Give and take

Who gets permission to take the title of "face of the league", and why it's contingent on where they're from.

I get so angry, walking from Union Station down to a morning event the Toronto Tempo are holding along the waterfront that I consider writing a letter to the mayor. I start to compose it in my head as I manoeuvre over hip-high banks of snow, tightrope walk the narrow, icy furrows cut through their peaks, made slick and hard-packed by thousands of other feet that scaled these same obstacles of urban winter in the last few days.

Three weeks, the city said, to clear all the sidewalks, the curbs and roads of their heaping mounds of mottled snow. Three weeks, even with all the sidewalk plows and road crews working.

Dylan told me this in the car on the way home from the airport, but the reality of it didn’t sink in until each of my steps on the narrow tract of foot-cleared sidewalk slip either to the side or backward, making each step quite literally one forward and two back. Why did this busted city sell off all its snow-clearing vehicles for private profit, and why hasn’t that money done anything to better the city? I mentally scrawl, even as a voice in my head chastises me over how lame a thing it is to consider.

Coming in from the cold I commiserate with friendly, flushed faces, all who’d had the same experience, some who could pin it starkly against what we’d just experienced (navigable sidewalks) in San Francisco. My anger settles, quickly dissipates.

Teresa Resch, the Tempo’s president, takes the stage to introduce Monica Wright Rogers, the Tempo’s inaugural GM. Though this is by definition historic, there’s a relaxed feeling in the room. Questions range from personal to professional and come prologued by introductions — who we are, where we work, a welcome or congratulations.

It isn’t until one comes with a new preface, Always good to see another American in Toronto, that I feel my brow wrinkle.

There’s something now, about the snow, the cold, about almost rolling an ankle or wiping out on the way that I want to wear like a dumb badge. Even more when later, another preface from the same person, This is a proud country. I think how divisional language can become in a second, how in jest or truth there’s often another deeper, more personal truth tucked away within the method of delivery. An expression, a stressed word, the timing, context — all of it like subtitles.

Walking back to Union together afterward, Jerome and I dodge and jump a dozen more snowbanks, complaining to each other about the roads, the city, but in our complaints, a handshake fierceness. What we aren’t saying speaking the loudest.

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Earlier this week, Charles Barkley said during a segment of NBA on TNT that he was annoyed at Victor Wembanyama being named the face of the league. It’s a title you aren’t given, he argued, but one that you take. He pointed to the opposite end of the desk at one of his co-hosts, Shaquille O’Neal, “Shaq took,” Barkley stressed, before going on to name Magic Johnson, Larry Bird, Kobe Bryant, LeBron James, Steph Curry, all as athletes who took.

Barkley’s complaint, made clear as he continued, encompassed another about the passivity of the current NBA superstar. Specifically, that they are handed too much. That this is even part of why the All-Star Game is what it is. That to be given a title like face of the league or named an All-Star means there can be no grasp of the history involved in, ostensibly, what it took to get there.

While I think that’s false — despite our current moment, history is rarely fully recognized while you’re in it — what I got stuck on was why this seemed mostly to be a problem because it was Wembanyama.