The guts of routine
My biggest concern was butts. I said as much to Sean as security checked our bags and we went down into the tunnels of the arena. It smelled like an ice rink. That slight tinge of chemicals, forced heat blasting, bodies. The Leafs had played the night before and the shift over to basketball was still going but there are parts of any arena that doubles up on its pro-sports, I’d bet, that have elements of one or the other baked in.
We dumped our stuff in the press room, a small makeshift cafeteria on one end, long tables down the other, spots along the wall with coveted electrical outlets labeled per each regular local publication. Writing workrooms are always hushed, which both surprises me and doesn’t. Doesn’t because of the writing, does because of the setting and the natural inclination that when you get that many people with some commonalities in one place, they usually break. You kind of crave the outlet. You want to talk. At Summer League, where there were three times as many writers, as many media, just that many more bodies proximally tied to basketball around at any given time, it was the same. That workroom had rows and rows of tables, TVs wheeled in sitting out at the edges, a small buffet, extra fridges stocked with bottles of water—because everyone was losing so much from their bodies in the heat, the overcharged A/C in the casinos, plus probably drinking, that you never quit trying to counteract drying out—and still every time I went in to grab one it was quiet, maybe the sound of someone on a call pacing around in one of the corners.
But right, butts.
There are women that go in the locker room. Women with key and senior roles on the team that go in, writers, but by my count that was still like, six, tops. I am also not afraid of butts. They are a wonderful commonality, an equalizer, and wow when one stands out. The butts in this case represented stepping between the boundaries of intimacy. Of going from watching someone in various states of athletic readiness—swaddled in warm-up gear so that no part of that precious body can get chilled, KT-taped along the contours of muscles and carefully suited in uniforms hung out for them—and watching them on either end of that, going in or coming out. And not watching-watching, because there are social norms, but being surrounded by.
It was representational for me, too. In my case the first time I’d be stepping into locker rooms as someone authorized to be there, to see these butts. Going away from the familiar perspective of how I had written up to then and toward what was ostensibly going to come after, eventually familiarized too. Because perspectives shift, even if you don’t feel like you are ready for them to. The ones that sometimes shift us the most along with them are the ones we almost always do not feel ready for. The realization that for the context to change, for us to get closer to the thing we want, we have to be the ones to move toward it.
Everyone who covers basketball in this way has been here. Has taken the first step over from observer, through some preconceived shroud of expectation, directly into it. But there is this sense that the sooner you move through the better, and also that the people in it have always been there. This is the same with anyone who has moved along from one thing to the next, the tendency to want to act as if there was nothing before this because what came before can represent a time where you had less, knew less, wanted less. But we aren’t diminished by those versions, if anything they can show how hungry, how nervous, how wide open we were. There is a forced forgetting sometimes of past perspectives, because the idea is that wherever we are now, we know better. Maybe. But why not try to remember all of it.
Personally, I don’t want to talk to people doing the same kind of work that I’m doing who won’t acknowledge that they weren’t ever afraid, weren’t ever unsure, weren’t ever in a previous version of themselves. A version of themselves that hopefully still crops up at appropriate or not times, times when you wonder why you are getting nervous for something you’ve done so much already, times when you are taken out of the moment because the normalcy of something that was previously only imaginable in private hits you over the head. Joy in routine, joy that something remarkable has become routine.
In my case, there was a physical shroud to step into, through—steam billowing out from the showers blasting hot one room over, slightly mystical and smelling of body wash. I went through it and ended up in the light pooling from half a dozen video cameras, all trained on me. The part of me that was giddy and preening because of it cracked a joke—“Not for me eh, not yet”—before stepping out of the spot that the players were going to do their postgames from.
‘Cause what do you do when facing a moment lit up and bound, in a way still unbelievable, to your life? You can crack a joke to start, to soften the impact, but you have to acknowledge it.
I started this week transcribing the dulcet tones of Mike Conley answering my questions in an empty locker room, so I’m not sure how things naturally go up from there.
The Jazz-Toronto game came on a night of a blizzard, the kind of snow that would switch to small pellets of ice or undulating mists of rain depending on where you were standing, but I blushed so much in the two minutes or so we had that I couldn’t normalize my body temperature for the rest of the night.
I ended this week, after a 3-day long migraine that had me in and out of various states of functioning, walking the dogs in the early morning and spiralling through two hours of conversation with my oldest friend.
The morning was quiet. Sun slid up just far enough to come spilling over the clouds huddling down at the horizon. There was nobody else out on the streets, no joggers, other dogs or cars, just Captain, George and I and our individual, small puffing clouds of breath. In the park I unclipped George and he shot out like a bird springing up from a branch, off a power line, and circled back to us in the same way. Captain recently took a long detour toward a dumpster in an active parking lot and then bolted inside a school where he scared a bunch of people, so he stayed on his leash. George zeroed in on every mound of snow not yet trampled for the sole purpose of bursting through it, the little particles of ice catching the light coming through the bare tree branches, catching his eyes as he glanced back to us, his teeth when he ran right at us and jumped up, high enough so his head was level with mine, as best as I can tell just because his body can do that.
Before I found him at the animal shelter George’s life was a mystery but the parts known are, like most animals that end up lost and found, sad. Kept in a barn 24/7, our vet thinks he was either hoarded or a bait dog for dog fights, because of the zig-zagged scratch lines that go across his snout. Healed now, but deep enough once that hair won’t grow there, so you see his past carved as an absence in his otherwise soft fuzzed face. Everything with him was a slow reverse. First, from his crate to the attic room we had to keep him in, then short trips outside, and gradually to the rest of the house. I can’t even tell you how long it took, and what a wonder it is to shorten the process in retrospect. Dylan and I were told at the shelter we’d probably never have him off leash, not even in the house.
So to see him run now is a wonder.
All his history disappears in the blur he turns into, because the dude is fast. When George runs it isn’t at anything unless he’s turned and is eating up the distance between him and me or Dylan or Captain. He runs because his weird big-little body thrills in it. Because the barrel of his chest is so deep I feel he must have horse lungs, but the rest of him is so slight we have a hard time keeping the weight from sliding off him. His legs are so long that when they cross underneath in the middle of his stride the back reach out beyond his nose and the front behind his long whip of a tail. For him, this new routine of running will not get old. And for me, remembering what it was to give him back a world he could run in, how routine for him means safety, it won’t either.
On the phone, cradled painfully between my cheek and shoulder—you’re not supposed to do this with our thin computer phones anymore I know—Steph and I had circled, branched out, looped back, stalled and jumped each other so many times that we’d said bye three times but one or the other ignored it and started in on something new. I’m tearing a chicken carcass with my hands, starting a stock, cleaning mirrors, watching birds arc and bank out the window, pacing, leaning, staring at myself in a mirror I just cleaned. I won’t remember any of it until after.
The routine of hearing the voices of people you love, and the ones you really know, when you challenge each other, press just enough, back off, when you hear their breathing slow and know they are considering or about to refute something you’ve said—you can practically hear the screech of sneakers on hardwood—what else is it but dancing.
Steph and I went to the ballet a few weeks back. The National Ballet of Canada sells rush seats in the very back row of the very top mezzanine for not much. The show was Giselle, an extremely goth ballet, and every time I started to tear up—a dancer went en pointe across the entire stage, 14 of them did the same sequence at once on a darkened set save for the spotlights on them and the mood of it gave me goosebumps—I’d look over at Steph and she was too. There are routines of feelings that come with familiarity that run like invisible currents between people. You can read the mood of someone like that without seeing their face, whether they are next to you in the dark or in the other end of the city. It’s the kind of routine that wears more deeply with time, like the ocean going at the coast, but inside your body. And it doesn’t really weigh you down, if anything it makes you lighter, the way you can hand off being known so well by someone else and not have to rely on yourself as a mirror because in some ways, crucial ways, they’ve become the better reflection.
Keeping routines can be radical. When we get used to wanting so much, so fast, when we live day-to-day and can deviate from plans, drop them, when something better can conceivably be around any corner and the way we’re connected we just have that many more corners to look around, everyday routines are a tether. Forging new ones, in the sense that they will stick, that you will see them to the point of habit kicking in, takes guts. And if it’s going to be a good routine, something that you pour effort, time, love and talent into, then you are going to need practice to get it right. Fucking up, doing over, realizing before you start that it might go sideways again, those are the intimidating parts of routine, starting new ones or stopping old ones. Failure might be the fork in the road or the chasm blown into it or the bridge that eventually connects the two sides, but there’s no way you’re moving forward, in any routine, without it.
Standing around waiting for the coaches to come out, Joe Ingles walked by me and boomed out a joke directed at a guy I was talking to. One I thought, Holy shit Joe Ingles is huge. Two, He really doesn’t sound that Australian. Three, Joe Ingles seems funny. Four, Do I like Joe Ingles now?
There’s a sort of kinetic energy in the milling comfort of people standing around waiting. Waiting for coaches, for players, for locker rooms to open, for someone to warmup, for the game to start. There is a general idea of what people are waiting for, you might talk to someone about what you’re working on, they might introduce you to someone that changes your wait, but the feeling, like the time, drags and rushes.
When Quin Snyder came out and stood in front of the makeshift Jazz step-and-repeat taped up over a section of wall in a section of tunnel, everyone but me seemed ready. Recorders were up and red lights beamed, arms jockeyed for position in front of Snyder’s mouth. Left a little in the lurch, and wanting to feel for a moment if it came, I hung back, but there was a point when he was asked about routine and he stopped, looked up, and spoke like a harpoon gun to my guts:
“You can't be afraid to fail. Something is never that easy when you first do it. You have to have a level of perseverance to become good at something. That's really, to become great at anything, there's going to be failure and you'll learn from that, that's what competition is.”
After that I took a breath, went around a blind corner, and talked to Mike Conley.