Feats
The abundant and easy-feeling physical exploits at the early stage of the NBA playoffs, and welcoming small feats in life.
In Montreal, standing in the sun beside the rushing flash of the St. Lawrence river, crying at the runners. Any race Dylan has done that I’ve gone out to watch, this is what happens. The first few who pass catch me in the throat, the next in the chest, I feel my face grimace in a pained contortion, a caving smile framed with tears, that hopefully they’re all too distracted within their own bodies to clock.
There’s something I’ve always loved about bodies in motion, made whole through that motion. When you can see muscle, speed, blood, and air reconciling like old friends, easing into familiar rhythms. I’ve wondered if I feel it more for what I have muscle memory for — running, swimming, working with horses, basketball — but I’ve felt it as keenly for people doing things I’ve never put my own body through. Especially if there’s a point in the action where you’re able to see someone’s face. Are they smiling, stoic, snarling, meditative? Are they in a conversation with pain, are they euphoric? It’s like peering into a house with the lights on at night from the sidewalk, a voyeuristic glimpse into the isolation of someone else’s body; in a physical feat, the flashing sense of a life.
I felt these flashes in ghostly replays, walking around the city over a weekend. Riding the bus up Ave du Parc and looking to the looming mountain beside, remembering nights the glowing giant cross on top worked like a compass point for a pack of us to climb from the streets into the woods after the bars closed in summer, up to the McGill pool tucked on one side of the hill and its barbed wire fence to scale so we could slip into the cool water and sink under, either escaping or prolonging whatever quality of night we’d just had. Waiting for the metro, those stations so far underground but the memory of always being freezing on the platform, mostly being alone. Taking Dylan by the old apartment on St. Dominque, unchanged in the flaking white paint on the 2nd storey stoop and how I could hear echoes of footsteps I did or did not want to welcome in the night hammering up the curving iron stairwell, then looping past Leonard Cohen’s house at the end of the block, water trickling from the fountain in the little park there, splashing across the azulejo tiles. Out in Verdun by the river with Brit and Mike and the kids drowsing in the double stroller, talking about how dark it used to get. Now, she urges me to let the dog, a big harlequin Newfie, off her leash so she can go careening into the water while Brit hugs to my back in the wind.
Walking past the McGill campus on Sherbrooke, thinking of Nick and how proud and nervous he was getting there one August, the guilt I still have of not seeing him as much as I meant to tied to the happy surprise of how fast he found his way, all the people and places he knew by the bite of November. Walking south from Concordia to Griffintown in periwinkle evening through gusts of fine rain, thinking how small my world got here, sinking into a sort of ready oblivion. Taking a lap of Parc La Fontaine and feeling the chill settle in as the moon rose over the reservoir, pointing out streets on the walk back to the hotel where people used to live, where things happened, all blurring together in the dark like memory.
An unexpected pride, leading a small group of runners up to the second floor of Biftek and an older guy coming over to laugh and say he knew there had to be alumni among us, to climb those stairs and come up where, he noted, Depeche Mode used to drink, just cause no one would bother them. I wasn’t alumni that far back, I laughed, but he said it’s all the same. Standing in front of the clarifying landscapes of Georgia O’Keeffe, a world refined through the bleached sockets of bones (O’Keeffe on that: “When I started painting the pelvic bones I was most interested in the holes in the bones — what I saw through them — particularly the blue from holding them up in the sun against the sky as one is apt to do when one seems to have more sky than earth in one's world"), or a lambent, lurid orange full moon Wanda Koop somehow put to canvas at Musée des beaux-arts, then rushing to try and see the permanent collection, a thing I never did in the time I lived in the city, as an amused security guard tells me, a bit too on the nose, “Try to finish what it is you need to do.”
A welcome overlay, that life to this. Not one in spite of, or to spite the other, not a parable, not even so much a making peace as a recognition. Like the French word linked to feat, au fait, “to the fact” — here it was as it had been, here I was now.
Feats at this point in the playoffs are loose, abundant, free and easy. Not that there’s any break, but if a team’s made it to the postseason (postseason legacies aside) they finally stop being asked for proof. The first round is (bodily injuries aside), as a result, a big collective exhale.
As the rounds winnow down, the cheeky hot potato pass sequences, heady hang time, superfluous shots and sometimes just dudes charging screaming through the paint will subside. So will the bench celebrations, the falling all over each other, the smirks between past teammates on the floor, the offhand or referential podium comments and winking digs. As all this side effect pent-up energy spent getting here gets used up, the mood will turn serious, studied, very pointed. There will still be feats — making it through four rounds of playoff basketball is a feat in of itself — but they’ll turn solemn, necessary. Energy expended on the floor will have to be accounted for, measured and matched exactly to what is being matched and measured.
There’s some superstition in it, not wanting to get too far ahead to overstep that invisible boundary between earning and asking for something. I didn’t have an immediate perspective on this until the Raptors made their title run, how in every subsequent round Toronto cleared their eyes narrowed a little more and their heads tilted fractionally down, like they were getting ready to run through a wall. They spoke in a mix of zen deadpan and sedate literality, other than The Shot — up there with weather and your most secret wish coming true, in terms of things impossible not to react to — they stopped celebrating wins altogether going into the Eastern Conference Finals.
Beyond the potential jinx, and bodies tiring, wearing down, feats subsist in the later rounds because they need to become ordinary. The cost of them climbs.
A 3-point shot taken and missed too early in a possession late in the game hands over a whole other desperate possession for the team that didn’t ding it. A possession spent passing the ball around to stretch the clock is begging to be picked off and turned over and then, exhilarating as a perfectly timed steal can be, how often does a ball lifted get whipped out of bounds because there was no plan for how the heist would end?
Feats get rationed the longer the contest goes because a dunk hammered down onto a player in pursuit, timed just so, is the perfect way to take someone’s spirit and shatter it. Feats move from prodigal and effortless to the front lines of strategy in postseason mind games.
But we’re not there yet.
We’ve only just watched the Heat rain down threes in Game 2 in the Garden to the point where the Celtics looked sludgy, absolutely waterlogged (save for Jayson Tatum sprinting in for a clarifying two-handed dunk in the 3rd quarter he hung on the rim and swung like a pendulum from, like the weather was clearer up there at least for a minute). And the end of a 99-99 tied up Game 2 in Denver, when Jamal Murray, strolling up the floor with 10 seconds on the clock, took the barest of glances at the normally imperial Anthony Davis and stepped (then fell) back for a shot that gave the Nuggets the win — and all the fawning glory — and had Davis on the postgame podium projecting ahead to the severity to come when he said, “Jamal Murray made a shot,” tossed the mic onto the table in front of him, then stood up and left.
Donte DiVincenzo tallied two feats in under 30 seconds when he nabbed the ball out of a pile-on scramble, flung it to Jalen Brunson in the corner who bounced in a three to inch the Knicks back to hope. DiVincenzo then quickly missed a three from out at the elbow with 15 blurring seconds left, scooted over on the arc toward the centre line like he knew the rebounded pass from his miss was coming, then caught, shot and sunk it to get the Knicks the game by one (Isaiah Hartenstein, with a chasedown block on Tyrese Maxey at the other end seconds later, secured it).
Has Kevin Durant looked as happy this series (this season?) as he did when Anthony Edwards hit a shot over him and the two went walking back down the court, Edwards trash talking Durant, the two just grinning at each other? Edwards said after the game that the exchange with Durant, his favourite player of all time, was “probably one of the best feelings ever, in my whole life.” His smile was almost shy. At this level, on that stage, there’s a feat in that kind of sincerity.
It’s going to get severe from here. Embarrassments are simmering, runway is running out for teams suddenly down two or three — things are tightening. This reprieve in feats, because the 82 game grind has been sharpening to exactly here, is such a brief and unusual haven. An anomaly, a lucky little blip in the NBA’s otherwise planned to the minute season. The existence of it, this tangible niche we’ve all felt ourselves in one way or another, swept up in its urgent and fleeting eddies, maybe the biggest feat of all.
There’s that saying, no small feat, to describe something difficult and to suggest, maybe, that small feats can’t be considered as such. With how hard things have felt lately, those have been exactly the kinds I find myself stumbling over and cataloguing.
I picked up three quarters on the wide steps in front of the library, after returning some overdue books. They were so hot in my palm from the sun that I had to pocket them, felt the warmth glowing against my thigh.
A couple weekends ago, after spending a long, easy Saturday afternoon with Greg and Germain, I walked through Cabbagetown and passed a guy going slow, his friend going slow along with him, holding a potted amaryllis carefully between his hands. One tall stalk and two big telescopic red blooms swaying with every step.
On that same walk: squinting where the sun spilled across the sidewalks, concrete dazzling with a fine, leftover sheen of winter’s salt.
Trying to read this Icelandic epic, Independent People, I keep stopping and flipping to the blurbs on the front and back for reassurance. Jane Smiley, Annie Proulx, these quiet titans I love telling me here’s another one. In the book so far, mostly sheep and something like 462 pages to go.
The novelty of a 7:30 p.m. tip-off when it’s still light out. Blinking from a timeout over to the living room windows, wondering what could be radiating that kind of light. Forgetting the game for a few possessions to lose my focus on the tan brick of the building across the street, glowing a tawny gold.
Feats: don't fail me now.
Beautifully written!