There was a question I wanted to ask Kyle Lowry at his retirement presser in Toronto yesterday, but couldn’t quite pin the framing down far enough to start. It was about softness. How in his nine seasons with the team Lowry’s softness seemed to deepen, grow more complex and palpable.
It showed up in the way he talked with and about the teammates he became a veteran for — Pascal Siakam, Fred VanVleet, OG Anunoby — calling them “beloved,” being open and demonstrative about his pride in them. It showed up physically too, that team was so quick with touch: quick touches subbing in or out, lingering embraces, playful bops and nudges, arms around each other’s shoulders in huddles, the really big hug. Touch was — I was going to say currency, picturing that team as their own small country, but they were a culture unto themselves, and touch was their language.
There was much made about Lowry’s mercurial nature on arrival in Toronto, his hardheadness up to then framed as a coaching nightmare and locker room killer. He was challenging, can be still, anyone around the team will confirm that and Bobby Webster said as much in his introduction yesterday, but as the seasons stacked in Toronto there was a shift. Some of it was maturation, in his personal life and in the changing dynamics of the team, but the softness that emerged welled up from inside him. It seemed not the other side of the coin to his stubbornness, but a glow that got revealed in all those pummelling and polishing seasons competing and losing and getting better in increments. The shine of the whole coin.
Where did that come from?
That was the essence of the question. Structurally difficult, maybe too much for a retirement presser. But then I am kicking myself a little for not asking, having been on the other side of Lowry’s thoughtfulness and candor, his surprise answers, like in a postgame presser leading up to the 2021 trade deadline where he answered media questions for an hour or more over Zoom (it was deep pandemic, and the Raptors Tampa season) because the consensus was he’d be getting traded (he didn’t, but he did leave Toronto that summer).
Kyle Lowry is my favourite Raptor, my favourite basketball player. In some roundabout way he’s probably the reason why I leaned into writing about basketball at all, having perked up to the teams led by him and DeMar DeRozan, my dormant fandom stretching awake. I know the same is true for other Toronto basketball careers with that duo and those seasons, but the softness Lowry hit along with his stride was so instructive to me. How an athlete could be so tenacious, fearless, a menace, maddening, and still — soft. Tender. Make the conscious choice to dwell there, yield to softness again and again, finding nothing about that mode lessening to competitive instinct. God, I was hooked.
The piece below was the first I wrote when I moved Basketball Feelings to Substack seven years ago, August 2019. Lowry was the only person it made sense to start with. Lowry (number seven) was also the numerical reason I made the big change this past fall (year seven) to turn Basketball Feelings from weekly newsletter to digital magazine.
It’s a snapshot of Lowry at a time I was sure Toronto was going to lose him, in the summer after the team won the title. Like looking at a photo, the details carry back and forward in time — the electrifying title-defence season as close in memory as yesterday’s press conference — flattening it for a minute.
Work changes, we lose places and people, we take detours we never imagined and still, it can all come back in a rush through a gesture, a word, a glimpse. Suddenly hard truths soften, the fact of something deepens. How do you mark the end of a career still going in the memory of millions? Seasons in a blink, finished and immediate. All gone. All there.
It is sheer good fortune to miss somebody long before they leave you.
— Toni Morrison
Lake water’s like silk and your fingers, shears. Slicing through it with the sun dipping past the hilled tree line, the depth of the water where I’m keeping my body still warm. Evening so still the tiny speaker sitting on the dock — twenty, thirty, forty feet back and growing — is as loud as stereo, water bugs skimming out in the wake of my breath. Muscles moving easy, bones clicking when I stretch them smooth past where they’d normally reach. The whole of my skeleton coming loose with the clarity and new-green smell of fresh water made fresher from northern thunderstorms all night and runoff over limestone, marble, moss, lichen covered quartz rock, slate and sandstone — Canadian Shield, the ancient core of the continent.
The limitless feeling of dashing your body again and again into lake water, breaking the surface and hanging a few seconds suspended, snagged at the lowest point of your own velocity before your body catches in the technicality of woozy gravity. Opening your eyes underneath with no burn, cascades of tiny bubbles rising in a veil around your head as your body goes loose and slowly coasts to the surface, browning arms already treading out of habit. A big loon, ten feet away, dives under and you picture its sleek black body cutting underneath you, clean down to the rock shelf, then past that, where even through the clear, sunlit water you can’t see, too dark and too deep.
Kyle Lowry can be silk or the shears depending on the minute, the quarter, the game, the season. Lowry can be the big loon watching from way out, so far you wonder if it’s a smudge on your vision and when you finally see the head turn and place it for living it dives under, gone. Lowry can be the storm that rolls into a clear blue sky without a trace of weather, drenching your dazed ass on the dock, can be the embers that shoot up out of a bonfire the second you tune slightly out to skitter down your cutoffs and brand your butt.
Though I shouldn’t be, like I ought to be used to it by now, the amnesia affect Lowry has on a lot of people surprises me every time. This near self-erasure, where his actions, what he’s given us — a championship — exist about as long as most people’s last medium-good memory. Then, when Lowry pops up a little bit later to reiterate a point that’s long been proven, underscored into oblivion, like he did in Las Vegas with USA Basketball yesterday saying that this Raptors team would still run it back, out come not only the cartoony, thumb jerking cross-body “get a load of this guy” gestures, but outright hostility at the suggestion.
The thing about this Toronto team, this Toronto team exactly, is it always had an expiration date. Even before Kawhi Leonard came along on what felt like a grift where your heart was the price but got handed back to you at the end of everything, the Raptors were working toward their own end. DeRozan was the first piece to go, then Valanciunas, and after that the more subtle threads that kept the whole thing tied together — C.J. Miles, Delon Wright, Jakob Poeltl. In a lot of ways Lowry is the last piece of a championship team pre-Championship title.
In the past five years the Raptors have had 37 playoff wins, putting them third after Golden State and Cleveland, tied with San Antonio. They rank the same for playoff games played, except for that they are not tied with the Spurs. They’ve been consistently getting there. In a league where winning is closer to everything every year, in Toronto it has been the getting there that’s counted. That’s what people don’t grasp who aren’t from here. Climbing the ladder, every season, up and up, or sometimes half as high, but the ache of what it takes to do it. Lowry’s been there for every rung.
The nature of invisible work is that it’s hand over hand. One step quietly to the next. While Lowry has his flares, his outright immolating bursts, what he has been to the team for longer is the quiet, hard work. It is what makes him fallible when put up against the superhero next-gen players like Giannis Antetokounmpo, that his flares come with burnout. But when Lowry disappears, and this is the paradox, it seems he takes his whole entire record with him. He’s got to start anew each time, proving himself to people who have let their memory unspool but forgotten how to trace it back to what is true.
“Close your eyes and swim toward the sun.”
I did as Steph said, twenty years, twenty summers, of knowing someone and you get used to it. We were swimming out from the dock into the wide neck of one lake where it empties into the head of another, the sun nestled exactly between the shoulders of land on either side. Both of us did a slow front crawl.
The feeling of being weightless with someone who knows you like that. Knows your whole body and what it’s been through, how your mind has submerged itself in all of it. You are already weightless with that kind of person on land but in water your outlines stretch and distort, ripple into the other, you take in some of them with the lake water you swallow on every stroke, you merge.
Lowry’s work has been clarifying. Not for him, clearly, but for all it has done to put Toronto up high in the light. All the deluges the franchise has ever faced have first fallen on his back before they could run clear again. Expectation and blame in, hope and pride out, our igneous rock.
He shouldered a team he hardly wanted, then grew into it, leaning hard and heavy, eventually learning to share the load alongside DeRozan and JV, then learning to share, generously, minutes with players he must have had to reconcile he was actively shaping to replace himself with. Pascal Siakam, Fred VanVleet (Lowry in midwestern miniature), OG Anunoby, Norman Powell, a bench to become a core that was a lot like improved upon déjà vu. Him at first rubbing wrong against Serge Ibaka’s hidden grain, something invisible under the sheen of Serge’s later fluidity, a fluidity Lowry proved a better vessel for getting Ibaka into precise placement to detonate whatever looked to dam them up. He let Marc Gasol in after the requisite one time of Marc standing awkwardly by as the team ran through its impromptu aerobic home court introduction, figuring out the best shots to feed him even in the games Gasol looked entirely too full already. Danny Green gave Lowry a chance to hang back and not throw his body so entirely toward the poised shoulders of oncoming charges, though he didn’t always take it.
And Kawhi, well, if I have to be very honest (and I do here, you know that) watching what Lowry did with Leonard, how he opened to him this entire microcosm he’d built, an underdog’s Xanadu that had silently, secretly, inched its way to near-legitimacy, how he handed that over without so much as a second-thought curling palm or reflexive pull-away, I was proud.
Lowry, who for so long was painted a stubborn teammate, if a teammate at all. Who had a hard time distributing the ball let alone due credit, who made all those beautiful, bullish runs right down the middle into the paint when he ought to have just saved himself another big date with a waxed floor and flipped it out to anybody open in the wings, waiting. Lowry who sometimes carried the team too far out into a current that took them under rather than regrouping, who was passed on over and over because he played somewhere a little more north than the broadcast rights could go, who saw, I’m sure, how this city will run a dark horse to death but showed up in those silks anyway.
Nights are as deep. Stars hardly waiting to knock you over the head. Swaths of the Milky Way scattered through all the recognizable constellations like road salt and planets bursting through solid and steady. Across the lake there are dots of other bonfires doing delayed call and return crack and pop to your own. There are nights here in winter when wolves can be heard howling over the lake ice cracking. Deep splits way down, the boom of their breaking apart thrumming up the channel like artillery. But in the summer the wolves travel farther north, up through Algonquin, leaving the lake to the loons and hissing packs of otters lurking in the cedars overhanging the cliffed banks, the wooded hills to deer and occasional cow moose and their alien calves, tall as baby birches and just as jiggly.
Night swims are dark. Nights when you have to light a bonfire to orient yourself to land once you come up out of the water mirroring the overhead patch of galaxy, exactly. Nights like that I’ve laid on my back at the surface and looked, upside-down, for the seam where the water meets the sky and not been able to find it. There’s a seizing in your body when your brain can’t quite make sense of what your eyes are sending back to it. Your breath catches and you don’t realize how long you’ve been holding it until the sound of it, usually amplified in yours ears half submerged in water, is gone.
Picture the last person you imagined being touched by, if it was deft or fumbling, hesitant or scorched with want. Water only touches you one way. The way you need it to, the way you are expecting. Enveloping, completely, touch to the point where you lose awareness of your body within it.
Even over the accusations of brooding for too long, not long enough, for being too sensitive, for needing to get over the franchise trading his best friend away at a timeline more adjacent to the tendencies of fandom than his own feelings on it — which he always kept respectfully private — Lowry took one look at Leonard and saw the clearest, best, and possibly last road to the top and handed him his franchise.
I’d been trying to describe the smell of the lake in the exact hour the sun starts to swing heavier down to the horizon, very badly, all weekend. At one point snorting back full sinuses worth of water when I hovered too close to the surface and huffed.
Cracking open a whole watermelon on the kitchen counter the evening I got home from up north, the smell of it lifting — sweet, green, wet — hit me so hard I got dizzy. It wasn’t perfect, but the right signals were there, the kind of sensory hit that places you explicitly, inexplicably.
Being able to name all the notes made it seem like something that could be assigned to memory versus what it was: etherial, immediate, desire that’s better for going unnamed until you get it in person again and your whole body shorts out.
All things have seasons. Lives or basketball teams or the players that make that specific one up. Whether or not this is the last season for Kyle Lowry and the Raptors, it is 100% the last of the one we’ve all been looking at, maybe taking for granted, that did the dirty work and got to kiss the sky for a second, battered and bloodied, missing parts of their teeth, thumbs bent like lightning bolts, grinning.
It is the last of this long iteration of all the different Lowrys Toronto has been lucky to have, and this one comes back to us a champion. To take that for granted, to look for reasons to contradict, to split hairs, even to let yourself lazily slip for a second into Toronto indifference is like letting the momentum of a moment that grabs you by both sides of your face and forces you, gently, to watch your luck lit up like when fireworks accidentally go off all at once, pass you by.
Thanks for sharing that first piece, Katie. After getting to watch "Coach" Kyle when he was at Villanova and this past year on the Sixers, your piece really does a remarkable job showcasing his evolution.