Summer League Forever VII
Another week in the desert transcribed via the harried, sappy notes I took throughout.
The airport is so quiet. Four people in line at security, none at customs. The agent asks how long I’ll be in Vegas for and makes a low whistle when I tell her a week.
I see Roven at the gate and he seems to blink me to focus. He says Summer League and All-Star, there’s always someone at the gate. I tell him it’s usually been very tall and sleepy teenagers for me who, when I ask if they’re going to either NBA event, shyly tell me they’re going to watch a friend play. Oh, I say, suddenly remembering, my first Summer League, Nick Nurse was on my flight. Which version was he, Roven asks. The one who travelled with a guitar on his back, I say. It was weeks after the title. Roven nods knowingly and shows me photos and videos on his phone from the title run. The night the Raptors won the East at home, Kyle Lowry carrying the trophy up to the concourse and outside.
It suddenly seems so long ago, rendered that way with Lowry’s retirement announcement earlier in the week, and why Roven was in town. We laugh about how, as fast as the NBA can feel and as reactive as we all are to it, the storylines for next season rear up in the distance like mountains. Their outlines already so stark against the landscape, impossible to miss.
On the plane I’m surrounded by a men’s hockey team. They aren’t impolite but there’s an erraticism to their energy; some from their age, some from the unpredictability of men in groups.
As we taxi out to the runway the sunset is haemorrhaging red, orange and pink. When we take off it only gets brighter. Lifting through then up and over the clouds, the entire sky turns orange and pink, purple where twilight tries to cling at the edges. I have a row to myself and shift over to the window seat, press my phone against the small pane. After a few minutes the hockey guy in front of me does the same.
Because we’re flying west, it doesn’t wane. The sky lightens to pale blue where it was minutes before mauve, the sun hanging at the horizon like a big, hammered bronze disc. It feels like flying through cotton candy being spun. It feels like flying through heaven.
The thing I have learned best about Summer League is you can conjure people. My first morning, wandering down to the hotel’s front desk, I think about Bobby. Less than a minute later, Bobby is there. Both of us still on east coast time, awake only with the staff trickling in and the people sitting at slot machines on the casino floor who haven’t slept yet. Neither of us is surprised.
A few days later it will be Sam. I’ll be thinking of him and how we usually sit and talk about books we’ve loved in the last year as we watch frenetic basketball, pausing for especially wild sequences or for him to point out the rookies who stood out most to him for their qualities off the floor. He’s really smart, He’s really funny, He had more questions for me than I did for him. I take Jerome’s open seat beside Will during the Raptors second game and a few minutes later Sam comes down the row, opening a spreadsheet on his phone of the books he’s read this year so we can compare notes.
It happens on the concourse as much as the media seats, it happens out in front of Thomas & Mack at dusk or down in the cool tunnels of the arenas. You can’t will it too hard. The looser the thought of someone, the more spontaneous in how they land in your head, the more likely you are to see them.
I see Tony by the entrance to Cox when, moments before, I thought It’s always so nice to run into Tony. He asks if I’m writing a recap again and it feels, for a second, too meta for Summer League. Too self-referential. I think of Noa because a Sports Business Classroom student asked if it was ok to reach out cold to people in the industry, that he’d emailed Noa, his favourite writer, and then I find her sitting with Jack and tell her. I think of how I’ve hardly seen Warren and then he’s there, resting his elbows at the end of the table to check in as a dozen messages a minute light up his phone. I think, briefly, of Kawhi Leonard as I stand at the end of the media seats in the T&M pit and talk about bands with Greg and then he is walking out from the tunnel, rounding the corner and passing behind me, murmuring, What’s up guys? as he goes by.
It’s a trick of proximity, odds and timing, like anything in Vegas I suppose, but I never feel so lucky as when it happens. A sheen of fortune and sweat glowing around me and my chosen one.
It’s just like a family reunion, Tommy Sheppard drawls to me one day on the concourse. A lot of crazy uncles, he grins.
Dan calls me and over the din of whatever section of the Wynn he’s in, and whatever section I’m in, asks if I can see Darvin Ham.
I eye the rag-tag cluster of people who’ve gathered at the casino bar with us, ostensibly looking for the after party in a club that turns out to be under renovation. I see Budenholzer, Taylor Jenkins, a smattering of media and team people.
Darvin? I say out loud, stretching to full height, I don’t—
Jerome, beside me, cuts me off. He’s there! He chirps, like we’re all in a living room. Green hat! Jerome and Dan confirm at the same time, one in each of my ears.
A feeling this year and lingering from last of statelessness, especially over the first weekend. In years past, since I first started coming, I spent the weekend running from game to practice, from scrum to any quiet area where I could do a pre-arranged phone interview, typing up transcripts and stories in the media seats or during bleary mornings in my hotel room. I spent the weekend working. At least work, for a writer, in its most tangible sense.
Now, with my work centred on SBC and teaching, the first weekend is for catching up. For meetings — some planned but most impromptu — and run-ins, for, what feels like in my antsy core, idling. So, I find myself showing up to every Raptors game to sit with colleagues and friends from Toronto, anchoring myself through them, leaning over to read their notes or watch as they film, feeling momentarily overlooked when no one from team PR asks me who I’d like to talk to postgame.
I feel like a bum about it until Jerome says that the first few years I spent working to do the kind of work I’m doing now. That mostly settles the restless part of me, though I will linger around the tunnels and at the edge of scrums when I find myself there in the week that follows. Old habits.
We watch the first half of Norway-England in Tacos El Gordo, the whole place cheering for Norway, and the mid-way point on a screen in our rideshare, after emerging from a 7-11 to find Jonathan Mogbo in his Kings warmup gear looking lost under the blazing sun on the Strip. The last bit of the second half we watch standing at the periphery of the Harrah’s sportsbook, paying equal attention to two small dogs with a booth to themselves, cocking their heads at the floor to ceiling screens.
In a club with an indoor waterfall I work up enough nerve to go up to Jerry Stackhouse sitting in a booth, and over the thump of bass and the rush of water thank him for a legendary Raptors 905 team. He looks as puzzled as he does amused.
You have legs! Is the first thing Jason shouts at me, when we run into each other in the tunnel under T&M. A podcast is haphazardly recording beside us and none of the hosts miss a beat.
Since October, when we started our slate of NBA TV shows, we’ve only seen each other through our laptops. Am I taller or shorter than you imagined? I ask. He thinks about it. The same, he says. I tell him my fear, of people surprised I’m tall, which means I present short.
We’ve both been on a water forage, going to all the fridges we know in the arenas to find a bottle. It’s the first day and there are only cans of pop in the workrooms. Someone from the league brings us a couple bottles, looking extra dewy, and a handful of snacks. We stand there eating goldfish crackers like children, smiling at the chaotic press of teams swapping out as one game ends and the next team streams on for warmups, floor a jumble of bodies and basketballs.
CJ Miles is at most every game I manage to catch a few stolen seconds of, weaving up and down the baseline or hovering at the stanchions, cameras slung around his neck and his eyes trained on the action. He has to shift his glasses every time he brings a viewfinder up to his eyes. A few times I watch as his legs tense or a foot pivots, instinctively, when someone on the floor does the same. Old habits.
I give my Storytelling lecture in the film room of the UNLV basketball team, our students all taking notes. I’ve watched J.A. for enough years now that my emulation of how he lectures — slow, engaged, fluid in his movements — feels less outright lifted than channeled, still, there’s a thump that starts to speed up I initially take for my heartbeat, hastening. Then it’s there in double, then triple, then out of sync completely. Basketballs. There’s a team borrowing the court directly above the room we’re in for their practice, thump of dozens of dribbles reverberating through the floor.
OG Anunoby comes into the party when the DJ starts playing ‘Everyone Falls In Love’ and starts hugging everyone from Toronto. The song, a quintessential summer in Toronto track, the first you’ll hear out of rolled down windows in early-May, seems to narrow the room and all its crammed bodies to a focused few. Even Alex McKechnie is dancing. Of course I start crying.
Standing at the tall, room-width windows and pressing my palms against the glass at sunset, feeling the heat reach my hands through the glass. The first time I opened the curtains of my hotel room I was surprised that they kept opening, took me physically walking them all the way to the end of the track instead of just my arm. There is nothing in front, no other towers, only a straight shot view north to Gass Peak and, looking west, the peak of La Madre and the ancient brick red and soft tawny gradients of Calico Basin.
The mountains loom, seem to tilt back with the sharp, thin light of dawn and lean in toward the city with the hazy flush of sunset. The clouds, whether on the odd overcast day or in roiling, cotton clumps, bolt out to them like wild horses, leaving trails in their wake.
When I am late throughout the week it’s because I’ve lost track of time standing there, staring.
In Adam Silver’s presser I find myself wishing the NBA’s production team hadn’t shut the immense blackout blinds of the room in preparation for all their studio lighting. It’s 7 p.m. and the beginning of the desert’s long golden hour, where the heat lowers its hackles for the first time all day as the Strip lights up like a bonfire. From here, these covered windows, you can watch the planes come in low over the Thomas & Mack parking lot, using the stretch to line themselves up for the runway just beyond. At this hour each one glows like a heavenly body hurtling to earth.
Silver answers a question about viewership and speaks, specifically, to watch parties. How these events have flourished in past years — not just for the NBA, but across all sports. He wonders if the hunger for collective activities is a result of how reclusive we now are, his voice catching, very slightly, on the note of people living more isolated lives.
I think of the juxtaposition, celestial bodies — or planes, feigning — and our lonely mortal ones. How the biggest relief of coming in for a landing is the sense of being back in the clasp of earth and the social mantle we’ve layered over it. How marvelling at golden hour, anywhere, is to hand yourself over to the sensation of feeling so thoroughly human, and how much better it is to gawk alongside people.
I am paying attention in the presser, I promise.
At Summer League sleep is less like currency than it is a friend you haven’t seen in a long time. A person whose laugh, or lopsided smile, some other identifying trait is what you remember fondly and sharply, if the rest of them faintly.
Standing with Howard in a tunnel as Ron Artest emerges from somewhere and comes striding, smiling, over to us. Clasps Howard’s hand and asks what he’s up to. He starts to tell him about SBC, Artest stops and introduces himself to me. He asks a lot of questions about the program and listens to every answer. Howard asks what he’s been up to and he says he’s been assistant coaching a girls basketball team but, he worries, he’s not that good of an assistant because he doesn’t want to take a backseat. He asks if we’re around the next day, we are, all of us. I won’t see him again but it doesn’t matter. I can’t stop smiling.
I ask Steve if he’s felt more depleted this time around and he thinks. It’s the sun, he says. It feels like a different kind of heat, like a different kind of force. I think of all the times the heat has walloped me this week, how quickly it’s begun to broil from the inside. How a cab driver asked me if I’d gotten “hot eyes” yet, the same time I was taking a video of a Walgreen’s sign that flashed the temperature: 119°F
You’re right, I agree, it’s different.
Jerome sends me one of the most earnest texts I’ve ever gotten one morning as I’m scooping skyr yogurt into my mouth with an electrolyte packet for a spoon. Grange and I are talking about the surprising grace of Allen Graves as the news of a shooting at a Toronto street festival goes down the row and we all stop, pull the stories up, some comfort in being together as we suddenly feel incredibly far away from home.
Crammed in backseats of rideshares and cabs, in restaurant booths made for four with six or five, hands and conversation overlapping, somehow always able to connect; after so many years vibrating alongside each other in such a loud and isolative place we’ve all grown less guarded, personal and social boundaries blurring from lack of sleep and charged air but something more. The repetitions and rhythms, the forced and then chosen proximity. A sense that you had better say what you mean when the time starts ticking down for another year as soon as you land.
The plane takes off and the whole side of a Resorts World tower flashes to an LED billboard for Summer League. Bye honey, bye.
It took me longer this time to settle, to do enough concourse laps to find the rhythm of the place and myself in it, but I did. I knew it when faced with the reality of leaving, when the clock finally slipped to no more hours left to wander, linger, will one more happy run-in by letting go of any and all expectation. That’s when the people you want to see pop up, that’s when they find you.
You never want to be the first to leave or last to go, Howard says as I linger on the concourse, choking up. Laughing at myself for lamenting leaving too soon. That it’s only been a week. This place like summer camp.
The wind that rushed to me the second I stepped outside on my last exit, shimmering with heat, eager and curling all around my face, legs, whipping my hair straight up, playful. Pushed Julie, Keeks and me to the front of the arena where the silver paneling of Thomas & Mack glowed soft gold and the heat and desert turned the flagstone pink, flushed as our faces. Julie takes a photo of me with my hair whirling all around my face and my hand up against my brow, squinting back to her and Bobby, whose shown up. The two of them start laughing at the scene of us all, haggard and tired and happy in a hot windstorm. I pull my phone out to take their photo in turn, to try and pin this exact feeling.
Clouds in the distance white and peach and piled high like dessert, like promise. When I go to the airport after picking up my suitcase at the hotel the rose gold will be washed even softer and out over calico basin the sky will have turned brooding, stone grey, but here, still, stalling to the last, the gold light shimmers over everybody. Gratitude presses in on my chest, joy squalls like the grackles up in the stubborn palms that line the taxi roundabout in front of T&M, happiness is a low thrum like the apache cicadas gathering in the feathery boughs of the shoestring acacias tucked in the shade of Cox.
Trust me to take a whole week to let go, to quit chasing, to hand myself over, to wobble and bend to the desert like a heat mirage. Old habits.
~Tommy Sheppard~ shudder. But love the opening with the agent whistling at spending a week in Vegas.
Tacos El Gordo by Resorts World? I am a fan.
I watched Norway-England at a high school graduation party, family all at tables in the garage and kids and neighbors all outside. My wife’s cousin’s family were Norway fans, and when Norway lost I thought of Exits. The world is so huge and wide and yet there are these tiny connections, when you have the time and space to look for them.