Peace from power

Diana Taurasi hasn’t retired yet, but for 20 years she’s made space for herself as a menace. A pantheon.

We’re sitting in the Metro parking lot at Kennedy Commons, eating cold, pre-made, end-of-day-discounted sandwiches we picked up at the deli counter inside. We just dropped the pets at my parents place and ate petit four cheesecakes my mom picked up to celebrate our birthdays early. When we wouldn’t take a drink my dad began offering us a strange assorted selection he named as his eyes roved over them real-time in the fridge — orange juice, tonic water — finally foisting a fizzy cran-raspberry water on Dylan. My mom soon kicks us out, saying, sorry but if you have to get to the store you should go.

Walking down the path from the front door, after hugs goodbye, I hear my dad shout ARRIVEDERCI! from behind the front door my mom has started to close. He throws it open and says it again.

The grocery store parking lot is sparse, huffing my breath into the air so it faintly glows under the stadium-bright blue-white lights of the lot as we cross back to the car makes it feel sparser. Fall always seemed to creep in closer in Scarborough, the suburbs — the space, the trees, the less interrupted sky, the quiet even here, watching cars wind down from the highway and spill onto the six-lane tangle of Kennedy Road and its comforting sprawl of discount furniture and electronic stores, strip-mall restaurants, and a giant aquarium outlet going strong since I was a kid.

I take a bite of a sweet gherkin slice, so far the only thing jarring about cold roast beef on an stale onion bun. Dylan finishes his pastrami on marble rye. We both laugh. Isn’t this funny, Dylan starts. Yes, I say.

In a little over 24-hours we’ll be in Rome.

This is my ancient civilization, I say to Dylan, nodding through the windshield at the lot. Maybe they’ll dig up the old AMC and Metro 1,000 years from now, he agrees. I look up and let my eyes lose focus over the glowing red of the grocery store’s letters. My pantheon, I whisper.

I’ve been thinking about Diana Taurasi since she may or may not have played her last professional basketball game two weeks ago. Untrue. I think about Diana Taurasi unbidden, mainly because to me she’s the perfect basketball player, perfect athlete. Less a villain than a menace, just chaotic enough, possessing an inherent knack for recklessness and when to deploy it, confident as anything.

While the space to embrace these qualities, for women athletes, is still a tenuous one, still very capable of making many, many people uncomfortable, there’d barely be room for a toehold in that space if it wasn’t for Taurasi (and Lisa Leslie, and Tamika Catchings, and Swin Cash, and Dawn Staley). She plays tough, relentless — I mean you watch the regular W season, certainly the playoffs, and this is the baseline of competition now — but the joy Taurasi does it with, like delight with teeth.

Unapologetic. That’s the word that gets lobbed around a lot with athletes controlling the space they’re working in. There can be an undertone to the word, a suggestion that there was anything to be apologetic, perhaps shameful about, in the first place. I feel the hairs on the back of my neck raise when I hear it used to describe women plainly owning space, but this is all irrelevant with Taurasi — there is no inch of remorse to her, which is probably what makes people so mad.

I think there’s an assumption with athlete who play it rough, who smirk and snarl around, that they’re somehow less serious than their stoic league- and teammates. That they don’t have their heads in the game. Watching Taurasi, I’m not sure how one could ever arrive at that judgement, given how she in turn watches the floor. Not like she’s decoding it, or looking for the next gap to blow through or open patch of court to pull up and shoot from, but like she’s already done the move she’s about to make and is doing a light jog down the floor, waiting for everyone else to catch up in transition. It isn’t visualization, not some woo-woo self-help tactic, because the ease in her body is the kind that comes through practice. When you’ve played for 20 seasons, everything is muscle memory, sure, but Taurasi’s confidence is the whetstone her skill continually sharpens against. Time hasn’t blunted a thing.

On the note of Taurasi’s solemnity, the capacity for depth that can get discounted — and doubly for women — for athletes who are visually and bodily expressive, there’s an excellent 30 for 30 episode on her and Sue Bird’s time playing in Russia, for Spartak, that upends the trope. It was early in Taurasi’s career, just two years in, she was recruited by the wealthy, little shadowy, and very gregarious Shabtai Kalmanovich, who’d bought the team after becoming enamoured with women’s basketball. He wanted the very best, so he went out and offered Taurasi and Bird more money than they’d ever made overseas, certainly in the W. Spartak won four Euroleague championships and Taurasi, Bird, and their teammates had an almost familial relationship with Kalmanovich.

I’ll give away the episode, it’s still worth listening to and this information is now public knowledge, but Kalmanovich was KGB affiliated and gunned down in his car in Moscow in 2009. Taurasi describes being so shocked when the team was told the news that she sat in silence for hours and then, when the team’s driver offered to bring her home, they drove by the scene of the hit where everything was still untouched, including Kalmanovich. She describes Kalmanovich’s lifeless body, slumped forward, his belly resting against the footrest of the car.

There was a giant funeral, almost a state affair, Taurasi was still reeling. Kalmanovich’s widow, the Russian basketball star Anna Arkhipova, told Taurasi she was free to leave the team and exit her contract but Taurasi refused, saying she’d close out the season for free. Bird did too.

“There was just something like I couldn’t leave. I just couldn’t leave. I couldn’t leave. I had this responsibility to him and his family. I just couldn’t leave,” Taurasi said.

That team was just so fucking edgy. Like there was anger about us when we played. And usually when you play angry things don’t work out well, but for whatever reason this sadness and this anger and this just unknown feeling of what can we do to make this better. That was our only solution.

Spartak went on to play hellbent, beating their rivals Ekat (including Candace Parker) and winning the Euroleague. Taurasi credits Kalmanovich’s passion, belief and financial invest in women’s basketball that in many ways, facilitated her own trajectory of success, “He made everything bigger than life. And at the time women’s basketball needed someone to make it bigger than life.”

Taurasi never needed to experience loss in the wider world to lend to any of her personal gravitas or professional prowess, but I do find myself thinking of that episode often, and Taurasi’s voice in it. Searching, frank, tender, like thinking back scrapes the memory anew. How her sadness and anger coalesced through the blunt instrument of her skill, her body, the two in perfect balance. How this brought release, brought wins, but also brought her a measure of peace. Peace wouldn’t be the word you’d first associate with Taurasi, going gleeful, pushing, shoving, gunning down the floor, but peace is in her limbs, the muscles trusting the motion, and behind them her swiftly calculating brain. Peace from power, its abundance and pleasure.

There are so many photos of Taurasi where she is captured in a pose that has previously been captured by antiquity. Goddesses, emperors, conquerors, striding forth with stern resolve to battle or standing with wan confidence over what they’ve won. Taurasi points, arm stretched somehow longer and more steadily than her peers, and she’s Caesar; she wings her biceps out and suddenly she’s Diana, is Diana already but now, Roman goddess of the hunt.

My pantheon, I can practically hear myself whisper.