Waiting for each other

“I don’t have a background in business ethics—”

“And I don’t have a background in basketball.”

Was how the call started with the professor I’d cold contacted to talk through the ethics of this NBA season with. It had really started with her answering the phone and telling me, before either of us had said hello or given introductions, that she was looking for her coffee mug.

For the last four months it’s been harder to find the brighter threads shot through this basketball season. There are the real and large problems with the season itself, its moral mechanics and potential longterm effects on players, and the longer it trudges forward bent on behaving as usual, the bigger the rift gets between the ease of finding those bright spots and the will to even want to.

When the professor found her mug, when we settled into the familiar beat of question and answer that eventually shifts into conversation, it hit me that what’s made me so happy in the hours of reporting for my extremely depressing series, ‘Contact Tracing’, these past couple months was in these engaged, occasionally nervous, sometimes fumbling, but always enthusiastic conversations with strangers.

Explaining the process of shifting to remote media in the Orlando bubble to a linguist who's spent her prolific career studying and writing about the nuances of human conversation. Her occasional breathless interruptions of, “Fascinating!”, a reminder that this whole weird time is like an anthropological study. Laughing along with team personnel as they walked me through technical troubleshooting of setting up a full-scale communications operation in a place where there weren’t even any chairs to start, softening along with the concern in their voice when we got to what all of this has done to players, to everybody, psychologically.

Doctors who took time out of rotations to explain to me the nuance of tendons and soft tissue, whose catching excitement about muscle remodelling made me, in the depths of January, the most engaged I’d felt all winter.

And ethicists who, what they knew of basketball mostly being in the loose ties of the American cities they were from, or the Canadian city they currently worked in, had felt enough of the business world of the NBA overlapping with their own through spring, summer, the current season’s start this past December, that its more troubling ripples didn’t need to be explained. They’d felt them, too.

I’d thought the anchor of all these conversations was basketball, but that was just the initial pretence. What made the conversations so compelling and what made everyone, across so many professional backgrounds and personal perspectives, so eager to talk about such terrible things, was people. How is this affecting people? And then, resonating somewhere within the echo of that: How is this affecting us?

Talking to strangers, I’ve missed it so much. The opportunities for spontaneous conversation, with acquaintances, with work friends, with people who you are connected to physically in a moment because someone else standing there becomes a human conduit and says, oh, do you know each other? The inclination to talk, to reach out, to smile or strike something up because your life has just then overlapped with somebody else’s? The world around basketball sets you up for these kinds of fumbling, joyful, weird interactions a handful to hundreds of times in the span of any given game night, depending how many you open yourself up to. Zooming out even further and I think about the social ping-ponging that’s been lost in the experience of getting to any given game night, too.

Our circles are so small now, no wonder it lit my brain up to cast these cold lines out into the abyss and have them come back with willing, compelling, perceptive, and intelligent strangers. It’s so nice to sit and listen to a voice that isn’t your own, inside your head. To be thrust into — what’s now become — the novel, straining rush of thinking of something to say that not just answering back to yourself.

If anything, the interviews I’ve done this past year, in the past four months especially, have rapidly shifted into familiarity, into just talking, faster than any I’ve had in the past. I have set questions but I lose sight of them so much faster because the conversations just spiral and shift, and everyone has been so quick to laugh, to come loose, to lose their train of thought and come shrugging back to something completely different. I had a call with an NBA player this past week and at the end we were both so reticent to cede to our scheduled half hour. Throughout the interview there had been a vacuum around him somewhere loudly switching on and off, revving and knocking into things, I felt the exact same way. At the end he said how nice it had been to talk, just to talk. My heart revved and banged into my sternum. I said I know what you mean.

I’ve been eager for scientific explanations of what’s going on in my brain, and bigger explanations that’ll come with time on what this course in history has and will mean, but really, just for me, it’s been made clear in all the bright little shining veins zig-zagging through the last year — connections to people, yes, but people, mostly just them.

I know I don’t have to cover games to enjoy basketball again like I know it’s not going to take calling up an ethicist, a doctor, a disaster psychologist every time I want to, either. For one, the people I know who have gone back into arenas have only said how strange it feels, and like scheduling spontaneous conversations, it defeats its own purpose as much as it’s untenable. The hardest thing as we watch the numbers (cases, vaccines, age limits), gain an hour, or fall in and out of this NBA season is in the waiting. Knowing how much more time it’s going to take to get back to the world and finding each other in it again. Knowing what we have all along if we’re being honest, a weird full-circle back from where we started when the distance didn’t seem so bad, when it seemed a drift or a stretch and not a course of history, is that we’re waiting for each other.