Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

Random House and the House colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Abdurraqib, Hanif.

Title: There’s always this year: on basketball and ascension / Hanif Abdurraqib. Description: First edition. | New York: Random House, [2024] | Includes index. Identifiers: LCCN 2023025673 (print) | LCCN 2023025674 (ebook) | ISBN 9780593448793 (hardback: acid-free paper) | ISBN 9780593448816 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Abdurraqib, Hanif, 1983– | Basketball—Ohio—History. |

Basketball fans—Ohio. | Ohio—History.

Classification: LCC GV885.72.O3 A43 2024 (print) | LCC GV885.72.O3 (ebook) | DDC 796.32309771—dc23/eng/20231215

LC record available at lccn.loc.gov/2023025673 LC ebook record available at lccn.loc.gov/2023025674

Ebook ISBN 9780593448816

randomhousebooks.com Cover design: Tyler Comrie

Cover photograph: Matt Eich Cover art direction: Greg Mollica

ep_prh_6.3_146506294_c0_r0

PREGAME

FIRST QUARTER: CITY AS ITS TRUE SELF

A Timeout in Praise of Legendary Ohio Aviators

Intermission: On Fathers, Sons, and Ghosts, Holy or Otherwise: He Got Game (1998)

SECOND QUARTER: FLAWED AND MORTAL GODS

A Timeout in Praise of Legendary Ohio Aviators

Intermission: On the Darkest Heavens: Above the Rim (1994)

THIRD QUARTER: THE MERCY OF EXITS, THE MAGIC OF FRUITLESS PLEADING

A Timeout in Praise of Legendary Ohio Aviators Intermission: On Hustles: White Men Can’t Jump (1992)

FOURTH QUARTER: CITY AS ITS FALSE SELF

A Timeout in Praise of Legendary Ohio Aviators

A Brief Postgame Scouting Report in Praise of Legendary Ohio Aviators

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

INDEX

PREG AME

Wanna fly, you got to give up the shit that weighs you down.

—toni morrison

Well it must be close to the Armageddon, Lord you know that I won’t fly by that lesson you taught me

—bizzy bone

5:00

You will surely forgive me if I begin this brief time we have together by talking about our enemies. I say our enemies and know that in the many worlds beyond these pages, we are not beholden to each other in whatever rage we do or do not share, but if you will, please, imagine with me. You are putting your hand into my open palm, and I am resting one free hand atop yours, and I am saying to you that I would like to commiserate, here and now, about our enemies. And you will know, then, that at least for the next few pages, my enemies are your enemies.

But there’s another reality: to talk about our enemies is also to talk about our beloveds. To take a windowless room and paint a single window, through which the width and breadth of affection can be observed. To walk to that window, together, if you will allow it, and say to each other How could anyone cast any ill on this. And we will know then, collectively, that anyone who does is one of our enemies. And so I’ve already led us astray. You will surely forgive me if I promised we would talk about our enemies when what I meant was that I want to begin this brief time we have together by talking about love, and you will surely forgive me if an enemy stumbles their way into the architecture of affection from time to time. It is inevitable, after all. But we know our enemies by how foolishly they trample upon what we know as affection. How quickly they find another language for what they cannot translate as love.

4:25

Our enemies believe the twisting of fingers to be a nefarious act, depending on what hands are doing the twisting and what music is echoing in the background and upon which street the music rattles windows. Yet there is a lexicon that exists within the hands I knew, and still know. One that does

not translate to our enemies, and probably for the better. Some by strict code, some by sheer invention, but I know enough to know that the right hand fashioned in the right way is a signifier—an unspoken vocabulary. Let us, together, consider any neighborhood or any collective or any group of people who might otherwise be neglected in the elsewheres they must traverse for survival, be it school or work or the inside of a cage. Let us consider, again, what it means to have a place as reprieve, a people as reprieve, somewhere the survival comes easy. Should there not be a language for that? A signifier not only for who is to be let in but also who absolutely gotta stay the fuck out?

There are a lot of things our enemies get wrong, to be clear. But one thing they most certainly get wrong is the impulse that they should be in on anything, and that which they aren’t in on is the result of some kind of evil. But please believe me and my boys made up handshakes that were just ours, ones where we would slap hands and then make new, shared designs out of our bent fingers, pulled back and punctuated with a snap. We would break them out before parting ways at the bus stop to go to our separate schools, and break them out again upon our return at the end of the day. The series of moves was quick, but still slow enough to linger. Rarely are these motions talked about as the motions of love, and since we are talking about our loves over our enemies, lord knows I will take whatever I can to be in the presence of my people. To have a secret that is just ours, played out through some quiet and invented choreography. A touch between us that lingers just long enough to know we’ve put some work into our love for each other. We’ve made something that no one outside can get through. I do not waste time or language on our enemies, beloveds. But if I ever did, I would tell them that there is a river between what they see and what they know. And they don’t have the heart to cross it.

4:10

And since we know our affections well, we also know the granular differences between their movements—the moment when an existing sweetness is heightened, carried to a holier place, particularly when orchestrated by someone we know that we love. For example:

3:55

The difference between enjoying food and enjoying a meal. I believe there is a sliver of difference between being naked and being bare; I believe that difference also exists between those who enjoy food and those who enjoy a meal. A meal is the whole universe that food exists within—a universe that deserves its own type of ritual and honoring before getting into the containers of it. As a boy, I got into the habit of watching my father eat. At dinner, our table was circular, and on the nights when it was all of us, four kids and two parents, my mother and father would sit in the two chairs on one side of the table. I would sit directly across from them, along the other side. I loved being an audience to my father’s pleasures, a man who did indeed have a deep well of pleasures to pull from, but a man who was also kept from them far too long, for far too many days, working a job he didn’t love but needed. Of the many possible ways to do close readings of pleasure, among my favorite is being a witness to people I love taking great care with rituals some might consider to be quotidian. And my father was a man who enjoyed a meal. Our dinner table was mostly silent, save for the pocket-sized symphony of metal forks or spoons and among them, my father, the lone vocalist, mumbling or moaning through bites weaving in and out of the otherwise mechanical noise with sounds of his present living. But even before a meal, my father would prepare, slowly: blessing the food in Arabic, seasoning it, stretching a napkin wide. There was a point I always loved watching, when he first set upon his plate, deciding exactly what he was going to allow himself to enjoy first. The moment never lasted more than a few seconds, but it was always a delight. To know that even he

was at odds with his own patience, wanting to measure his ability to sprint and his ability to savor.

My father is a man who has no hair atop his head. I’ve never seen my father with hair, save for a few old photos from before I was born or shortly after where, even then, his head is covered by a kufi—only revealing that there is hair underneath by some small black sparks of it fighting their way out of the sides or down the back. It is because of one of these photos that I know my father had hair when I was a baby, too young to remember anything tactile about my living. In the photo his head is covered and he is holding me, but there is, unmistakably, hair in this photo. There is no way to tell how abundant it is or isn’t, no way to tell if it was ever robust enough for me to have run a small and curious hand through it while resting in his arms and fighting off sleep.

But in my conscious years, I never knew my father to have hair, which is, in part, why watching him eat was such a singular delight. No matter the level of seasoning that was or wasn’t on his food, small beads of sweat would begin to congregate atop his head. A few small ones at first, and then those small ones would depart, tumbling down his forehead or toward his ears to make way for a newer, more robust set of beads. This process would continue until, every now and then, my father would pull a handkerchief from what seemed like out of the air itself, dabbing his head furiously with one hand while still eating with the other. The sweat, I believed, was a signifier. This is how I knew my father was somewhere beyond. Blown past the doorstep of pleasure and well into a tour of its many-roomed home, an elsewhere that only he could touch. One that required such labor to arrive at, what else but sweat could there be as evidence?

I never saw the old photos of my father with hair until I was in my teenage years. I don’t remember when it was that I realized that the bald black men I loved had hair once. Or that they put in work to keep their heads clean, to stave off whatever remnants of hair might try to fight their way back to the surface. My father and grandfather both had clean heads. And they both had thick, coarse beards that they cared for rigorously. The scent of my father’s beard oil arrived in rooms before he did, lingered long

after he left. He approached his beard care with a precision and tenderness

—his fingers shuffling through his beard when he spoke or listened intently, a beard comb peeking out of his front pocket at almost all times, hungry to once again tumble through the forest of thick hair, be fed by whatever remnants clung to the teeth on the way down.

Because I came into the world loving men who had no hair on their heads but cared for what hair they did have—bursting from their cheeks, or curved around their upper lips like two beckoning arms—it seemed that this was a kind of sacrifice made in the name of loving well, of having something that a small child could bury their hands in, something closer to the ground those hands might be reaching up from.

If my father worked in the backyard washing his car or hauling some wayward tree branches, his bald mound laid out for the birds to circle around in song, I could see the sunlight find a spot to kick its feet up, right at the crown of his head. I was so young, and so foolish, and knew so little of mirrors. I imagined that if I crawled high enough, on the right day, I could look down from above and see my own face reflected back to me from atop my father’s shining dome. And nothing felt more like love to me than imagining this. A man whose face I hadn’t grown into yet, wielding an immovable mirror which is, always, a sort of promise which, through your staring, might whisper to you Yes, this is what you have now. Yes, the future has its arms open, waiting for you to run.

3:50

I have told you all of this because I found a love for the black bald head early, and I pity those who might not appreciate it. Even “pity” might be too generous a word, but I am working on generosity toward our enemies, if it might get me closer to any heaven my beloveds are furnishing.

3:45

It was James Brown who once said Sometimes, you like to let your hair do the talking, and I do not know what he looked like at the exact time he said it, but I would love for us to imagine him tenderly touching his palms to the sides of an absolute monument of a pompadour, the way he looks in one of my favorite photos of him, backstage and staring into a mirror with a look of both concern and determination, the sleeves on his robe puffing out around his wrists, one of which is adorned with a gold watch and then, slightly farther up, a gold ring on his pinky. And I would love for us to imagine that James Brown said this and then said nothing. Allowed the room to be silent while he made the necessary adjustments. When you performed the way James Brown performed, some nights it would be a miracle to have your hair stay in place. There were no promises of what might happen when the spirit took hold of the body, and so the first time the crowd saw the hair, it had to be perfect. It had to be its own song, its own conversation. This idea that what is atop the head or not atop the head or what is temporarily masking the head is all a language, a code. That at the highest point of the body, there is still a point that can be made to ascend higher, by some invention of whatever God has given us to design with, or even whatever wasn’t given, or what was given once and taken away.

In returning to the Gospel of James, the hair (or even lack thereof) does do the talking, and it has been true for me that black hair talks in a language that is entirely its own, and a language that not all hair can achieve—even among the multitudes of black folks, some hair can speak in a manner that other hair might not be afforded. Even among kin, even among siblings. But when it speaks well, there is nothing else that needs to be said to it or about it, although if I know my folks, I will say that many of us don’t mind heaping praise upon someone who knows they look good, even if they already know it.

If there is a discomfort that registers, perhaps it is in the realization that, once again, there is a lock that our enemies cannot pick. There is a code that they cannot decipher, no matter their desire to. No matter how many times they have fallen into dreams of our language, our enemies wake up with the same tongues, reaching but falling short. What else to do, then, but to

imagine every gesture toward flyness as an affront to their own monochromatic living?

3:40

I don’t recall when I first heard of the five black boys who made their way to Ann Arbor in 1991, but I know I heard of them before I saw them. This is a miracle of the past—one that many young folks might not have the opportunity to indulge in now. Hearing word of something, someone, some brewing storm. Hearing before seeing, building up the myth before confirming it. I am from Columbus, Ohio, which means that even when I was a kid of eight years old, I knew wasn’t nobody in my city fucking with that school in Ann Arbor, but I knew the Fab Five had people around me shook. You might hear about them on the schoolyard courts, watching the older kids play, fetching the ball for them when one careened off of a foot and out of bounds. Some would say they’d seen them play, or they’d played against a couple of them in some tournament or whatever. This was the time then. Information would crawl through an ever-evolving game of telephone on corners, on porches, on cracked courts. It was miraculous, a gift for the imagination. It beckoned us to see without actually seeing.

And yet I do recall when I first saw the Fab Five, both in stillness and in motion. First, in stillness:

before the 1991 season starts, there are photos in Sports Illustrated and the Detroit Free Press. Two different ones. In the first one, the one taking up most of a page in the magazine, the five freshmen are sitting on the floor of University of Michigan’s Crisler Arena. Jalen Rose, Juwan Howard, Jimmy King, Ray Jackson, and Chris Webber. At the center of them is Michigan coach Steve Fisher. Their poses are textbook. Looking at the photo now, I can almost hear the photographer shouting out directions the way photographers shouted at me and my teammates when we took our high school sports photos. One player on one knee, arm draped over the bent knee. Anyone in the front, stretch your legs across the floor. The

smiles, fluorescent as they are, also seem trained. The only player breaking decorum slightly is Webber, who rests his head on King’s arm, slightly thrown back like he’s either entering or exiting a large laugh. For the uninitiated, for those not on the playgrounds or in the streets or privy to the whispers in locker rooms about how big and bad the storm descending on Ann Arbor was, this photo is a photo of reassurance. The one that calms those who might think they were going to be subjected to years of towering swagger that might disrupt the precious landscape of college basketball.

And then there is the other photo. The five freshmen form a half crescent in their white Michigan uniforms. King and Howard on one side, Rose and Jackson on the other. In the center, Webber sits on a lowered basketball hoop, cradling a basketball against his thigh with one hand. His other hand is across his chest, angled toward his heart, stretched into what would be a distinct “5” if not for his index finger and middle finger twisting together into what looks like could be a single, winding, and interconnected finger. At a second glance, they are all making this same motion with their hands, all twisting together the same finger. There is no Steve Fisher in this photo. Absent also are the smiles which could have placated some of those who were witness to the first photo. Yet here they do not look bereft of joy. They look mostly like teenagers. Certain of their own invincibility because no one has come correct enough with anything to make them uncertain. Each of them glaring into the camera, except for Webber, atop the rim, looking somewhere slightly above—not quite heavenward, but his eyes appear to be at least curious about the doorway to the angels.

3:25

And then, in motion:

When they came back for their sophomore season, the Fab Five had chosen to evolve their style. Their sneakers were all black. So were their socks. Both going against the tradition of uniform that Michigan wore, and also going against the style of their teammates at the time. They were a

team within a team. But it wasn’t only the black socks and kicks—Chris Webber and Jalen Rose also sported freshly shaved heads. In their freshman season, Webber and Rose both flirted with baldness but usually kept a tight fade. Low, but still just high enough to let people know there was, in fact, hair present, its abundance stifled with intention. In their sophomore season, the two left no doubt. Clean-shaven, shorts so baggy that the fabric trailed behind them like a herd of horses during a fast break—and there were many fast breaks.

Let it be known that the Fab Five were always what some would consider brash, which is to say they came through talking shit from the word go. Talking shit to anyone who happened to be within earshot, and that sometimes meant talking shit to each other. You can always tell who did or didn’t grow up playing the dozens by who clutches their pearls when they see some black folks talking shit to each other, to their competition, to the world. All kinds of affection tucked underneath the talking of shit. Jalen Rose used to study his opponents, do real-time research on motherfuckers— in the no-internet early 1990s, no less. Just so he would have some shit to say to make sure a nigga was shook. And listen, ain’t that a kind of love? To say You are worthy of the time it takes to dismantle you. Yes, do not waste language on our enemies, but an enemy, to me, implies a permanence. A thorn that cannot be removed. An opponent is different than an enemy, even if you see that opponent twice a year. If you know you’re good, an opponent is a temporary roadblock, something to be taken apart and moved out of your way. Before the Fab Five knew this, Ali knew this. Even in the years before Ali knew this, black folks who couldn’t talk shit to their bosses or whoever presided over their lives knew this, because they’d run home and talk their shit to anyone who would listen. Shit talking is a right, a gift, a mercy with a lineage all its own.

If you were to go back now and look at or listen to some of the commentary from white college basketball experts and announcers going into the sophomore season of the Fab Five, you will find the occasional odd fixation on baldness as something menacing. It was often looped in with the black socks and the black shoes and the baggy uniforms, all as a way of

saying that there was something troubling about the team’s presentation and therefore something troubling about their approach to the game. These weren’t the people who were supposed to make it. Not this far, not this fast. Announcers, shaking their heads, decrying how much time the five freshmen spent in the ears of their opponents, particularly Rose and Webber, who were artists at squeezing everything they could out of a small moment of excellence. There was an unspoken (and sometimes loudly spoken) glee when the Fab Five would lose. And this, of course, is where I came to love them more. With an intensity that led me to understand that anyone who did not love this team was my enemy. Anyone who might wish to pull apart their brilliance, to tame or temper their flourish, was my enemy.

3:15

So much of the machinery of race- and/or culture-driven fear relies on who is willing to be convinced of what. How easy it is to manufacture weaponry out of someone else’s living if the emphasis is placed on the right or wrong word, or if that word is repeated enough, perhaps in a hushed tone. The early ’90s—like the majority of American eras before it—had no shortage of panicked people who already feared young black folks, simply looking for anyone, anywhere to dress those fears up in an attire that the panicked might consider to be more publicly palatable than the boring racism humming underneath the dressing up of haphazardly assembled fears. But the targets of the panic know better.

I do not spend time in the caverns of fear our enemies have built for themselves, and I especially did not do this when I was young. When all of my heroes either had long hair that looked like it would send any and all devils back to their smoldering misery, or no hair at all. Afros or glistening curls cascading from the backs of LA Raiders hats or hats with a red, black, and green “X” directly at the center. And I know, this began by talking about an absence

3:00

of hair, and we absolutely will return there, if you will allow me just one more moment to say that I never believed any of my beloveds to be villains. I don’t need to say that here, to you, but I do adore the way it looks on the page, so I will preach it while I still have you. Back then, when there were those who might strip my beloveds of the fluorescent accessories of their living, I never once thought they were the villains in the story. Not the ones who tucked colorful bandanas into their back pockets and slowly unfurled them once they got the fuck off school grounds, not the ones who sat in principals’ offices because they had just left the salon or the barbershop and looked too damn good to cater to anyone’s comfort but their own. Not the ones who wore jean jackets with thick, puffy letters airbrushed onto them— the names of who was once among us but no longer, the name of a block you refuse to leave behind even for a few meager hours per day. If I had any heroes at all, I know none of them gave a fuck about the targets being stitched to their immaculate garments. The first way I felt myself operating on the other side of America’s fear was being young and idolizing the people America was trying to convince me to be afraid of.

This is what propelled my love for the Fab Five most in their sophomore season. In the fall of 1992 and early 1993, when announcers sometimes talked about their black socks and baggy uniforms and bald heads and trash talk and the music they listened to and the clothes they wore before and after games and the way they walked into arenas, with a lean and a slight dip, and isn’t it funny the lengths our enemies go to in order to say I am afraid I am being left behind, and then who will love me?

2:29

But since we are talking about an absence of hair, let it be known that by the time Chris Webber and Jalen Rose were swaggering through Ann Arbor with their bald heads, having a bald head wasn’t exactly something that was decried, particularly not in the sports world. This was 1992, and MJ sure

enough didn’t have a single hair on his head when he won those titles and smiled in those commercials and wore a gold medal for his country. It was Jordan, also, who first had longer shorts made for him in 1989, which moved the Fab Five to do the same two years later.

In 1992, Michael Jordan was a bad man, but he wasn’t a Bad Man. Feared on the court, but mostly beloved in the world outside of it. Wasn’t a hustler but could sell damn near anything. Smiled for every camera once the game ended. Only had enemies between the lines, or at least it was easy to believe that for a little while.

Athletes had been bald before Jordan, but his baldness was a signature, in part because he had the perfect head to pull off such a show of nakedness. Aerodynamic, some might say. Made it easier for him to be cradled in a tunnel of air when he stretched himself skyward, made it easier to believe oneself as impenetrable cool, even as you pulled strands of exhausted hair from your scalp during showers or woke up to dark hair on a white pillow. It’s okay, was part of MJ’s promise. There is a way to be cool on the other side of whatever befalls your scalp. Which is funny to me, because Mike was never as cool

2:23

as he was in ’85, when he showed up to the dunk contest with thick, tightly coiled patches of hair making up a hairline that was fighting for what little life it had left, if you look closely. If you are the type who has loved or known a black person whose hair has begun to retreat along their dome. Mike would shave all that shit off in ’89, but at the dunk contest in ’85, he had yet to cross the threshold that would define him. I propose that the difference between being naked and being bare is that in a state of nakedness, the end can be seen even if it hasn’t arrived yet. It has less to do with what one is or isn’t wearing or showing, and more to do with how poorly one keeps the inevitable hidden or how long a person can hold back the undoing (pleasureful or less so) that awaits them.

But in ’85, it wasn’t the hair, and it wasn’t even the fact that Mike lost the contest. It is the photo of him soaring toward the basket, his arm cradling the rock with ill intentions, eyeing the rim like prey, like he’s already seen its demise. And Mike took flight in a pair of kicks the NBA had banned and the gold—yes, the gold—stretching up along his neck, almost angling toward his open mouth while he was in the air. Some might say that in any consideration of flight, one must also consider the excess weight of anything that might render you closer to the earth than to the sky, but one must also consider that you don’t show up with gold if you only plan to take it off. There are those who demand to be buried with all their gold on. To reach heaven, perhaps, still wrapped in the arms of their earthly jewels. Mike was never as cool as he was when he climbed toward the sky with two gold chains around his neck, ascending, too, so there could be no mistake about that miraculous air that refused to let MJ down. I believe no gold to be subtle. I believe nothing to be subtle when it can be snatched from a neck in order to feed a family. But Mike said, again, you’re going to have to catch me. You are going to have to climb, and I know you want no parts of the world from this high up. Find the point where you are unkillable and jump toward it if you can. Mike was never as cool as he was in ’85, when he hadn’t yet begun to take a blade to his scalp. When he started at one end of Market Square Arena in Indianapolis and ran, catapulting himself from the free-throw line (yes, the actual free-throw line!) and remaining, suspended and extended, for what feels, even now, like a glorious hour. Your finest hour. The hour you’ve dreamed of living again ever since the final grains of it kissed the mountain of sand at the bottom of the hourglass. Have you ever been in the air so long that your feet begin to fall in love with the new familiar, walking along some invisible surface that is surely there, that must be, as there is no other way to describe what miracle keeps you afloat? How long have you been suspended in a place that loves you with the same ferocity and freedom as the ground might, as the grave might, as a heaven that lets you walk in drowning in gold might?

When Mike finally came back down to earth, gold in the exact same place it was when he took flight, he simply pumped his fist, clapped his

hands a little bit. Mike was never as cool as he was right then, in the moment directly after his singular defiance of the routines of both flight and flyness. Smiling to himself like he was awaking from a dream—a good dream, a dream of invincibility, a dream where no one can kill you but you. Even now, I wish to touch the hem of that type of cool. To ascend and then return, knowing the world has been altered before I landed. And there is no reason for me to be longing for this now except for the fact that I am looking up at the sky and thinking, again, of the most cartoon version of heaven—a place overcrowded with people whose names I have brought back to life, whose names I have scrubbed the dirt off of after long winters have weighed their headstones down with the treachery of the season. A place where the dead have nothing else to do but watch the living they loved and still love, watching all of the sweetness lurking around the corners we ourselves cannot see, shaking their heads as we deny ourselves our waiting miracles. This is a self-indulgent way to imagine the life after this life, but I have massaged all other meaning I can out of the sky, out of the shapes of clouds and the oranges and reds that fight their way through those clouds while the sun laughs its way to surrender.

I have led us astray again, I know. I meant to talk about gold—which is both a color and a state of being—though definitely a color, one I have seen knocking tenderly on the glass of a window in an airplane in the early moments of descent, right after waking and sliding open the plastic lid temporarily quieting the shining empire of light, which—if you are lucky— greets you at just the right distance, where you can see where you are going and see what is carrying you there. Which means, if you are coming back to Columbus, as I do always, you can see the yawning mouths of stadiums bursting with green and you can see the familiar buildings, the ones you might take for granted if you live in a place long enough and forget to look skyward all that often. And yes, with the plane tilting at the right hour, the gold from the sky can make its way across your newly awakened eyes, the color itself, two hands nudging you home. And this is why I must believe that there are my people, beyond the clouds, draped in some exquisite shit, untucking the shine just as a reminder. And Michael Jordan was coolest

when he was close to them, alone, statuesque and still but for the stadium lights dancing along the gold around his neck, sending a signal to someone, somewhere. Yes, my beloveds, it is all this talk of gold and skies that makes me want to jump toward you, even with my sturdy head of hair and my legs not having as much to give as they used to. My god, how I miss you all. My god, how I pray to be buried in whatever decoration will allow me to arrive to your arms, new again. Clean.

1:49

Today, Chris Webber’s hair piles in neat and even knots atop his head. Jalen Rose’s hair is the source of awe and jokes on the internet. His hairline, so precise that if I look at it for too long my vision begins to blur, trying to figure out the math of it all. The two friends don’t talk much anymore. The intensity of their years-long feud waxes and wanes, sometimes punctuated by a brief, awkward interaction. It feels important for me to be honest about this here—this insurmountable rupture between the two. I am reminded, again, of Chris Webber in 2015, on The Dan Patrick Show, lamenting Jalen and his other four teammates for cashing in on the legacy of the Fab Five, doing documentaries and putting out merch.

“No one ever loved the Fab Five,” Webber says, seemingly exasperated. “So why would you use us to tell stories to get that fake love now?”

1:48

I loved you // I’m sorry // I loved you.

1:30

If you didn’t have the money for the barbershop, someone in the crib damn well better know how to cut hair. And not just a little bit. Surgical with the Wahl, someone who learned how to fade their own shit by holding a mirror

in one hand, slightly angled to pick up the reflection from another mirror, looking both into it and behind them—assessing both their present self and the potential for their future self—with the clippers, stretched toward the back of their head, thrusting upward in small shouts, but never too high.

It is probably best if this someone is a someone who also carries your last name, or some kinship, so that there is just a touch of extra incentive to not fuck your head up. Any good barber takes pride in their work, but that pride increases depending on how easily the results of it can be traced back to their doorstep. And so, in my house, that someone was my oldest brother, who cut my hair from my first haircut and almost every haircut I got after, into my early teenage years. Even when he went off to college, I would let my hair grow until he visited for a weekend, when I could convince him to take care of my head. I believe he enjoyed being of service to his younger brothers in this way, even if he didn’t show it. He would sigh, jerk our heads around and tightly hold them in place. But there was also a sense of care that came through when he caught a good groove within the cut. When he was proud of his work, or even fascinated by it, you could tell. His pace slowed down, his grip on the back of my head would loosen a little bit. It was a strange pleasure, getting to act as his sometimes-unruly canvas.

Through almost every year I was in school, I wore a kufi. Not just in school—I also pulled one on to go to the store, to run errands with my parents. Bright, colorful designs were stitched into them by way of my mother’s hands, working at a loud, vibrating sewing machine that could be heard echoing throughout the house in the evenings.

Because of this, my hair was covered for most hours I spent outside of the house. There was no real reason to spend much time on my hair at all. People would be able to see the faint lines of a fade beginning, if anything at all. But my brother took to the cutting of our hair with the knowledge that we didn’t have yet. To keep a part of oneself covered sparks a fiery curiosity within others, particularly if those others have to remove whatever hats they have on when they enter a school building and you don’t. This isn’t to say that I was the target of excessive bullying or that my elementary and middle school experiences were significantly more tortured than

anyone else I knew—the specifics of my tortures, at least, were more rooted in the fact that I was both small and a little too eager to talk my shit than they were in whatever was worn on my head.

It is, instead, to say that my hair and what it did or didn’t look like became a source of wonder for the people around me. I took a youthful and foolish pleasure in holding on to that kind of power. Having a secret that, almost every day, I knew someone would want revealed.

I was never good at cutting my own hair, and I knew I would never be good at cutting my own hair. My oldest brother passed down his knowledge to my next oldest brother, but I didn’t take to it as easily myself. Part of this was due to lack of care or investment. Sure, when I took to the basketball courts across the street from my house, my head was uncovered. But in pretty much every other corner of my life, no one saw my hair anyway. The other reality, of course, was that I knew I wasn’t good at it. And to learn to be good at it meant fucking up hair on my own head. I was the youngest. The lineage of home-taught barbers ended with me, and so there was no one to practice on but myself. Even if no one else saw much of it, I would have to live with a reminder of the damage I’d inflicted on myself in my attempts to learn. It is a challenge for someone, even with the steadiest of hands, to be confronted with themselves in the mirror while pulling a humming blade across the front of their head, trying to adhere to a strict line. A line that is predetermined for some, but not nearly precise. The widow’s peak that pushed its way to the front of my mother’s forehead, rising slightly out of her afro, had descended upon my own hairline, which always caused me to stumble through my already shaky attempts to line my hair up to the point of unmistakable precision. I would start by cutting off the small mountaintop at the front of my hairline, almost resetting what I believed to be the natural starting point. But then, wait, what of the curves as the line makes its way around the head? What of the stopping point? Not going too far into the hair itself, or too far back? It might have served me best to imagine the hairline as a border, a clear interruption between two interconnected but distinctly different expressions of black. I didn’t see it then.

During most of these attempts, one of my brothers would come, frustrated, to get me in order again. Repairing the damage.

1:15

I don’t remember when my first crush was, but I remember the first real crush I had, which means the first crush that sped me toward the cliffs of all things irrational. In seventh grade, I wanted someone who didn’t notice me to notice me and I figured the way to do it was to show up to school, finally, with my head entirely uncovered. To be the talk of the hallways, even for a few hours, and go from there. So many of my childhood impulses relied on the logic of taking to the air and then figuring out a plan on the way down. This plan, of course, involved coming to school with a fresh haircut. One that I would be the architect of. I would be the only one to be under the hood of my romantic destiny, I thought. And so, in the bathroom, with the door closed, I unfurled my brother’s clipper set and went to work. The hairline would be done last. I had learned that much, at least. Get the hair to a desired length. What I didn’t learn as clearly was about the guards that needed to be placed over the clipper blades to get the desired length, or the sound the old clipper blades would make when they ran over a patch of hair the wrong way, a sort of growl emerging from the otherwise constant hum.

When it was all said and done, what I had inflicted upon myself was beyond repair at the hands of anyone who lived under my roof. My parents, too amused to be annoyed, gave me a little bit of money and told me to walk to the barbershop down the street. It was just enough money to get the most basic remedy for my affliction: a bald cut. A baptism of sorts. The hair will grow back, I was told. And then it can become anything.

In the mirror the next morning, I looked at my own bald head and thought about the men I loved who had worn theirs so well. The men who wore it so well, I thought their heads were never graced with any hair. My own baldness was jarring, in the face of what I knew. The light wasn’t beckoned toward it. The top of my head, instead, was shadowed, hiding

from its own luminescence. It isn’t the uninterrupted blackness I was ashamed of, it was how we arrived there together.

1:00

I have been better than I have wanted to be at giving in to the foolishness that allows us to sometimes mistake the desire to not be lonely for love. Perhaps I am averse to my own baldness because of what it signals to my often fragile interior: another language for loneliness, having to carry a version of myself that is at least a little bit more empty than the version before it.

I was best at giving in to this foolishness in my teenage years, and so, after school let out, I would go to Leslie’s house. Her father worked second shift and her mother’s name was carved into one of the headstones in a field a mile west of the school, just a few miles north of the field where I’d buried my mother two years earlier. In the fall and winter months, there would be a small break between the end of the school day and the start of whatever practices I had to get to: soccer, or basketball, or drama club. I had no car until my senior year and lived too far away from the school to bus home and then make my way back, and Leslie lived a few short blocks away from the soccer field. Convenience is also mistaken for something a little bit like love, or a lot like love, depending on what is at stake, and what part of a life is being made easier.

Leslie and I didn’t talk in school. We’d pass each other in the hallways, tucked into our respective groups of friends, and not make eye contact. Within the loose social hierarchy of our high school, it wouldn’t have mattered or been all that surprising if we did interact, but it was an unspoken choice. It made the seeking of each other outside the confines of the building feel more forbidden and also more transactional. If we don’t talk about what we do beyond the frantic moments of what we do, then we can convince ourselves that there is a newness to each clumsy encounter. That we’re mostly strangers, drifting toward each other, desiring only touch

and nothing else. And in the hour that is our hour, a window opens and we can breathe out all the sad stuff. Find a closet for our tapestry of aches. Both of our mothers had died, which might bond us in another world, if we were considering falling in love and not simply pouring ourselves into what would otherwise be vast, lonely gaps of living.

Above her bed, Leslie had a promo poster for Meshell Ndegeocello’s 1999 album Bitter. If you were buying records in the ’90s and early 2000s or any time before, you will know that some record stores would keep such posters on hand, hang them in the windows in the lead-up to an album’s release. And if you were smart and looking for a free (or at worst cheap) way to adorn the bare walls of an otherwise unbearable childhood room, you could go into the record store on the week before the album’s release and have your name and phone number scrawled on the back of the promo poster. And when the store was done with it, the poster was yours.

The poster, a large reproduction of the album cover, was stunning. Ndegeocello is lying upon gold-colored bedsheets. She is slightly out of focus in the photo but is also being generously gripped by sunlight, slanting in from an unseen mirror, clarifying the unmistakable position of the artist, resting on her side, one arm propping her up and one ring on the hand of that arm. Ndegeocello’s head is the star of the album cover. Bald and half- awash with that eager sunlight, glowing, a clear, expansive dark brown.

In the small moments when Leslie and I did talk, she would obsess over the poster, over the album cover. She would show me pictures of bald black women in magazines and ask if I thought they were beautiful. She would sometimes run a hand through her dark curls with a look of surprise, as if she’d dreamed them away and couldn’t believe they had the nerve to reappear.

One day toward the end of the school year, it rained, delaying some spring practice I was supposed to get to. Leslie and I sat together on her bed, weaving in between the silence that we both came to understand as us telling each other Not today, the world is too much.

She told me she’d borrowed hair clippers from one of the boys on the football team. She was ready, she said, to cut all of her hair off. It grows

back, after all. That’s the miracle of hair. It allows us our mistakes and still returns to us, potentially ready to endure more.

She wanted me to do the cutting of the hair. It was easier that way, and she knew that I at least had some limited and clumsy experience in the cutting of hair, enough to know how to work my way around cutting hair off of someone’s head evenly, leaving no remnants of what was. We laid a bedsheet down and then placed a chair atop it, as I’d seen my brothers do before. I wrapped Leslie in a blanket as she sat. It escaped me then, the tenderness of the moment, something far beyond what we’d experienced even in our most heightened pursuits of physical affection. During those pursuits, we were never scared. There was never anything at stake except for a stumble toward the ecstatic, which was easy to stumble toward at that age, at that level of physical curiosity. Here, alone in a house with a chair and a head full of hair that required removal, we were both scared. Of separate things, I am sure. Fear is one thing that can carry an unassuming heart to the gates of love, or at least gates that might be in the same neighborhood as the gates of love. Something that has been denied until it is undeniable, like a slightly out-of-focus photo colliding with a bath of irresistible sunlight, which says What you have imagined seeing has always been real.

The short, sparse title track of Meshell Ndegeocello’s Bitter ends with the lyric “For us there will be no more / and now my eyes, they look at you

/ bitterly / bitterly / bitterly.” And though I understood this to be about a beloved making a permanent exit, I used to think it would be better if I understood it as the present version of a self pushing a past version away. The past version who loved someone, and then buried someone, and then was never the same after.

I knew Leslie’s mother wore wigs. I saw the open closet once when I had to slip into her older brother’s room—he was then well off to college— to steal another one of his old condoms. In all the time I spent with Leslie, our mothers never entered the room. We never spoke of what ailed them, what took them from us. I never asked about the wigs, and I never asked about the cancer. I never asked about the old coat of her mother’s that never

seemed to leave the coat rack by the front door. I knew what it was like to keep something close, just in case there was some error in the universe. The people we love deserve to return to the places they left with the things they love intact.

In the makeshift chair at the center of the makeshift barbershop, I moved Leslie’s head into the best lighting in the room, the way my brothers had done with me a hundred times, trying to find the best place to start. When I turned on the clippers, Leslie squirmed, and so I turned them off. I turned them back on and she slid down in the chair a little bit, and so I unplugged them. I moved to the front of the chair and sat down on the floor. When we looked at each other, her face contorted as though she had just considered something immense for the first time.

“What if I’ve got, like, a fucking weird-shaped head??” she asked me, her nose upturned slightly.

After a pause to do the math of such an outcome, our laughter began small—hiccups of snorting and snickering and then outright shouts that sent both of us rolling on the floor, knocking the chair over with our temporary madness. And yes, laughter and crying both tumble out of the body’s orchestra at a similar tune, and so who is to say, really, when one became the other, or if they were ever disparate devices of pleasure at all on that afternoon, the rain percussive against the windows, keeping time with our reckless unfurling. The two of us, laughing and crying ourselves to sleep, wondering if there would ever be a time when we might find ourselves unleashed from the kingdom of vanity.

0:30

There is, though, a strange sort of honor in pulling up to the court with a rock that has worn itself down, with no grip, no traction to speak of. A rock that some might call bald on the street where the games are played, and never played with that worn-down ball you rolled up with. But still, on my block, the hoopers everyone thought were the realest either showed up with

a brand-new ball or showed up with a ball that looked like it had been through hell. Whatever brand or logo beaten off of it, the black rubber lining the seams cracked and waving down, signaling surrender. And yes, none of the raised rubber along the surface that might offer grip, or the comfort of stability while shooting.

There is a reality of loving ball in a place where people don’t have money. A place where sacrifices are made to keep the lights on, to keep food on the table. Sacrifices that, sometimes, don’t have your desires at the end of them. Hardly anyone I grew up around could play for the high- profile traveling teams, and so the training ground for the offseason was the neighborhood court. And because people from all over the neighborhood converged in the same place at the same time, one of the negotiations of the game, and of the court, revolved around which ball could be played with for the real, serious, full-court runs. There wasn’t judgment in these assessments as much as a kind of science. Players passing a ball around, squeezing it, turning it over gently in their hands. It was here I learned the difference between an indoor ball and an outdoor ball and a ball that served well for both purposes, depending on how well the outdoor surface was cared for, and on my block it was never cared for, but we knew how to navigate the aftermath of neglect. Which side of the court dipped slightly and which crack in the surface might send the rock careening toward the baseball diamond, which, depending on the day, might be housing a little league game and a throng of concerned parents who never made it to our side of town, eyeing the players on the basketball court with their loud, echoing foul language and the music sometimes spilling out of a small boombox at the court’s edge.

But it was also here that I learned that there is nobility in a basketball that has faded, that has gone bald. And there is nobility in the person who carries it to the court. The shooter who has learned to shoot at a deficit, with a ball that slides around in their hand, or the dribbler who made a way with a ball that had endured seasons of being battered against the concrete.

Your ball is your ball, and depending on how you and your folks are livin’, you might not see a new one for a while. And so, of course, praise to

the person who made a way with a bald rock, and a little path of concrete that was their concrete, and a rusted rim with no net. Those be the noblest of hoopers. The ones who, back then, you had to keep an eye on. Cuz they’ve done all the hard shit already. Once they get a little bit of a grip on something new, it’s lights out.

0:20

Islands of gray have begun to form on the beard of LeBron James, and have started to grow toward each other, uninterrupted, reaching toward each other through the once-black hair. You can notice it best in the offseason, depending on the light he’s in or how long it has been since he’s gotten a beard trim, how long the grays have had permission to flourish without bowing to the sharp edges of a blade.

In a clip that circulates on Instagram, LeBron is standing on the sideline at his son Bronny’s game, shouting out instructions, lovingly. His beard is long, and the lighting in the arena is dancing upon it in a way that highlights the patches of gray that are harder to spot when he’s in-season, seemingly more aware of the fact that he’s on television more often than most people.

It is a strange miracle to be able to trace your own aging, your own mortality through someone who is living alongside you, someone who has survived eras at the same time as you have, in some of the same places. LeBron’s face was as bare as my own when I first heard his name. It is impossible to believe that any of us ever looked like children. I understand, of course, that we were once children. The cloak of time has yet to grow so long that I have surrendered my childhood. My shouts thrown into air like knives, just to hear my own symphony cutting through the night sky and returned to me in small slivers of echo. The lightning bugs who surrendered, lazily, to my open palms for a few moments before flickering their bodies on and off and then flying away again. The tree branches that sighed against the fresh arrival of my weight but still did their best to hold me. I believe that I was a child once because I am afraid today. There are

parts of me that might die soon, parts of my memory that might drift to a distance too far for me to get back, and because I know myself to be afraid of this, that is all I need to believe that I was once a child. But it is hard to believe that we ever looked like children. Even when the people I love, fresh from a trip back home, excitedly pull me close to unfurl photos of themselves when they were babies, or preteens, or even disaffected high school goths or punks or jocks or drama kids. Even when my best friend shows me a video of her toddler making the same exhausted and delightfully scolding face that I have seen her mother make many times, through many years, clearly a transference of the divine, it is still hard for me to believe that anyone I know now was ever physically not who they are. I do not say this to submit the aesthetics of childhood—specifically black childhood—to a nefarious algorithm. I am not suggesting that I do not see children as children. When the black boys on my block zip through the streets on their bikes, I can’t resist shouting some concerned correctives at them the way elders did for me growing up. I’m talking, instead, about our past selves. The way romantics have failed my own clear memory. I remember LeBron James as a fourteen-year-old, skinny and seemingly poured into an oversized basketball uniform that always suggested it was one quick move away from evicting him. But even with what I know, even in photos, his face blurs into the face it is now, the face that ages alongside my own.

Conventional wisdom says that we look to our elders to find the footprints leading us toward what we ourselves might look like as elders. I last sat down to dinner with my father five years ago. The meal wasn’t spicy, but it was a meal he loved, and so I watched the sweat begin to congregate at the crown of his head, and I watched him wipe it away tenderly, as he did when I was young. I also watched how sincerely and intently he spoke with his hands, the way they would slice through the air. The way they would sometimes make the shape of the word, cup themselves toward the sky and make the shape of a bowl, well before my father finished describing what once held a soup he missed tasting. His hands always moved while he spoke, seeking to animate the language of a

story, or lesson, or monologue. I hadn’t noticed this about him until I noticed it about myself, that it was something I would find myself apologizing for. I am sorry for what has been passed down to me without my knowing, what has just shown up on the doorstep and found its way in.

My father and I also probably have the same smile, though it would be hard for me to know, because I don’t smile enough to trace it through any kind of consistency. One thing that is for sure is that my father and I have two different hairlines, mine (gracefully! thankfully!) still intact, and I pray to whatever gods oversee such matters of self-indulgence to keep it intact for at least a little while longer.

But it is true that small clusters of gray stars have begun to make their way through my otherwise dark solar system. When the light shines down on me from above, in the bathroom mirror, I notice them, slightly peeking through the top of my head. In the rearview mirror while driving, I look up, and there is a small curved gray hair unmistakably hanging down from the edge of my hairline. At first it was jarring. Something I believed was happening to me. Even though the grays have not yet overrun my head and beard, I still found myself wondering how to remove them, pick them out one by one, even against the advice of my beloved barber at the time, who was an old black man with a head covered in gray, who I went to because he cherished the hair on his head, and you must find a barber who cherishes the hair on their own head slowly, thoughtfully, and carefully, so that they might (if you are lucky) extend that kindness toward yours. And this barber told me never to pull the gray weeds from the dark garden, for they might simply grow back with a newfound ferocity. An anger at their removal, he told me. You don’t want to make an enemy out of the grays, he told me one day, while lining me up. Best to just thank them for showin’ up to the party. Lucky you got a party for them to show up to.

There has been much made about the fading of LeBron James’s hair. All largely uninteresting jokes, or at the very least jokes that are immensely predictable. LeBron himself doesn’t acknowledge it much in any explicit manner, which is probably for the best. Even in the early points of his NBA career, anyone who knew hairlines well enough, who stood under good

lighting and checked their own for signs of vulnerability, knew that LeBron’s hair wasn’t long for its more youthful state. There have been moments in his career when he’s seemed to try to revive his hair, to mask the portions of it fading along the top and back of his head. There are those who have, in their incessant joking, insisted that LeBron just go bald, give in to what the hair itself seems to be demanding.

There are ways that LeBron James does seem to be concerned with the project of vanity, though perhaps this is not among those ways. Most of those ways seem aligned with how he is perceived as a full, expansive person with a legacy to uphold in a sports ecosystem that—during the time of his initial NBA ascension—became more hands-on, more rigorous in not only how players were critiqued but how easily and how often players could hear from fans. The vanity of LeBron James seems to be the vanity of legacy first, and I might be apologizing for my Ohio brethren for the first of many times in these pages, but I believe there to be far worse vanity projects to pursue than that of legacy.

But enough, enough.

—

If you are someone who is from a place not everyone made it out of, or if you have been to enough funerals where parents or grandparents weep over the caskets of their babies and grandbabies, if you know forever is a hand dealt by an uncertain dealer, you may wear the signs of your aging like thick, heavy gold, weighing the body down, but still stunning—unavoidable in its shine. Lord, the clouds atop the fields of my life are so thin now, the sky is bare and pummeling all that rests below. Lord, the gray won’t stop coming, and for once, my arms are open to it. Lord, I have lived long enough to look like my father, though I might fight it. I have lived long enough to cut through the air with my hands, to trim the long hair of the Midwest wind, to make the shape of a bowl when telling a story about something sweet I once held, and can still taste. Lord, release me from whatever might make me wish for the way I looked as a child, which I can

hardly remember through this beautiful fog of mortality, this slow march to the kingdom. Lord, when Tyler left us, his hair was so long and dark, I would still find tiny ropes of it around my apartment for months after the funeral. When the judge sentenced Brandon, with not a single line yet woven into his furrowed, boyish brow, to thirty years in a cage and his mother whispered He’ll be so old when he gets out, I know what was unspoken on the other side of that was And what will become of me in the meantime? Yes, Lord, I come to you today pleading for all of the aches of age, all of the permanent and immovable damage you have to offer. Yes, there are moments I have spent and will continue to spend in a mirror, massaging products onto my skin and slowly washing them off, if not to delay the very things I am now welcoming, at least to make them as luminous as possible. Do not be fooled by the weapons I refuse to lay down. I come to you today with gratitude in knowing the fight cannot be won. Let the hair turn its drab colors and, perhaps, slowly begin to depart down the drain. Let the pain in the knee linger as a reminder that movement might one day come with a price, if I am lucky enough to make it that long. Yes, Lord, I am thankful today again for every reminder of how I have outlived my worst imagination. I will walk slowly through the garden of all that could have killed me but didn’t.

0:10

When the world has grown weary with indulging our selfish living, I hope to not be alive for whichever apocalypse is the one that ends humanity. But if I am alive for it, I hope that it takes me out early. I do not wish to be alive in the aftermath of the world ending. The movies and television shows don’t make it look appealing, what with all of the scavenging and the hard surfaces and the need to be proficient with multiple forms of weaponry and alert at all times. Survival, sure, but when the world suggests it may be done with us, I have no interest in pouring myself into rebuilding it.

But one thing I would crave is the silence. The emptiness of it all. In the spring of 2020, when I thought the world was doing a dress rehearsal for the apocalypse, the only thing that comforted me was the silence. Knowing that the city would otherwise be flooded with shouts and sounds and yet was forced to restrain itself was strangely calming for me.

There was a window of time in this moment, when people were still too stunned to spend any time outdoors and before the parks decided to take the basketball hoops down and lock the gates and barricade the playgrounds. In that window of time, I would grab a ball and go to the court alone. I loved most when the world felt newly bald. If you have ever gone from having hair one day to waking up without it the next day, you might be familiar with the gestures of disbelief: the repeated touching, the returns throughout an hour or a day, the shock when a breeze first plants soft kisses upon your new nakedness. The world felt like that to me then. I would walk into it, tentatively, astonished by the quiet until I let it envelop me.

On the basketball courts, alone, there was nothing to contain the shattering echo of the ball’s dance with the concrete. I love a sport where even when I am alone, I am not alone. And I am a little bit ashamed to say that I also love basketball for the violence of its sounds. The way a ball sounds when it ricochets off of a metal hoop that has been worn down by the seasons. The way that a ball, when it rips through a net, might sound the way a thin leather belt sounds being lashed across a child’s bare skin by a parent who might sometimes have been one of our enemies, but only sometimes.

This was how I came back to what I considered might be the end of life as I knew it. Alone on a court at the arrival of spring, while the world was locked indoors. Until one day, the rims vanished. Not just at my most beloved park but at all of the parks. I drove around the city frantically, ball in the passenger seat, looking for anywhere that might still have a rim fastened to a backboard. They were all gone, overnight. In a place where suddenly so few people were surviving well, I was asking myself, again, how I might survive.

And I know, it might seem like this has all been about absence. But do you see it now? Absence, maybe, but absence requires an understanding of what should be. What was once. It has always been impermanence, beloveds. Impermanence was the altar I was leading us to this entire time. The altar that right now we are kneeling before. My hand on your shoulder, as it has always been. A promise is a foolish thing to make, but here is one, again:

We will leave our enemies behind here and never turn to face them again. But this is not a story about heroes, either. Not everyone will die. No one will live forever.

0:00

FIRST QUART ER

CIT Y AS ITS T RUE SELF

“To leave a place…you’d best leave everything behind; all your possessions, including memory.

Traveling’s not as easy as it’s made out to be.”

—viruinia hamilton

12:00

Three days after Christmas in 2002, a white pair of kicks, clean enough to still be worn, swings from the telephone lines a few blocks outside of Value City Arena in Columbus, Ohio. Jordan 7s. White and blue. The pair that had just dropped two weeks earlier. If one looks long enough, the thin wires blend into the dark sky and the shoes emerge as though they are swinging from nothing, ornaments at the mercy of clouds. There are a greater number of older white people than usual in this neighborhood today, a cluster of them walking ahead of me, nervously trying to make sense out of the mythology of the sneakers swinging from phone lines, rattling through rumors they’d heard from their kids or things they’d read on the corners of the still-young internet. Drugs, they decided. People sell drugs here.

Tourists believe the hood is a monolith, not an ecosystem that can function differently from block to block, from corner to corner. And so, when someone speaks in hushed tones and says Bad things happen here, they don’t necessarily need to define the here in order to get an affirmative response from the types of folks who only walk through an area because it was the closest place they could park to get to the basketball game that drew the attention of the entire state, most of it in that glowing haze that exists in the days after Christmas but before the new year. Akron St. Vincent–St. Mary was coming to town to face Columbus’s own Brookhaven Wildcats, state champs last season. In 2002, SVSM was otherworldly, unfuckwithable to an astonishing degree. But Brookhaven were our guys. Columbus City League kids, and if you came up watching Columbus City League ball, you know ain’t no one in there afraid of shit. Keep the rankings, keep the decoration, keep the magazine covers. You come to Columbus, you gotta be able to scrap it out. Even blocks away from the arena, old heads waved signs suggesting that they needed tickets. For weeks leading up to the game, my boys and I hatched a plan to sneak in before reluctantly shelling out the bread for seats, fearing the increased security.

And here we were, on the long walk to the arena, in a cluster of white men, already fantasizing about the danger they believed they were traversing just to watch the chosen one, descended from Akron.

I didn’t know the kid who was shot a few blocks south of here on Christmas Eve. I knew he was younger than me, and he could hoop. I’d seen him at the park in my old neighborhood once or twice. Quick first step, never passed but could get to the rim anytime he wanted. The bullet that hit him wasn’t meant for him, but the bullet doesn’t apologize and isn’t especially discerning. The bullet only knows what is in front of it. I don’t trust people who don’t love a place to understand how that place remembers its dead. The living who throw an item the dead once cherished toward heaven, wrap it around the highest wire. So high that it looks like the shoes are swinging from the sky itself. Like two legs are hanging down from the edge of a cloud.

11:40

And don’t get it twisted, this wasn’t some underdog story of some City League kids lucky to get a little on-court time with the teenage messiah. Going into the game, Brookhaven was ranked sixth in the country, Akron SVSM was ranked ninth. More people packed into the Arena that Saturday night than there were earlier in the day, when Ohio State played an afternoon game there. Even they knew to surrender prime time to the pulsating radiance of this matchup, which, in the moment, felt once-in-a- lifetime. I tricked you there, not long ago. Not all of you, of course. Not anyone who is from a place that gets talked about a certain kind of way, or anyone who has had to fight their way into, out of, or through the merciless yawn of neglect that growls over the beloved corners of a city. I could never trick those of you who already know that what an underdog is or isn’t has little to do with what small number rests next to your name in a newspaper. Brookhaven were underdogs because they weren’t on magazine covers, they weren’t on ESPN. They didn’t have anyone who was going to leap

straight to the league. They were underdogs because the streets loved them, and the streets can determine who is chosen and who isn’t because the streets are where underdogs flourish—niggas who quit something or dropped out of somewhere but still ain’t gonna be taken for no fools when it comes to getting to the money a whole lotta folks said they wouldn’t ever get to. I propose that above all, you are a reflection of who loves you. And look, I ain’t from Akron and so I can’t call it. I’m sure the streets were teeming with affection for LeBron and his mighty crew, and I love those who love the streets and are beloved in the streets, which means it would be treasonous for me to try and strip whatever reality existed for Akron SVSM in their northeastern corner of Ohio. But I’m from East Columbus and I know what I know, and I know Brookhaven must have been underdogs because people who didn’t have the money for tickets found the money. Because kids who didn’t have cash for a fit or a clean pair of kicks to show up to the game in made some shit shake, blew all their Christmas cash and then some, for one night. Underdogs because they required people to show up to a place in whatever made them feel singularly limitless, even if the paychecks and the bank accounts didn’t have it, even if the hustles dried up for the winter and the shoeboxes under the bed were running low. I ask you to arrive here, for one night, and never consider the possibility of losing anything or anyone.

11:15

In the end, Brookhaven’s star point guard, Andrew Lavender, uncharacteristically missed two free throws. The game was frantic, bogged down at points by referees who didn’t seem equipped to handle the pace or the stakes of the matchup. St. Vincent–St. Mary overwhelmed Brookhaven in the first half, but in the second half, Brookhaven stormed out and returned the favor, setting off a second-half rally that involved a flourish of fast-break basketball led by the dazzling and ever-calculated Lavender, diminutive at five-foot-seven and yet still the best player on almost every

floor he stepped on, even this one, with LeBron James, who would often step out to the perimeter to hover over Lavender, bending down low in a defensive stance that still had him taller than his opponent. And time after time, Lavender would blow by LeBron, get to the rim, and push a floater toward the basket, over the late-arriving outstretched arm of LeBron. The floater, the most romantic shot in the game when done right, guided toward the rim with a heave and a wish, how the follow-through after the ball leaves the hand can look like an overeager wave, like saying goodbye to a person you never wanted to leave. The floater is beautiful for how it relies on height, how the shot itself turns the ball into a bit of a show-off, obsessed with drama, almost pausing in the air to make sure you get its good side before it begins to twirl downward. If you were a small, quick guard, you probably learned to get good at the floater. And if you were Andrew Lavender, you learned to become lethal with it.

But after Lavender led a ferocious second-half comeback, with the score tied 59–59 with ten seconds left, he was intentionally fouled by Sian Cotton. Two shots and the ball for Brookhaven. There was a section of us, city kids, the ones who spent our paltry paychecks to get into this hot, crowded gym and sat through most of the first half thinking about the cash we parted with, who were too stunned to celebrate in the moment of the foul and Andrew Lavender, the best player in the city, going to the line for two. All he had to do was make one, and then Brookhaven just had to inbound the ball, make another free throw or two, and get the fuck outta here with a win.

An entire half of the court was empty, save for Andrew Lavender at the free-throw line. The free-throw line can feel like an island when the lanes are clogged and crowded with limbs trying to carve out an inch of space, an elbow aiming for the softest spot in a torso. Without its accessories, the line can feel like a broken-off piece of metal one clings to while floating in the center of an ocean that seems endless, the kind where it is difficult to say where sky ends and water begins. Lavender’s first shot was short, and the crowd—even those who were neutral—let out a collective groan. Lavender walked away, mumbling to the hardwood as he paced just beyond the three-

point line and then readjusted himself at the foul stripe. The second shot was just as short, if not shorter, hitting the front edge of the rim, and careening back toward where Lavender stood, his hands on his knees in disbelief, the ball bouncing slowly, a mockery of sorts. It was fine, someone behind me said. A few seconds left, Brookhaven gets the ball back. Lavender catches the ball on the baseline and gets a step on LeBron, same way he’d been doing all damn night, and he throws up that reliably potent floater, which looked good for just a split second, the way a ball that flies toward a rim can look good before it descends and touches nothing but air on the other side.

If you’ve played enough basketball, or watched enough basketball, you know there are some games that are over when they make it to overtime. You can see it in how the two teams carry themselves. The team that wasn’t supposed to be in the game at all, who got within a murmur of victory and couldn’t finish the job, walking to the bench, dejected, while the presumed victors bounce on their toes, grinning as if they already know the end of the movie and can’t wait to see your face while you watch.

11:00

When I say Brookhaven were our guys, I mean that in a vague, overarching sense, though it is also indicative of how basketball worked, how it came to life in a city like Columbus during the heyday of the City League, which began, most prominently, when East High School won the first state championship for Columbus back in 1951, and then won three more in the ’60s.

One miracle of Columbus City League basketball, which is not a miracle unique to Columbus, is the geography of the city and the hard borders drawn around the public school districts. It is hard to call this a miracle, since there were, of course, nefarious intentions undergirding the decision- making process, intentions that restricted access to city kids, structures to keep them in their place, both literally and in any other sense one can

imagine. But it means that schools are clustered in the city’s four primary geographical corners, defined by neighborhoods and all that neighborhoods are sometimes defined by—pride, territory, lineage, history. But also, everywhere was easy to get to. Any school you wanted to be at was a bus ride away.

For this, the Columbus City League was susceptible to seemingly fleeting dynastic eras, passed from school to school, depending on what player or coach ended up where and who chose to follow them. The league was also susceptible to heated competition, because most everyone playing knew everyone else, with varying degrees of intimacy. AAU circuit aside, there were only so many parks in the city where real hoopers played, and it didn’t matter what side of town you were from: if you could play, you’d find your way there. Scores that bloomed from the cracks of some neighborhood’s blacktop in the heat of summer were settled in City League high school gyms. The stakes of every game ventured into the intersections of pride, respect, a weekend of immortality on the block for someone who got especially hot from three or worked a crossover at just the right moment to send someone flailing backward, like a ghost of their future self latched on to their jersey to get them the fuck out the way of whatever was coming.

The Brookhaven Era began in earnest in 1992, when Coach Bruce Howard took over the program. Brookhaven was, by that point, a school that dominated in football, sometimes baseball. When Howard came to the school, he sold a simple, three-pronged principle: family, academics, and basketball. Players were required to take all three equally seriously. Howard had played for Mifflin in 1977, when they were runners-up for the state title, and he coached both the boys’ and girls’ basketball teams at Crestview Middle School before being handed the keys at Brookhaven. Most importantly, Howard was respected. Players wanted to play for him. When he asked them to prioritize family, what he lived was the reality that he might have to be a family member to the players who lacked that closeness elsewhere. In Howard’s first season, Brookhaven made it to the City League title game, where they lost to Marion-Franklin by one point. In 1996, they won their first city title. In 1998, they captured the district crown. And by

the early 2000s, they were reveling in their dominance. Many of the city’s best players flowed into the Brookhaven pipeline, even if they could have gotten more run at other schools. Sixth man with more Division I letters than most other City League schools’ star players. Seventh and eighth guys getting ten minutes a game at Brookhaven even though they could have been the best players—by far—elsewhere. You went not only because you wanted to win but because if you played for Brookhaven, people came to watch you. Not just college coaches but the whole city.

They were brash and thrilling, dunks punctuated by a player swinging on the rim like a gleeful metronome, and then coming back down to the floor and throwing up the dynasty sign: palms extended, both thumbs and index fingers touching, making the shape of a diamond. And even if you envied them or hated losing to them or knew you couldn’t hang with them even though you desperately wanted to, it was still difficult to ignore how special the moment was, especially because no matter what happened when encased in the game’s whistles, they were still a group of kids from the city, like all of us. Their ascension meant something, even for those of us who were residue in the midst of their greatness.

And the real thing about Bruce Howard that I will always remember is that he never forgot