Book Review: There's Always This Year | On Basketball and Ascension by Hanif Abdurraqib
There’s Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension
By Hanif Abdurraqib
Penguin Random House
ISBN 9780593448793
A basketball game consists of four quarters (and overtime if necessary). A finite amount of time, space, and structure set up to hold the infinite number of stories and threads that can unwind from a game, a season, a career, and so on. Of course, a single game is never about just the game. Championship seasons are never about just the victories a team earned before planning a parade route. Every single year holds thousands of tunnels and tangents worth exploring to find stories that tell us just a little bit more about the game, and if we’re lucky, a little bit more about ourselves too.
Hanif Abdurraqib has always been a sensational writer and cultural critic. For me, he is always at his best when exploring the many different tangents he finds in a subject while never losing sight of what unites them. Perhaps that’s what I admire most about his latest book, There’s Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension. It’s a book about basketball, of course, and it’s a book about everything else too.
Structured like an NBA basketball game, There’s Always This Year is divided into four quarters, and sections are divided within the 12 minutes of time allotted for each quarter. Ample time is dedicated to Abdurraqib’s fellow Ohioan LeBron James, a man crowned as king when he was still just a boy in high school. Basketball fans will recognize the stories of the legendary high school career of James and his mighty St. Vincent-St. Mary Fighting Irish, the stories of ESPN cameras and production trucks invading any community across Ohio where the Irish were scheduled to play.
This brings us to Columbus three days after Christmas in 2002 when James, his teammates, and the enormous hype and attention that surrounded them arrived in Abdurraqib’s hometown for a highly anticipated game against Ohio’s defending state champions, the Brookhaven Bearcats. A single regular season game that packed The Schottenstein Center at Ohio State to its capacity. James may have been the star of the moment, but Abdurraqib brings our gaze to “diminutive” Andrew Lavender, already Columbus basketball royalty at that point in his young career, a 5-foot-7 dynamo with the weight of a basketball-loving city on his shoulders.
Diehard hoops fanatics of a certain age will surely remember Lavender and his college career at Oklahoma and Xavier, where he helped the Musketeers reach the Elite Eight armed with his unblockable floater, another subject of Abdurraqib’s precise prose:
The floater is beautiful for how it relies on height, how the shot itself turns into a bit of a show-off, almost pausing in the air to make sure you get its good side before it begins to twirl downward. If you were a small, quick guard, you probably learned to get good at the floater. And if you were Andrew Lavender, you learned to become lethal with it.
The story of Lavender and his Bearcat teammates were not told through national magazines or segments on SportsCenter. As a team, they were ranked sixth in the country. James and the Irish ranked ninth. They didn’t have a “teenage messiah.” They had Lavender and his floater and a hometown crowd that wasn’t surprised at all to see the score knotted at 59-59 in the closing seconds.
Lavender had two chances to win it. Once at the freethrow line and again with a floater. Abdurraqib:
Lavender catches the ball on the baseline and gets a step on LeBron, same way he’d been doing all damn night, and he throws up that reliably potent floater, which looked good for just a split second, the way a ball that flies toward a rim can look good before it descends and touches nothing but air on the other side.
This sentiment from “First Quarter: City as its True Self” echoes through the entire book.
The third quarter (my favorite quadrant), “The Mercy of Exits, The Magic of Fruitless Pleading,” is where Abdurraqib shares that he “would like to be granted an audience with the architect of longing.” Readers of his previous works, like his brilliant essay “On Breakups” in The Paris Review; or his glistening ode to the rapper Future and remaining productive while sad, “On Future And Working Through What Hurts,” from his first essay collection They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us; will recognize the way Abdurraqib navigates the difficult waters of grief and of wanting something that’s just out of reach.
But let us dwell on heartbreak and its subplots for a moment. For example, I would like to examine the admittedly childish impulse that exists when seeing an ex-anything in the throes of a new pleasure, a pleasure that you do not have access to. One that you could not provide for them, and even the pleasure that they left you to seek.
This naturally returns to the story of James and his departure from the city of Cleveland and the controversy that stemmed from the national broadcast of “The Decision.” Though Abdurraqib does not linger in these over congested waters where sports writers have spent years and some have even made careers over hating James, but rather in finding substance in the suddenly “LeBron-less” Cleveland Cavaliers who fell from being one of the best teams in the NBA to one its worst the second James headed to Miami.
There was pleasure in watching this aimless disaster of a team. Veteran castoffs who had been given up on, young players who seemed, mostly, bewildered by the pace and intensity of the games, forced to play minutes because someone had to, after all. At a certain point, it seemed anyone who could run up and down the court would do.
Jerry West (the Los Angeles Lakers great whose silhouette is depicted in the NBA’s iconic logo) once said, “People always show these winning locker rooms, guys celebrating. There are more stories in the losing locker room than there will ever be in a winning locker room.” There is no ascension without descension, as it were.
The Cavaliers had a losing locker room 63 times in that first season without LeBron, the most losses of any team in the Eastern Conference (shout out to my Timberwolves who had 65!). Yet Abdurraqib brings West’s sentiment to life by chronicling them in such a way that the losing basketball fades deep into the background until it's forgotten that one is even reading a “basketball book” at all.
Basketball is just the lens in There’s Always This Year, and much like his previous works, Abdurraqib shows once again how far that lens can see to tell the stories of heroes, of heartbreak, and of anyone who ever had the courage to launch their hopes into the air and eagerly await to meet them and what they’ve become when they come back down.
Terry Horstman started playing basketball as a child in Minneapolis and grew up to become the all-time lowest scoring player in the history of Minnesota high school hoops. A dubious record, but one that can never be broken. His writing has been published by or forthcoming from Flagrant Magazine, The Next, The McNeese Review, Taco Bell Quarterly, The Growler, Eater, USA TODAY Sports Media Group, Unplugg’d, and he once Googled ‘submission guidelines for The New Yorker.’ He is a graduate of the MFA in creative writing program at Hamline University, a co-founding editor of the Under Review, a co-host of the Belligerent Beavs podcast, and a co-many other things. He lives and writes in Northeast Minneapolis.