscle memory. All automatic. That’s great against a team like the Suns, who love the rules so much they can be upended against them and who still won’t lean to deviate, but Golden State only presented a new field full of gopher holes to fall into at every possession.
Dallas: Home of the frozen margarita machine, the first 7-11. The second most churches of anywhere in the state and the first 1-800 number set up for dealing MDMA (also, the first time it was coined as ecstasy) by a seminary student in the 1980s.
The duality of Dallas, the team, hit me for the first time when I found then coach, Rick Carlisle, standing courtside during warmups in Toronto, watching the last of his lineup go through the motions. He’d done his pregame, taking questions in the tunnel and answering to the tangle of media recorders and phones, flipped microphones up, the Mavs step-and-repeat wall, hung hastily, so a buckle in the vinyl turned the expression of that giant horse head especially solemn, behind him. I remember hearing he could be stern, but he was direct more than clipped. Still, he didn’t linger.
Out on the court, maybe 10 minutes before they cleared it, most media was gone. I wanted to write something about Tim Hardaway Jr., who’d shook his head no to me in the visitors locker room five minutes before and mouthed “after”, so here was Carlisle, the next best guy, rolling on his heels and watching.
As I got up to his side he glanced down at me, nodded. I introduced myself and asked if he had a couple minutes to talk about Tim. He did. And when he did, he was almost tender. Listing out Hardaway Jr.’s unsung qualities, noting how the season before, with the Knicks, he’d been playing on “half a leg”. The whole time our eyes followed the same rhythmic shots going up in front of us — lift, release, swish, catch, lift, release, swish, catch — the boom of early gameops spots on the jumbotron overhead echoing around us, maniacal for the hundred or so fans already in their seats. In a lull, after he’d answered my questions, Carlisle cocked his head and said simply, “And I love him”.
John Neely Bryan, born in Tennessee, coming down from Arkansas to the trident forks of the Trinity River with a Cherokee guide and his dog to write his name on a hide, nail it to a stake and lodge it down into the dirt. It was 1839. He didn’t stay.
Two years later he came back to the stake and declared it Dallas, then left for California and the gold rush. He came and went, building bridges, watching the first trains roll into the city. He shot a man for insulting his wife and fled to the Muscogee Nation to wait out consequence. In 1874 his son told a Dallas court, “I am the son of John Neely Bryan, my father is insane.”
Admitted to the Texas State Lunatic Asylum in the winter of 1877, Bryan died seven months later. He was buried in an unmarked grave. The city would put up a pergola in his name on the grassy knoll, where the bullets that killed John F. Kennedy have been argued to have been shot from, and roughly, maybe, where Bryan first jammed that stake with his name nailed on it into a bluff above the river. The knoll’s also been called “the birthplace of Dallas”, where the city’s first house (that became its first courthouse, then post office, then store) was built.
This tendency to pile memorials, or to reuse the parts of itself tangled in some of the strangest, tragic, and most jarring parts of its history a quality of frontier practicality as much as an earnest nod to the value in duality, an almost too straightforward, too sincere rejection of artifice. Hitching two horses to a wagon and then, smiling, handing the whole thing over.
Dallas got as close as it did because Kidd did not want his team to lead with ingenuity and inventiveness, he wanted mechanics. That worked comfortably for Maxi Kleber (the German tic for efficiency) and fine for Dwight Powell (strong and long enough to get there, there being wherever the lobs were, whenever they happened), okay for Jalen Brunson (stoic), but Reggie Bullock and Dorian Finney-Smith, as wings, were clipped.
Less obvious, Doncic had the worst of it.
What Kidd undercut by insisting on rote systemization was the potential for aberration, for artifice. Champions don’t all need to be unhinged but adaptation is always, at first, deviation. There were so many sequences where the Mavs, against Golden State, stood still. Stuck waiting for rotations that didn’t come because the Warriors cut, or went wily, pinned Donic down by doubling up on him so that his teammates didn’t know where to go without him. In postgames, he quietly admitted he had to play better defence, but that was just the one side of the floor.
Doncic needs to be able to gloat, to exult in himself, for his team to reap the dividends of its fallout in frustration on the other end. He has to menace and simper in order to unsettle. Tamped down, the Mavs were rolled over. All that practice for nothing because when it came time to take ten paces, turn, and draw, the Warriors, certainly Steph Curry, just had to shoot.
Stubborn and stuck, fantasy devoid of reality, practicality for only its own sake — there are times that Dallas has become too singular in of itself. This was also a team that was fined three times for its bench being deemed too unruly in the playoffs. The line between that behaviour, and the formulaic rigor of the floor, could have stood to blur.
This place may be proud, and individualistic, but it’s also boastful and plenty strange. There’s always a balance in trying for, or managing, both sides of any one nature.
In basketball, at least, it’s easier. Adjusting for balance — leaning into chaos one match, calculated restraint the next — is the best duality. The plains of north Texas might be flat, that doesn’t mean that next season, with all they’ve learned here, the Mavs have to be.
The Texas of my dreams has always been in dyad — feather soft split with the pitilessness of nature; cocky and sure but industriously tender. Sky so big with tumbling clouds you feel you could pull down and tuck yourself in with, the ease of friendly acquiesce, cowboy boots for the taking, sweating bottles of Lone Star but if it tasted any good, loved pickups with bench seats polished to shine by jeans worn soft sliding in and out and over them. Gas stations redolent with leather and beef jerky, ghosts, space to spare, slick pads of a thumb fumbling over pearl snaps, dogs trailing with tongues lolling down dusty roads in a permanent dusk.
Buttes, hickory, stone pine and cypress baking in the sun, needles blanketing the ground to velvet underfoot. Blue bonnets, barbed wire, bleached out bones, the old cover of Blood Meridian. The modernist blooms and pulsing midnight fault lines of Dorothy Hood, a motel room and Townes Van Zandt playing from a phone set in a paper cup on the nightstand while cars on the highway roll by, the sound of them rearing like waves.
Feet on the dash, styrofoam cup of sweet tea big as my head wedged between my thighs, windows down, eyelids slung low as the sun. Good porches, nights that take days to come down. And horses, their long profiles, patterns, discarded shoes, loamy smell, tracks, swishing tails, sun-warmed bodies, just everywhere.
It’s good to dream, to lean into the tropes in yourself, that way you’ll recognize your fantasies when it comes time to rope them.
I'm sorry, I can't help myself: it was the Book Depository JFK was shot from, not the grassy knoll. The grassy knoll is where most conpsiracy theorists insist he was shot from.
Very much enjoyed the piece.