There's Always This Year, page 1
Copyright © 2024 by Hanif Abdurraqib
All rights reserved.
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
Contents
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
_146506294_
PREGAME
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 o
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.
