The Ides of March, madness
LeBron James deflects, Scottie Barnes fortifies, Saddiq Bey reaps, this month in duality.
March, somehow a third of the way through, has been high and low. Bad news eddying with the good, usually on the heels of the bad, so any sense of a positive, progressive stretch wobbles and grows murky.
Dylan and I hear from our landlord that he’s selling the house we live in and suddenly the next six months blur, we can’t picture where it is our lives will convalesce, where the most mundane and important things will happen. I go out for a drink with Greg, our first in months. Outside, the halogen lights pointed to the name of the place come on and flood down through the front windows, bathing us in a cold bright wash. For a few acclimatizing moments it feels like we’re on stage, acting out our conversation, until we forget and it seems the brightness has been there all along. I put my hand on Greg’s knee and we talk about going to the desert together. After, when it’s gotten dark and we’ve stayed two extra hours but hurry to leave before the band goes on, I watch him walk toward the viaduct with the snow swirling thick down around the streetlights. Fall asleep texting him descriptions of hotels, one that boasts, “some rooms feature steel horse trough bathtubs”.
Dylan and I go for dinner, cram into a tiny table for two, again the first time in months. The room is shotgun narrow and bright, hammered tin ceiling, loud voices, we cheers to a week of bad news. We celebrate Dylan’s mom retiring, toast on a soft Sunday morning where the air, in its chill, starts to turn, bites fresh instead of sharp.
Everyone we know, it seems, gets Covid in the span of three days. We test negative, test negative, test negative, I’m laid low by a migraine that clings and roils. It pours. The temperature climbs to double digits. The street is muck, the boulevards mud, but the car-wide sheets of brick thick ice that made islands along the curbs finally melt.
I pile the grocery cart high with citrus in its last gasp: stemmed mandarins, Cara Caras, Orri tangerines, chocolate oranges.
Captain finds a rib in the street, blackened with curb thaw and grit. I grab his jaws to try and pry then open and he yanks his head around, slipping his collar. He bounds sidelong into the road, car incoming. I grab him by the thick ruff of fur at his neck, wrestle his collar on, pull him from the street as George sniffs him worriedly. I can’t pick out the bone without him clamping down hard on my fingers, so we walk on, his head high and proud, chewing at the bone until I hear it breaking, picture its shards catching in his throat. He works on it for a block and then it’s gone. Captain is a very good dog who does dumb things and picks his battles with a feral sagacity I admire once we’ve retreated a safe distance from them.
Good work news comes, bad work news comes. Every day my friends and family have different symptoms. The two days it’s been sunny I watch the light tack across the front hall, the big painting on canvas and framed exhibition prints we’ve hung there, think how we heard an hour later the morning we put them up that we’d have to take them down and leave.
Scottie Barnes at his postgame in Toronto on Friday, asked what he made of going up against a hero like LeBron James, says he was a Kobe Bryant fan.
Barnes, four nights before laid flat on his back in Los Angeles, turning his head in time to see an airborne James trebuchet a ball from on high down at him. There’s a second or two where Barnes, getting to his feet, angles himself away from James now bearing down on him. James who, after yanking at Barnes’s shoulder and sending him to the floor in the first place, seems so angry at the call in front of his coach, his bench, that he turns on Barnes. Barnes’s face, always so wide open, cycling through what all just happened.
James behind Barnes, I won’t say it’s Brutus, but the image comes close.
Call and response. James bookending the week by telling media in the Raptors’ makeshift visiting team’s media room, one half of the media workroom where dinner was served, hot dogs rolled never-ending in a stainless steel warmer, pizza turned slow in a glass case, partitioned off now with heavy black drapes, that he saw this talent in Barnes since he was in the 7th grade. It might be true, it feels true, but the biggest accuracy is the the acquiescing rhythm of James, always more forgiving in a win.
The Ides of March were when things came due. On the Roman calendar, around the 15th of the month, a time for collecting debts. First, sacred to Jupiter, a day of sacrifice. Sheep led down the Via Sacra, past the Forum and Colosseum, looming and whole, to be slaughtered in the street. Later, in the Imperial period, a tree was cut down and carried into the city by priests, hung in the temple from an image of Attis, a Phrygian god of nature who went nuts at his own wedding and castrated himself. Oscar Wilde wrote a poem about it.
The Romans were sacrosanct in their symbolism. It was on the Ides when Julius Caesar was killed in a meeting of his senate at the Theatre of Pompey. Caesar apparently cracked a joke on the way. An eye-rolling, still familiar sarcasm even now across 2,000 years, basically a shrugging, “Well, the Ides have come!” just before he was stabbed to death, some 60 conspirators taking their due that day.
Seven players, with no more than three days between performances, have had 50-point games since March 5. James started it, 56 against the Warriors, Karl-Anthony Towns cranked it to 60 after an undulating streak of 50 to 54 between Jayson Tatum, Kyrie Irving, Kevin Durant and James (again). Irving mirrored Towns a day later.
It seemed all quiet on the conference fronts. Then, in the lone NBA game this past Thursday between Orlando and Detroit, March Madness in full-bore and most eyes not on Amway Center’s parquet floor and the tottering slime green, pineapple shape of Stuff the Magic Dragon, Saddiq Bey made his 50th, then 51st at the free throw line.
The last time this happened in the league was December 1962.
In the grand scheme, there is no reason. Six of the eight games were against teams kicking rocks around the bottom of their respective conferences, depleted by injuries or belief or both. Two, back to back, were against the Magic.
On a smaller scale, especially with Bey, it feels more apt to hone toward personal intention. To know on some level that a Thursday night game mid-March in central Florida between the 14th and 15th ranked teams in the East could not compete with the piqued scramble and furor of college ball. To decide to go for 50 anyway, or because of, that sense of a stage left empty for you. To spin under a spotlight tracking just you, only you, and go flying into the corner for a fadeaway jumper as the shot clock saws, one leg kicked up in a grand battement, only to come back one second later with a steal and a wide open shot from the wing to close the half. To call for the ball and keep calling for it, skipping into traffic and driving Terrence Ross, Markelle Fultz and Admiral Schofield off the road. To make it to 49 with Dwane Casey screaming, “Attack, attack, attack!” over your shoulder and a begrudging arena rising to its feet in the kind of synchronized push that sinks the building a little bit lower into the swamp, into that porous limestone bedrock way below.
To reap.
And anyway, Bey went to Villanova, they didn’t play until the next night.
The thing about coming due is that for so many of the bigger, more wrenching things, it doesn’t. Deshaun Watson had 22 counts of sexual misconduct brought against him and this week walked into a new, $230 million contract with the Cleveland Browns. With Watson, as with Derrick Rose, Robert Sarver, all the many and more, what is longed for is surprise. The surprise in justice meted out, coming due, in a wavering from our calloused expectations. We’ve hardened to surprise out of necessity, in requirements of self-protection, guarding against exhaustion, in steeling ourselves against the next time.
There’s always a next time.
So I find it a curious, depressing jolt when I am surprised in the midst of more of the same.
Why was it surprising to see James laud Watson’s new deal? James who has made more missteps, or strange ones, this past year in legacy-building than I can recall him being so overt about before. The issue isn’t in how loud James has been in his recent criticisms against public health during a pandemic, his silencing of 22 (and just think, for a second, how many more women opted not to come forward against Watson) women, it’s in how wrong he’s been.
There are people who will look to figures like James, self-made and savvy, and treat his stamp or stance as final. An emphatic end to argument or the inclination to look a little deeper, if only for themselves. James is a product and figurehead of the same social environment we all are, one that encourages the loudest voice as being right and enforces the richest or most powerful, even popular, as being inherently correct.
The jolt of James in this case could come as an eye-opener, a clarifying turning point. To disentangle from James as public figure, a leader, an idol it might serve better to take off the altar of worship. I’ve seen the surprise of James’s endorsement echo across Twitter but it’s still mostly been from women, always women, willing to take even the smallest stand — through an app on our phones — and voice disappointment. It isn’t about blaming James, or anything so rudimentary as right or wrong in a vacuum, as it is deciding what counts as accountability. To me, it has to be inherent of burden, a measure of difficulty, or else why bother. Or by all means bother, but don’t be surprised or annoyed when asked to explain yourself.
James doesn’t have the responsibility that the Browns do in justifying the team’s actions, which the Browns did very badly, or the Blazers did, also very badly, when the team hired Chauncey Billups as a coach in spite of a very public rape allegation. The Browns and the Blazers cited independent investigations we were supposed to believe happened in a matter of days over instances of assault that happened over the course of years with Watson, or happened over a decade ago, as with Billups. With the Blazers, it would turn out that the investigator the team hired was close to Neil Olshey, ran a private security firm, and failed to contact any of Billups’s accuser’s attorneys. With the Browns, it’s already proving the same.
James can and readily does toggle between the version of himself, as empire, and himself, as a person, just a guy able to claim he was only excited about his football team. That’s deflection. It’s also familiar, so much so that I’m waiting for the in-game performance, or postgame comment, that will serve to overshadow James’s ringing endorsement of Watson and get us back in his rhythm of authority. To lull from accountability when we could stand to be jolted.
"failed to contact any of Billups’s accuser’s attorneys. With the Browns, it remains to be seen."
Have I got some news for you!