With the 30th pick in the Basketball Feelings Feelings Draft, Corbin Smith selects... LOVE
Corbin Smith has a knack for chaos. His writing tends toward what’s charged and he doesn’t quietly approach so much as drop himself and whoever’s reading right in the middle, but once there Corbin knows what parts of a story to keep close, what sharp parts to pad with an almost yawning malaise, and what can be walked out, left to revel or run. The first time we recorded a podcast together he got up partway to make soup, leaving John Wilmes and I to talk around loud stretches of clanging pots. Another time a siren was faraway on my end, fading by the second, and he interrupted the three person recording with, “Whoa, WHOA, KH, what’s going on over there?” His awareness is high-tuned, impossible to switch off but acute, and also why under his cacophonous velocity he’s warm, gruffly sensitive. Maybe that was a secret, but you don’t hopscotch between earnestly, effortfully, striving to make sense of the snarl of the world and retreating, abruptly, for a breather without keyed-up empathy — an emotional state I feel is becoming the norm for many, in its wild oscillation, given the current condition of things. The secret was also gonna be out with his pick, the last in the inaugural Basketball Feelings Feelings Draft, of Love.
Let’s say rooting for a team is an expression of love. I’m not sure that's true, myself, but let’s go for it. We invest ourselves in the on-court fates of stranger millionaires on account of thin threads of memory, our associations with family and community, of moments from years past that stick in your head, of the pure aesthetic joy of sports itself. It all kind of melts together and is distilled into what amounts to an association fuelled by affection and longing, which is fairly close, I’m pretty sure.
When we think about fandom the first thing that comes to mind is the high points. I remember watching Damian Lillard hit the shot above Paul George’s extended hand in the Century Bar on Sandy Blvd. in Portland with my friend Anna. I remember watching him walk up and having a psychic sense that he was going to readjust the game to his whims, a strange moment of total confidence right before a profoundly goofy and unlikely shot paid my moment of emotional investment off tenfold.
Even in writing this, probing my own memory, I am not certain that I actually had that premonitive moment. I wonder if I am retrofitting this feeling of confidence onto something that made me happy. I wonder if the joy I felt in that goofy ass bar — the seats are built to resemble risers in a basketball gym, they spent ENTIRELY too much on the lighting, and after the games are over it turns into a coke-vibesey dance club — made its own retroactive confidence in my memory.
But what I recall is this: my affection for Lillard, all the good times he’s provided me, transmuted into confidence, which was instantly paid off when he drilled that ridiculous shot. It cemented something in me that validated my love, or what have you, for the Blazers, made attaching my wagon to this obscure institution controlled by a cadre of billionaires.
I am fairly certain I watched that game at Century with Anna, at least. I could be thinking of another game or another person.
But the flip side of that impressionistic moment of joy, the thing that pops up and immediately defines my relationship to the Blazers in the moment is the years and years of tedious fucking nonsense and anxiety you go through when you root for a team. I think about all the times something Neil Olshey did made me roll my eyes out of my head, I think about watching Raymond Felton crash and burn, watching Hassan Whiteside just stink up the joint for a year, watching JJ Hickson embarrass himself out of the NBA while Mike Barrett sat on the call and insisted everything he did was gold.
I think about watching the team fart away leads, of the moment to moment anxiety of a close midseason game that just turns into irritation and rue when the refs eat shit on some close call, or someone on the team shits their doo doo ass instead of boxing out. The way your arbitrary-seeming emotional investment doesn't pay off, makes you roll your eyes in the back of your head, gets you to think why the fuck do I care about how the Blazers are fucking doing anyway, why can’t I just like basketball and not give a shit about the little psychic strings that have attached me to this particular team? What does love even get me, right now? It’s just anxiety, pessimism. It’s worry. Love, as Rosenstock says, is worry.
I was in love a while back. The romantic kind. Fell apart. Not an uncommon story, you’re probably familiar with the feeling.
At no point in the collapse did me or this person ever like, stop enjoying each other’s company. What happened, when I think about it, at least, was that the state of our feelings for each other made what we had important, and when there were questions about my efficacy on stuff that was related to building something off that love just made the whole fucking thing curdle. Was I making enough money? No. Was I doing a good job endearing myself to her family? No. Etc. etc. you get it.
Sooner or later, all of these lingering personal fuck ups just fell in the milk like lemon juice and curdled what was a good thing into something that just couldn’t function anymore. Anxieties about the future make themselves known and turn the importance of love against itself, raise the stakes on everything and make the good feelings feel irrational and unworkable. It’s excruciating. You’re familiar with the sensation, I suspect.
But, still, when I recall the time I spent with this person, I regard it with fondness. But why can’t fondness and love ever exist without the demon of worry? The anxiety of fandom is love’s little stabs manifested in a cute micro-manner. When those same worries explode in the real thing, it’s just… way worse. Why do the Raymond Feltons of the self live in the parts of my brain that give me the most happiness, waiting to fuck up and lose the ball and cost me the game?
America is fucking miserable. Right now sure, but also always. If you think about the pure dysfunction of living in a society that gives almost everything to the whims of the market, the pure destruction and malfeasance and fucking suffering that happens as a result, and the monster out suffering we export on behalf market organs with common contempt for life, it can really start to weigh on you.
In the Bible — heard of it, illiterates? — there are several words for Love, that all apply a different context of the feeling or the action or whatever you want to call it. “Agape” is the word for the highest love, the one that God has for humanity, the one that expresses his endless compassion and mercy etc etc etc. It is the love you’re supposed to aspire to. Obviously, there are some logical gaps regarding the existence of suffering in a world ruled by a supposedly compassionate god, and believers in the book do an absolutely miserable job bringing that energy to their own lives and actions but… I mean, it’s a nice idea. A noble thing to aspire to.
But like… how can you maintain that love in the face of the overwhelming suffering our country creates? The natural action of someone who loves humanity is to try to make the world a kinder, safer place, but every mass effort to that effect is just wrecked by an economy that prefers, instead, to concentrate as much wealth and as it possibly can in the hands of a few freaks who, at best, spend the money on a basketball team, so they can sink billions of dollars into feeling a kind of heroin-version of sports fandom, the pursuit of the overwhelming sense that you are the king of the world, surveying the goings on of sports Adonises, playing for your edification and glory.
The open hearted person who seeks to ameliorate suffering in America appears to be doomed to perpetual failure for reasons totally outside their control. But then what? If holding onto that agape or what have you isn’t going to pay off, what are you left with?
An overwhelming sense of human suffering. A million ways to worry, every day. Little victories around the edges while we steer towards disaster after fucking disaster. Worry. Worry. Worry.
Being a fan of people seems like a sucker’s game, right now. But I know that’s not a point of view that will get anyone out of anything. I know that turning your back on love will keep you from true happiness. Nihilism and indifference inoculate you against suffering but they also bleed the essential joys out of life. I hope that someday, standing on the precipice of a better world, that I can say there was a point I felt like when I saw Dame hit that shot, that I just knew it was going in, even if I misremember my true feelings from the time.
thank you for making me cry