Summer's false starts

The miasma of hurt that's kept summer at bay, and why this is the most hopeful time in the NBA calendar.

The slow swirl of your tongue around ice cream, catching a breakaway drop racing for the lip of the cone just before it slips over. Small triumph.

The heat that builds in the body when you’re lying in the sun, how it starts feathery and shifts to the feel of a hand running along the skin, pressing down, grows prickly, turns from an idle awareness to the only thing you can focus on.

The cool relief of water. Jumping from a dock, eyeing the starry wash of light over the surface before you leap, how the water will envelop — muffle sound, blur sight — so instantly and entirely that it’s hard to imagine ever being out of it.

An idle afternoon spent reading in the shade of a tree, letting your eyes slip from the page up to the swaying leaves, the play of sunlight in them. An idle afternoon spent reading on the couch, heat of the afternoon at bay and a drink with ice cubes melting down, condensation beading the glass. Sawing of cicadas the soundtrack to both scenarios.

So much of summer is anticipation. Picturing what you want to do and how you’ll feel doing it. Who you’ll be with, what you’ll be like in that moment, what you’ll wear, how your body will react. There is no thought given to whether reality will stack up to anticipation, or whether in the moment you’ll really and truly be aware of yourself in it, only to the sparkling prospect of you in that future time, enjoying yourself.

I know why, living in a cold climate, summer’s anticipation is so heady, practically a pastime in itself. But even without the desolate and dulling grip of winter there is a tendency to project onto summer the best version of yourself. The most carefree, a well of bottomless energy able to execute all those plans with a limber and healthy body to match. A being of lightness, freedom, and mobility, up for anything and with the exact right sandals.

As a lifetime summer acolyte, it takes very little for me to sink mentally and bodily into the season. Shorts are my body’s natural state, my hair lightens and my skin tans easily. My best summers are the ones where I’ve spent most of them in the halfway state between swimming and dried off, biking between one thing and the next, book splayed open on the back of the couch or concrete of the pool deck or worn wood dock, plus always a little bit sweaty. This summer has been different.

A miasma of grief and injury since mid-spring that flowed stubbornly into early, now high-summer, my body has been in a state of revolt. A back injury turned hip injury turned leg/nerve/back injury has left me with a buffet of every symptom I’ve felt since April lingering and presenting on alternating days. There have been breakthroughs and new wrinkles, discoveries about my body I’d rather not know and filing that awareness into prognoses, progress and then lurching backwards almost to square one. It’s all of a sudden August and I find myself still waiting for summer to start. At least, summer as I recognise it.

Logically, I know why. I am reluctant to move my body in most ways, let alone with the kind of blithe confidence and trust that lends to the languorous, lithe movement I associate with my body in summertime. Because of pain, I think about my body practically every step, think ahead to how I’ll get in and out of seats, bend, or walk where I need to. Sitting (to work, to write, to drive) sucks, walking depends on the day. I haven’t swam or biked once. Emotionally, it feels foreign that in a season where I’ve always clicked easily into a deeper, lightly feral, easy understanding of my body, so much more of it exposed to sun and heat, muggy air and water, beads of sweat gathering, running, and cooling, that I now feel my body through its physical limits and barriers. Pain for contours instead of heat, light or water. Pain instead of suspension of higher thought.

As a result I haven’t left the summer in my head for the one in front of me. I’m watching friends move through the routines and activities of these brief months, their glowing, sweaty faces and heat satiated bodies relaxed against a backdrop of permanent golden hour, cotton candy skies, great pine forests, long cool lakes. They bike, swim, find pockets of relief in the grit of city heat; they go to shows, the beach, pile into cars and portage canoes to hidden rocky islands, take the ferry and look back on the city at dusk. They check in, too, but there’s only so many ways to describe pain in abstract, and the even more abstract increments of improvement or regression. So I study their photos like postcards and map location along with sensation. I, mostly, watch.

An unexpected parallel with this forced, seasonal voyeurism has been to notice notes of the same quality of projection in NBA analysis. This is, perhaps, the most hopeful time in the NBA’s calendar. Not the wide yawn of “the offseason” in its entirety, but this exact monthlong stretch after the first, second, even tertiary flurries of free agency and its shocks have faded, weeks past the rookie debuts of Summer League, when teams are more or less formed up for the coming season. It’s far enough from the season that was to the season that will be for a soft blurring of the worst hurts, and what we’ve been promised — new roster combinations, big stars on different teams — still exists best and most prominently in imagination. Here, in this rare place, hope springs again.

The personality plus duo of Anthony Edwards and LaMelo Ball on the Timberwolves together, maybe so over-the-top that they come full-circle down to a place of gravity and depth. Giannis Antetokounmpo in Heat crimson, experiencing the last headiness of summer as a relief for the first time in his professional career instead of a seasonal mourning. No shifting foliage, no chill coming down with the evening, only royal palms rustling along the freeway, marigolds and firebrush exploding in orange blooms from gaps in the asphalt where they’ve sprung wild.

Mike Conley with a new team to metronome, Paul George there too as a steadying hand. All the ways Joe Mazzulla is dreaming of using Mitchell Robinson’s huge, jolting body to upend defences his team isn’t quite fast enough to get around. All the volatility gone from the Hornets, whether it will be possible to see a new quality of lightness throughout all the gears of their speed.

Lonnie Walker, on the moon again (again), back in the league and now with a chance to learn what it means to play basketball on the back of a mountain.

The Pistons, a little less top-heavy, the Bulls now with grit at the flick of a switch through Norman Powell. The Lakers largely, surprisingly, with considered depth. The Grizzlies suddenly without seasons of existential baggage and blown expectations, fresh with tactility and backbone.

And the Pacers, what must that even be like? The relief for Pascal Siakam, who held his team up all season best he could, drew from a well that somehow he never scraped the bottom of. Tyrese Haliburton’s first steps on the floor, will they go from tentative to sure in surreal reunion, or thud firm, psychic reclamation.

Photo credit Trevor Ruszkowski

What Tyrese Maxey must be feeling, the initial Christmas morning of it all and then the comfortable weight settling on his shoulders for what it will be like to lead that team. How he’s never weathered, only tempered his skills, whistling in whatever element the Sixers have faced. Some of that perennial, open-faced zeal even rubbing off on Joel Embiid, how interesting it’ll be to see the affects on LeBron James, Jaylen Brown.

It’s not too heavy, this high-summer analysis. It’s quick, light, like in how readily new fans and media will cast off old baggage from an athlete on the way in. The requisite debates about fit, salary, which team “won” which trade have not so much been won or lost as much as forgotten. For the player, in abstract, all that matters is not all there is to go on (which can be a decade worth of seasons, in some cases), all that matters is the last best showing. For the player, in reality, it must feel — once the logistics of the physical move and its emotional upheaval are sorted — like the sort of tremulous and soft summer morning you feel you’re the only one awake in, briefly entirely yours to do what you want with.

It is, perhaps, the most forgiving time in the NBA’s now 365-day calendar, when the contours of disappointment have yet to be drawn, haven’t even been sketched. A time when promise feels as heady and long as the days, with plenty to go around. A time that merges with my own summer’s false start and kicks, deftly, at the lingering fantasy of waiting. Where I can wilfully lose myself to the fantasy that summer as a season might last, might wait for me, my work has made it so I know the NBA’s offseason never does. That it only speeds up from here. Time, I suppose, to jump in — ready or not.