Legacy/legacy

Have we gotten any better at processing the inevitable impermanence of an athlete’s career?

She’d been in front of me in line at the coffee counter. When she turned from paying to put her wallet back into her purse, balanced on her wire tow trolley, the trolly tipped backwards onto the tile floor. She swept up her bag and righted the trolley, then moved over a few steps to wait for her coffee. A couple minutes later, I caught her in my periphery as I pulled a heavy glass door out to the street from the underground mall open. Her pollen yellow blouse stood out. I held the first door open for her, then reached for the second in the indoor vestibule to haul it open too. Outside, both of us pausing to squint in the sun bouncing down from the glass towers above, she looked at me and smiled. You know what? She said. I feel so young whenever someone holds the door for me. So young! She laughed and started up the dozen steps to the sidewalk before I could ask if she needed a hand with her trolley.

I thought about visibility. Did she feel young because she’d been noticed, seen? Someone recognized she could use a hand and held the door open for her? Someone helped her, someone was kind? The potential truth of it threatened to crush my chest and I went powering up the steps, off on my own way, before it could.

The valuation of women is still highest when we’re young. Myriad reasons, and certainly the most glaring on display at the moment in American politics having to do with fertility. Women who can reproduce have something to offer and are in turn worth more. Beauty, or perceptions of beauty, also a reason, but that beauty is directly tied to youth and its visibility. If a woman must appear old then she is expected to mitigate her age through personal aesthetics or intervention, should be preemptively apologetic, not too loud, too anything. For a woman to appear old without any apparent awareness of her age is close to unspoken transgression as they come. That is, if she is visible at all.

I’ve been thinking about visibility and age because — and sorry to be mysterious — for professional reasons I can’t disclose athletes at both ends of this spectrum have been on my radar this week. The newly retired athlete, facing the framing of their legacy and what comes next, and the young athlete who is just getting started, hopeful and hopefully free from those considerations. I say hopefully because the capital L subject of Legacy gets brought up earlier and earlier to rookies, college, even high school athletes. That to be successful, young athletes need to consider not only career trajectory for longevity’s sake, but the optics of that trajectory and its implications towards success — the publicly held perception of it. To think of an abstract, ephemeral concept the way they would about training or nutrition, as if Legacy, a kind of publicly traded valuation, had trackable metrics and benchmarks when it’s as volatile and malleable as the stock market.

Because there is a minuscule possibility that the Raptors could draft Cooper Flagg next year, I have been getting asked about him a lot. In that context, I don’t like talking about it and usually decline to.

Flagg is 17 years old, and going into his freshman year at Duke, which means that when I get asked about him I’m being invited to make a hypothetical guess about a high schooler who has yet to play his first year of college basketball. I understand Flagg’s talent, have seen clips of him take an upright stutter-step to trick the brain of his defender who, like me, has hardly registered his lower half moving to a different section of the floor because Flagg’s torso seems fixed in place, even though Flagg has just created space to take a wide open shot. I’ve watched him dunk in two easy steps, toes still skimming the court, watched him pause mid-air and bring his two hands with the ball in them back over his head, or around to his shoulder, to buy some time while his defender succumbs to gravity’s greedy grip and falls back to the floor and Flagg then carries on finishing his shot.

I’ve also watched him do an awkward raise-the-roof gesture after he dunks, or the little intro pantomime his Monte Verde teammates did with him where Flagg bowed his head and bunched his shoulders down, his 6’7 frame already so out of reach to them, so they could gently place an imaginary crown on his head before the game started, and laughed because they’re teenagers and all these gestures are effused with a sort of projection into the professional world they’re rapidly approaching, but also with self-referential confidence and tenderness. It’s this part I think of most when people who have designs on Flagg that quickly and weirdly are inclined to delve into the negative ask me to assign worth to him based on the murky valuation of Legacy. I know that’s the valuation, because the preface comes coded in words like potential, and hype, whether Flagg will be a bust, whether he’s the real deal; an assessment preceding the person who has yet to be drafted, yet to declare for it, yet to finish his first college semester. An assessment predicated, already, on a career’s worth of information we haven’t seen the start of, and by that warped logic, on Flagg’s retirement or departure from professional basketball.

So, no, I don’t like to guess at what Flagg or anyone yet in a league has to offer a team. I want to watch them now, in the present. Watch them learn, struggle, improve, do the weird and sweet pantomimes. I don’t want to think about their ends when they’re just now beginning.

The truth is that most athletes retire and we hardly hear about it. Many, I think, welcome the quiet goodbye or Irish exit given the public nature of their careers. Especially NBA athletes, where the fan and league appetite, the two locked in a chicken-and-egg grapple for which entity’s desirousness led to demand, has turned the season into a year long event without end, only resetting when its new competitive calendar year begins with training camp. A quiet quit when your professional life has been so public could feel, I imagine, pretty freeing. A quiet quit could also stave off public tabulation of a career, the difference of a few fans discussing your legacy versus it being turned into a question, and the question of that Legacy being used to fill a week’s worth of daytime sports network’s airtime.

We haven’t gotten much better at processing the inevitable impermanence of an athlete’s professional career since we watched them fight and die in amphitheatres.