Lonnie Walker, on the moon again

After nearly a season away Walker's made it back into the NBA.

Lonnie Walker doing his warmup shooting circuit, a semi-circle around one half of the floor.

Square up, shoulders back, two palms on the ball, bend knees, lift, jump, release at the apex. Side step, shoulders back, two palms on the ball, wait for longer tenured teammates to shoot, bend knees, lift, jump, release at the apex.

After every shot Walker keeps his shooting arm, his right arm, up, and his right hand hanging like it was on a towel hook. His left arm swings free at his side, shaking off momentum. His peripheral awareness not jumpy but not oblivious, like many of his peers in these routines. After he’s reset back to the corner, 3 o’clock on the half-court, he pauses to turn and check that a passing camera tech clears the strip of hardwood between his back and courtside seating before beginning again.

Lonnie Walker in warmup gear different than everyone else on the floor. He’s in blue, bright royal blue hoodie and sweats, they’re mostly in greys.

Lonnie Walker on his outer orbit, eyes on the rim, tensing, releasing, tensing, pausing, deferential. Ricky Council, Andre Drummond, the last guys out warming up for this under-bodied team go flying in for dunks and layups. This late in the season on this forgone a franchise the warmup process really doesn’t count beyond the movements for the body. Warm the tendons, work the muscles. Walker treats each of his shots as a small ritual.

How the habit steels him, I wonder, watching at the baseline.

Lonnie Walker breathing in sequence to his shooting motions. Square up, deep breath, lift, shoot, exhale. Body as instrument and metronome.

The vulnerability of Lonnie Walker, something delicate swimming just below the surface and flashing like a fish darting through sun. Square up, shoulders back, a painstaking patience, awareness of how hard it’s been to get here. In all the usual ways and then, skipped overseas. In all the usual ways and before them, childhood abuse that preyed on how vulnerable, how trusting of family meant to keep him safe.

Two palms on the ball, bend knees, lift, jump, release at the apex.

The first time I ever spoke with Walker, January 2020 in the visitors locker room at Scotiabank Arena in Toronto. Almost exactly a year earlier he’d made his NBA debut in the same building.

Lonnie Walker in a beautiful, fire engine red letterman jacket made of wool that felt soft just to look at. His guard up when I approached, his shoulders tense. I asked him about his dogs, one a big brindle mastiff. Zola. Flash under the surface, he brightened. We quit treading water and found our footing.

A few moments later, an arm from behind reaching over one of my shoulders to touch Walker’s jacket. Gregg Popovich, fingers glancing the metal then gently thumbing the jacket’s collar in admiration. You gotta take me shopping, Popovich said, I think I’d look good in that. He did a low whistle.

Lonnie Walker, for a few seconds, face shining in the focus of soft attention.

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It’s hard to say why you end up rooting for the athletes you do. Less the big, bounding stars than the zippy in-betweeners, the jack of all tradespeople, the very hopeful or very persistent, the people who occasionally make it look as difficult as it is. The ones who tend to make their teams work.

What’s become clearest to me covering basketball and the athletes who play it, at every level, is my lasting interest forms in kindness. Not from kindness, not in acts of it that specifically impact me, but tuning to a person’s frequency and finding notes of curiosity, patience, courtesy, gentleness, shyness, hesitation — signs of kindness.

The signs tend to come in the quieter times around the main event (games) and the supplemental stuff (their lives). Buffer stretches. The convenient if occasionally frustrating thing with writing about basketball and the people who play it, it’s the buffer stretches you often get the most of.

Talking with athletes, walking with them, watching them in their routines when the arenas are empty save for the smattering of a few idle eyeballs versus the press of one giant, collective gaze. Chatting over the phone, through screens, while they’re driving, sitting in their cars, waiting to travel, or briefly at home; triangulating to the muffled auditory hints of their environment overlapping my own. Seeing them in the liminal spaces of their public personas like tunnels and locker rooms, pre and post game.

It’s all still observation, and unlike it would be with actual strangers there’s a voyeurism to it. An awareness that you’ve watched them and know about them, that this can never quite be a from-scratch conservation. A voyeurism worth being aware of but also worth breaking away from.

It’s all still observation but it comes closer. Proximally, to hear the hitch of someone’s breath, make eye contact, see a brow furrow or a flash of understanding suddenly bolt across a person’s face. Familiarly, to elicit a laugh, an excited interruption, a considered pause, a change of heart, a dap, a thanks.

Kindness is not a metric or component considered crucial to competition, a competitor’s drive, but I can better pull from my mental catalogue the sunny burst of someone’s laugh, or the pause they took to really consider a question, than their true shooting percentage when pressed. Those details enrich my work much more than stats, and I believe the root of them infuses the on-court work of the athlete too.

The kindness that persists through competition’s ruthless catabolism has been tested, same as any other quality. Kindness that hasn’t been hardened or lessened, but concentrated. That remains, wholly and perhaps in spite of itself, intact.

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Lonnie Walker checks in at the start of the first quarter. Up in the media gondola, I cheer.

The game seems trivial, stakeless, people say it around the tunnels before it starts. For both teams it’s a kind of binary — a win or loss toward a tally column, toward a tank. The crowd has a manic energy, excited to be there, intrigued by the eccentric rosters injuries and a long season have forced at either end of the floor. For these players though, there’s nothing trivial, no futility. Every minute, for a group of athletes either undrafted, on two-ways or, like Walker, fresh from playing for a Lithuanian club for the last five months, is a test. A never-ending audition. The name of the show is to stay healthy and to stay here.

Less than 20 seconds into play, Walker lifts for a dunk, starts to fall.

When an athlete falls in a game, especially from or during the action of shooting, it looks unnatural. Like gravity is grabbing them wrong. A sunk feeling in the gut, watching. The eye snags on the lurch of limbs out of sequence, a body suddenly jolting, recognizing it isn’t where it’s meant to be.

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There’s a five-tiered Japanese pagoda in Reading, Pennsylvania, the city where Lonnie Walker grew up.

Built in 1907 by William Abbott Witman Sr., it was meant to be part of a luxury resort but Witman’s application for a liquor license was rejected and the project abandoned, the pagoda and the land donated to the city.

Witman built it because a friend had shown him a photo of Nagoya Castle, and because people in Reading had started to complain to him how ugly the quarry was that he’d originally bought the land to dig. The one historic element in the pagoda is its bell. Cast in Obata, Japan in 1739, the bell came with a written history and instructions but both were lost on arrival.

I think of Walker growing up and catching glimpses of the pagoda, high on its hill in the woods east of the city. For the most part, landmarks fade into the periphery of a place when you live there, but can still on occasion catch you out. Stall you in the history and strangeness of their existence. In the 1960s, Reading wreathed the pagoda’s tiered eaves in red neon lights, so whether dusk, drizzle, or bleak grey winter dawn, it would’ve been there, glowing.

Japan probably seemed far away as the moon to Walker. Landing on the moon was how Walker (IV) and his dad, Walker (III) joked about making it to the NBA. As a freshman at the University of Miami, right before he was drafted into the NBA, Walker recalled, “You’re like ‘Oh, I’m going to get to the moon. You best believe I’m going to get there.’”

For his dad, who’d raised Walker as a single parent, the reference feels like the kind of coded familial joke able to express hope and humility in one go. Reading was then as it is now one of the lowest income cities in the U.S. so from their perspective, Walker III working multiple jobs, drilling his son to read and write at least an hour every day and Walker IV, drilling a basketball with a neon red pagoda looming otherworldly in the hills, why not the moon?

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Lonnie Walker, yanked down to earth.

He hits the floor hard and all at once with the entire plane of his back. His head bounces forward — chin to chest — with the impact and then snaps back against the court, harder. On the ground, amid a tangle of legs, Walker’s arms curl protectively in. The same hand he let hang after making his warmup shots now moves to cradle his head.

Slowly, slowly, he rolls to his side and then, perhaps because the floor is rearing up, the arena swirling to a dizzying vortex beyond it, rolls to his stomach. The crowd, seconds before frenetic, stills.

Much later, when I watch a replay on the train home, what I’ll get stuck on is how Walker seemed to be speaking. Lips moving inches from the court. Some steady-handed camera operator found a gap between Walker’s propped elbow and his hands, tented against his forehead, and zoomed.

Maybe it was prayer, maybe Walker was tentatively testing that he could form whispered words. I’m going to the moon. The camera pan so close that it caught a skein of saliva stretching between his lips.

In the moment, I dart my attention between Walker on the floor and the Sixers bench, a pang in my gut wondering whether the reaction might’ve been more urgent, whether Nick Nurse would have made the dozen more steps over, had this been someone they’d had with them all season. Someone “permanent”.

I go back to Walker’s warmup motions and think how reflexive, but how separate. It was only his 10th game with the Sixers. His body might know the motions but the routine, its tics and rules, are different every place. I will kindness right then to be reflexive, to come from the gut.

Square up, shoulders back.

Lonnie Walker, helped up by his teammates who, given the o-k to respond, fall into habit around him. Offer their hands and arms and steadying touches. Someone drapes a towel around his neck. Walker takes one shaky step into one steadier. Head swimming but hopefully recognizing under the lambent glare of arena lights that he’s on the moon again. That it’s back where it belongs, under his feet.