There’s Always This Year by Hanif Abdurraqib #
There’s Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension by Hanif Abdurraqib.
This book is amazing. And amazingly hard to categorize. The former partially because of the latter.
People often lament these days that certain media, especially new TV shows and movies, are designed for (or by?) the algorithm: instead of being driven by a compelling idea or novel story, some reek of being produced solely to cater to the demands of the audience. Analytics say viewers like X, Y, and Z, so let’s find a way to mix those up in a bowl together.
In a much more positive sense, this book—a holiday gift from my partner—felt custom-made for my “algorithm”, the book equivalent of the hyper-niche reel only your best friend knows to send your way.As much as I mostly loathe social media and the effects its having on society and our attention, this is a particular form of emotional expression worth reflecting on. Spending years 11–18 of my life as a jew in the northeast, basketball was part of the essential fabric of my formative years: my brother and I played around on a driveway hoop, my friends and I frequented the outdoor courts behind the school and the superintendent’s building in our town, and the sound of shoes squeaking on gym floors was the background TV to a lot of our hangs.
Though most of my friends established loyalties to the Knicks or Celtics, I was never one for true team-based fandom, not wanting my emotional well-being determined by something so beyond my control.A recent piece on fandom not disconnected from the present story. Instead, I latched on the LeBron James, whose meteoric rise coincided with my becoming conscious more broadly. To me, a privileged kid from a small town, LeBron represented among many other things the pursuit of excellence and the matching (and exceeding) of unreasonable expectations. I always appreciated how, unlike someone like Michael Jordan who "imposed his will"Not my favorite sports metaphor. on the other team, LeBron had the talent and skillset to pick apart another team in myriad ways. He could respond to the game and do what was needed of him, whatever it may be.Why am I talking in the past tense? At age 41, he’s still mostly doing just that. I remember where I was when he scored 25 straight in the 4th quarter and OT to will an undermanned Cavs team past the Pistons in the playoffs, when Ray Allen saved the 2012 Heat against the Spurs with a miraculous 3-pointer, and when James made his pivotal chase down block against the Warriors in game 7 of the 2016 finals when the Cavs overcame a 3-1 deficit against the best single-season team in NBA history.
Abdurraqib tells a story that traces many of those same events seen through the prism of his own life, growing up in east Columbus, Ohio. Not Akron (where James is from), nor Cleveland, but still: Ohio. The book is not about LeBron; it’s not about Basketball; hell, it’s not even necessarily about Abdurraqib. What is it about?
We are told with 30 seconds left in the fourth quarter: “If I haven’t made it clear yet, this is all about the good fortune of who gets to make it out of somewhere and who doesn’t.” All told from the perspective of someone who got the chance to make it out but loves the place that built and nourished him so much that he returned to and still lives there.
“With 30 seconds left in the fourth quarter”? In a book? Not a typo.
The content is not the only thing that makes this book hard to categorize. It has an unusual formal structure too: there are four “quarters” instead of chaptersFollowing a “pregame” instead of a foreword, and each punctuated by “A Timeout in Praise of Legendary Ohio Aviators” and concluded with an Intermission meditating on a famous movie featuring basketball. and each one is broken up by a countdown from 12:00 to 0:00, as the clock winds down in a basketball game. These time-stamps break up the text the way chapter or sub-section headings usually do, but are quite often thrown right in the middle of sentences.
Though the book is partially chronological, it’s not completely a memoir, and it’s not completely about basketball. Abdurraqib can extract extremely subtle nuances of human emotion from many places, from the pleasurable sweat on his dad’s bald forehead while eating to the subtle offsets indicating uncertainty in break-up and pleading soul songs. Both topics which invite multi-page meditations that you can’t stop reading, among many others. The structure changes too, from neat narrative prose, to in-line poetry, to—with 5:19 left in the fourth quarter (titled “City as Its False Self”)—a page-long run-on “sentence” describing what he saw after cops killed Henry Green in a way that partially induces in the reader the anguished exasperation he felt.
Just as this book is hard to categorize, it is also hard to review. Not least because my writing can’t begin to hold a candlestick to Abdurraqib’s. So, to wrap up: do yourself a favor. Go read this book.And I will now be reading some of his other’s.
Grade: A