Summer League Forever IV
The annual and hopefully coherent recap of nine days in the desert.
The flight to Vegas is delayed. All day the humidity has been growing like a dome over the city and just before leaving for the airport it breaks. Rush hour. Cars backed up nearly the whole way and an accident on the ramp to Departures slowing the stream to a crawl. I rush through the automatic doors into the frozen time of the airport, same now as it was last year going again to the desert. The only thing that changes is you.
It’s empty. Everything takes less than 10 minutes to get through. As boarding time comes and goes, the energy turns restless. I watch a burning orange sun drop from behind the clouds and sink across the tarmac and feel, already, a tinge of the sadness I know is coming.
I always thought about it as finding me, at the end. Like a creature that had been trailing me for days and caught up when I finally slowed down. But sitting there eating a bad prepackaged sandwich, listening to the impossible number of dudes get louder, impatient, more drunk, I think how it’s always in me. Stirring to memories of voices, how heads tilted or teeth flashed or eyes looking back into mine took in the light of a place like a cat stretching out in the sunlight — greedy, like a sponge. It’s there and ready, blipping like a beacon.
It’s dumb to think of endings before something’s even started, I know, and it isn’t a trick of bracing. I can’t prepare myself for how bad it’s going to feel — saying goodbye, acute awareness of the yawn of a year stretching out as another one goes, and loss, from pang to wrench, in the stomach — but if I look at it from the right angle, it can be like a bodily consult.
The little dipper grows in the window as we get airborne and I think how preparations fall away in the moment of meeting the moment. Over Colorado, a storm in the distance. Lightning lighting up clumps of clouds from the inside, sparking in ruddy orange and yellow strobe. Above that, stretching toward me, stars trailing cool blue. I feel my blood and pulse and the pacing thing in my chest rise with every electric burst, toes curling with the concept of the land changing down there in the dark. Now prairie, now plains, now rising peaks and yanking me toward it, somewhere still an hour ahead, the jagged spread of red and calico rocks, the desert baking in the night and my body ready to hand itself over.
For the rest of the trip, Wyoming to Nevada, the moon hung in a third quarter wink above the wing, reflecting a warm white over the shining metal and spilling into my window. It’s never enough time but I leaned forward in my seat, knowing we were chasing it.
The refrain becomes, I’ll find you. But it’s the only place I’ve been where it’s meant sincerely and not as an easy cast off at the ready. Wherever you are — baseline, bleachers, concourse, casino, in the ubiquitous sprawl of strip malls and standalone big, building block restaurants between them — you’ll be found, again and again. And in that finding each time the sense that you’ve thwarted rules of the universe reliant on circumstance. That you, watching the person you’ve found or has found you, in eyes brightened by recognition and arms opening to you with the happiness of it, have made your own luck.
I see them all sitting in a bar shaped like an old football helmet on the Caesars’ casino floor, and feel my legs extend mid-stride without willing my body to do it. The flush of giddiness that comes over me only seconded by a deep down warmth, bubbling up through my chest. I come up behind Keith, sitting inside in the low booth, and cover his eyes with my hands. Not a thing I would ever, until just then, think to do to him. Guess who! I shout, too excited, fully giving myself away. Gee, I wonder, he goes, deadpan. Everyone is smiling like this is a thing we always do, meet here at midnight on a Friday to close the giant football helmet bar down that is already trying to close down, before going to sit in the next one set amidst reproductions of Bernini sculptures. It isn’t and it is, here in a city where one reality concedes to the other, making both true.
Victor Wembanyama just dribbling is a marvel. A weird warp of physics. Watching the floor react to him, try to get a handle on how he handles the ball, an action he starts from 7’ up. First Charlotte, then Portland, neither team has any idea what to do about him, how to go about lifting the ball from a place already so inordinately high. When he blocks a shot, standing under the basket or way out from deep, he stands and lifts his arms to drape like a cartoon Dracula. His legs, so long, swallow the floor with every stride so he only ever ambles. All the hurry he has is just what other players have for him.
One of my cab drivers gently asks one day whether it’s true what he’s been hearing, whether he’s a bust. I’m not sure how prototypic is a bust, I say. Watching him, you can already see the landscape of the league buckling, foundational plates shifting to catch up.
Notable absences from this Summer League: Seerat, Haley, Rob, the Godzilla vs. Kong machine; an excess of four hours of sleep and a way to ever explain the softness of a desert sky coming shy up on 6am, somehow not wracked with guilt but tender with promise. Restraint.
I watch Ron Harper Jr. eat the floor up, wonder out loud from my seat in Cox on his contract with Toronto. Eric, beside me, says, Bobby, to Bobby Webster in front of us. Bobby Webster turns around, says, Ask his agent. His agent, beside Bobby, turns around. I just want the best for him, I say, too earnest for this or any gym. That makes two of us, he smiles.
Being there as long as I was, nine nights in the desert, days started to feel marked by people leaving and then, how long they’d been gone. My reality inverting so that their absences from Vegas were the anomaly, not all of ours collectively in being there. Wandering the concourse and casinos with a sense of aimlessness for direction, finely tuned only in picking out the faces of friends against the waves of strangers eddying around me. Understanding better than ever that it’s the people, the spontaneous, deep, playful and tentatively new interactions that keep me going.
Winding up on the floor in both arenas at UNLV, sometimes forgetting basketball was happening until a loose ball or body flew at me, or the team coming in from the tunnel for the next game jogged by in tight single file, stir of the air made by their bodies in motion like the arena breathing down on me. On the floor at WNBA Skills, laughing hard with Jordan and coming to focus on photographers crowding all around our chairs, cameras trained at and just beyond us. Both of us turning, slow, to see Arike Ogunbowale, DiJonai Carrington, Jackie Young, Kelsey Mitchell, Sabrina Ionescu and Sami Whitcomb standing on the stage right behind, each idly holding a basketball, tightening a ponytail, waiting for the broadcast to come back and the smoke cannons beside us to blast on.
With every person that left the ones remaining became life rafts, the rare ones coming in late and fresh — Ashtyn, Alex, Jordan, Emily, Sabreena again — like gleaming and well-provisioned yachts, safe harbours.
I feel charmed at Summer League. Can feel its bustling microclimate working for me, on me, burnishing me golden and with it, the control that comes with walking through the world that way. It isn’t luck, but a cracking open. The carapace of the every days and their rationed opportunities (social, professional, personal momentum) falling away to reveal a version of myself too present, in motion, to let doubt settle over any part of me. I stand taller, straighter, my stride opens up, everywhere I go there’s only the feeling that I should be there. It isn’t through chasing, though there’s enough of it, but possibility. You know every time you’ll come out scoured and still you push, the desire perhaps to go past, to come away clean in how completely consumed.
What the desert wants, it takes. There are rare lessons in living, for a time, like that.
Things I already regret: Not turning around to see and stare hard in the face of the guy who tried to follow me into my hotel elevator, intersected instead by a woman working who saw him trailing from the lobby as I got in and closed the distance coming the other way to meet me, escort me to another elevator. Not holding Keith’s leftover container from dinner when he asked so he could have both hands free in the photo I insisted on taking of him and Tyler, the Freemont Street video show overhead some kind of slowly impacting asteroid. Not telling the guy who pressed the floor, same as mine, to fuck off when he got off and waited, motioning for me not to get off out of politeness but to join him — the gesture, if it’s ever been made at you, assuredly different. Missing a few evenings, whether leaving too late or too early, the Thomas & Mack parking lot at peak, perfect, pastel golden hour — if there’s any place that’s ever felt holy and vast, glutted with soft, compliant exhaustion tangled with the thrum of the night coming on, Strip at arm’s length and desert out on every other side as a nod to what’s fleeting, that’s it. Opening a giant and dramatic set of wooden doors, so slowly via the door’s overriding automated system, into Chet Holmgren. Not staying longer which seems, unabashedly and certifiably, unhinged.
Going out from my room, still wet from the pool, to my last hotel’s parking lot at dusk to watch the planes landing so close the tallest palms dotting the lot shudder. In their wake, oblivious, grackles wheel from the palo verde and desert willows along the fence line, flowering a pink flushed as my face in the heat, still up above 110°.
Overhead, way up, I catch winks as the underbellies of planes banking in or out float in the light and are made the same glowing blush. By then, most everyone has gone. By then, standing alone in an off-Strip parking lot dripping chlorine, breathing heat and gawping up and around at the desert fading to night feels the only communing I am capable of. I send pictures of the planes coming in and going out to the people who’ve left, no explanation. Picture them on them, coming back.
Somewhere around Searchlight, Nevada, the car’s air conditioning conks out. Martin dutifully coaxed and tried every button in patterns like Morse between him and his car, but we sweat through the next three hours, climbing the burning hills and burning with them all the way into California. The desert gave way to more desert. Glowing hills of soft bleached sand, stacked canyon with their secret, interior patterns laid bare from where the highway was blasted through, pebbled or pocked with sage and stunted Joshua trees, impossible to believe that beyond the mountains, some still capped with snow, there’d be ocean.
There was ocean, but first a cold shower, and letting my eyes adjust to green when we got to the dappled streets of Long Beach with bougainvillea frothing over and through fences, the giant ficus, willows, citrus trees, palms not so sun-bleached and made glossy by the Pacific salt wafting in the winking air, the barely there humidity like a gentle hand at your back. I felt compelled, getting into Vegas; Martin and I joked that I’d had to drag myself out. Magnetized by some bigger force. I still feel the loss in leaving, the pangs, but the people I love to see haloed by arena or casino bulbs no longer just exist for me there, under them. The pull, the frenzied few days of proximity, still thrives best in the desert, but tenderness, the making luck, always travels.
Catches the emotion of an in a place, in a specific time and space that wouldn't be the same any where else. A world of relationships and interactions that is unique to that place, those experiences that couldn't be what they are anywhere else. Beautifully expressed.