Everyone’s from Somewhere

Matthew Ritchie reviews “There’s Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension” by Hanif Abdurraqib.

By Matthew K. RitchieSeptember 30, 2024

• Memoir & Essay

• Sports

PARTWAY THROUGH Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon (1977), the narrator pens an ode to perpetual confusion of the people who hail from the Great Lakes region. Through no fault of their own, she asserts, these inhabitants are cursed by their geographic lot in life. Because unlike landlocked people, they’ve been tricked into believing that the geographical partition they look out upon is a coast of an ocean, when it is in fact merely a border. That what they believed and hoped to be the precipice of a final escape turned out to be just another layer of the glass case that imprisons you as you yearn to be somewhere else.

Morrison’s journey chronicling flight expertly introduces a prevalent anthropological question: what causes one to pine for a departure from the place that raised them? A familiar sensation that rests—or even boils—within many of us as our minds wander away from the streets and corners that we know like the back of our hand. And why does that urge to leap fester, particularly for someone who lives in Ohio or Michigan? Morrison writes, “Once the people of the lake region discover this, the longing to leave becomes acute, and a break from the area, therefore, is necessarily dream-bitten, but necessary nonetheless.”

There are the people who leave and the people who stay. This tension shrouds Hanif Abdurraqib’s new memoir There’s Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension. Like his critical works A Little Devil In America: In Praise of Black Performance (2021) and Go Ahead in the Rain: Notes to A Tribe Called Quest (2019), the Columbus, Ohio, native’s most recent book utilizes the romance and reality of basketball as an entry point to a perspective through which to view life and culture. There’s Always This Year arrives as a masterful trick play draped in love and sincerity, with the poet and essayist using basketball as a conduit to pen a dedication to the place that he’s from, an ode to the sport and city that raised and loved him, and an examination of what it means to “make it” from somewhere.

Embarking upon a dizzying mix of genres within the same work sometimes results in wandering focus and formal meanderings that lead the reader astray into Abdurraqib’s dreamlike musings. His tendency to launch into fits of distinctive poeticism, while rife with beauty and intentionality, create extended periods with the ability to disrupt the reader’s rhythm. But it’s the vast stretches that he pulls off marrying the tenets of memoir, biography, and criticism with evocative kindness and incisive precision that make it feel as though this was the book that Abdurraqib was destined to write.

The book’s form reflects a dedication to the sport of basketball, with the chapters split into four quarters, bridged by prelude and intermission essays and his compulsory “Timeout[s] in Praise of Legendary Ohio Aviators.” Even with the guardrails of a regulation NBA game encasing his thoughts—sections and paragraphs are time-stamped to mirror the game clock counting down from the full 12 minutes—Abdurraqib’s handle on structure and manipulation of pace ensure that the ploy never gets old. The times listed on the page dwindle at random intervals; paragraphs and sentences bleed into each other across vast line breaks, causing the reader to hang on to each word with anticipation, as if they’re watching two star-crossed lovers teeter on the verge of being reunited. He simulates one of his favorite ruses that basketball plays on reality, writing, “In sports, the clock can oscillate between the minutes feeling eternal and then rapidly tumbling away at a pace that cannot be grasped by anyone who might reach for a few precious seconds that they wish to get back even while they dissolve.”

Abdurraqib’s first quarter, subtitled “City as Its True Self,” begins with a tableau of Columbus in 2002, on a night where LeBron James’s St. Vincent–St. Mary squad from Akron faced off against the city’s Brookhaven Wildcats. In an instant, he introduces two genres of people—insiders who are bound together by love and community, and the outsiders who seek to extract—contained in the microscopic symbol of a pair of clean kicks hanging from the wire. Here, it’s the eager and anxious tourists who have flocked to his hometown to gawk at James and the heralded SVSM, speaking in hushed tones about the mythology of the monolith of “the hood,” rubbing shoulders against Abdurraqib and his friends on their way to support the reigning state champion Brookhaven. In a succinct lambasting of those who descend upon a figure or a place simply to take from it, Abdurraqib writes, “I don’t trust people who don’t love a place to understand how that place remembers its dead.”

As he recounts the tightly contested overtime thriller, Abdurraqib carves out space to praise the minutiae of the game of basketball. He spends a third of a page on the mechanics and romanticism ingrained in a floater that’s been sharpened into a lethal weapon, then breaks down the psychological fault line between the two teams entering the gladiator cage that is overtime basketball, as he winks at the result without giving it away. But the 2002 game, which in the story of LeBron James likely registers as a footnote, is also used as an entry point to catalog the lives of Columbus’s basketball titans who were flourishing at the same time—the ones who didn’t get the ESPN The Magazine and Sports Illustrated covers. Abdurraqib chronicles Brookhaven’s rise to prominence from the mid-1990s to the early 2000s under head coach Bruce Howard, how their leaps from the floors and past the rims to city titles meant something to those in the community who couldn’t reach those heights. He remembers Howard’s impact on Brookhaven’s players and students alike, that the coach’s kindness and remarkable ability to never forget a face made everyone who came into contact with him feel safe, right up until his death from liver failure during the 2003 season.

The care with which Abdurraqib handles the figures of the Columbus basketball landscape produces some of the most brilliant stretches in the first half of There’s Always This Year. The tale—Abdurraqib’s liquid combination of prose and poeticism makes it feel more akin to a biblical arc than a biographical account—of Kenny Gregory’s ascension in the 1997 McDonald’s All-American Boys Game looms just as large as Howard’s story. Abdurraqib lauds Gregory as “one of the greatest basketball players the Eastside of Columbus has ever seen,” as a humble older high school hooper who acted as a beacon for the younger kids on his side of town. Not simply their own personal Michael Jordan, but an MJ that put a subwoofer in his truck and shined his car on the driveway four houses down from Abdurraqib. And the moment when Gregory attempts a vaunted free-throw-line dunk in round two of the dunk contest builds the foundation of understanding what it can feel like knowing that someone you love, somebody your community loves, is on their way up:

Kenny was in the air long enough for everyone crammed in a small East Columbus living room to rise to their feet in anticipation. […] Long enough for an entire neighborhood

5:45

to hold its breath, which means that for a moment, the singing stopped and the shouting stopped and the no-good motherfuckers who might have otherwise been cursing out some weeping beloved just trying to do their damn best held their breath and turned toward a television screen and the cops lurking the corner store stopped following the kids with baggy jeans and pockets wide enough to house a circus of unearned delights and the fist that might have otherwise chipped the tooth of someone who couldn’t afford to get their grill fixed recoiled and became an open palm again, and again, and again, collapsing into another open palm, slow applause that beat the hands into a blood-red drumline, and anything on a stove was left long enough to burn but never long enough to catch fire, long enough to fill a corner of a house with puffs of black smoke, the kind that rise in praise of absence, a gentle reminder before the flame, and I know there is a difference between what happens in real time

5:40

and what we are subjected to in the endless replays of a moment, the ones that project into the darkness of closed eyes. But I swear, Kenny Gregory jumped from the damn-near foul line in Colorado, and it seemed like he might never come down.

The ease with which Abdurraqib slips into this dreamlike stream of consciousness prose elongates the seconds in which Gregory glides through the air for the reader. When the clock ticks down to 5:45, one can’t help but think about the way that Virginia Woolf crafts her London society in Mrs. Dalloway (1925), or Toni Morrison’s world-building of the unnamed Black Michigan community in Song of Solomon, as Abdurraqib’s immersion skillfully drops the reader into the houses and corner stores of Columbus as if he’s an omniscient spirit tasked with capturing the tableau of witnessing a miracle from as many different perspectives as possible.

Even in the midst of granting space to the Columbus basketball giants of his childhood, he attempts to counteract impulses of sentimentality, while also extending grace to those who seemed to fail—or at least remained unable to get off the ground in the same way that others ascended. The tale of Estaban Weaver looms large: his mythological status ballooned as word spread of his handles that could snap a defender’s ankles in the blink of an eye, with journalists, scouts, cousins, and friends packing dusty gyms and cracked blacktops just to catch a glimpse of his prowess, before his perceived “conduct” issues and falling stock led him to drop out of high school after his senior season. But Abdurraqib also offers a nuanced line of thought that forces the reader to recontextualize their definition of success in the face of insurmountable pressure. “Don’t talk to me about any version of making it that ends with someone like Estaban Weaver being described as a failure. Not if you weren’t here. Not if you don’t know what it’s like for a city to make you into a savior before you finish ninth grade. Not if, despite that, you survived,” he writes. In Abdurraqib’s history book, nobody’s story falls by the wayside, or is regarded as a truncated footnote marked by stereotypes and rumors. And when you’re writing from a place that you love, with Black figures that have largely been forgotten by the rest of the world’s record books, keeping their stories alive is paramount to survival—no matter how the facts fall onto the paper.

¤

Abdurraqib opens the second section, subtitled “Flawed and Mortal Gods,” with the prospect of him facing eviction, unable to find another job while the money in his bank account disappears, in the summer of 2007 when the Cavaliers lost LeBron James’s first NBA Finals appearance. Relentless optimism and promise surrounded the area, excluding Abdurraqib, as James morphed into a savior through miracles. But the manner in which Abdurraqib is able to analyze highlights, as well as moments that have been replayed endlessly, with imaginative depth puts his brilliance on display: he describes the stretch in Game 5 of the Eastern Conference Finals when James scored the final 25 points as if every witness and player entered a portal to another universe: “There was a point where I and everyone around me couldn’t remember a life where LeBron James hadn’t scored a point. It is one thing to take over a game and another to transform time, to rearrange the minds of everyone watching.”

At the same time, Abdurraqib bares his soul about his own hopeless years rapidly stacking up: how the impending eviction pushed him to return to praying five times a day, a chore that burdened him as a child; how he depended on his own hustle and the mercy of others as he faced the immediacy of having nowhere to go, and nowhere to turn; how on his fifth day in jail, for reasons so mundane that he can’t dream to remember, he could look up at the television and see LeBron James’s face on the TV screen. What stands out is the quiet acceptance in Abdurraqib’s tone, like when he refers to how he arrived to his unhoused state as “unspectacular,” confessing to holding on to rage and attempting to make crooked deals with God. There’s not much to hide or withhold, but what shines through in his patient honesty is a willingness (at times, he even implores the reader) to exalt the love and beauty in the world that helped him survive. Finding a semblance of solace in the routine—whether putting up shots on the courts of Columbus during the day or silently recreating his jump shot with a balled-up pair of socks in his jail cell—is sometimes all that we have.

In an interview with The Ringer, Abdurraqib alluded to Morrison’s shadow over There’s Always This Year:

There’s so many gestures toward Morrison in this book. ‘Song of Solomon’ is all about flight. […]

To fail reaching for Toni Morrison is to succeed in a multitude of other ways. And I felt like this was a book where I finally figured out how close I can get to the parts of Morrison’s work that I love.

Devastation haunts much of the realm of Song of Solomon, even as Morrison posits the flights of protagonist Milkman Dead as heroic, and that of the titular Solomon’s as magical and breathtaking. Abdurraqib pens a poem to Morrison as one of the “Legendary Ohio Aviators,” and he opens the third section with a tender account of the ritual of he and his father watching planes take off from an airfield in Columbus: “I never thought of my father as longing for a return to anywhere, which is, of course, what a child believes. Even while sitting beside a man who has made a ritual of silence. A man who made a ritual of looking up and watching planes take people from the place he was to any place he wasn’t.” But it’s the manner in which Abdurraqib explores the fallout from a person’s flight, speaking through the avatars of himself, LeBron James, and the city of Cleveland, that feels particularly closest to reaching towards Morrison:

It bears mentioning that I come from a place people leave. Yes, when LeBron left, the reactions made enough sense to me, I suppose. But there was a part of me that felt entirely unsurprised. People leave this place. […] People at least claim to know that Ohio is shaped like a heart. A jagged heart. A heart with sharp edges. A heart as a weapon. That’s why so many people make their way elsewhere.

While not always the direct cause, alienation does beget an acceleration towards yearning for an exit. Let Morrison and Abdurraqib tell it, and the geographical predisposition from Great Lakes heritage is always waiting for an inciting event, a heartbreak and rejection to push them out the door. Whether it’s failing to reach the mountaintop of your profession in your own backyard or finding yourself trapped in the cycle of disenfranchisement, going in and out of jail, the latent thoughts of “I need to get out of here” seem always to be right around the corner. And while comparison is often the thief of joy, Abdurraqib’s natal proximity to James (being born just a year apart) ensures that they remain on parallel tracks as their lives rise and fall.

Much of There’s Always This Year feels like Abdurraqib playing isolation hero ball, attempting to wield all the aspects of his artistic repertoire with reckless abandon. It manifests in different ways, like the winding poem about LeBron James and Terrance—the fickle McDonald’s manager who watched over the soda machine—whose length and verse has the ability to rip the reader from the page and into Abdurraqib’s consciousness (where it’s quite easy to get lost). Or during his musings on heartbreak and misery in “Third Quarter: The Mercy of Exits, the Magic of Fruitless Pleading.” He is able to oscillate between exploring his own pain of missing an ex-lover or friend and expanding upon a city and fanbase’s feeling of abandonment when James goes to play for the Miami Heat, all while he finds the space to launch into a critical diatribe about the “Begging” and “Leaving” song genres. When he spends pages on the genius of Otis Redding’s version of “My Girl,” or parses through the moments in these tracks where you can tell the ego has been shattered through rhythmic begging and screeches, it hits as though you’re listening to someone you love ramble about the only thing that matters to them. Much like Gladys Knight’s train back to Georgia, Abdurraqib’s criticism doubles as a vessel to help you arrive at a new understanding of how love impacts the self, and those around you. There’s a large part of you that wants him to stay on this path until he runs out of ink.

In the same way that grief evolves, Abdurraqib’s book morphs into so much more than a collection of essays on the sport that he loves. Yes, the sprawling odes to Game 7 heroics stand out—“I love a Game 7. The sun sets for someone, and the sky remains a parade of colors for someone else,” he writes in the final quarter (subtitled “City as Its False Self”), because it wouldn’t be a fitting denouement without Abdurraqib imploring you to extend an appreciation of the natural world toward the arenas and courts encased inside it—or vice versa. But it is the avenues where Abdurraqib tends to the feelings of anger and grief within oneself and a community, while also fighting to keep the sparks of hope and love alive, that turn the closing moments into a melancholic churn. Distance makes the heart grow fonder, or when you’re away from a person or place, all the qualities and faults that made you love them are magnified exponentially. There’s Always This Year rubs up against the reality of losing time, braving to allow for the hope of an existence where we can hold on to what we love and who we love, despite the enemies plotting to take both away at every turn: “Let’s say you and the chorus both lock into a type of eternity, a forever of wondering God only knows what I’d be without you, an eternity of praising the fact that you’ll never have to find out.”