My Basketball Feelings piece ‘Everything in a name’ was selected for The Year’s Best Sports Writing 2025. This year’s anthology was edited by the wonderful Hanif Abdurraqib and hits bookshelves October 7th. You can pre-order the book through your favourite bookstore and online.
I’ve been in bed for days. Sick. Watching the bright, warm autumn light slip across the bedroom ceiling from the gap in the blinds. Light this time of year feels precious, the sun heady and sharp. Light on its way out. Light that already makes you miss it.
A pining, frustration, to know that I’m wasting it. Falling in and out of the sleep I’m fighting, the feeling of waking to light that’s shifted and is heading down to pass another day a desperate one.
The animals stay close. I watch videos on my phone of people in Rome, what they’re wearing, hoping to mentally prepare the suitcase I have to pack, somehow, later today or frantic tomorrow. Realize as I watch that the people and the clothes belong to another demographic, a different online caste. It’s disorienting but then so is a lot of being on the internet, even when you intend to just dip your toes. The awareness that there are several thousand variations of experience happening in parallel for any given circumstance, at any given moment. Too much for the healthy brain, dizzying for the cold-addled one.
I should stay offline when I’m sick. I already know being in a diminished state makes me more porous, prone to absorb what scrolls by. Feel guilt for what I’m not doing as much as for what I don’t know about all those parallel worlds.
I try to read, to finish the last 40 pages of Monkey Grip. I usually love Garner’s quiet incisiveness, the observations that come so sure and sharp you don’t recognize their cleave until your brain catches up a few lines later. Reading about love and dope sick people without the sieve of my own health makes all the details render too immediate and precise. The physical descriptions of blackened lips and sores, of someone’s heart ratcheting in their chest. My body protests, my joints throb. Not helped by lines like, “That old treacherous feeling that real life is happening somewhere else, and I’m left out.”
I can count the times I’ve surrendered to sickness, usually because the pain is so bad my body promptly overtakes my brain and its impulse to resist. Once with a migraine I still remember acutely, and then the first time I had Covid. Under the pain, feverish and consuming, something like relief. Stuck in a hostile environment but stuck, fixed firmly, in my body. What was there to do?
If you’ve been to one Media Day you’ve been to them all, is something you’d probably hear at Media Day. The Raptors have theirs tomorrow, barring an overnight burst of recovery I think I’ll likely miss it.
I like Media Day. I like it for the same predictability some people complain about. There are only so many ways for an athlete to tell you they worked out over the summer, only so many ways for a coach to tell you they hope the team is better this season. Beyond those assurances there’s a nervy giddiness as the day gets going.
It’s not likely there’ll be revelatory answers to: How was your summer? How are you feeling? What are you looking forward to this season? Who are you excited to play with? But there are quiet revelations to be had in the comfort or tension of the person responding to them. Of where their eyes go — up and out to the room or down to the table under their hands — of how those hands are resting. Do they seem a little nervous, does it take a few questions for their shoulders to loosen and relax? Do they pause before they answer, does their gaze drift, does it soften?
How do they probe at the environment they find themselves in?
Kyle Lowry had the teasing reputation of someone who didn’t like media and yet his latter Media Days in Toronto were playfully prickly, familiar, generous. He just had his 20th in Philadelphia and started it by asking the room to give Brandon Chinn of Sixers PR a hand, “He just got a raise,” Lowry grinned.
Pascal Siakam, in what would be his last Media Day in Toronto, was fidgety. I remember him clasping and unclasping his hands, swaying in his seat. It was the first season, too, he’d play without Fred VanVleet since the two arrived together from the G League. There was tension. The first time he smiled, even after saying he’d had a beautiful summer, was when he mentioned VanVleet. How they’d had to earn their way up.
Bobby Webster spoke to the media ahead of Media Day, on Friday, and he started with a small smile behind the first sip of his water bottle. Eric asked him whether all Toronto’s players were available to start the season. Yes, he said, shifting in his seat, eyes looking over the room. What I thought was the most telling came a few minutes in, when he got to the obvious change in the room, that it was him there and no longer Masai Ujiri.
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