Swans in winter
Ricky Rubio and our lust for athletic tragedy.
For days, when I looked over at the tulips I thought of swans. Their broad feathers, wide and scooped like a hand with fingers gathered in a flourish for a big pinch of salt or to make an emphatic gesture in the heat of conversation. Ruffling over one another in water, dense white like packed snow in the overlaps and ghostly pale along the edges or thin, tapering points. Every day the tulips opened a little further, white blooms fluffed, overlapping as the petals spread. There was a cleanness to them but it wasn’t austere. It was a snug clarity, the feeling of getting out of the shower and straight into warm clothes. The tulips nestled. Turned and tucked back into each other after I separated the stalks to trim the ends and change the water in the vase every couple of days. Reading on the couch I’d catch my focus slipping off the page to the coffee table and the tulips, like a white bird cutting through water will inevitably capture your gaze. They were, of course, still. But just the word ‘swan’ will shuttle you off, wide black webbed feet flicking in the underwater of your head.
One of the most memorable moments of Ricky Rubio on a basketball court, to me, is when he told Alexey Shved to change his face.
It was late February, the Wolves were on a three game losing streak that was turning to four, and coming back from a timeout Rubio reached over and ruffled Shved’s hair.
“Alexey,” he calls, and Shved, whose attention you only know was off in a concerned middle distance for how it immediately snaps to Rubio with a smile, nods in response. Rubio shifts his expression to one of a gentle bearing down, a little like you’d use with a friend you want to tenderly shake out of something they’ve spent too long in.
“Change, change this face,” Rubio says, patting the back of Shved’s head, “be happy.” They’d been walking side by side and split as Rubio drops his arm so they pass, in front and behind, a security guard standing in a cherry red jacket on the court. Once they do, Rubio levels Shved with a smile and caps the exchange with a cherry of his own, “Enjoy!”
It’s only a six second exchange and still I think about it most times I’m in a bad mood. Change this face, a voice says in my head, somehow nowhere near as loaded as being told to smile, and usually I do. More than how funny, or Shved’s face lighting up, it’s Rubio’s concern I come back to whenever I dig out the clip.
Rubio has a face like mine, in that you can see every feeling passing over it as they spark. Rubio has never been especially open with American media — not rude, just clipped. In Minnesota, he was one of the last to come out of postgame treatments for locker room availability, like if he couldn’t put them off completely he could delay, or thin out a little, the throng of people waiting to talk to him. In most of his interviews he generalizes when asked about himself and broadens when asked about teammates. His expressions tend to follow.
There’s a good clip of him being interviewed after the Jazz took Game 4 from Russell Westbrook’s Thunder in 2018, where Rubio’s face runs a gauntlet in 50 seconds. He doesn’t react to the crowd’s cheers growing louder around him, doesn’t react at all until he’s asked about Donovan Mitchell. Rubio breaks out on a smile, his big eyes widen and press his expressive brows up as Mitchell pops into frame behind him, raising his arms and asking the crowd for more. Rubio resets, briefly, until he lets himself settle into the next question about it having taken him nine years to get to the playoffs. He smiles again, glancing around the arena, but the smile is tighter, his brow too. There’s a split second where it feels like the nine years are flashing in his head not just on the court, but off, especially to the losses he had there. He tilts his head back and caps his answer simply with, “It’s fun.” Asked about whether they’ll take the next game, his softness recedes, the openness of his face flips to the rote script of one-game-at-a-time. “Well, we’ll try,” he says, almost a bit surprised, tripping up, gathering himself back.
By then, at 29, Rubio had been playing professional basketball for 15 years — since he was 14. He technically took some of his first shaky steps on a court at five. In Spain, even with its basketball development system mirroring that of European soccer and no shortage of young talent, he was a celebrity. La Pistola, after Pete ‘Pistol’ Maravich. When he first went pro with Joventut Badalona, the next youngest players on the roster were 20. Adolescence is rough enough on its own with trying to fit in while yearning to stand out, and Rubio was a teenager in the spotlight, likely all too aware of the attention he was getting over his more tenured teammates. It’s probably one of the reasons he started to pass so much — something he got flack for later in his NBA career, a “one-dimensional guard” — opting to get his teammates shots, showing how seamless he could make things.
A lot was made of Rubio being drafted by the Wolves in 2009 and not playing his first game in Minnesota until 2011, mainly that he was a mama’s boy who grew up on the beach and couldn’t hack being away from home, alone in the cold. But the actual reason was an overarching contract with DKV Joventut that the Wolves, because of NBA regulations, couldn’t completely buy Rubio out of. Rubio’s agent even tried to drum up endorsement deals to help cover some of the $8.1 million that Rubio would be on the hook for if he went to the NBA, but in the end he signed a new contract with FC Barcelona, covered most of Joventut’s outstanding contract by playing with Barca for two seasons, and played his first game with the Wolves after the NBA lockout.
A relevant side note: Rubio rented an apartment by the beach in L.A. the summer of 2011. His agent told him about a pickup game with some pros, he showed up and found Kevin Garnett, Paul George, Danny Grange and Paul Pierce. He was 19, shy, hadn’t met any of them professionally yet, and ended up playing with them all summer. I mention this because Rubio’s first taste of American pro basketball, of the NBA, happened over an L.A. summer against the backdrop of the beach, and he still showed up in Minnesota in December.
To swan around, to me, calls to mind someone moving proudly through a room, the world. Head high, neck long, looking preened and primed. Another way: armoured and ready for the day, a night.
To swan around, in more common definitions, is to move about aimlessly without responsibility or real direction, carefree. In its implication — shirking what’s serious in favour for what’s not — and outcome — time to waste in the first place, frivolity, vapidity — it skews distinctly feminine (which also makes it, for some, distinctly negative).
Have you watched highlight videos of Ricky Rubio passing? The no-looks are probably the most well-known, for good reason. Rubio has done those spinning out of bounds and colliding with the scorer’s table while still managing to fling the ball like a shot-put, backwards, to a teammate in transition. He’s also done them through opposing players’ legs, or while faking a pass to someone else, or behind his back, full-court alley-oops with both hands as often as with one. In basketball, passing like this might be interpreted as the most “swanning” of moves, the athlete doing it for the sake of pure form over function. In all the passes I’ve seen, Rubio only celebrates — with a shrugging smile, a quick grin — if his teammate has time to find him in transition to thank him. Otherwise, he and they are back down the floor to do it again.
There’s a pair of swans that nest at the sailing club my dad’s part of. He helped build the place, hung from a harness over the chop of Lake Ontario to weld steel sheets together to hold boulders that form the breakwall. It’s a small, sleepy club, mostly old sailors and pleasure boaters, where nobody moves too fast or gets too loud beyond a homemade barge that used to be launched every Canada Day for a choreographed fireworks display, manned by a guy everyone called Pyro Joe. The swans showed up one summer and save for the fireworks, probably liked it for the same reasons.
They do rounds of the docks every spring with their cygnets in tow like an otherworldly welcoming committee. The pair let people get close to the babies, leaning off the backs of boats to feed them by hand while they bob watchful and silently behind, heads cocked on those long, balletic necks. They were welcome, too, because they thinned the large flocks of Canadian Geese that hung around, and then removed them completely. Swans are ferociously territorial, drowning birds that happen to land in their waters. I remember my dad telling me this and picturing the shift in them, serene one second, near saintly, then stretching their long necks to catch, rend and kill. A knife’s edge capacity for brutality bound up in that pristine and hypnotic grace.
For life, and for Rubio, I like my interpretation better. Something latently savage, in swanning around.
But human beings, on account of their own fear of death, utter falsehoods even about the swans, and say that they sing their song of departure in sorrow, lamenting their death. — Plato, Phaedo
Swan song, as an expression, is a tangled one. We have it now as a final triumph by someone considered great. The past tense is crucial because in order to produce a swan song it’s expected the career, or life, that triumph is attached to will soon be over. For that reason, swan songs are usually titled in retrospect, by the audience and not the artist.
Musicians get the title most often for last albums or songs, especially when their lives come to violent or sudden ends, but athletes get them too. The athletes are less morbid, in that Lisa Leslie (22 points and nine rebounds in her final game — Sparks lost the Western Conference Finals) and Reggie Miller (27 points, four of them 3-pointers — Pacers lost to the Pistons in Game 6 of the Eastern Conference Semi Finals), for example, did not die.
Aphthonius of Antioch originated the swan song around the 4th century. In his, a swan saves itself from being killed by singing, its owner having mistaken it for a goose in the dark. Laurentius Abstemius, a 15th century Italian writer, wrote in a book of fables about a more goth swan. Asked by a passing stork why it’s singing so joyfully when it’s about to die, the swan replies that it welcomes the release of death from life’s miseries. There are cynical swan songs, with swans complaining that there are more geese (code for fools) in the world mistaken for swans than actual swans, and religious swans, trumpeting their last songs to heaven. Ornithologically speaking, none of them are accurate.
Swans trumpet, and some don’t even do that. The European swan, the one we’re all likely the most familiar with, is also dubbed the mute swan. There are very old naturalist texts that slam with some disappointment these swans for not singing in death, which means there were probably some brutal early field studies done in the name of science. Whooper swans, trumpeter swans and tundra swans all share an extra tracheal loop, which lets them bugle beyond the mute swan’s honk and hiss, and might’ve been the birds Aphthonius et al were on about.
The tragedy inherent in the swan song took wing with mythology. There was Cycnus (or Cygnus), king of Liguria, who lamented the death of his lover Phaethon so desperately that the gods turned him into a swan. Apollo, Phaethon’s father, whose own chariot was occasionally depicted as being pulled by swans, going so far as to turn Cycnus into a constellation (Cygnus) when he eventually died of heartbreak. In the Finnish epic, Kalevala, a black swan (that sings) lives on the Tuoni, a river in the land of the dead, and whoever kills it will perish themselves. Swan Lake ends very badly, in the Irish legend, Children of Lir, a woman transforms her three stepchildren into swans for 900 years, and the story of Leda and the Swan is, for all its romanticism in art, about rape.
In sports, we so often want our stars to function like the real ones. To flicker to life like a small and secret joy, to brighten under our gaze; to burn white hot, so bright for a time we can hardly bear to look, worried they’ve gotten too big for this carefully contained universe we’ve created for them and then, we want them to implode. To lose their light completely, to be snuffed out, to give us swan songs to crow about. The impulse, the very savage inclination, resting just under the surface.
It’s bleak, but I can’t make sense of some of our stranger behaviours toward total strangers any other way. Why we demand flesh for our feats, why we will bodily harm. Why we declare a body bankrupt, forfeit before it’s finished on its own power or before the person powering it has decided it’s done. When athletes just kind of fade out, or worse, walk away before we’ve decided we’re over them, we tend to take it as sleight. So much so that we can be retroactive about it. Rewriting their abilities, their entire careers as we knew them, to better suit our hurt — which is really just surprise, manifesting in a stupid way.
Does there have to be tragedy to justify the flourish? Does there need to be heartbreak, a public show of misery, an explosive collapse, all as a counterweight to a good or great career? Do we scale up the toll to match the heights made? Why is the impulse to rend the individual from their career, that the career can be considered a failure without consideration of the person — of what they’ve gone through — attached to it?
I love a Dutch Golden Age painting. The heavenly landscapes but especially the still lifes with fruit, fish, tumbling flowers, all of it sprawled and layered across tables that look like they’ve been ransacked. Dead game that appears more alive for how the fur or feathers are paid precise, devotional care with each brushstroke. I love them for these fixtures but also for their frankness: they are what they are, or were, in the moment they were made.
There are lots of dead swans in Dutch still lifes, alive birds so rare I can only think of one — Jan Asselijn’s The Threatened Swan.
The swan in it radiates power. It appears as a source of light, its body warped with action. The dog it’s reacting to in the lower left corner barely visible. So, too, is the text. Between the swan’s legs: ‘DE RAAD-PENSIONARIS’ (the grand pensionary), and over the dog’s head: ‘DE VIAND VAN DE STAAT’ (the enemy of the state). The largest egg in the clutch beside the swan says ‘HOLLAND’. Asselijn didn’t write any of it.
Something like 1.3 million paintings were produced over 20 years by Dutch Golden Age painters after the Eighty Years War, and most depicted subjects defined as the “lower categories” in the hierarchy of genres for the time — landscape and still life. The rise of Calvinism played a role in the re-focus of Dutch painters, with religious art (the highest in the hierarchy) banned from display in Reformation-era churches, but so did money: pastoral scenes sold.
The proliferation of art made it possible for ordinary people to buy it and gave rise, for the first time, to professional art dealers. It was a dealer named Cornelis Sebille Roos who bought Asselijn’s painting at the estate sale of another art dealer, and is thought to have written on The Threatened Swan.
Roos was hired by Dutch politician Alexander Gogel, a revolutionist who aligned with the Patriots (an early Dutch democratic movement that failed but inspired the American Founding Fathers). Gogel was a finance guy, but admired what the French had made with the Lourve — a national gallery to display and promote the country’s art. Knowing Gogel was mostly interested in acquiring patriotic art for the new national museum and that his tastes were shaped by his fears, Roos hurriedly scribbled some patriotic slogans around Asselijn’s territorial swan. To make it more, but mostly to get it sold. It was the (now) Rijksmuseum’s first acquisition, and is still hanging in its galleries today.
Asselijn, born in France 102 years before Roos and given the nickname “little claw” because he was short and one of his hands was withered, was, likely, not a Dutch revolutionary, and just had the talent and pleasure of painting a life-size swan like a lantern.
Rubio, it seems obvious to say, has had his share of hardship in basketball’s bodily price and on the personal side. He tore his left ACL twice, both times against the backdrop of seasons ramping up — first a career in bloom as a rookie (during the ACL surgery it was found his LCL needed reconstruction, too) and then on another verdant orbit, 10 seasons later in Cleveland. On November 1, 2014, the day after signing a four-year extension with the Wolves, two days after his friend and teammate Kevin Love was traded to the Cavs, Rubio sprained his left ankle so badly he needed surgery to repair it and was out until February. In Game 6 of that hero series he played with the Jazz against the Thunder, Rubio hurt his left hamstring and was out as the Jazz won, then lost in the next round.
Beyond his body — though it seems more accurate to say inside of it for how deeply he’s talked about the loss rending him — Rubio’s mother died of cancer that started in her lungs and spread, after bouts of treatment. He’s talked about how angry he felt the next season, how dark things got for him. That was 2016-2017, his last with the Wolves. In Utah, of course, there were on court bright spots, and in Utah Rubio also visited cancer wards on his own and with his father, and sought help in the logistics of starting his own charitable foundation.
When he was with the Cavs, years later, I watched him post shoot-around in Toronto one morning. He moved between his teammates as they towelled off and picked up water bottles, touching each of them. On the small of the back, the shoulder, the stomach, glimpsing contact that magnified Rubio’s care for each person. I was sitting with Jarrett Allen and Rubio came over, first catching Allen’s eye, who smiled and reached for Rubio, then mine, smiling too.
When Rubio said he was retiring earlier this week I thought of that. How care, the responsibility of holding onto so much and so many, paired with the weight of expectation, resolve, a career spent with all that on your shoulders and plain on your face, can add up to a hulking weight to carry. I thought of it again when Donovan Mitchell, who’d briefly reunited with Rubio in Cleveland, said "I feel like he could breathe,” when asked about Rubio stepping away, after the Cavs practiced Friday morning.
There are already 'What happened to Ricky Rubio’ videos popping up, some lamenting the Wolves “greatest mistake in franchise history” of picking Rubio before Steph Curry in the 2009 Draft, others trying to jam together enough ill-fitting pieces to present a solved puzzle that shows Rubio’s career to be a failure. As if there’s no way to talk about, to celebrate, his career without it ending in loss — not for him, for us.
For Rubio, I think, there was loss enough. He doesn’t need to take us deeper into the dark place he went this past July. To prove to us, essentially, that he’s worth this kind of sold-short tragedy we turn athletes leaving on their own terms into. Like we’re those bloodthirsty naturalists of earlier centuries, killing swans just to hear if they sing.
Most swans in the northern hemisphere migrate come fall. They need open water to feed. The sailing club, with its live-aboards who have underwater machines to “bubble” their boats and keep the ice from damaging the hulls, plus the plunging depth of Lake Ontario that keeps it from freezing through, provide open water for fish and plenty of people willing to supplement their diets. So, the swans started to stay through winter.
Anthony Edwards was drafted and started playing during the pandemic. His first viral interviews featured him talking about Rubio. Edwards said he wanted to travel and learn Spanish, etc. I imagine being in the cold of Minnesota during lockdown and dreaming of traveling. I think Rubio's mentorship helped Edwards so much, especially since there was a low key negative buzz around Edwards at first.
Fantastic work.