Exits: Thrumming centre, winking periphery

Pat Riley's long competitive memory, what you learn in locker rooms, and Jimmy Butler's future in Miami.

Anytime I write about the Heat I end up writing about Miami. Not anything so useful, mostly the way light slants urgent through the streets at golden hour, flowing like a molten tide between glass towers back out to Biscayne Bay, or the salt-softened pastel buildings of South Beach crumbling, chips of peach, rose pink, teal and sky blue paint coming away on your fingertips along with an urge to bring them to your lips.

Or the palms: towering, squat, rustling, proud, frizzed, bow legged, leaning like they’ve been waiting for you. Thunderstorms that slink in slow, dash down in a roil, retreat leaving the world and every fresh scoured surface in it dripping and bright. A single slice of coconut cake I still think about, nondescript in a plastic clamshell fished from a corner store’s open cooler and eaten in bed the right amount of sunburned with the A/C giving me goosebumps and King Kong on cable in the dark. How your skin starts to glow with a permanent sheen of sweat, a saint’s aureole around your body.

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What can you glean from a locker room while waiting around to talk to its inhabitants? I’ve been in some where the answer is clearly “not much”, the mood terse, rushed or guarded, sometimes even worse: the mood good but with the distinct feeling you’ve walked in a minute too late and missed something, and now the fun is winding down. Other times you can’t take notes fast enough.