This particular beast

Nikola Jokic, the driving force of devotion, and the myth of the wounded animal.

The myth of the wounded animal is one of desperation, untapped reserves of power and strength, ferocity, renewed purpose. The reality is retreat, solitude, the preservation of energy and largely, in nature, death.

The myth of the wounded animal has nothing to do with the animal. It exists in the eyes of the observer and more often, the agitator of the animal. The wounded animal doesn’t become cornered on its own, but the hand that’s provoked, wielding the weapon that did the wounding, that’s the perspective we tell the myth of the wounded animal from.

We love the analogy of the wounded animal, we especially love it in sports. The underdog, the dark horse, the poked bear. In these imagined beasts come easy vehicles for triumph, for a wild and unruly hope we can’t name. The animal, cornered, claws its way out, and if the win isn’t achieved then immortality’s granted through effort. Either way, a kind of life.

Michael Malone was fired by the Nuggets this week with three games left in the regular season. I’d like to say that the shock of it wasn’t prematurely diminished given all the head coach firings there have been so far this season, but it’s what my subdued reaction to finding out seems to suggest.

After the first game the Nuggets played without Michael Malone, a win after four straight losses, Jokic was pulled to the side in Sacramento and asked about all of it.

His answer about losing Malone was diplomatic, professional, and whether wear from the game or emotion his voice cracked pointing out the 10 years they spent together. His answer about the win post-Malone, and president Josh Kroenke’s decision, I woke up to clips and pull-quotes of the next morning.

“People say that we are vulnerable, but I think the beast is always the strongest— the most dangerous when it's vulnerable,” Jokic said. “So maybe he woke up the beast.”

Context is important. A few years ago, talking about Devin Booker being out with injury and the subsequent state of the Suns, CJ McCollum reached for the wounded animal: “A wounded animal is more dangerous than a healthy animal,” McCollum said, “‘Cause you don’t know what to expect.”

It was something he told his teammates many times, McCollum said, this anticipation of the unexpected. To a degree, that’s just basketball, but McCollum meant it as a show of respect. To not count Booker out, to give him and a capacity for dormant ferocity benefit of the doubt.

With Jokic, what I expect got to so many people who went on to share the quote, was its encapsulation of a kind of affability he’s been infused with. Out of context, just reading and with no knowledge of Jokic, it comes across like any rote sports quote. The simple binary of competition, easy to follow. Asleep, now awake. Out of the zone, now in it.

Knowing Jokic, having watched him play or listened to him talk about playing, the reality of his talent being so natural and sublime that at times it appears he’s not trying, moreover the balance he strikes between what he acknowledges as his job and his very valued personal life, the quote’s imbued with his complexity. The nature of, but more so the nature we’ve given this particular beast.

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Two days in a row Louisa texted me about Jokic, both about an exchange he had with a reporter. The deja vu of it was only because both times I was lying in the same spot, under the same palm tree, reading the same book slowly for how distracted I’d get every time a frigatebird drifted overhead, or a pair of brown pelicans banked in low and close from the sea, or a cluster of laughing gulls swooped in and took up jockeying residence at the lip of the pool. My phone, the times I remembered to bring it with me, buried down in the bottom of the bag under books and tubes of sunscreen, gritty with sand, but the two days I did: there was Jokic (well, Louisa and Jokic). Aside from watching the women’s Final Four from the hotel room’s standalone bathtub, it was the only basketball I consumed on vacation.

The first text was a context-less quote, that horses are like athletes, with no attribution or preamble. It didn’t matter. This is usually how we talk about Jokic and this is usually what Jokic talks about. Louisa said what she loved was the order of the line, “My opinion is that horses are basically like athletes.” Jokic comparing athletes to horses — horses the primary, the constant — instead of swapping them to compare horses to athletes. I replied I would have put them in the same order Jokic did.

The second text, the next day, was a now clipped video of the specific horse-athlete question, and Jokic’s response.

“As you hang out with horses in stalls,” the reporter starts, and Jokic’s eyes suddenly go lovestruck-cartoon wide, “and basketball players in the locker room, does it ever bother you or intimidate you that both racehorses and basketball players, they usually have huge appetites to compete?”

Jokic starts his answer with an anecdotal aside, “I think racehorses know when the race is coming,” he smiles, a little conspiratorially. “We are born for this. We train since we were little. My opinion, that horses are basically like athletes, they’re really similar to us. They have different characters. Even in a race there’s a different character in a horse. I think they are born to run and we are born to play.”

“Do you ever get tired of competing?” Comes the follow-up. “No,” Jokic says. "They do probably,” he adds, face softening and eyes, momentarily, going farther away.

One of the things I love about Jokic is the at once tender and deadpan way he talks about horses. His love for them, by now, well known around the NBA and with fans. It’s referenced in playful asides in most everything written about him, brought up with a sort of “isn’t-this-cute” cadence reserved for an athlete or public figure’s hobbies or quirks.

Because he’s a smart person, I think Jokic recognizes the quaint way his devotion has over time been framed. For some the framing comes from the inability to let athletes hold two interests, or any interest outside their sport and their dedication to it, simultaneously. For others it’s because horses, like many animals, are a secondary object. I know it’s not a real fault to judge people for — some people’s exposure to animals has been bad, others may not have had any at all — but I’ve always linked an additional level of observation, a honed curiosity and its requisite patience, to those who treat animals as primary entities. That is, with their own impulses, motivations, and behaviours.

Jokic has never entertained any of the occasional questions he’s asked about horses as cloying or all that entertaining, even if they’ve been poised to him with that kind of cadence. His mannerisms change in that he’s suddenly more entertained, more engaged, but his answers never return any of the whimsy he’s getting hit with.

The simplest reason is routine. You do something your whole life and you cease to snag on the contours others might find anomalous. The other reason is fascination.

Who knows why we’re drawn to the interests we are. Some is exposure — Jokic grew up in Sombor, the land outside the (relatively) small city immediately falls away into fields and farmland — and some is an unknown, persistent pull toward what’s captivated us. We don’t tend to treat our own fascinations as twee or unserious, we treat them as driving forces. So I’ve always wondered why Jokic’s is handled as peculiar, even funny. Certainly, seeing Jokic’s frame folded into a harness racing cart makes the brain do some extra work in familiar proportions, but it is quite literally the vehicle for his love and fascination.

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The truth is there are hundreds of everyday ways to fell a horse. The constant creeping threat of colic, thrush, laminitis, strangles, cribbing, moon blindness, ulcers, any manner of injury to their long and precarious ligaments and 205 bones. To care for horses is to exercise constant vigilance, knowing when a nip they make to their ribs is to scratch and itch or a sign of intestinal twisting. All of it makes me trust Jokic more when he references them, any animal. Especially a wounded one.

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Early in his career, after his his first playoff run, ESPN did an interview with Jokic. The story mostly talks about his adaptation to NBA conditioning (a favourite and strange fascination, still) and Game of Thrones, but mentions his horses at home in Sambor and is the source of a quote I often roll over in my head.

“I enjoy animals,” Jokic said, “their nature.”

The duality of it, whether via our projection or his meaning, is very Jokic. So is its simplicity and directness. The frank pleasure. His nature.

Watching a horse take to speed is seeing a different, primal part of their brain take over. Pure instinct. Their head snaps up, the neck, maybe hanging long and loose seconds before, goes suddenly stiff, ratcheting toward the shoulder. That impulse carries down their spine in a physical change you can track; something in the long, clean line of their back appears to connect, ending in the dock of the tail — an extension of the spine — as it whips up like a flag cranked to full mast.

A horse runs for pleasure, survival, something to do, but when they run the choice of movement goes out of them. They just move and in turn are taken up by the movement, brain turned responsive to stimulus and stimulus being speed. Natural, explosive, occasionally dangerous.

Some athletes call the feeling of free and decisive movement during a game a “flow state”, where the body’s response to the action shifts into a heady autopilot. When Jokic says horses are made to run like athletes are made to, in his case, play basketball, I know he means the instinct of it, the automatic impulse. Their natures.