Sit proud
A weekend in Dallas for the Women's Final Four, regionality, and the shifting stakes for women's basketball.
Too rude. Too nice. Too showy. Too big (ego). Too big (physically). Too hood. Too ghetto. Not nice enough. Too soft. Too cocky. Classless. Too flashy (personal aesthetics). Not cocky enough. Too flashy (in-game). Boring. Too tough. A bitch. Steals the moment. Not tough enough. Not ready for the moment.
At the Dallas Wings party, on a balcony 33-stories up with a view of the city, talking about the impact geography makes on mentality. Is this too boring? Courtney stops herself mid-sentence to ask me. I assure her, it’s not. I’d asked her what the main difference was, as she saw it, or felt it, between Houston and here. I can still feel the sheen of humidity the air in Houston had, shimmering as it settled on my skin, as the warm, dry wind of Dallas tousles my hair. The prevalence of one while here in the other.
That’s hard, she says. There’s something about flat land, about who your neighbours are here where it’s landlocked and Oklahoma is an hour and a half drive away, versus having the Gulf at your feet and being there at the bottom. She tells me in Texas, when you’re from Dallas, you hold a stiff shoulder to anyone from Houston, but outside the state if you come up on each other you’re all warm relief.
I love a sense of regionality. Of how different cities in the same country or state can feel depending on where they happened to be founded. Then, due to migration and shipping routes and proximity to water and rail and worn dirt tracts. Now, due to preference, family, work, the call a place can have over you. Soon, yes, climate.
I think it’s why I’m always asking the Americans I meet, the last few years mostly through basketball, to tell me about where it is they’re from. I make loose-sketched guesses I keep tucked away like dog-eared or underlined parts in the book of their personality. Notes I keep for myself and feel pleased with when they come to pass, or I can connect those points to things I come to learn or see in them.
My fascination with the States, I know, borne out of travelling across so much of it when I was young. My brother and I each getting a back bench seat in the family minivan as we went through New England, or south to spend annual balmy weeks in Myrtle Beach for March Break, or went all the way to Florida and back, because my dad, a DJ his whole life, couldn’t take summer vacations. That was wedding season, the busiest season. Later, when my dad on something of a tour circuit with a dental conference, my brother and I would go as sullen teenagers to be assistants and hand out giveaway props themed to songs as they were played, e.g. tiaras for “Dancing Queen”, light up devil horn headbands for “Hot In Here”. The crowds, having also travelled to these hotel ballrooms in cities like San Francisco, Las Vegas, from other places, went rabid for them.
I inherited the wrong geographic fixation, maybe. Feel parts of the Canadian Shield laid down in me like bedrock, the bracing to silk smooth lap of Great Lakes water gurgling around my blood, but a fascination, a hangdog longing for the States — the whole big, star-spangled sprawl of it. All those road trips, then my own flitting drops into California, or staring out over the desert, or spending weeks in a pin-prick town in Mississippi banked by burred cotton fields when I was 18, here was land that became formative.
Your own regionality is in you, maybe for good, maybe as something you’ve worked to shed. I’ve always looked at land like a puzzle, what histories get buried or bulldozed, become singular or forgotten. Tics and twangs I can pick up on my own by being somewhere, research or better yet, learn what’s been formative to friends or compelling people. Like a coin I can flip, seeing both sides and then shoving greedy down in my pocket, rich with what it’s told me about place and person.
By the end of the conversation, I have a better sense of the city we’re both looking down on as it winks in the North Texas dark. Jordan bops over to us, so sunny, and I feel aptly, right away: California.
The cheapest ticket left for the sold out NCAA Women’s National Championship game was $466. A cursory Stubhub search showed the cheapest for the men’s game the next day was $54. I tweeted that, just the fact of it. A search result. The scattering of responses once it gained enough momentum reframed the fact of it. The Women’s Championship was in a basketball arena, the men’s is in a football stadium. Someone shared a photo they’d (ostensibly) pulled from the legwork of googling, “view from seat in NRG Stadium” to reply to a stranger.
The point, blunted by ego, insecurity, the urge to override, becomes what it isn’t instead of what it is. What it is: important, necessary, very cool. The point, ironically, made clearer in the proof of asinine pushback: whenever women succeed past something, the stakes will be shifted.
Jonny gives me a ride back to the hotel after I’d spent the afternoon wandering Deep Ellum. His old 4Runner, a comfortable relic. The seats a soft taupe in colour and fabric, worn, the dash a shade darker. He puts on country music. More Texas for you, he smiles.
He grew up in Forth Worth, 30 minutes away and still technically part of the same metropolitan overhang. Dallas, he tells me, has a reputation for being fake. Like, buttoned up? I ask. Arms-length? Just not so exposed and out there as Houston, he says.
We pass the kind of buildings I’ve noticed all weekend, one or two of these boxy brick old saloon style types, hunkered down between blocks that have nothing else on them. Leftover from sometime in the last 182 years of the city, probably closer to the 100 year mark. Downtown, the buildings skew from tan to sandstone in either Gothic or Brutalist, shimmering even in the tentative late-March heat. Looking over my shoulder at downtown from around its edges, it feels so warmly neutral, like a steady hand with a good weight settling against the small of your back, or sinking into a chair that just spent a couple hours baking in the sun. Like the 4Runner’s passenger seat. I arch to it, feel it thrum through, surprising, right to my blood. And all over, spotting them like secrets on lamp posts or store fronts, the sigil of the city, a pegasus rearing into the air.
I haven’t had as many down days in it to drift around but Dallas, like Houston, like Texas, is a place with so much land to spare. Everything made to feel smaller by how flat the ground and unending the sky. History’s lying around here, I’ve noticed. I don’t know if that’s because there’s so much more space to put it, forget about it, or move around it.
Not as good. Not as strong. Not as talented. Good for women. They’d get paid the same if the interest was there. “Oh yeah, women’s basketball, that’s cool, but who’s the biggest NBA player you’ve ever talked to?”
Stepping out of the American Airlines Center the humidity settles against me. Like the first day I got here, when thunderstorms rolled skittish through downtown and then right out again, streets soaked and drying in under an hour, air turning from heavy and dense with moisture to oven-baked. Sabreena and I delaying then pressing on with our plan to meet at a store called Wild Bill’s close to the Kennedy Memorial, to find me a cowboy hat. Red brick sidewalks of Dallas’ Historic West End slippery and steaming.
LSU just won and the chest pocket of my jumpsuit caught confetti that rained down at the buzzer. I notice it while waiting for each LSU athlete to carefully climb up the ladder brought out for them under the basket to cut their piece of the net down. How careful they each are, making sure they don’t take too much, holding the scissors with the precision of a surgeon and staring at the piece in their hand for a beat before proudly holding it up for the crowd hanging around the arena and the photographers clustered under them.
The sky’s blue, towering mounds of white clouds lurk out at the edges and the tumbling wind is back up, big oaks rustling in lurid green after the rain that came while the game was at its closest.
Walking by a giant, 10-storey mural of humpback whales on the side of a building I laugh, think of how far inland we are with nothing but land on all sides. We’re under a tornado warning, somebody says. There are two strings of gold plastic Mardi Gras beads looped around my wrist and I picture how they’d look if I flung them into the air and the wind took them, pressed them taut up against the sun-bleached whales.
Bar fighters. Pushovers. Crude. Graceless. Loud. Too quiet on the court. Too polite. Rude. Not raised right. Disrespectful. Too deferential. Not humble enough. Didn’t want it bad enough. “I just don’t like watching women’s basketball as much, no real reason.”
After I told them I was just visiting, and couldn’t buy a whole vase of blue bonnets (only $10 including the vase), the couple at the farmer’s market stand selling the flowers plus free range eggs speckled brown and solid pale blue, pull out a few loose stems from a metal bucket and put them in a plastic bag with some water.
Dylan had said get some flowers for your hotel room, when I texted that nothing at the market would travel. It was the kind of very simple idea, or maybe easy kindness, that I wouldn’t have thought to do for myself.
Clutching the plastic bag bouquet I stop at knick knack shop across the street and get some postcards. Where did you get those? The woman who rings me out asks, pointing to the flowers. I say across the street. You’re not supposed to pick ‘em, she says. I assure her they told me they had land, seeded these themselves. I say where I’m from it’s also illegal to pick the provincial/state flower, trilliums. Trilliums are beautiful, an older guy behind the cash nods appreciatively. Well, that’s good then, if they’re their own, she says as she slides the postcards into a paper bag.
Back in my hotel room I crack off the bottom of each stem and fill my ice bucket up with water, put them on one of the nightstands. They droop and I don’t have high hopes they’ll make it, but the next day when I wake up to the sun slanting down through the tall windows they’ve perked, sit proud.
This is beautiful and so much in the place and space that is Texas