Hope in cement tunnels
After the Bucks edged out the Raptors, after Kyle Lowry tried to fit his compact engine of a body headfirst, diving down between George Hill’s legs in a way that you really believed, because he really believed, that it could work, after Terence Davis sat—tender, brash-faced brave Davis, running at the immovable force of Giannis Antetokounmpo when no one else on the floor would, half like he wasn’t giving himself enough time to think about it, but mostly because watching him, you have the sense that him running fearless at things feels safe as home—sitting in the postgame Raptors media room and listening to Nick Nurse talk about how sometimes you coach for the game, but sometimes you coach for the future, I was impetuous. Flooded with it. The sense of sure, fine, but also, why not right now?
Why not right now with a sharpness that is going to tear the tail off February, the tuft of it hanging in wet strings from a grinning mouth? Why not lean into weird lineups, let the overconfident, under-covered bench cook? Take a team like Milwaukee out at the knees, not especially nicely, to make a juddering point? Yeah, it’s February, you can hold the month like prayer beads, repeat it all you want, but at some point it’s going to quit being February, going to quit being March, going to quit being winter and then where are you? Stretching your muscles in the new light, barely lucid, trying to make up the time.
There is nothing easy about looking around a game scrum, a media workroom, seeing the people who have been there, embedded, for dozens of years, smug or harder faces watching as you catch yourself smiling, teeter on the expression and wonder why you are catching yourself like you’ve accidentally shoplifted. Them thinking you are there for something like fun (you are), a toe in the water (that too), to build yourself up as best you can from fear, pushing, persistence (100%). But that you will also retreat, leave them their worn down, trodden and browned turf once you’ve realized that everything there to go around is plenty, but it doesn’t always feel like enough.
Nights that unwind into feeling only tired, gravity pulling your bones close. Nights that taper rather than combust. Nights where there is no upswing because you didn’t manage to catch someone, you stood too long wondering in the same place, you watched people pulled by gatekeepers eyeballing you behind curtains to get what you were after. Nights where you think, enough. Nights where you pack your things up and leave the room, walk the emptied out streets to the subway, towers gone dark stretching up around your shoulders, think of all the different lives you can have, have had, in a city. Nights where you marvel at how lonely it feels, leaving a place that just held 20,000 people, the heat and swell of their voices rising to pool in the rafters heavy, molten. Nights where you lean on long distance assurances that you are getting at something even as it feels like it is getting away.
You push and push, you ride these insane highs and feel your heart so close to the surface of your skin that it’s vibrating you off a folding chair. You isolate with precision these moments that you know will slip by and you’ll regret as loss the second they do if you don’t dig your fingers into them—who wouldn’t that wrack all to hell?
My own doubt seemed delusional set next to a locker room full of G League guys come loose from a game they’d just won. They were so easy, lolling on the simple wood benches, generous with all 4ft of their own designated space to me, dropping in for a few hours one Saturday afternoon. Every time I asked, “Can I sit?” they made a flourish of their hands, opened up their faces, scooted over, said of course.
On my two hour trip home, hurtling past the airport in the hands of a Mississauga bus driver pushing it faster than the planes taking off over us, all I could think of was what it takes to hold yourself in that kind of suspension for a week, let alone an entire season. Playing every game with the knowledge that it’s not just eyes on you, but hands that can make calls, shuffle papers, pass them to you along with a pen and a way to some solid ground. No one talks nearly enough about what it takes to make a career of waiting. To take contracts that give days, occasionally in double digits, that demand you are there for the very next one after that, thousands of miles away. We know about making it in the NBA but we know barely at all about making it almost there because the stories don’t align with the narratives we want to tell about triumph. We like a story with a clean ending. We don’t like the ones still on the way, no assurances that they’ll get there, because it’s one thing to extend support expecting that it won’t stay hanging and another to extend, and extend, to hold your arm out til it shakes and to realize you don’t have as much strength there as you thought. The stories of these guys go forward and back before you can catch up.
Not to be dramatic, or maybe to be too much entirely, the best I could equate it to was the feeling I had once all the exotic bird coloured bruises absorbed back into my skin, and my skin, where it had been made to split open, closed to cotton candy pink scars. I could walk again, sleep through the night again, go back to my apartment from the quarantine of my parents place, and get on my bike the spring after I’d been dragged under the car of a drunk driver for a minute, maybe two, I don’t know, I was knocked out. You’re just alive. You’re aware in this new way of the very beautiful, straightforward day to day of things that usually escapes you, that we all leap-frog so easily ahead of. And when you know, when you’re in it, you wish it could stay, that awareness and the loosening of everything else that used to be capable of knotting your days. But it goes, because your mind has to move on and because all the minutia of being human comes back. Best you can do is try to call up that feeling as a reality check when you remember to, when your blood won’t settle.
The stretch of that feeling is the G League. Of what it takes to handle each day as that day only. But it has been made meditative, because the rest of these guys’ lives need to balance around it. They have to get groceries, they have family obligations, probably long distance. They have to figure out how to stretch it. And they have that feeling, that steady thump of seconds adding to hours up to a day’s worth, like recall.
Where they could become closed off from each other, secreting away the small breaks, they instead open up. Lean wide into each other and the precarity. They talk in one breath about how happy they are for a teammate getting the exact thing they want, even as their eyes go, for a second, far-away. Competition isn’t only coming from whomever is inside the locker room down the hall, flipped on its axis to this one, it’s coming from guys they know the rhythmic breathing of in the night.
You think how close you’ve been, maybe right beside with fingers out to grab it, to what you want. How it was everything you could do to give yourself only a day to mourn whatever that was when it shied, went bolting away from you, when you wanted, probably, to shut out whole handspans on the calendar. Can you imagine being so close, every day, as your job? When I asked Paul Watson what he’d learned of patience, thinking it would be hard for him to explain because it had to be intrinsic to him, he brightened and flinched at the word at once. He was the opposite, he said, impatient. He told me how long it had taken to learn it and then told me, by the pauses between his words, the way he weighed them or didn’t especially, how it all came down to pace, routine, trust. Nothing about it miraculous. Hope in cement tunnels, ice packs taped around knees, guys transferring chicken laid out in big aluminum trays on a folding table taking up a quarter of the locker room into smaller containers to carry home with them. You move from one moment to the next. You manage your days.
Before he left the small room the last thing Nurse said, blinking up into the spotlight that’s affixed to a cubby at the back of the room that points to the podium at the front, was that he was too late.
“First, I was thinking about doing it really early. And then I was thinking about doing it again.”
He was talking about Davis, putting him back in.
“I was going to give Serge a couple cracks, and he had the arc three and the corner, and the corner one went around and out.”
He was moving one hand in a tornado spiral, voice speeding up, “Then I was going to go small, but then I, kinda—” he cut himself off, waving his hand up, palm out, “we got into pressing, and then we got a stop. I think one.” He swallowed, stopped. Looked real wistfully out into the room, a small, sad smile on his face, “And then it was too late.”
His eyes panned the room, snagged on mine. I felt my face pull a mirror. A bad trick I’ve never learned to contain, my empathy at times like an over-friendly animal, ready to close whatever gap when the space between two people gets offered up. Nurse’s look had gone behind itself, casting back maybe to how he stood, what he saw, what the sounds were in the moment he realized the seconds had counted too far down to gather up the time left, “I was too late.”