Occam’s translator

The push-pull of vulnerability, posterization, and embracing what you don't know.

Vulnerability, I think about it a lot.

Probably because for most of my life I’ve been in a cold war with the concept. To be vulnerable to life is the ideal, right? To be open and receptive, taking bad with the good, not willfully shrinking your world out of hurt or fear or convenience. To be vulnerable to life means being vulnerable in life, but being vulnerable, the act and expectation and result of it, is trickier.

The world, for all the ways we’ve set it up to work, requires vulnerable people. Vulnerable in this sense means people who are struggling — financially, mentally, personally, emotionally — who become more affected by, or are hoisted into, the margins. Living in late capitalism means vulnerable people shoulder much of the work, because everything up to now has defined success as doing whatever it takes to escape vulnerability, to scramble and scrape to the top.

There aren’t the same kinds of accolades for performing and perfecting vulnerability the same as there are for effectively crushing it. Triumph, we’re told, is getting to a place where we’re not vulnerable to anything. Delusional, obviously, when you look at climate change and major weather events stacking year over year, but we’ve lived this way for so long that it’s still possible to see a person or dozens of houses or a whole town get washed away and call it “an awful lot of rain”.

At a very, very micro level, my own difficulties with vulnerability have come out of wanting and finding it necessary to reject its tropes for women — being sensitive above all else, a softness required for care, caring for others over oneself all of the time, being secondary by default — while wanting and finding it necessary to reclaim them for myself. While I definitely do think there is something worthwhile in being, down certain stretches of life, radically soft, I’ve also come to understand better and wrestle less constantly with the hyper-sensitive animal in me (ironically this has not made me much better in recognizing it and befriending it in other people, but I’m getting there).

To be aware of your own emotions all of the time is exhausting, to be buffeted by them incessantly even worse. To live like that doesn’t actually leave a lot of room for life, for the rough and tenuous and very small and beautiful parts of it you’re supposed to be making yourself vulnerable to. I can look back at the most recent situations or events I’ve struggled in and see where I was in thrall to my feelings, wildly vulnerable, almost in prostration, while at the same time shutting out what else was going on and what got me there. Warping vulnerability, at least the better informed version of it.

I can only be myself, etc. Yes. But I can also be better aware of her. Recognize where vulnerability in the moment is not going to help me or anybody else out. Where the world, so long as it’s in this version of our image, is going to run me over without a backward glance. At the same time be able to take chances with vulnerability when toughness or bravery is required, to not ask or say the easiest thing but probe, push, go against the grain; try my best to move forward without already having considered the outcome.

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There’s a level of vulnerability in all levels of basketball, even down to its basic premise of people putting their lightly clad bodies out there to run and chase and jump and leave the ground only to quickly come crashing back down to it. There’s a vulnerability in impossible shots, though the people who are so good at them make you forget it and we love them for it. There’s vulnerability at being on the record, pregame for saying out loud your intentions, postgame for trying to explain what happened. There’s vulnerability in fumbled passes, missing signals, botching plays, transition sequences seem to me outright scrambles of vulnerability when no one is set yet and everyone is stuck between what’s just happened and what can and is going to. There’s vulnerability in dunks, without a doubt. To trust your body to launch you with force toward something unyielding, to trust that you’ll get the timing right to ride physics out so the ball is gulped down by the net instead of one element going fractionally wrong — the ball hits rim, a wrist or a forearm or an elbow hits rim, face hits rim — and the whole thing exploding spectacularly in your face.

The most vulnerable, though, is in blocking dunks.

The only reason blocking dunks is less of a thing is because it happens so infrequently, and it happens so infrequently because it’s so hard. Think of all the mechanics of a dunk in motion. Now think of clocking that, plus your own speed and physical placement, how willing you are to be hurt or worse, posterized, and how aware you must be of tangling up with or interrupting the propulsive force of another person and hurting them (especially if they are the kind of person going up for dunks regularly, which means they are probably the kind of person who is a superstar).

I first put a feeling to this phenomena with Haley — or rather she did — for her pick in the Basketball Feelings Feelings Draft, which was vulnerability. She talked about Aron Baynes, at that time and maybe comprehensively and accumulatively still, being the most dunked on person in the history of the NBA. There are entire YouTube compilations about it, and as Haley rightfully pointed out,

Now it’s almost not even about him anymore. It’s transcended him and it’s more of a rite of passage for the person dunking.

Which is vulnerability to a beatific degree.

Haley and I have talked about a lot of things, in life and in basketball, that I end up turning over and coming back to, whether on my own time or because the world heaves them up anew. This I have been thinking about again because of Jakob Poeltl. Specifically, Poeltl under Ja Morant.

First, I’ll say, Morant is an equal opportunity dunker. Even as a general flusterer of opponents, Morant is impartial. He’s so equanimous in these brief sequences of total ego annihilation that beyond targeted malevolence, there is really no sense of recognition at all to the other person. Which is, in many ways, much worse.

But back to Poeltl. The first time this happened to him was nearly a year ago, late last February. With a little over two minutes left in the second quarter, a time in a game where there is so much time left in a game that everyone on the floor is mostly trying to ease their way into halftime to regroup for the rest, Morant accelerates downhill on Poeltl who is just kind of gently loping backward.

Very quickly Poeltl must realize what’s about to happen because he cuts his loping short and stops dead in the paint. Always a bad move, but especially a bad move when you’ve unknowingly set yourself up in perfect posterization form. If this were ballet — and sure, sometimes it is — Poeltl would be a technical savant for resetting to whatever numerical title this position was assigned. Instead, he gets collided with and thrown backwards so hard he winds up flat in front of the stanchion, like a cardboard cutout of himself.

Forward to this week, in an impatient anniversary, Poeltl no longer loping but stutter-stepping sideways in a much tighter space and Morant, zero recognition in his eyes, bearing down on him to the point where Poeltl at the last moment attempts to turn and get out from what will secondarily be under Morant, but alas, it’s too late.

I didn’t watch this game so the first I heard about history repeating itself was a clip of Morant’s postgame being shared around, where he smiles exceptionally cheerfully after saying of Poeltl, “Obviously I guess he ain’t get the memo last time.”

Something I’ve noticed about Morant is that when he says something that can be interpreted as biting — and this is probably because of the hyper awareness it takes and he’s lived with for so long now to be a star at his level in knowing everything you say will be spliced and cut and referenced — he will follow it with something softer, more encompassing. He did it a couple weeks ago in Toronto, when he was asked postgame about Scottie Barnes’ progression this season, and whether he had any insight for a second year guy going through it. Morant paused a beat, clearly thinking, before saying he couldn’t relate, because he had a great second season. And he did, he improved across the board, so it was an honest answer as much as it seemed like him firmly pressing down a definitive stamp of differentiation on his and Barnes’ trajectories. But the air, for a split second, went out of the room. Sensing this, or because he’s a nice person, or both, Morant told everyone as he walked out that Barnes would be alright, that he’d figure it out. That he’d be special.

Morant did the same thing in his postgame this week. An exhaled breath after he mentioned the memo Poeltl missed and Morant smiles, looks out over the floor, then gently interrupts Rob Fischer to say, “Nah, he’s a great shot blocker. So I knew if I went to lay it up he would’ve blocked the shit out of me.”

The fundamentality of Poeltl’s game makes me feel like his being dunked on is less willful attempt to chase down or reverse what’s already in motion, than being in the place he knows he’s supposed to be. Both times he looked a bit bewildered, but never shocked. But even in that rote, utilitarian sense there’s still a vulnerability in essentially saying, What’s about to happen is just part of my job.

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The job of basketball can be a weird one. And I mean my job, of talking about and around it. There is the implication that to do so with authority you’ve got to come into it already knowing everything. That’s obviously two-fold for women. This is changing, slowly, but one of the ways in which I’ve seen it shift best is seeing people in the business of it stay excited, surprised, curious, willing to change their minds — vulnerable.

For the next Basketball Feelings podcast, which I’ll half spoil without giving the guest away, the person I had on talked about getting to a point in their work where they realized how much they didn’t know. I had asked how and when their eye changed, as in how they saw the game and how it informed their work about it. For them, when their work got expansive, more honest, and to them, much better, was when they were willing to embrace what they didn’t know without it being seen as a fault or a strike against their authority. Because of course there is so much we don’t know, even in the tiny and hyper specific microcosm of basketball. Even down to the fundamental mechanics, which are changing all the time and faster than ever, there are weird little mysteries. None of this to mention plays or scheme lineage, skill trees, athletic capabilities, and an overwhelming universe of personal stories.

We both agreed how incredible it feels to get to, and tried to explain, the point in an interview when you feel that magic click with someone. You’ve been speaking the same language but all of a sudden, however many minutes in, you are full-throttle in communion. It’s tricky to pinpoint because different people will let their guards go for different reasons, maybe it’s with stats, or a personal story, or having them walk through a move as it happened, but for their guard to go yours has to, too. Vulnerability becomes necessity, you don’t get there without it. Occam’s translator.