Kiss the big dumb ring
Holy! This really snuck up on me, and it shouldn’t have considering the anniversary is the same as that of my literal life, but it has been one year (yesterday) of BASKETBALL FEELINGS. So first, thank you. For hanging around and hunkering down through 365+ days of feelings, for joining halfway, for starting yesterday (there were a lot of you, who told?)—whenever you did it, I am very happy to have you. Is this a Wednesday night newsletter now? Monday morning? Friday night? So far, all of the above. That’s how feelings go, scheduled with best of intentions but gonna get away from you, more often than not.
So sure, there were a few occasions yesterday. The NBA season officially started up, as previously mentioned—plus you no doubt wished me one—it was my birthday, and, how could you forget if you laid eyes on ‘em, the Toronto Raptors got their rings.
It should come as a surprise to nobody that I started choking up at the Orlando Magic portion of the playoff montage. That means the very beginning. Montages always get me pretty hard, it was the first thing I wrote about when I started BF a year ago, but this montage nearly killed me. They really didn’t rush it. They went through, very slow, every single series, tenderly dragging on the moments Raptors fans are still playing over themselves but suddenly there they were screaming like new on a gigantic, cubic screen with sound coming out of speaker stacks tall as a small building, shivers going down about 19,000 spines at once. Is this erotic?
And it wasn’t just the montage because while that was happening there were sudden swells of cheers and chants and howls prompted by almost every cyclonic highlight clip swirled all together, and a giant spotlight fixed on LOB (all credit to Malcolm Miller for this nickname), shining at centre court.
The lights came half up and the ownership group stood awkwardly beside the trophy, preparing for their rings. The crowd booed because two out of them run the two titanic telecom companies in the country and god knows the data we were all racking up recording this thing. Thankfully that was quick, and it got to Masai who had the arena air shimmering with sound. Then front office, a bittersweet chorus of cheers for Alex McKechnie, who is almost out of fingers for these things. Down the line to Jamaal Magloire, my cool and compact dude Sergio Scariolo, and Nick Nurse, shaking his shoulders out again and again like a current was running through them.
When it got time for the players whatever semblance of shit being handled was gone. The crowd lost it. The guys had been standing there the whole time, watching the same as the rest of us, honestly resplendent in their white and gold Champions technical windbreakers. The announced down the line in an order I think any fan could and would have drawn up, starting with Eric Moreland, fresh in from Oklahoma, and ending with Kyle Lowry who I was croaking by. The whole thing is worth a watch, if only for Powell and Ibaka’s dances, OG pioneering a new style of embrace, and the looks on all their faces as they were handed their rings and gently palmed them, dazed, walking back to the side, slipping these shining hunks of gold and stones on very slowly as they went.
Lowry, who is always special and sweet, does a special and sweet thing where he airplanes his arms out but keeps his head cocked to look over a shoulder at the ring out to the side, then brings it up to plant a kiss on it, before joining his team who crowd him, who have all been staring gleefully at their own.
Lowry takes the mic to thank the fans, his teammates, Toronto, and then he calls the guys to him. If you weren’t there you’d think it was done but it was not done because there was still a giant, silken tapestry to be unveiled. Lowry had everyone count down from five, many people in my section were headily fucking it up, but when one hit the black sheet covering the banner was drawn up as fireworks went off in blooms around it. On the court Ibaka cried, in the stands I was still crying. I hadn’t ever stopped.
I was standing in the freight when Greg called me.
Happy birthday, he blurted at the same time I said I’m so sorry.
The rain was coming steady and hit in matted pings on the plastic wrapped skids of used dishes the rental crew was moving out of the elevator and into the driveway toward their idling truck.
Where are you? Greg said.
The freight where I live, I said.
One of the rental guys let out a gut laugh from where he was bent at the waist, attempting to position a pump truck into a wooden skid underneath a plexiglass bar.
Greg was barely 5 hours out of managing a federal election campaign since early summer his incumbent had just, heartbreakingly, lost. He’d gotten home maybe 4am, as the final votes from out west were tallied, in the middle of the rain storm that swept into the city overnight. He sounded tired, bruised, but when he said how proud he was of the work they’d done despite it all his voice and my heart cracked a little.
I waved goodbye to the crew as they took the last of the load off the cavernous elevator and I shut the doors after them, the alarm bleating.
Hear that? I asked Greg.
What is that? He said.
It’s the freight in a siren salute to Greg! I shouted.
It wasn’t funny but it was so loud and we laughed. The freight juddered up a few feet and the door on the opposite side opened into the museum lobby. Greg complained how old he felt picking up empties and pizza boxes at the campaign headquarters as we spoke, just as I put an empty the event had left behind into a garbage can on my end.
How old are you? He asked. We laughed at that too.
Does it matter? I said, Don’t you just feel like you are simultaneously every age you’ve been already?
Yeah, he murmured, clunking another can.
Somewhere down the floor I could hear my dad, who had come by on a belated visit to the museum he meant to make a year before, when I opened it, but was taking now with me a week out from my last day.
Where Greg and I both were, what we were doing, on two ends of celebratory, was not very. But hearing him breathing and hearing my dad’s friendly chattering to whomever he had cornered, made the moment feel a ritual. A silent, private thing bound out by a phone line, a friend, a lost election, months and months of work, the occasion of me we were meant to celebrate and one of the people who had caused it waiting for me so we could walk up the street to the chocolate factory, and then to lunch.
The universe, which tends to hit heavy, can sometimes be excruciatingly gentle, in a way that breaks you harder, in what it tries to show you.
The ring that I got along with 18,999 other people on the Raptors opening night is very gigantic and fun. It is heavy and doesn’t fit any fingers save for my middle one, and even then I have to keep the middle knuckle slightly bent until my finger starts to sweat enough under the metal’s weight so the slight slickness locks it in place. It came with its own stand.
I wore it to work today like a chest-puffed-proud unhinged person, noticing how dramatic it made everything. Swiping my Presto card at the subway gates, flipping the pages of my library book on the train, shaking the hand of the person in my first meeting of the day and watching their face for when their fingers rested across the striated, 3-inch diameter of the thing.
Everyone wanted to hold it. To feel its weight. A stranger told me it suited me which is a wonderful way to feel intoxicated by a power as false as the stones in the ring that a colleague tried to break to me gently weren’t real, and I gasped so loud I tricked my own heart to catch.
The ring is a ball gown. An occasion. I half hoped I’d see some people out in the wild today with it on. I didn’t, but everyone seemed to have a story of a friend who also got one so it’s probably the closest I’ll ever get to being welcomed into a secret society where the only induction is screaming yourself hoarse.
Everything about the ring ceremony, the banner reveal, the shaky first quarter of the Raptor’s first game, was over the top celebratory. It had to be. It was an atmosphere of heady relief, reconciliation and triumph. The t on the latter, just like on the name of the city itself, felt capitalized, which you will know if you are from here can feel a rare thing to step into without ducking your head out of this expectation to stay humble. The theatrics were half placed by the league, but there wasn’t a person in the arena or watching outside, or at home, that didn’t drink up every gout of flame sprayed up out of the backboards or let their eyes glaze over as the last shimmering precious metal particles from the fireworks fell to the court. The game, as it steadied, was a glimpse forward and back, as Lowry took enough of a sidestep for Siakam and VanVleet to burst ahead, leading, with his feet still planted firmly right there to take a charge.
Was OT necessary in a first game, on a Tuesday night, against these Pelicans? Both answers are correct. Both rely on the other to be right. Ceremony feels truest when you can use it like glass that magnifies both ways, thick enough to get knocked a few times but tempered so that even with time, the cut of it remains crystal, clarion. Celebrate the good when you get it, the past and future as a frame. Take the small occasions that mark your life as moving forward even if it is just by virtue of time, going—it is hard enough to do that to begin with and not wish for more. Breathe the smoke from a moment exploding, kiss the big dumb ring.