Exits: The quiet life of a mountain

The Nuggets are best when they reject the projection of what it's supposed to mean to be bigger.

What’s wrong with a small life? 

Tucked under the tail of the Rockies, Pikes Peak and Mount Evans jutting like proud outliers, I can understand the inclination to want to stretch, to reach. Not to scrabble at the slow and drudging climbs. But don’t try telling that to Mike Malone.

In the NBA, of course, it’s no good to have a small life. A small life means small dreams, small drives (it doesn’t really, but stick with me). In the NBA it’s panicked to true to dumb optimism or bust. It’s pressure points of pride and knowing you might soon be replaced, and scaling — contracts, skills, interest — everything scaling.

Nikola Jokic is the league’s heady, unapologetic champion of a small life, seeming to look forward to his year in reverse — get through the season, get home to the countryside and his horses.

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The pleasure of horses is an experience of small repetitions.

Walking out to the fields, the muddy yards, the plain corrals where they wait, unaware of your existence until they scent it, see your form growing larger in their vision, closing the gap between the two of you. And you, you shrink yourself. Make yourself quieter, speak softly if you do at all. You open gates, make sure to close them behind you, lift a halter of nylon or leather slow up over a giant head, taking care to spring the ears free from under the headband in a cupped hand. You clip a lead on or loop it through, tug them to the gate, swing it open again, steer their huge body through as if it were a trundling buggy full of groceries and not 1500-plus pounds of muscle capable of knocking you on your ass with any decision it makes. You close the gate behind you.

Take a slow walk back to the barn, chattering nonsense or thinking of what’s to come or, if they rush, pushing a squared shoulder gently back into their chest when they do. In the barn aisle, or tethered to the side of a post or building, sometimes a trailer, you go about brushing them. First the rubber curry in slow and small but vigorous circles, loosening dried mud, sweat, grass stains, then the hard brush in short, pressured flicks of the wrist. Take the soft brush now to the face, down the long forehead between those plum-sized eyes to the peach fuzzed nose, huffing gently if they like this, jerking their head up if not. Pick out the hooves, taking care to work around the frog, that V-shaped island of soft sensitivity in the hard bed of the foot, clumps of mud and manure freed in satisfying, hard-packed segments. Do the fetlocks, the little gully between the hoof and the ankle, with the hard brush if you forgot the first time you had it out.

Tacking up is its own infinitesimal galaxy of specifics and order. Saddle pad or blanket then the saddle, lifted and settled on the sway of the back then shifted forward to rest just behind the withers, the small peak of the shoulder. Girth cinched with room underneath for two fingers. Warm the cold metal of the bit in a palm, present it to the horse’s lips and see if they take it, if not, shift your opposite hand around to the other side of the head from where you’re standing and slip a finger gently at the corner of the mouth, where there’s a gap in the front and back set of teeth in that long vehicle of a mouth. Free the satellite swivelling ears again from under the crown band, fiddle with the chin strap, do up the nose band, slip the reins back over the head into one hand and lead the two of you to where the work will be done.

And that’s all before you get started.

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When you call to a horse out in its field, when you are in another country with horses that somehow just seem different, and press up against the barrier between you and them and click your tongue, resort to sheepishly saying a human word out loud and they still don’t come, or they do, to a point, trail behind you on an empty beach until you turn back toward them and they still to watch what you’ll do next, what it is you want of them, that is an acute, naive, private and deeply specific kind of disappointment. The rational brain recognizes it as foolish but you feel it, very intensely, all the same.

The best thing to me about watching Jokic play basketball, besides watching him play basketball, is knowing he’s felt that feeling.

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What would be wonderful, because it would be so novel, so new, is if the Nuggets became the first team to be fine with, even revel in, a small life. If it was fine of the franchise to want Jamal Murray back, to want Jokic to continue quietly, frankly as-is, the most straightforward force in the league. For the team to quit considering where they stack against the bigger, more fevered markets.

I don’t get the sense, watching Malone, that he wants, or projects that want, onto his players. Wanting to win, wanting a title, is different than wishing desperately for what would be in Denver’s case — in circumstance, geography — something completely different. Not just a bizarro version of what’s there, but literally something else entirely. Watching Malone, I get the sense of someone who has become perfectly adept to the altitude of his locale and the attitude of the people he relies upon the most within it. Is it wrong for him to be happy for his lot in the league, when his lot is a 2x MVP who responds to in-game assignments the same way he does to the demands of life — with a calm certainty, a knack for knowing where it is he should put his hands?

Or a superstar calibre athlete on the mend in Murray, a long mend, but coming back around to being on the floor, icily polite beside the guy who held it all together while he was gone because Murray might be the one person Jokic likes as much as his horses?

You can never plan for what’s not there, but with the Nuggets now, and for the past two seasons, a quiet life has been the ready thing, already there. The framing was that it was temporary (and a part of it, the missing Murray part of it, is), but what if it’s possible to continue quietly, diligently, with a fondness for the known-ness of it, and still push all the way past the panicked expectation for something bigger? To be made small in the shadow of the mountains but to hold fast to the understanding that every day spent looking up has produced a bearing of height, of pride, ironically closest to what it feels like to sit on the back of a horse, moving in perfect design over the earth, the world.