Summer League Forever III

Dispatches from the desert, its pummelling heat, love and hardwood.

Here’s your heart, set out in the desert and left to broil. Heatwaves rising up off the pavement after dark, rising up around the shining faces of the people you love, their heads knocking at the swelling moon, bigger every night, or else butting up against daylight. Stolen moments of rest lolling around in backseats of rides together, sliding into empty seats beside each other in arenas, catching up or saying nothing, vibrating with proximity, basketball the backdrop. A better rhythm than your heart running increasingly ragged on no sleep and oxygen, on the overwhelming feeling of having to see every night into morning. Sun so bright it shoots through everybody’s thinnest parts — ears glowing pink, eyelashes caked with it in gossamer strands, laughing teeth like floodlights — light so tender and cruel that you can’t pick the line where the two things pull apart.

What you love laid bare — to be undone and unbound by a place where it’s possible to move without consequence of distance, of time, of context or pretext. How big everything is, colossal recreations in miniature, making the city feel so small, easy to speed across to find your people at the other end or else, impossibly, exactly where you’d want to run into them.

Is it scrambling in the dark? Is it the fact of focus, that the point of us being here is on games that overlap, stretch unbroken through entire afternoons, their extenuating orbit of team practices, shootarounds, scrimmages, soft palms slipping against a ball over and over, that gives everyone and everything you might do with them room to exist unexamined? To flourish and feint and feel headily sincere because of it?

And there’s always the end. Galloping fast toward you the first step you set onto burning asphalt, its heat like a caress, a warning, radiating up your legs and settling around your shoulders, your pact with the desert sealed.

---

When Jaden Ivey rolled his ankle and hopped to the sideline, brought his fists down in frustration on the scorer’s table, the flinch into realization that his Summer League was over 36 minutes and 52 seconds into it starting.

Sitting with Ron Harper Jr. in a gym packed up. The shouts, shoe screeches, bone-deep thuds of so many basketballs going at once, all gone quiet and our voices lowered to softly conversational as we talk about settling in and stepping out of the shadows of the people who name us. He means family, his dad, but the truth in what he’s saying envelops who or whatever gives you doubt. His voice takes on an open-ended timbre, trembling lightly, and I realize we haven’t broken eye contact in close to a minute.

---

Pulling laps around the airport in Joey’s car the night before I fly out, windows all down and the crackling air coming in at speed and volume my lungs have a hard time heaving. Out past the air traffic call towers, the Strip beckons. Shimmering and blinking like a mirage in miniature, the pillar of light shooting up from Luxor to the lifting moon a lambent compass. The open expanse of sand and still warm, calico rocks beyond the runways call just as strong.

The desert at night, shaking itself like a dog, panting for you. Casino lights hanging off its teeth like saliva.

I feel sweat running free down my spine, backs of my knees damp, my face permanently flushed, hot wind rushing over my lips like a prayer. It’s the only time, over five days, that time slows. The city and the desert at equal distance from the two of us. We smile in the dark.

---

Flying home, somewhere over Nebraska, my heart seems to gulp and sinks itself heavy down into the middle of my chest. The realization, as it always comes slinking in, of how long it will be until we’re back here again, all together. How lives will fan out and people will forget, the stretch of days and months coming to reestablish their claim. Of what you get being there. So tenuous, out under the baking, crushingly open sky.

Martin, Bill, Robby and Brad patiently taking all my questions about chicken tenders around a formica table at Raising Cane’s before squeezing into the rental, then a line of seats in media row, jokes spinning so fast I’m sure we create a small gravitational pull because so many people wind up getting sucked into it. Jerome racing out to the front of Thomas & Mack to meet me as the sun shifts from caustic white to honey to take a picture, Jerome staging us all in front of an indoor waterfall, Jerome never flagging, Jerome like a lighthouse at a bad airport diner as I fall into the red vinyl booth across from him. Keith as patient eating a hot dog on a garbage can with me as he is in a long, intimate conversation with Andre Iguodala. Dave hurtling around until he stops, briefly, to take care of everybody. Sabreena out of nowhere, corona-bright and haloed because I’m crying laughing; falling back fast into Mo’s languid rhythm; Jordan generous and kind and cracking up after a perfect beat for suspense as my Topo Chico explodes all over a leather studio chair.

Last year I wished I’d taken more pictures, this year I brought a disposable. The hope is to have hazy images in hand that match the lucent ones in my head. The hope is to ration longing.

---

Walking in for dinner with Haley and realizing when she pops up from her seat at the counter that we’ve both worn, essentially, the same thing. She hugs me with a force of familiarity that knocks me backward into all the memories together we haven’t actually had. We remember to say it’s nice to finally meet each other somewhere after the first hour slips into the second, the blue and white balloon of Paris glittering in the window over her shoulder, night coming on, stretching itself proud in front of us, fatigue and hangovers cured with no plans to leave until she stands to use the washroom and three servers, who must’ve been trained on us for forty minutes, thank us loudly for coming. We laugh our way into a juddering cab that races down the highway for a blink. The speed alarming until we give it a second and realize it’s only catching up.

---

D.J. Wilson sitting down beside me in the high school gym’s bleachers and telling me about telling his mom and grandma about his new contract the night before. How it is to feel the oldest on the team at 26. How easy his candor, how he leaned into the end of every question to tilt toward the beginning of his answers.

The strange, bottled ferocity of Josh Giddey whipping cross-court passes. The stranger way it was to watch the awkward, gangly frame of Chet Holmgren fall away from him as he stepped into the action of the game, those passes, like a rocket shedding its casings and hurtling into space.

---

In the small gym, watching the Raptors first game early Saturday afternoon, I find myself fixating on Rodions Kurucs the same way I did seeing Derrick Rose the first time I covered a game with him in it. With Rose, there was the separation that a “real” game brings, mainly in its feeling of production and how that puts up a clean wall between yourself, as witness, and athletes, at work. He did his warmup in front of where I stood at the baseline until, after a while, I had to move myself to the other end of the floor. It’s difficult to explain if you’ve never felt the vibrations of capacity for harm coming off someone. Or, rather, proven capacity for harm.

With Kurucs I watch his movements: guarded, out of step, brash. I question whether I am seeing these things, truly, or whether harm is there as something noxious, silent, distorting the view. Then I wonder why I’m trying so hard to sift through a reality that should absolutely stand to cloud some of this one when benefit of the doubt barely ever goes the other way.

Here I could get up out of my baseline seat, hop off the media riser, cut a slow path behind both benches against the stream of roving players, coaches, executives, fans coming in as I try to get out. But this place, for me, has been the one that’s felt most free, easy, hopeful in how much green promise when compared to the league, the Raptors, growing capacity of providing safe harbour for harm. The expectation, the assumption up to now, has been for the people who have a problem with it to leave, so I press my spine into the back of the folding chair and sit up straighter, keep watching until Kurucs gets cut.

---

The grandeur and smallness of the game at this level, crashing around you. Legs found in real time, others folding, ten voices calling out at once, a crowd rushing in and out like the tide, game ops at random, dreams made, others breaking apart, and the never-ending loop of the concourse as a way to steady, pace yourself.

---

“This was still too much light out”, Rob texts at 5:30 am.

The night before, stepping out of El Cortez, the sunrise hits us all in the face hard as being punched by Midas. Dazed at the curb, gilded with the brute force of a morning full-on, we blink and squint and hold our hands up to shield our eyes. What a vision. Everyone wincing, made light by the money we just lost and a night that outpaced however we intended to spend it, laughing and barking out shocked sounds of protest the best we can manage.

Heading back, hurtling southwest toward the Strip, the rising light at our backs tumbling in through the rear windshield may as well be gold in its elemental form. In that light, I think, all manner of things might be forgiven, but I hope my face at that hour, slick with sweat and softened by being at a point past tired, is the bare minimum.

This morning, after that morning, the mountains are hazed in heather, light fanning soft against low white clouds that stayed invisible all night like it knew, even if we knew it was coming, it ought to be tender. After two hard goodbyes I stand, swaying a bit from their impact, staring out the window, past the roof of the parking garage below where the black burnout spirals I’ve laughed at every morning are starting to stand out, along the stretch of Flamingo Road and the palms dotting its median before the sprawl swallows it and then past, to the sliver of desert left, and finally Frenchman and Sunrise Mountains.

“It’s like”

“Muted”

“Pastel?” I try, texting back.

“I’m trying”

My eyes drift back out, I think that I better start packing. The phone dings cheerily.

“I think you’re being too kind”

“It’s some bullshit is what it is”

When you’re catching up on a year in 5 days, sleep doesn’t, can’t really, factor in. What the desert wants, it takes, but in its heat, its scouring light, its palms up offering excess of want, promise and familiarity, we give it all so willingly.