The swell and the break

“At least it broke outside you,” the night guard said, helping me pick up the shards of glass in the spreading pool of water, darkening the concrete floor. “That’s what my father always said, better it break now, for you to see, so then it won’t break later.”

There was a little lost in translation, for sure, from his Sri Lankan father giving him the adage he was handing to me, along with the long stem coral roses and calla lilies with their blooms flipped backward, so the waxy white insides have a chance to shine in whatever light will catch them.

The event had left enough flowers behind in the museum lobby to outfit a wedding, jammed into tall, thin glass vases. So thin that when I shifted my grip on one, to pinch it at the rim and take it all upstairs to the office, the section I had a hold on snapped away, leaving the half moon of glass the only thing left in my hand and the rest falling onto my feet. It came apart lightly, glass splintering so fast I didn’t process what had happened until I felt water pooling around my toes inside thin leather loafers.

The night guard’s saying, in how absolutely loose, was comforting. Better to see the thing breaking than to be the one that breaks, is broken. Better to have it happen now, when you’re watching, than later when you’re not. To have it done rather than have it due.

Whatever is going to come out of what Daryl Morey said, enough to fracture, to break, the ties between the NBA and China—the whole country!—isn’t done. The break is the splintering kind. A spidering crack weaving there and back, in and out on itself, with every statement and counter statement and careful revision and outright refusal to accept another hairline fracture spiralling out. Morey, for sure, had no clue what had been going on in Hong Kong before a cursory look. And that’s not a thing to blame him for, honestly. It is always good to look. But the most surprising thing in all of it, to me, was how little it took. He got a hold on the very edge of something and it snapped away, severing the hold, shattering the whole in the process. Morey, this bumbling, analytics geek who came up in the league on the integrity of numbers, going out on a limb as far as taking a chance on sentiment, and watching some inner sanctum of his corporate world get blown apart for it.

The erosion of the NBA’s progressive image, for me, has come, keeps coming, through its continued inability to get it right when handling abuse and violent assault allegations levelled against its players. It is not so shocking to me then that it is tripping all over itself to keep a firm hold on its best face and business interests in a less than progressive country. It would almost be easier, as a fan and consumer and critic of it, for this to have been the eye opener, versus the lopsided feints at accountability, or the support of those in vulnerable positions. It would be almost radical to me for the NBA to admit that this China snarl is about money, and move on. Refreshing for it not to be about basketball building bridges, or that politics framed by painting a court over top wouldn’t scuff. That is the kind of thing you can, could, placate greater powers with, maybe your audience for a little while, but don’t bullshit people whose lives are teetering on the real weight of those decisions. People who have only ever been looking at the bigger picture through the fractures put there by greater powers but manage to see glimmers of hope refracted back to them in what’s been broken. I love basketball but my relationship with the league has reluctantly become realistic, and it has been, not joyful, but clarifying with a tinge like touching your tongue to a fresh battery, watching them trip all over the mess that probably seemed too impossible to ever happen with this. Years of careful stewardship, corporate relationship building, busted up by the first thing Daryl Morey probably found when he Google Imaged “Hong Kong protest”. A reminder that nothing, no matter how streamlined, how seamless it might appear, can’t just snap apart and shatter when the slightest amount of pressure is placed on it.

I loved Hong Kong. I was lucky enough to be there so recently that I can still remember what it smelled like. How heavy the air, like swimming, fried and spice twined together with fresh and wet winding its way down from the thick, wild jungle on Victoria Peak. Leaning over the rail at the Happy Valley Racecourse, watching the horses muscles work under the brightest floodlights I’d ever seen, the hyper green of the grass going neon and coming up in clods as they thudded by, racing silks buzzing like the signs over restaurants in the streets. The quiet of the days, how hot, walking slow up sheer angled side streets, plateaus nestled with basketball courts that dropped off into air, people playing pick up impervious to the heat, the sound of the ball hitting the backboard echoing off between the brutalist concrete apartment towers in soft hues—lavender, baby chick yellow, cornflower blue—further softened by the salt in the air from the ocean all around. Climbing the peak, going from dense city to dense jungle in under an hour, probably less if I had been used to those inclines and that kind of hiking. Riding the ferry around Victoria Harbour, gawking back at Causeway Bay with the sun high up over Kowloon, coming back into an artificial aurora of strobing colours from every building, twice, down onto the water and back up into the night. Tropical storms suddenly flooding the streets and watching from a high stool inside a bar with a chopping ceiling fan, condensation running down a green glass bottle neck. These are tourist takings, purely, from a place that I could not on arrival and still can’t with distance draw any parallels to. There is nothing really academic in these observations, they were stimulus, for me all of Hong Kong was. Being there was physical, there is a weight to the place I felt on my bare, permanently sweating skin, coming in through my lungs. Buried under layers of history and colonial handovers, with people who have stayed, through steady generations, all through it.

There is always a place under what is being talked about, the physical place or its elemental form, out of people, out of its origin, out of what it’s been tempered from. To get into it you sometimes have to watch it break. If it breaks now—the tidal swells of Hong Kong protestors in the streets against police lines, the NBA buckling under scrutiny from foreign and domestic sides and pressures it hasn’t ever faced in public as a platform—it can save it from breaking later. If it breaks now there are ways to see at once all sides refracted in the fragments, behind, the necessary forward, the easy forward, the clarity of a point, the jagged edge that could rend, do real harm, or scrape something clean. What happens in a break can be respite.

In Hong Kong everything felt like a view. Like a plateau you earned. Everything moved up. Turn an alley and you’d find a narrow set of 100 concrete stairs going up to a street where the cars and people who knew better ways there looked tiny in passing and then steady, just watching your feet, you’d be up at the top, looking back and thinking how time slips when you’re moving forward. A winding dirt path up through the jungle that spit you out at a radio tower and a garden in the flat plateau of a mountain, city workers patiently pruning its flowering trees, with you, heaving for breath, looking down on Victoria Harbour to one side and the South China Sea on the other. Every climb just led to more ways up. I don’t think the saying that nothing worth it is easy always needs to be true. Sometimes things that are easy are worth it, just happen, and that value isn’t inherent in difficulty or tests. Big things are going to wind you, and that forces greater will bow and break, sometimes, a lot of the time, you just need to keep pressing, to take the impossible stairs while staring at your feet, knowing that the view from the top could get a lot more complicated but it is something you are going to want to see. A place where you can pluck something vital out of the torpedoed pieces.