Basketball -- Ohio -- History. |
Basketball fans -- Ohio. |
Ohio -- History |
Abdurraqib, Hanif, 1983- |
Willis-Abdurraqib, Hanif |
Basket-ball |
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Summary
Summary
#1 NATIONAL BESTSELLER * A "powerful" ( The Guardian ) reflection on basketball, life, and home--from the author of the National Book Award finalist A Little Devil in America
"Mesmerizing . . . not only the most original sports book I've ever read but one of the most moving books I've ever read, period."--Steve James, director of Hoop Dreams
Growing up in Columbus, Ohio, in the 1990s, Hanif Abdurraqib witnessed a golden era of basketball, one in which legends like LeBron James were forged and countless others weren't. His lifelong love of the game leads Abdurraqib into a lyrical, historical, and emotionally rich exploration of what it means to make it, who we think deserves success, the tension between excellence and expectation, and the very notion of role models, all of which he expertly weaves together with intimate, personal storytelling. "Here is where I would like to tell you about the form on my father's jump shot," Abdurraqib writes. "The truth, though, is that I saw my father shoot a basketball only one time."
There's Always This Year is a triumph, brimming with joy, pain, solidarity, comfort, outrage, and hope. No matter the subject of his keen focus--whether it's basketball, or music, or performance--Hanif Abdurraqib's exquisite writing is always poetry, always profound, and always a clarion call to radically reimagine how we think about our culture, our country, and ourselves.
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Cultural critic Abdurraqib (A Little Devil in America) returns with a triumphant meditation on basketball and belonging. Serving as a love letter to Abdurraqib's hometown of Columbus, Ohio, and the state more broadly, the book is structured like a basketball game, divided into four "quarters" with game clock time stamps demarcating section breaks. The first quarter describes the collective ecstasy Columbus felt during a 2002 game in which the city's nationally ranked high school basketball team held its own against an Akron team featuring up-and-comer LeBron James. Abdurraqib suggests the Columbus team's respectable showing (they lost in overtime) asserted the greater community's pride in spite of politicians and police who called Black Columbus neighborhoods "war zones." Elsewhere, the author considers the "era of Ohio Heartbreak" that followed James's decision to leave the Cleveland Cavaliers for the Miami Heat in 2010, and offers a lyrical account of the protests that followed Columbus police's 2016 killing of 23-year-old Black man Henry Green. (He writes of the makeshift shrine on the sidewalk where Green was shot: "Whatever is left behind dries and turns a dark crimson, the wayward light from candles flickering over what remains--a strange kind of memorial, a strange kind of haunting.") The narrative works as if by alchemy, forging personal anecdotes, sports history, and cultural analysis into a bracing contemplation of the relationship between sport teams and their communities. This is another slam dunk from Abdurraqib. Agent: Alia Hanna Habib, Gernert Co. (Mar.)
Guardian Review
The literary stamina of Hanif Abdurraqib is impressive. He is the author of two poetry collections and three nonfiction books, plus countless articles, reviews and essays as a music journalist and culture critic for the New York Times, among others. He is also much lauded. Earlier this month he was announced as one of the recipients of a Windham-Campbell prize, and in 2021 was awarded a MacArthur "genius grant" as well as the Gordon Burn prize for A Little Devil in America: In Praise of Black Performance - a book in which all his talents came together. Structurally inventive, it is a well-balanced mix of memoir and ruminations on Black American music, culture and history. Some of the essays are built on loose poetic forms and the result is audacious, energetic and playful (and sometimes painful), conjuring the feeling of a writer running for his life, running out of time, running circles around his traumas and joys. There's Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension is about "the emotional politics of place" and what it means to honour (and sometimes be honoured by) our home towns when we leave, and the demons we may have to reckon with when we return. As they were born and raised in Ohio a year apart, Abdurraqib blends his own biography with that of LeBron James. His gaze is turned upwards towards the gods and kings who are basketball players at the top of their game - men such as LeBron James and Michael Jordan, who are ordained on the court, their image pasted on the walls of bedrooms and prison cells, their performances defying the laws of what is and isn't possible for mere mortals. As they were born and raised in Ohio a year apart, Abdurraqib blends his own biography with that of James, contrasting the star's rise with his own less obvious ascent. Abdurraqib was at one point "unhoused" and jailed for petty theft, while the teenage James drove to school in expensive cars even before he made it to the NBA. For him, basketball was "his way out the hood", while Abdurraqib's writing talent and emotional intelligence allow him to reframe his circumstances and shortcomings, to honour and grieve them in equal measure. There's Always This Year stands in opposition to disappearing into depression by revising the rules for Black men, whether they are exceptional or not. Abdurraqib's approach is at times whimsical and meandering, at others sober and reflective, but almost always self-aware. The American dream promises material rewards for those who strive and hustle hard but, conveniently, doesn't factor in poverty, race, gender, sexuality, education, disability and neurodiversity, and how they may affect your rise or fall. I read this book while in ascension myself, on a plane to New Orleans, where I first attended an NBA basketball game. There I sat facing the shiny maple wood floor of the Smoothie King Center, home of the New Orleans Pelicans, struck by the athleticism of a sport I knew little of but had read many poems about - by Terrance Hayes and Inua Ellams, Jim Carroll and Natalie Diaz. Now Abdurraqib, too, captures the experience in the heightened mode of the poet. So much so that by the time my plane descended, I felt invigorated, as if I had been called to reckon with my own gentrified home town and the nostalgia and survivor's guilt I feel for having left it, despite sometimes longing to return. There's Always This Year also contains the stories of basketball's forgotten players, such as Kenny Gregory and Estaban Weaver, the one-time rising stars who fell by the wayside. I felt their tales as powerfully as those of the anointed kings, because Abdurraqib has found an entertaining way to make the act of watching sport akin to witnessing miracles. If you are looking to read something that "pushes against the door of reality and offers an elsewhere", I recommend this title.
Kirkus Review
The acclaimed poet and cultural critic uses his lifelong relationship with basketball to muse on the ways in which we grow attached to our hometowns, even when they fail us. Growing up in Columbus, Ohio, Abdurraqib, author of A Little Devil in America and Go Ahead in the Rain, was in awe of the talents of such local basketball players as the legendary LeBron James ("a 14-year-old, skinny and seemingly poured into an oversized basketball uniform that always suggested it was one quick move away from evicting him") and Kenny Gregory, who went on to play college basketball for the Kansas Jayhawks. Abdurraqib's complex love of the sport and its players mirrors the complexity of his love for his home state, where he's spent time unhoused as well as incarcerated, and where his mother passed away when he was only a child. "It bears mentioning that I come from a place people leave," he writes. Yet, despite witnessing the deaths of friends and watching the media deem his home a "war zone," the author feels unable to leave. "Understand this: some of our dreams were never your dreams, and will never be," he writes. "When we were young, so many people I loved just wanted to live forever, where we were. And so yes, if you are scared, stay scared. Stay far enough away from where our kinfolk rest so that a city won't get any ideas." Structured as four quarters, delineated by time markers echoing a countdown clock, the narrative includes timeouts and intermissions that incorporate poetry. Lyrically stunning and profoundly moving, the confessional text wanders through a variety of topics without ever losing its vulnerability, insight, or focus. Abdurraqib's use of second person is sometimes cloying, but overall, this is a formally inventive, gorgeously personal triumph. An innovative memoir encompassing sports, mortality, belonging, and home. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
MacArthur fellow Abdurraqib follows his Carnegie Medal--winning A Little Devil in America (2022) with another unique, memoir-propelled, far-ranging, and affecting inquiry. Basketball is the heart of this many-faceted exploration, from gatherings at the garage hoop at his family home to competition at the neighborhood's most popular court to high-school champions to LeBron James. Structured like a game in quarters and minutes, it's a galvanic drive through the intricacies of family, community, belief, and dreams. Ascension, for Abdurraqib, is soaring to the basket and elevating as a human being. As players, teams, and fans ascend, so does a neighborhood, even one called a war zone by outsiders, and a city, in particular the one Abdurraqib's loves, his hometown, Columbus, Ohio. Passionately attuned to the resonance of home and heartbreak, survival and mercy, he also chronicles descension, sharing unforgettable tales about becoming unhoused and incarcerated. He writes about growing up Muslim, losing his mother at a young age, friends and enemies, athletes as gods, police murders of unarmed Black boys and men, "the gospel of suffering," paying witness, protesting, music, miracles, love, and time's mutability. Abdurraqib keeps multiple balls in the air as he swerves, spins, and scores, and every thoughtfully considered and vividly described element and emotion, action and moment, ultimately, connects. An exhilarating, heartfelt, virtuoso, and profound performance.HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Poet and writer Abdurraqib is a reader favorite with his fresh, innovative work and magnetic social media presence, and the focus of his latest will create new fans.
Excerpts
Excerpts
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 f*** 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. Excerpted from There's Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension by Hanif Abdurraqib All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.Table of Contents
Pregame | 1 |
First Quarter City as its True Self | 39 |
A Timeout in Praise of Legendary Ohio Aviators | 67 |
Intermission: On Fathers, Sons, and Ghosts, Holy or Otherwise: He Got Game (1998) | 95 |
Second 2 Flawed and Mortal Gods | 109 |
A Timeout in Praise of Legendary Ohio Aviators | 143 |
Intermission: On the Darkest Heavens: Above the Rim (1994) | 165 |
Third Quarter The Mercy of Exits, The Magic of Fruitless Pleading | 167 |
A Timeout in Praise of Legendary Ohio Aviators | 209 |
Intermission: On Hustles: White Men Can't Jump (1992) | 231 |
Fourth Quarter City as its False Self | 237 |
A Timeout in Praise of Legendary Ohio Aviators | 273 |
A Brief Postgame Scouting Report in Praise of Legendary Ohio Aviators | 319 |
Acknowledgments | 323 |
Index | 325 |