Klay Thompson, gold in the dark
Sometimes I don’t want to be the considered, measured and critical one. Sometimes I want to tell the person with the koala profile picture who replied to my dumb criticism of All-Star voting for the even dumber possibility of an All-Star game with “you must be fun at parties” to fuck off. Would you say that kind of shit to a firefighter waving you out of a building on fire? Because that’s the state of pro-sports operating as-is during a pandemic. That’s the state of pretending anything is normal enough during a pandemic that your go-to is to still criticize the level of a stranger’s joviality.
And who the fuck is going to parties anymore?
Any time I have felt good and ready to throw in the towel this NBA season Klay Thompson shows up. More often than not in a boat but inevitably, reliably, there. He was there when the first little fissures in the Raptors organization started to spread under pressure. When it seemed they were quietly and assuredly backing Terence Davis while feigning their own forced inertia at the credible allegations of domestic violence against him. When that was, in fact, what they did, what they continue to do.
When the bumped-up season start felt plainly wrong and naively hopeful rolled into one weird mess to oscillate inside of, at least there was the truth of Thompson coming back. To be the one to shift the feelings around the Warriors from sympathy to empathy, to excitement, to a team once and for a long while so unanimously hated finally edging back into a place in the sun. The bright reward at the end of what had been such a long recovery.
Then he was out, awfully, again.
When Covid cases started cropping up in the league, edging out in volume even the wave of first month back soft tissue strains and sprains on the injury reports. The shorthand became so familiar that it only got alarming when you allowed your brain an extra beat to think about what it all meant, and how easily you acquiesced to it as familiar, as normal.
Games cancelled, postponed, the alarm not being that there weren’t enough healthy players to allow a playable roster, that the rosters were being shredded by a virus that saw through the league’s half-measures for the fragility of imagination that they were, but would there be enough flexibility in the season’s schedule to make up the games.
When it felt impossible to let the easy swell of league drama drag me away in the riptide that came after the James Harden trade because I was straining for a safer shore than the desert island it felt like the league left Karl-Anthony Towns on, there was, inexplicably, Thompson in a rowboat.
And now, with the alarming possibility of All-Star, the newest exercise in how far we’re willing to suspend reality for the sake of a multi billion dollar corporation, Thompson has surfaced for me again.
“Steph, what’s going on man? I haven’t seen you in a while.” Thompson says from a solitary booth with a custom vinyl wall behind him, positioned so #REPORTERKLAY hovers over his head, in case you were worried this was a dream.
“What’s up my guy?” Steph Curry is laughing.
All business, he drops smoothly off into the interview he’s there to do and asks Curry what it felt like to get hit in the head with a basketball.
Thompson’s abrupt just being there in the booth and calling the game, his opening line to Curry, instantly vanished the narrative he’d been squared away in. One that had him as outlier, at arm’s length from the thing his body is knitting itself back together so he can get back to. Recovery, once the injury has been formally reported and its prognosis set, is something players do in the shadows. We set them neatly out of sight while the season goes on, a penumbra of the player like cross-hatched headshot in our brains.
But there was a smiling Thompson, hair long, shouting things like “Barbecue chicken!” in his play-by-play, decidedly radiant.
It’s been like this for Covid cases in the league, too, which is another reason why the NBA has been able to roll steadily forward with the season. We accept recovery to be a player’s private experience, but Covid is a public health emergency.
Anyway, Klay.
To focus on him was a reprieve from mentally rebutting the replies of strangers telling me that there was more to All-Star than just the game. That more important than the life and livelihood of players, their health and the possible future side effects of a virus that ravages all the most prime body parts a running, jumping, vital athlete needs, is the money players stand to potentially lose, of course. The bonuses paid out by teams when a player of theirs makes an All-Star team, the increase in a future salary or its extension. Like all things you can force into theoretical discussion when the regular way of the world and its known bounds have vanished — sure. But the stranger, crueler fact that will turn you a little bit crazy if you let it is defending yourself against what is already the clear, crucial, incontestable thing: to actually hold an All-Star game this season would be the NBA’s last step off a cliff-face into sheer delusion. You can argue it, but why would you?
Thompson and his timing are my own delusion, I know. A reaching coincidence that has offered my brain a sensory deprivation tank out of a 6’4”man in a rowboat. But the brightness of him is real. How he has, is, reworking his expectation and ours along with it by being himself. You don’t have to know Thompson — and we don’t — to see him offer up a few auric moments and the easy way he handles himself in them. A lesson, if anything, in grace. Of knowing when to avoid the well familiar and blunted teeth of provocation, to make light when so much is, without much extra urging, dark.
Katie, you just keep killing.
Loved this and would love to talk hoops with you at a party (a zoom party, of course)