Helios or nothing

The soaring career and quiet retirement of Blake Griffin.

Before he was dunking over cars, he was a boy of the plains.

Blake Griffin was born, grew up, and stayed in Oklahoma until the Clippers picked him above all others to go west and found Lob City. He leapt fences under a blue sky that stretched to the horizon, unmarred and ceaseless as silk pulled tight, sky that sloped down toward the southeast and climbed toward the northwest. A football state, but he grew up hitting dingers you can hear the tinny thunk of echoing out past the red dirt diamond, into the alfalfa rows beyond the cropped green outfield. A football state but he swam, ran track, and kicked a black and white checkered ball high and wide a few times. He also played football.

Griffin’s mom, Gail, has memories of the whole house shaking when Blake and his older brother, Taylor, tussled. Threw shoulders into one another passing in hallways made suddenly narrow by their expanding bodies. Blake has memories of every backyard competition he put to his brother ending in a fight he started out of frustration, because his brother — bigger, stronger, with the perpetual head start of three years on him — always won. Scouts didn’t come to watch Griffin play basketball until he was in his junior year of high school, and the thing that stood out most was that he played angry. Played with a chip on his shoulder. What could a teenager out here have to be mad about, they must have wondered, for that to make him stand out.

Beyond the simmering hostility of siblings and the bucking oscillation of teenagers, growing up in places decidedly and geographically between other places, bigger places, there is the sense of nothing to do. You invent. Games and challenges, ways to — at least in your mind — push past the invisible pressing of place, encroaching smallness, the big sky bearing down. Griffin’s mom said everything her youngest son did he turned into a contest. The outcome of those contests, especially when lost (especially when losing to no one but yourself), stacking over the years and accelerated in their stings by puberty, pressure cooked into a chip proudly worn on the shoulder. What is there to be mad about, at that age, way out there where the High Plains reach down from the north with long, skinny fingers of buffalo grass? Where it feels possible to hear the rasp of rust forming in real time on the countless outbuildings of endless farms dotting the interminable plains going out in all directions? Nothing, everything.

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There aren’t that many NBA athletes who hail from Oklahoma, the state.

Before him: Ron Boone, Wayman Tisdale, John Starks — all who bookend Griffin in the top four for total minutes spent playing competitive basketball, but none who spent as many of those minutes mid-air.

After him: Josh Richardson, Shake Milton, Jeremy Sochan — all who have yet to do either.

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The Osage Plains are a physiographic region stretching from the north of Kansas into Oklahoma like an ink stain, tapering south into Texas. They are a transitional plain, a stretched boundary where timber gradually tapers to prairie, accelerated by farming and agriculturally stoked drought. The biggest concentration of zinc deposits on earth were found in the Osage, as well as lead, both prompted mines that left the land pockmarked with one ghost town in their wake when they closed. The region’s rich natural bird population was stamped out by a booming cattle business, annual burns and extensive grazing scouring the shelter they needed. These were not the kind of transitions the Osage was meant for, namely forced, but progress and ruin seem to look the same to people when we squint.

Griffin followed his brother to the University of Oklahoma, down in a city called Norman turned third most populous in the state for its dense citizenry of students, 30 minutes south of home. He went for basketball, too, and quickly eclipsed his brother, who was sanguine with the switch because he probably already had a pretty good idea about Blake. For Blake, trapped in the perpetual motion of catching up to Taylor, that first budding sense of himself must have been a relief.

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There were movers out of Oklahoma, the university — besides tornadoes, Buddy Hield. Trae Young too, in his floating rolls to the basket, came out of Sooner U. Griffin is the only one of them who put his professional foot up, in ascension, before he put it forward.

Photo by Nathaniel S. Butler

When Griffin started to leap it was never with the wherewithal of coming back down. Like all those formative years under a sky so sprawling raised his centre of gravity. He was no Icarus, he was Helios or he was nothing.

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It’s funny to think of something so formative as an accident, the result of a reroute. Chris Paul to the Clippers instead of the Lakers via the veto, for “basketball reasons”, of then-Commissioner David Stern. The nickname too, a joke Griffin blurted out in the locker room to DeAndre Jordan when the team was told the news. A name that started to annoy them a month later for the underlying worry of its limitations and one they began to mind less after two runs at the postseason, priming for their third. By then, they understood very well their scope. By then they were comfortable too, had meshed so well that the ‘Lob’ part stood more for how they could finish each other’s sentences on the floor than just a punctuative, two man action.

But at an extremely basic and relatable level, they also just loved to watch each other dunk. So they made plays that made it so they could watch each other dunk.

"I couldn't really run up to him because I wasn’t in the game,” Griffin said once, after a game where he watched Jordan dunk while he was on the bench. “I didn’t know what to do. I was just running around. I honestly couldn’t believe it for a while. I was just kind of running in circles and Vinny [Del Negro] told me not to get a technical so I had to calm down.”

Jordan would pull up and huck a shot from deep that had no hope at going through the basket but made perfect contact with the width of bracket behind the rim, leaving the ball to arc up in an abrupt rainbow and land in Griffin’s reaching hands after he’d sped from mid-court to get there. Paul would heave the ball two handed back out on the second step of a layup, flinging it like a lasso, and Jordan would pogo from the key to bring it back down. There were open floor dunks, turnovers or steals forced by Paul and an unhurried pass to the other end where Griffin was already waiting to meet the ball and adjust his speed, velocity and bounce accordingly. There were dunks off of bounce passes, behind-the-back passes, volleyball tips between three people; lobs from sprinting full-speed that got put up like a shrug before Paul ran out of floor and tore past the baseline, Jordan and Griffin a few steps behind to catch them. It became so intuitive that the name reinforced itself anew, took on the comfort of a place long-standing. Theirs was an easy city.

The basketball gods love nothing better than anomaly, a dare that hitches their brows. In that borrowed benevolence Lob City prospered for six seasons. Paul forced his way out after the team fell short of the playoffs in 2017, wanting to be mayor of someplace else. Griffin was sent to the Pistons in January 2018, and Jordan opted out of his contract and became a free agent. Lob City became the heyday of another place, something you’d hear about but got harder to picture as the reference points fell away.

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Griffin’s father ran a trophy business out of the family’s house. Griffin and his older brother would pitch in assembling the little gold statuettes and folding ribbons for orders. Griffin had his own box of trophies from his track and basketball wins, and when it got too full he’d recycle them for parts. He had no false reverence for what were effectively separate components, all screwed together.

It makes the Dunk Contest trophy he hoisted out of the sunroof of the Kia he jumped over, grinning mostly to himself, even funnier.

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In Detroit, a betrayal. Back came the anger, an edge to the chip that years living in saltier air tinged by the sea softened. And why wouldn’t it? To go from the beating heart of something to outlier country, worse than flyover.

There was some joy with the Pistons — being named an All-Star for a fifth time, a career-high game of 50 points, passing 12,000 career points, and carrying the team to the playoffs all in the same season — but mostly pain. He hadn’t made it one year into his 5 year extension with the Clippers when he was traded, and insult to literal injury, came back a month ahead of a two month recovery mandate from an MCL sprain in late-November 2017 only to be sent packing in January 2018 after a blisteringly productive stretch of games.

Griffin grew his beard out, kept his head down, and threw his body around. Tomahawk dunks in close quarters down on the heads of defenders who couldn’t scramble out of the way, two-handed slams after looking around and ignoring who was open. He rarely took the outside shot, seemed drawn not just to contact, plowing through clogged lanes with big, planted bodies, but to collecting as much of it as he could — crooking into bent elbows, snagging on shoulders, backing his body into double and triple teams, determined to take everyone with him. Gone was the flourish of Lob City, most every action in Motown was pummelling.

Photo by Al Bello

Here was someone who’d always been in the familial orbit of others — his brother, first as competitive bane and then teammate; the triangulation of Chris Paul, DeAndre Jordan — cast out on his own, expected to lift a diving franchise. Think of the shift, going from six consecutive seasons of postseason basketball, the rhythms and ramping up, to flatlining. Watching highlights of Griffin in Detroit in his first full season is to see the half-life of velocity. A person dragging his team with him through sheer will and what feels familiar, forcing himself not to forget.

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He was so big, the biggest thing even as the sheen of his number-one-pick-prestige grew dimmer, like it always does. Sought out by LeBron James in his Heatles era for a hug before going head-to-head, battling for the basket against Dirk Nowitzki who’d get backed down so badly he turned the other way, laughing. Chasing Pau Gasol off the line, making Kobe Bryant stop in the middle of transition to stare, climbing over Tim Duncan to get to the rim, Duncan who made a point to find him and pull him in for a squeeze before games. All the Titans wanted to come and see.

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“The stat was, ‘he hasn’t dunked in 400-and something days’, sure. I also had surgery,” Griffin, chuckling, told JJ Redick about the end of his time in Detroit when, recovering from knee surgery, he was re-injured after 18 games back and needed a second knee surgery.

I played my last game for the Pistons before the pandemic hit, December 2019, and we didn’t go to the Bubble, so I didn’t play again until December 24 of 2020. Everybody’s like, he hasn’t dunked in over a year. I haven’t played in over a year.

That just pissed me off. You guys know the stat. It was just, let’s do days instead of games.

The Pistons wanted to rebuild again, told Griffin that at 31 he no longer fit the timeline. They sent him to Brooklyn and he gave them back $13.3 million of his $75 million remaining contract. There were two season in Brooklyn, another in Boston, the bounce came back a bit. He could’ve taken a vet’s minimum somewhere else but Griffin, who’s dabbled in comedy and television, did the braver thing — he hung it up quietly.

Photo by Noah Graham

We try very hard when we’re young to get out, to push past whatever it is we’ve determined to be holding us back. There’s a sense the place we’re from is keeping us from someplace else, instead of just keeping us.

The smaller towns around Oklahoma City have names like Goodnight, Bison, Bee, Bowlegs, Mounds, Maud. Names that feel proximal, comforting, a little bit funny, picked for the first flash that came to mind. No giant thing.

Griffin made peace with something when he was cast out in the NBA wilderness. Played as physically as he could until he crashed up against it, maybe making up contests with himself like he did when he was a kid until he finally caught up. Saw he was still himself. No giant thing.

What was there to be mad about, after a career like his? Chasing and running and becoming synonymous with a move that seems to slow time, stowing it away, pushing at a ceiling bearing down and feeling it, miraculously, give, like the sky loved you best. Everything, nothing.