Rip the recency blinders off

The return of John Wall and the short-sightedness of basketball's collective memory.

Is there better proof of recency blinders in the NBA than John Wall? I don’t mean quality of play, or volume of play, I don’t really mean any kind of play at all. What I mean is remembering a person.

There’s an injury grace period that coincides with the jogging of memory. That is, how good that person was right up until they got hurt determining how long on the other side of an injury the collective monolith of basketball will still bring their names up, 1. In high regard (tones inclusive of sympathy, respect, support), tapering to, 2. Any regard (tones inclusive mainly of wistfulness) to, 3. Still saying the name out loud.

Memory, in sports, reduces down to math, and the math of memory in sports is reductive.

Wall took his first step toward vanishing on his left heel, undergoing season-ending surgery on it in January 2019, not even halfway through a season where he was averaging 20 points and nearly nine assists per game. A season where he passed Washington legend Wes Unseld on the team’s all-time scoring list and put down 40 points against the Lakers on a random Sunday in December. Fast forward on that left foot, the same one Wall would develop an infection in the initial incision meant to repair it so bad that the foot almost had to be amputated, and it led in the next step toward his perceived oblivion when he fell, at home, and ruptured his Achilles. It was the same leg and it makes me think of all the times I have placed a wrong foot in trying to be protective of something tender and instead ended up making it worse. For Wall, think of how raw still or just the memory of a festering wound on that foot would be, coming down on it in sickly slow motion, slipping, bending wrong, feeling another part of the same leg explode. Think of the knowledge rising out of that thunderclap of immediate pain, whether then or later, lying there in the hospital, of just how much time there was now layered on top of that worst first foot forward.

Wall was out for 12 months as of February 2019 — think of what happened a year later. Wall was gearing up to return as the whole world shut down.

He didn’t go to the Bubble with the Wizards, couldn’t have known the last steps he’d take on the floor in D.C. would be Boxing Day, 2018. The next time Wall saw the floor again it was set down on the sinking back of Gulf coastal plain.

Houston is home to an estimated 300 active faults, none of which have been active-active since the city was founded, but none that have been counted out to rear up and rend the ground apart again some time in the future. Unsteady footing, in other words. Strange terrain.

Remember when Wall didn’t play for the Rockets? Maybe the better question is remember why? After an initial season where he played 40 games and averaged the same 20 points per he was the last time he’d played basketball, Wall and the franchise reached “an agreement” that he would not play at all during Houston’s 2021-2022 season. And how did that go, for Houston, do we still remember that?

It baffled me at the time, that Houston wouldn’t have him. More than that, didn’t seem to want him or understand how they very much needed him. The Rockets were a raw, explosive mess and here was a person whose game has always been, at its molten core, frank. Earnest, exacting, at times a little unyielding, but always bold, blunt, impeccably direct. When handling a live wire, or a raw nerve, it strikes me the last thing you’d want on were kid gloves. You want real gloves and better still, expert hands in them. But yes, sure, Houston politely asked Wall not to take a backseat, but no seat, concerned, ostensibly, with his age rubbing off on all that green, unpracticed, unproved, underdeveloped potential.

Knowing now because of what Wall himself very bravely shared this past summer, maybe it had something to do with the place Wall was in, the losses that had kept on piling up for him, all compounding back to that left foot. For everything we know in basketball, no matter how close we brush up against it or ask it outright to answer for in tunnels, there are the myriad conversations we’ll never know, the more myriad emotions behind them. But it still bothers me, what the Rockets did, because it made Wall’s disappearance complete. There was no ethereality to it, no nuance, it was just one day we understood, very well and very vividly, how excellent an athlete and commanding a presence on court Wall was, and the next it was like we had never heard of him at all. What the Rockets did was almost an effective revision of the nine seasons that came before, the five All-Star trips, all the way back to Wall as a lanky 20-year-old in triple pinstripes (long grey suit, baby blue button up, diagonally striped tie) shaking David Stern’s hand.

I asked, at first out loud and of many people, “Where’s John Wall?” I changed my tack and started asking, “But why isn’t he playing?” I kept asking but eventually, nobody really knowing, I was muttering it to myself through a season still largely going off the rails. A season going through the motions. After a while it was like whispering reminders or encouragements to yourself, some you tuck away and others that dissolve midair, a dialogue of 1:1.

“I’M BACK!” Wall is screaming, it seems like, to punctuate every whistle, each transition, every made shot and downhill drive at the Rico Hines runs this past August. These were 1:1 dialogues too but they came booming, full-body, the rough roar of Wall’s voice mid-scrimmage roiling with presence and heat and entirely corporal. He was announcing himself to himself, over doubts and the people and time stolen from him, but he was, by virtue of us disappearing him, also telling us. It’s impossible to watch Wall in that handheld, jerky footage, throwing his body through anyone that gets in front of him and not lean a little bit forward, bunch your hands, press your feet to the floor and feel your spine shift a little straighter. You are, watching him, underscoring your own physical presence, the very physicality of yourself, same as he is. Wall is a running, hollering, behind-the-back passing, taunting, bullying embodiment of practicing mindfulness but instead of sitting and focusing on your breath moving in and up from your lungs, or the way sun feels against your face, he is bringing that mindfulness to you, direct.

Watching the clips that trickled out of UCLA and watching Wall this season shouldn’t be a reforming in real-time, but it is. Shouldn’t be, because as we intellectually understand Wall did not go anywhere, but is, because it’s not enough to be endlessly enthralling and live within NBA collective memory, because NBA collective memory wants only to be in thrall. In service to and abiding by the singular force du jour.

A part of me wonders if the storylines getting so singular in any given stretch of the season is because of how laser focused it was to be at work in, or a fan of, the NBA the last few seasons. To exist on zoom for scrums and interviews, to lose eye contact and the small motions between two bodies in conversation, even the larger temperature of a room as you walk into it. For fandom, I have a harder time understanding the desire to limit so explicitly the amount of potential joy coming at you any given day the more athletes you watch and actively root for, instead of insisting on the collectively considered “best”, right then. It could be an attention thing, we know that’s gone to shreds, or a deeper guarding of time and reward, whatever it is, Wall was tangled in the current of all this and yanked out of public consciousness on its back.

I don’t want to lose somebody like Wall again — or even hear it considered that someone like him couldn’t “come back” — to an idiot math contingent on counting people out. I want to rip the recency blinders off. Basketball is a game of the body in totality, so why can’t our collective memory for it be the same? A full-body remembrance, fleshy and somatic, delighting in the force of its proclamations, be them people propelling nightly through space or someone in a packed gym with each pair of eyes already trained on their every move, yelling, “I’M BACK!” Announcing themselves as here and solid and stuck in our heads in no uncertain terms, and what we could learn from sometimes, for no reason other than the pure physical pleasure of it, screaming the same.