Reach out, not in

Compartmentalization as its own refined skill in basketball, and the awful luck of the Orlando Magic.

Beyond dedication and talent, past practice, measured ruthlessness and on-call individualism, there’s another skill we require of athletes. I thought of it earlier this week — urgently, jarringly — watching Cole Anthony watch Jaden Ivey being strapped to a stretcher on the floor in Detroit.

As Anthony stood in the huddle of players, coaches, and equipment managers stretching small towels in an attempt to shield Ivey’s prone body, towels they usually hand athletes subbing out mid-game, I thought how he must be cycling backward. Back through the game’s previous three quarters, the Magic trailing throughout. Back to the end of the 3rd, as he brought the ball up and Ausar Thompson planted himself in front just to reach in and wrench it away, so that the 4th quarter started with Orlando trying to dig in for some added propulsion to close the gap. Back to that split-second choice to dive for a loose ball, to get the tide-turning possession and not seeing Ivey decide the same thing.

Back to the blinders-on rush of his fingers stretching, reaching, tips skimming the pebbled leather surface and Ivey’s, right alongside his own, doing the same. Back to how fast — so fast — his hip somehow collided with Ivey’s knee when, weren’t they just, didn’t they just have their hands hovering hopefully over the same ball?

Back to the moment Anthony looked up, his body still sliding over hardwood, to see Ivey hit the floor inches in front of him and scream.

Maybe, waiting there, the arena gone tomb quiet, Anthony cycled all the way back to Moe Wagner’s injury weeks earlier. When Wagner hopped to pull-up under the basket and his left knee wobbled, gave out. As that arena similarly went shock still and somewhere in the vacuum of quiet Anthony registered that he’d be subbing in for Wagner. This timeline of freak accidents, of cruel eventualities, stretching back and back, from Paolo Banchero’s torn oblique in October being mirrored by Franz Wagner’s in early-December.

Standing there, crying, maybe all of it hitting Anthony at once — where was he meant to put it? The lack of logic for, but the reasoning of, cause and effect that comes hand in hand with competitive action and potential injury? The bad luck that seems to be haunting Orlando this season, now spilling out like a greedy ghost reaching its bony fingers into whatever the team touches? The recognition of time, so much of it now unfurling in front of Ivey in his recovery, and his inadvertent triggering of it?

Compartmentalization.

That’s the other skill, the unnatural but necessary talent we require athletes become adept at. This accelerated construction of fortified, invulnerable mental chambers to shove each setback, or hesitation, injury and ordeal into so they can get on with the game, the season, the career.

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“It broke me a little bit,” Magic coach Jamahl Mosley said of watching Moe Wagner go down. Part of that breaking, he said, was knowing the work Wagner put into this season. Work that had his name being brought up in early Sixth Man of The Year conversations. Part of the breaking came in what losing Wagner would mean for the team — his energy, toughness, his ability to take the gaps of Banchero and his younger brother, Franz Wagner’s absences and fill them in by virtue of his own effort.

It shook him, Mosley added. Ostensibly that it could all be for naught.

I planned to go to the Magic game on Friday night. Planned but failed. The seasonal realities of winter in Toronto have been hitting me hard — mainly the feeling of my body at the end of a light switch, toggled on or off depending on whether the sun shows itself.

I had a sinking feeling in my stomach leading up to the game, then during, even as I watched from my couch. This was being alarmist, I chided. Just because so many bad things have befallen this group doesn’t mean they’ll continue to, even Murphy’s Law has its limits. But then, Jalen Suggs, accelerating into what he planned to be an interception, shouted out in pain and reached one arm to clutch at his back while the other windmilled against gravity, his body crashing to the floor.

As he lay there writhing the game seemed to accordion out, carrying on in slow motion as his teammates and Toronto’s players, in possession of the ball Suggs never stole, kept one eye on the action and the other on Suggs.

Do their heads, I wondered, go to the same dire place as mine, or have they mentally cordoned Suggs off, like little psychic traffic cones were quickly placed around him? Are the physical demands of the game on their bodies enough to make the mental compartmentalization of another potential injury, a hurt friend, a cascade of doubt crashing down on the season like an avalanche, automatic?

Suggs’ teammates gathered around him, bunching up in the same protective knot he was part of weeks ago (and weeks before that, then weeks before that). Anthony is there, pressed close as he can be and then bending deep and low to help lift Suggs to his feet. Suggs screams, his eyes squeezed tightly shut. While they wait for a wheelchair, someone brings a small towel to drape over Suggs’ head.

This too is compartmentalization. At face value it's the hope for privacy and dignity, yes, but it stems from the belief that the audience must not see honest expressions of pain and at the root of that, visible emotion. That this part is what’s too much to witness, not the physical injury itself. That someone else’s strife and grief needs to be cloaked, hidden, made solitary. This as Suggs is literally held up by the hands of his teammates and coaches. Symbolically alone in a sea of support and touch.

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So much of basketball, of sports, exists in tandem with its own delicate ironies and obvious contradictions. Compartmentalization becomes key to watching at all.

At times it’s innocent enough — you root against a person who used to play for your team. Other times it’s difficult — an athlete is accused of committing acts of violence and harm against an intimate partner, their children.

The former’s compartmentalization is involuntary as a shrug, you hardly notice it happening. The latter is uncomfortable. There are some things not meant to be tidy, or neatly squared away.

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In a post-practice scrum before the holidays, Moe Wagner was asked whether he knew, in the moment, that he’d torn his ACL. He says if you go back and watch the sequence, you can see him try to get up and play it off, but he knew something was wrong. He called it “a very slow moment”. That the pain was one thing, but the emotional realization was overwhelming.

He also shared that his family was there, visiting for the holidays, and watched it happen. “It does something, when you see a loved one like that,” Wagner said, “I realize that too. It’s not easy for your mom and parents to see you like that.”

Both illuminate the kind of compartmentalization that briefly takes you outside yourself. Wagner facing, and stalling just a little longer the exact moment of recognition that he’d suffered a season-ending injury, by feigning — even to himself, even in pain — that nothing had happened. Wagner, later, reliving the moment through the eyes of the people who love him, jarring him perhaps out of total compartmentalization and lending a better capability of parsing through the extreme emotions that come from injury. Any injury, but certainly those that are debilitating, immediate, and contactless; where it seems your own body has betrayed you.

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I wanted to go to the Magic game because I wanted to ask Mosley how he was navigating all this compartmentalization, some necessary, some I’m sure that he’s working to help himself and his players back out of the constrictive box of. He was asked something similar after Moe Wagner was hurt, specifically how he handled being responsible for the emotional steadiness of the team, in light of all that’s come down on the Magic this early in their season.

He said that after feeling those first big swells, you had to let go, “You gotta let them go in those moments because we’re in the human being business. We’re in the relationship business.”

What he meant, I think, was that his own emotions had to come second to what Moe Wagner — or Banchero, Franz Wagner, Suggs — was feeling. That his own fear, doubt, panic or worry had to be pushed to the side, set away. He said he was trying to impress the same thing on his players, to let themselves be walloped by the emotional realization of each injury, and then to recognize it was secondary to what the person had to go through. Moe Wagner hinted at it after his injury, when he said he was now focusing on — in an endearing muss up of a common phrase — “Putting my energy on running hill up.”

To be honest, I don’t know that I would have had the stomach to ask him, had I been at the game. It’s one of the challenges in reporting, to ask questions about events unfolding, whether difficult or awkward, in an emotionally nuanced and still direct way. Especially when reporting about people, who at the best of times burst out of the boxes we attempt to sequester them in. Let alone when you’ve just watched that person walk calmly and determinedly toward someone in their care, in agony.

After each of the injuries his players have suffered this season, Mosley’s pressed his team on the urgency of the physical and mental act of wrapping their arms around that person. Lifting them up.

Even if I didn’t ask, in recalling that, the answer to my question was obvious. The act of care is and always has been in direct contrast to the self-protective habit of compartmentalization. You reach out, not in.