Remembering, better

Aron Baynes and our collective attention.

Aron Baynes made me a bad person.

See, I wanted him to play better basketball, to be better at this nebulous thing so simply defined as his “job”, and also, in the back of my mind, I resented him for making me feel the way about him I’d rejected for so long in my fandom, almost as a moral code. Seeing a basketball player as more than the conditional, ultimately doomed dichotomy of good or bad.

The dichotomy relies on the unflinching ability of flattening people into — language I try hard in my work-work and here to avoid, but there’s not a very good and specific enough substitute yet — “players”. Skips even the arduous implications of “athlete”. When people exist as a position, part of a performative whole, then judgements like good, bad, middling, inefficient, can settle. Easier to blanket a body than a face.

Where I stood was worse. I knew the arbitrary judgements I was assigning to Baynes stripped him of present circumstance (Tampa, a team reeling) and past team climate (surrounded by ready, volume-driven shooters in Phoenix; shooters and another, even more menacing centre in Boston), but I passed them, and played incredulous, anyway.

Frustrations bloomed like algae in stagnant water last season. Trickled past the fans, the front office, into the heads of the guys living it. On the floor you’d watch them watch Baynes ding a rebound, completely wreck a pass — things basketball players do literally all of the time — and Kyle Lowry or Fred VanVleet tense, maybe let slip a quick grimace, a clenched fist, get over it, and get asked about it after every game. Was it a symptom of something greater? Of course. Could anything be done about it? Not really. It always would have been easier to blame the guy who seemed to have two wrong feet he kept getting off on, but to those guys credit, I never heard them say his name with anything other than understanding.

I was smug, very smug, in my self assurances. This was the role-player the front office decided would best fit the Marc Gasol, Serge Ibaka-sized craters in the lineup? Were his hands even capable of closing, I crowed. Yes, Baynes made me a traitor to my own sensibilities and I had the self-awareness to be mad about it, but not the perspective to see how that was so much worse.

When I think back on it, as a Raptor, Baynes was alone, a lot of the time.

If you’ve spent any time in any hospital, you understand how disorienting they can be. Even the ones in a country you know, pulsing in the language you speak, with people or at least one person around you to push that language to its limits when it comes time to advocate for you. Or, when you’ve had to be the one advocating.

When I read about Baynes waking up in a Tokyo hospital, the masked faces of nurses probably coming to crowd his clarifying vision, I thought of the hospital rooms I’ve woken in, or sat beside a bed in, and how they could have been anywhere. Even the rooms with windows, the view is of another part of the hospital, a parking lot, a service road, or a nondescript clump of green space scattershot with a couple benches and hospital staff, zoning out, on their breaks. Any view underscores that everything within the short distance you can see circles back to the hospital.

How quickly you come to be transported, to forget the life you just left outside the sliding or revolving doors, if you had the luck to arrive by your own power.

To wake up in a hospital is different.

I’ve woken up in the roar of an MRI machine, on a gurney having my forehead, numb, prodded and tugged at with a scalpel and sutures like it was an extension the doctor didn’t seem aware I was attached to until I managed a raspy, “Hi”. Those were both the same visit, but for each, plus the times I’d doze and be roused (head injury), I had to trace the ceiling, the walls, whatever surroundings I could see without moving my head for mental markers to determine place, time, and then, with those shored up, the state of myself.

Baynes waking alone, again and again, without language, in a room he said was so small he could’ve touched the walls if he had the power to put his arms out, the only constant to latch onto, as he recalled, wave after wave of searing pain, is a gamut of most every horror available to a person. Physical, psychic, isolative, reductive, the sense of being sawed, in a way you can’t even remember, out of your own life.

The fresh horror that cropped up, for me, from the ESPN story was why did it take so long to hear about this? Baynes’ privacy, his family’s privacy, that was first and obvious, but that his absence, any whispers of the hows or whys of it, didn’t surface before this. This isn’t a complaint or criticism against access, who has it or that we need more of it in order to probe into people’s lives, but it is an open-ended lament over how we handle the burden of collective memory in sports. Or more accurately, how we don’t, that we shrug it off, tend not to consider carrying it at all.

The clipped and rhythmic quality to a pro sport’s season is one reason. That our interest and time is so neatly summoned in increments we can essentially clock in and out of. We stretch this, of course, talking about and around games and athletes, but even these never-ending dialogues are primarily concerned with what’s current, or what might shape the next current thing. There’s very little room, if you want social traction or plaudits as a conversation starter, for diversion into what isn’t, right then, being gnawed down to the quick.

(And I understand the irony in this, me writing about Baynes, about the amnesia for guys like Baynes, because a big and awful and newsworthy story about Baynes just happened.)

Information begetting more of the same information forces us into lockstep. While what’s ongoing with Ben Simmons and the Sixers is by no means parallel with what happened to Baynes, the only things we’ve heard about that entire situation tend to “leak” out in trade talks, because trade talks get traction. What I would be more interested in learning and talking about would be the enshrinement of Daryl Morey by the franchise, how Simmons is spending his time away, really just the long and regular stretches of his days, and how absolutely bizarre it is what’s happening. Is it lack of interest that revs psychic bulldozing? Or is it symptomatic of something deeper and worse, that our attention best fits in a span and pattern so short it urges us, like a favourite song, into repetition as comfort. And that the clean slate of each day exists that way for a brief and tremulous hour or two before the day’s big story, even if it’s just an updated version of yesterday’s, settles down on us like a welcome amnesia.

I can’t tell if the Baynes story would seem less pointed, less cruel, less so totally lonely, if it weren’t for the effervescent production of All-Star voting results coming out on the same day. The overblown indignation about who got picked as a starter and who was left off, as if any of it was ever, any year, a surprise. How it does still mean a lot to the people who get picked, stings to the people who don’t, but how they all still carry on in such close quarters, side by side, jostling and diving for the same ball and clapping each other on the back, on the outs of All-Star or in it, but still in the same overarching universe, all together.

I think of the heartbreaking, which I think was supposed to read as hopeful, end of the Brian Windhorst story, where Baynes talks about watching this season, its heightened physicality, home now in Australia.

“It looks so much more fun now,” he says, “That's how I grew up playing and I really want to get back to it.”

There is so much distance in that quote, for me. Which makes sense when you think about how physically far he was, still potentially is, from playing again, how fast the NBA hurtles itself ahead each season — another factor against our remembering, better — and then just visually, picturing Baynes alone watching a primetime NBA game over his lunch, the next day in Australia. Midsummer, Brisbane (I think), the city and big river glinting in the heat. Jacaranda trees that frothed purple through October now spent, paperbark trees peeling in the humidity, lorikeets and kookaburras sitting up in the canopies dazed, eyes half-lidded and feathers puffed out for relief. It’s home, for him, but he hadn’t seen it in its swelling season, squinting up at a big, hazy sun through the dripping fronds of towering king palms, for years now. He can go to the ocean, watch the whales bump around Moreton Bay, or up to the mountains ringing the city (Mermaid, Tempest, Moon), but every measured step he’s taking now is in service to the hope of leaving. Getting back to a league and the people around it (me, included) who gradually, but assuredly, winked him from memory.

Aron Baynes made me a bad person, but I can be better in remembering that.