All photos by Ana Murphy (@anamurphyphoto)
There’s a section in Hanif Abdurraqib’s new book There’s Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension where he equates basketball to not just a game, but a spiritual practice. It’s not a groundbreaking conclusion to draw given the ubiquity of the phrase “ball is life.” Many coaches deliberately equate basketball with religion as a motivational tool. The iconography of the game is often framed within religious symbols and spaces. Take the Nike commercial featuring pastor Bernie Mack telling a congregation in a space combining the church and the gym that he “feels the soul of the game coming over me” just before Lebron James enters to dish out no-look passes that infect every receiver with the holy ghost of hoops. “Basketball as spiritual practice” is essentially one of the pillars of Sacred as a journal and living art project. But, Hanif’s perspective, his proposal in the book, places a ripple in the conversation—as he’s known for doing.
His proposal:
“With enough repetition anything can become a religion. It doesn’t matter if it works or not, it simply matters that a person returns.” (pg.153)
What follows is Abdurraqib moving through his life, family, and basketball, pushing this “anything can become religion” concept into reflections on his grandmother ritually buying lottery tickets, his ritual of prayer as a Muslim, and a memory of pretending a balled up sock was a basketball while he was in jail. Later, he examines the passionate Cavaliers fans that chose to burn Lebron effigies, which is more about being a member of a congregation and questioning devotion as it degrades into scorn. Still, he is operating within the lens of religion. Through these disparate reflections, Abdurraqib encompasses the hope, the faith, and even the misguided pieces that comprise a religious practice. And, that last one, when religion goes wrong, is far less explored in basketball conversations.
Despite the conflicting examples, Abdurraqib’s “anything can…” premise rings optimistic for basketball’s potential as a stand-in religion, mostly because when we need comfort, when we’re hurting for direction, basketball is there. And the rituals within basketball mirror those in many of the global faiths.
I can name a hundred good reasons to read There’s Always This Year, like how the book is structured as a game of runs, in which there are furious momentum swings followed by timeouts, and how the ticking clock motif always seems to imbue the page with urgency (this book knows the analytics on pushing tempo). But I keep coming back to the spiritual tone. Before he introduces his “anything can…” premise, the “Second Quarter: Flawed and Mortal Gods” chapter opens with a meditation on belief, in which Hanif recalls a platitude: “I was first told that prayer was a ritual, and ritual was the reward.” It makes me think of game announcers who are prone to call last second shots “prayers,” which has always felt inconsistently bound to searching for luck. We’ve all heard it. “He/She throws up a prayer.” It often goes unnoticed when the player contradicts the “prayer” presence in the post game interview; “we practiced that shot,” i.e. ritual. Prayer and luck are not related.
I called the poet and MacArthur Fellow back in March to talk about pick-up basketball, the book, and his childhood court in Columbus, Ohio. Then, in April we played pick-up in a middle school gym on the Upper West Side. The following is a lightly edited version of our conversation.
Do you find the game has spiritual weight in your life?
I talked about repetition as a spiritual action in the book. Repetition is not unique to basketball, but for me personally I find the repetitions of basketball a lot more pleasing than say soccer. I’ve played soccer for the longest and most stretches of my life. Some mornings I’ll go to the park by my house and shoot until I make 50 jump shots. What I most love about the repetition of basketball is when you get into a groove, you feel like you can make anything. To me, if I make four jump shots in a row, then I'm certainly gonna hit a fifth and probably a sixth. There’s something that I love about your body just locking into what it knows. You, as a vessel for what it knows, almost exiting the process entirely and just watching yourself. You're separate from the process and watching yourself enact the process. The body knows what it knows.
To be Muslim and pray five times a day, your body just responds to that ever shifting clock. There’s something very distinctly spiritual about the repetitions of basketball that I don’t find in the repetitions of other sports.
I wrote and continue to write a lot about this myself. My free throw routine that I've been doing since I was nine has a meditative quality that felt like I’d be exiting my body in a way that I’m outside the action and it brought me a great deal of inner peace and joy. Other days it brought frustration when I could not lock in, and I’d learn from that as well.
I’m really fascinated by free throw routines. Jeff Hornacek, watching basketball in the 90s, he had a really interesting one. I really loved his.
Touching the temples, right?
Yeah. I love a free throw routine. I really love the stories of them. I oftentimes wonder when it began? These are things that build through life. I would imagine at least that you don’t wake up in the NBA and decide to do a free throw routine.
“It was all arms, and so it fell short and wide. He called for the ball again, once my brother chased it down. His next shot was long, barely skimming the edge of the rim as it descended from its rainbow arc. His form was strained, almost like he’d never held a basektball before but had watched the game endlessly.”
My favorite passage in the book is when you see your dad shoot a basketball for the first time. Who eventually did teach you to shoot a basketball?
I just did the Pablo Torre show and we went over this. I just straight up don’t know. What I do remember is shooting from my chest early on. A lot of children have a jump shot that is all arms and nothing else. I don’t remember the bridge between that being what it was and that not being what it was. It happened at some point. But I don’t recall when or how. That is something that is going to wrack my brain forever.
Imitation or osmosis from the people around you.
It’s definitely imitation, like anything is. I don’t know how I learned how to do a lot of things I do in my writing practice other than imitating writers I admire. I don’t have any formal training in writing. I didn’t go to school for writing. I didn’t study writing at all. So much of what I understand is operating through these imitations that are being lensed through my own abilities. This book is very much an ode to Toni Morrison. The start of the 4th quarter is pretty much Jazz. It’s a scene from Jazz. There’s a way that imitation, if we can call it that, really defines my mode of operation. As a writer, as a curious person, as all that shit. There’s certainly me trying to take a certain shape on the page that I’ve seen before. I’d almost guarantee me finding my jump shot was mimicking other people. You have coaches eventually who tell you all the proper things like which finger should be the last one to touch the ball to have the right rotation, but before that I think I just found my own way.
Have you been consistently playing pick-up as an adult?
Fits and starts, you know. I mentor young writers in Columbus and in the summer I play with them. Some of them come back from college. It’s good for me to play with younger groups of people because it’s illuminating for me. It helps me understand how my game is changing. Also, I’m a runner. I run a lot. All the time. Just having the stamina… I can run up and down a full court better than someone who is 20. That alone is a skill I didn’t see being one I’d adapt to when I got older, but it’s working.
It’s important playing into your 40s to be mindful of the ways proper rest and conditioning enhance your game, which some younger players don’t take into consideration. It’s an edge you can have.
I played soccer in college and I wasn’t thinking about that. You feel invincible and perhaps you should. I think you should be operating with some… well, false sense of invincibility. I’ll take advantage of it. Another reason I enjoy playing with younger players is because I was that. I was the young player who took bad shots or tried to be flashy when a simple pass would have done the trick. It’s great to be present with that as I get older. I’m not rolling my eyes at it or wagging my finger at it. I appreciate being a witness to it.
Delay as much as possible being the old head disapproving.
Really that’s it. Hold it off. We all don’t want to age into being an insufferable old head, but our old head nature will come out in some ways.
What’s a part of your game you feel time has taken away from you?
I’ve never been an over eager defender at all.
[Laughs.]
I’ve never been good at defense and now I can fake it a bit. I can go through the motions of defense. I will, happily. My desire to play defense is at an all-time low. Unfortunately, I think it kind of works because I think the playing of defense in pick-up ball is at an all-time low.
One could argue that’s everywhere at every level of hoop. But I do think with pick-up ball it’s really at a low. It’s different…Now I’m steering into old head talk. But in the era I came up in it was very much like defense would get you on the court. There were guys in the neighborhood where I grew up where they couldn’t really shoot, but if you could shut somebody’s water off you could be the second or third pick up. There’s that. But I was never that player and I don’t think I ever will be.
I’m also someone who very early in my athletic life, very quickly understood what I was going to be good at and be interested in and how I could heighten that while not trying to be something I’m not. Defense, I think I’ve gotten worse as I’ve aged. It’s not even a physical thing. I think my lateral movement is fine. It’s mostly an interest and investment question, I think.
Playing basketball into my 40s has been a balance of both refining existing skills and trying new moves to experiment with my limitations and adaptability. Would you say that has an equivalence in becoming a writer or even a better writer?
I hope so. I started so late. I didn’t start writing until 2012. I didn’t start taking it seriously. I hope I’m always finding new ways to do the work. Finding new ways to stay focused on the work. I do think in terms of inventiveness and risk taking, my relationship with aging has led me to be, I think, a writer who is more invested in saying I don’t have forever. The amount of time I have is not permanent. So I have to work as though I’m seeking something I’ve never seen before every time. Something miraculous. Some miracle every time.
That really informs my approach. I think that approach comes with aging and wanting to not be stagnant. Being aware of time’s passage and not wanting to surrender to it.
When did this book begin for you?
2018, I think I first dreamed it up. It was a broader, more stagnant idea. I wanted to write what I called a book about Ohio in the age of Lebron James, but that didn’t actually mean anything. We’re around the same age. Grew up in the same kind of era of Ohio. Two different Ohios, to be clear. Me saying “I’d like to explore” that doesn’t really move the needle in any way. I’d write these little vignettes about Lebron, but that didn’t really do anything until the engine of this book, the emotional/mental engine that got dropped into it. Asking real questions around 2020 about mortality. The passage of time as it inflicts itself upon Lebron James, whose someone I first saw when he was 14 years old, and how that passage of time mirrors my own. It also became a question of making it.
I really wanted to write a book that asks some thoughtful questions about what it is to make it. What it is to make it out of a place. If quote unquote making it means exodus? All these things were really on my mind in a really big way. It was one of those situations where it was a real benefit for me to really sit with the idea, as opposed to rushing into this vague ‘I’m going to make this book and write about Lebron James’ kind of thing. Cool, but that’s actually not doing anything.
You had a review series for The Paris Review of basketball films. I know the “White Men Can’t Jump” essay found its way into the book. Was that essay series giving you a template or guidance in making this book?
It was. I took on the Notes on Hoops in part of when I was thinking through the early phases of what this book could be. I wanted to get back to writing about basketball in a more expansive way. It’s like warming up. I wanted to warm up.
That was a way I could do it. I wrote four of those that got published, but I wrote a bunch. I think I wrote eight or nine just to flex the muscle to see what I could do. That was fun for me. It also opened up a reality that I think or I began to think that this was a whole world that I could operate in. It wasn’t just ‘isn’t basketball great’ or ‘isn’t Lebron James amazing’. It was building a cinematic universe around the way I understood the game that could clarify some things for me in my approach to writing the book.
When did revisiting Ohio high school basketball legends like Drew Lavender and Estaban Weaver enter this book? I remember both of them growing up in Ohio and I haven’t heard those names in forever!
That was ever present for me. I’m always thinking about those guys. To ask the question of what it is to make it, is to ask these questions of who gets to make it out of where and why. I was fortunate to come up in a place and a time where these questions were high on everyone’s mind because we saw people who felt like Michael Jordans in our neighborhood and we saw them not make it to the league. Kenny Gregory is a great example of this. I remember people being baffled when he didn’t make it to the NBA. He was a bit undersized.
He’d have been drafted to the NBA in the mid-2000s. When there was kind of a space for the hyper athletic undersized power forward I think. But at the time a 6’6” power forward who couldn’t shoot… You know. It’s heartbreaking in a way to say Kenny Gregory could have made it, but the time wasn’t right for him.
The book does a wonderful job of giving more depth to these stories beyond the ways they were dismissed in their original time. Have you watched the Who Is Estaban doc?
Oh, of course! The homies made that. I think the thing about Estaban, that documentary was good for a kind of nostalgia trip and it gave him his flowers, truly. The thing about Estaban is people are always seeking the why. Why didn’t he make it? There’s not a sexy or romantic reason. He just peaked a bit early. He was singular as a ninth grader. Very good as a tenth grader. And he just kinda got surpassed. I don’t know if people remember his senior year as well. It wasn't what people thought it would be. It kind of hurt that he was on a team with Kenny too. That team didn’t really gel entirely. They got to the State tournament and Zanesville just slowed the game down.
There was a point, I think, the book on city league teams was when you get to the State tournament you slow the game down and that’s how you beat them. Of course, I think Brookhaven upended that. They could play anyway. Beachcroft too obviously in this golden era.
Estaban deserves his flowers. The question of making it versus not making it is centralized on him because I propose honestly that if your name is known and you’re beloved, there are kids on courts in Columbus right now who were not even born when Estaban Weaver played at Bishop Hartley and Independence who know his name and revere him. That’s making it to some degree.
The book begins with this idea of inventing enemies. What was the seed of that for you?
That first line came to me in 2018. I held onto that. I didn’t know it would be the first line in this book, but I knew it was going to be the first line for something. I thought it was also a useful thesis statement for the book because the book I think is a very romantic book. I think there’s a requirement to define the enemies of that approach, the enemies of romance, the enemies of friendship. Anyone who might stand in front of the affections we have for each other becomes an enemy. To signal to the people to say our, to say this is no longer just me. This is about a pursuit we are in together. It does require that second person invitation repeatedly.
Operating in two ways. One to say that I’d like you to understand what I mean by enemy. I’d like you to see the potential for an enemy in the way I mean. If we are on the same page about that then I think we can be on the same page about what the machinery of this book is asking of us.
Another thing was I was really trying to get to this question of the ways I’ve been an enemy to myself. The ways I’ve been an enemy to my own desire for survival. I hope that a big part of this book is about seeking grace and seeking forgiveness. Because that was part of the process for me.
You certainly take the book to some significant low points in your life. Was that part of the forgiveness? To revisit those low points?
It wouldn’t be earnest for me if I didn’t go to those places. They felt required. To be honest about the impact those places had on me. I needed to see if I could be thankful for those places. For me, being thankful for them has some gratitude for having survived them.
When was the last time you visited the Scottwood courts?
I did a photoshoot there for the Washington Post. I wanted them taken at Scottwood. It was so wonderful to be there because the courts had enlivened again. For a long time there was no one really playing there all that often or out there all that often.
Is this a pandemic thing or before that?
No. Way before that. The courts have been in a slow state of decline. The courts feel new again. When we were out taking photos there was a full court game going. It felt like it was really back. Back in a big way. That was refreshing and delightful for me. It did not seem like that was a possibility for a very long time. I have endless gratitude for what seems like the revival of that space. It’s a mighty important space for young folks to be outside dreaming.
When I say the court was dying, there were no nets on the rim. One of the rims just didn’t exist. They did some renovation around it. It’s inviting to say here’s a freshly painted court. Here’s some new nets. Some rims newly applied. These kinds of things invite people in. It says this is a space that is once again yours. It’s vital.
All photos by Ana Murphy. Thank you to Maria Braeckel at Penguin Random House for the invite to the run. Hanif Abdurraqib’s There’s Always This Year is out now in hardcover.