Witnessing the Witnesses: On Hanif Abdurraqib’s “There’s Always This Year”
Hanif Abdurraqib | There’s Always This Year | Random House | March 2024 | 352 Pages
When I found out Hanif Abdurraqib’s next book was about basketball, LeBron James, and Ohio, I took joyful note. Concerns about any obligatory table-setting exposition to placate casual sports fandom are unwarranted here. There’s Always This Year is not your typical sports book. On the first page, Abdurraqib asks us to hold his hand: “You are putting your hand into my open palm, and I am resting my one free hand atop yours, and I would like to commiserate here and now, about our enemies.” Hard to imagine a beat writer like Brian Windhorst leading off in such a heady, metafictional manner. Plus, James goes unmentioned until page thirty.
There’s Always This Year is a deeply personal book, radical both in form and content, with a wide range and subtle analysis, celebrating Black excellence in countless ways, while thoughtfully detailing how integral the game of basketball has been at all junctions of the author’s life. It recounts Abdurraqib’s childhood growing up on the east side of Columbus, his experience playing soccer at a mostly all-white private university, his eviction and homelessness post-college (he slept in a storage unit and showered at a YMCA). Paralleling the autobiographical is his retracing from a fan’s perspective the golden age of 90’s basketball, from Michael Jordan’s famous foul line dunk to the array of unmatchable nicknames that donned the era (“The Worm,” “The Glove,” “The Dream,” “The Admiral”), the long-lasting influence of the “Fab Five,” local basketball stars who never quite made to the league, and, of course, Ohio’s Chosen One himself. Despite the blast-from-the-past glance, Abdurraqib’s insistence on revising, and not just revisiting these memories, rescues There’s Always This Year from mere nostalgia.
Told in four “quarters,” each with a countdown clock descending from twelve minutes, which breaks the chapters into smaller segments, the book’s structure mimics an NBA game. There are even “Time Outs” focusing on “famous Aviators” from the state, which comprise a paragraph or two on real pilots and astronauts, from little known Black pilot Lonnie Carmon to the famous John Glenn. The longest sections in the “quarters” are a few pages; the shortest, just three words. Abdurraqib, also the author of two poetry collections, occasionally breaks off these vignette-like sections mid-sentence, creating enjambed lines for poetic effect. “And it was just you /” one section ends with another continuing, “against time, and nothing else.” This playfulness conveniently constricts the author to the short essay format, a genre for which he’s best known and does his strongest work, letting him jump from one thought to the next without penalty. At times, though, the structure can seem arbitrarily employed. The three “Intermissions” make little sense from a naming convention standpoint (NBA games have one halftime).
Accompanying the short chapters is an accelerated prose style that only occasionally lets up its pace. There were moments when I marked in the margins, “he’s writing as if this sentence will be his last!” I was not surprised, later, to hear Abdurraqib confess in an interview with the writer Airea Dee Matthews that he wrote There’s Always This Year as if it were the last thing he’d ever write, citing his early mentor, the late Ohio-born poet Greg Tate, who approached everything he wrote, “even book reviews,” with a similar mentality. Beyond the pacing and chapter styling, which emphasizes the notion of time running out, the point of view often employed, the notoriously tricky to pull off second person “you,” adds to the urgency. Unlike the unnamed son of Ta-Nehisi Coates’s in Between the World and Me or James Baldwin’s nephew (also named James) in The Fire Next Time, there is no stand-in referent for this missive “you” to sustain the device. Abdurraqib does away with the buffer; the “you” is sometimes the reader, sure, but as is the case with most writing in the second person, it’s often the author addressing himself at various points in his life.
As the “Pregame” section unfolds, your palms might get a little sweaty. Abdurraqib tests the limits of imaginative writing in these opening pages, perhaps to keep readers out who can’t handle it. After asking readers to pretend to hold hands, we’re asked to share enemies (“my enemies are your enemies”) and then told, “there’s another reality.” And in this other reality, our enemies are actually 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.
There’s some puzzling (partly because they turn out to be foreshadowing) moments like the above throughout the epigrammatic opening few pages and a reader may ask how indeed affection, difficult to measure in any tangible way, can have its “width and breadth” observed through a window that’s not real but “painted”? He asks for forgiveness three times on the first page alone but once it warms-up, the “Pregame” artfully introduces many of the recurring themes of the book and features some of its strongest writing. The blending of beloveds and enemies unfolds with some obvious examples, like LeBron James—from hero to villain—to larger and less distinctive entities, like entire cities.
In his previous works, A Little Devil in America, Go Ahead in the Rain, and They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us, Abdurraqib offers dazzling cultural critiques that unearth seemingly random connections in thoughtful, personal, and insightful ways. It’s a style that’s become his signature and is on full display in There’s Always This Year. Consider baldness, Black male baldness, in particular, as Abdurraqib does. First, writing about the intentionally shaved heads of Jalen Rose and Chris Webber of Michigan’s Fab Five, to the bald head as seen on his loving father, then Lebron James, desperately trying to cover up his receding hairline. There’s also the baldness of a basketball itself, worn down from overuse, and how the lack of grip never phases the real streetball hoopers. And finally, a friend in high school who lost her mother to cancer, asks Abdurraqib to shave her head to match the Meshell Ndegeocello poster that decorated her childhood bedroom wall, though she backs out at the last minute. These memories and images connect in evocative, collage-like ways.
Running through There’s Always This Year is a strong biblical motif. God (sometimes capitalized, sometimes not), savior, prayer, mercy, miracles, redemption, salvation, and eternity all permeate the book, just as fans and sports commentators use them analogously to make their points or express shared joy and dismay. Abdurraqib presents them intentionally, teasing out their double meanings. For readers unfamiliar with his previous books, the religious impulse as a kind of intellectual or philosophical template may seem misguided at first, but if you think about the important role churches and mosques have played when other institutions in this country have let Black civil society down, it makes sense. As Abdurraqib confesses, he’s “spent enough time aligned with both religion and sports to know there is no gospel richer than the gospel of suffering, of living through large stretches devoid of pleasure for the sake of reaching some place beyond your current circumstances and feeling as though you have truly earned a right to be there.”
The religious framework also matches nicely with the mythology of Ohio’s Chosen One and hero, King James. As Abdurraqib points out, “In the King James version of the Bible, the word ‘witness’ appears 167 times, more than in most other translations.” You know the story: the King’s arrival is something of a fable that you could feel “like the embers of white chalk that would explode from the hands of Lebron James before Cavaliers home games.” Then the King leaves, abandons his people/fans to despair, only to return to “Believeland” and repay those who never lost faith (and even those who did) by fulfilling his promise of championship glory.
One of the author’s great talents is breaking down video—rap videos of A Tribe Called Quest, long forgotten commercials, TV shows, old basketball highlights, news broadcasts, there’s even lively criticism of basketball films in the “Intermission” sections (He Got Game, Above the Rim, White Men Can’t Jump). In one particularly haunting section of A Little Devil in America, he writes about watching reruns of Soul Train, the long running Black musical dance TV show that started in the ’70s. “When I moved to a city or visited a city where I didn’t know anyone, or didn’t see anyone who looked like me, I would watch the Soul Train Line videos,” from which he “claimed the fantasy of kinship with so many of you, dear cousins from another life.” Abdurraqib mentions that never saw his parents dance (his mother died when he was nine, a subject which he writes touchingly about in all of his books) and he watches the videos of dance lines almost as in a kind of afterlife, “wondering if there was some past version of themselves that had been hidden.”
A similar philosophical vein is employed in There’s Always This Year. His argument that the King’s patented chasedown block represents the highest form of witnessing (unfolding in front of our eyes before anyone else’s, including the unsuspecting opponent) remains one of the more insightful things said about a player who, at this point, not much more can be said. Much of the commentary after James left Cleveland, annoyingly expressed through the commonplace prism of a bad breakup, saw Ohioans as spurned lovers, dealing with the fallout of a romantic partner who left for a better chick and a warmer climate. Abdurraqib’s take follows this logic to a certain degree, but with a notable exception. He examines the love not only as romantic but as unconditional, with a familial bond, meeting Ohioans on their own terms. This allows for a much greater depth and nuance, like when he writes about the nearly forgotten “We Are LeBron” song recorded by a cast of local luminaries, featuring business leaders, politicians, reporters, all who sing (mostly) out-of-tune in a choir to a rendition of “We Are the World.” The cringe and pathetic-seeming lyrics (“Please stay Lebron / We really need you / no bigger market's gonna love you half as much as we do”) come alive through the caring mind of the author’s, shining an empathetic light on love, loss, fear, and longing, like a melancholy parent addressing a child about to leave home for good:
There is a shortcut to glory that does not run through Northeast Ohio. But no one will love you like we love you here. How can we get you to believe that’s enough? That whatever is out there, beyond this place we have loved each other, is too uncertain to trust.
A similar close reading of “The Decision” itself is missing from There’s Always This Year. But Abdurraqib is right to highlight the disturbing images in the aftermath of the prime-time program, where fans stood in front of burning replica jersey’s belonging to James, “everyone circled around the flames was white.” I remember feeling uncomfortable watching these videos along with a friend, also from Ohio. As upset as we were, I couldn’t imagine either of us burning a jersey. Then again, we probably hadn’t owned or worn an NBA jersey since elementary school. Abdurraqib filters the moment through the lens of various US city’s burning due to the heartbreak of racial injustice: Oakland in 2009, Cincinnati in 2001, Los Angeles in 1992, Miami in 1990, and so on. “Any place where black people have been conductors to a symphony of fire, the question is always asked: how could you burn down your own neighborhood?” Abdurraqib gets why people feel the need to burn their own things, and explains how cleansing flames assuages such heartbreak:
& I know this isn’t generous to the shop owners & the elders who have lived on a block for decades & wanted to die on a block that was at least close to how they remembered it, but what can I do to convince you that fire is not the villain & the person who lights a match isn’t a villain & the people cheering while a building burns aren’t the villains & there are villains, surely, but they aren’t here, not among a people seeking deliverance.
For what it’s worth, by comparison, when Kevin Durant, arguably the closest thing to a next best player of a generation, announced he was leaving Oklahoma City for Oakland, it happened not at nighttime, but in the daylight of a sunny Fourth of July afternoon. There were other things to light on fire besides the news, however explosive it may have been. I don’t recall any disturbing images unless you have an aversion to cupcakes. But that’s the thing about the King; there’s only one.
Despite the best player in the league announcing he was “taking his talents to South Beach,” a player he used to drive up from Columbus and wait in long lines to see during his St. Vincent-St. Mary’s high school days (he met LeBron then!), Abdurraqib never loses interest in the Cavaliers. He even “worked at the diner near the arena downtown in the LeBron-less years” and, along with his friends, would score cheap tickets and take advantage of lax security to move into better seats, though there wasn’t much to cheer for. He writes poignantly here about the iconic “We Are All Witnesses” mural being removed from the building in downtown Cleveland. Fittingly, it is the “witnesses” panel, he reminds us, that was the last to go.
Back in 2016, during the NBA Finals that would ultimately see the city of Cleveland winning its first championship since 1956, Abdurraqib was in Connecticut, but emotionally and spiritually it was like he never left Ohio. There’s a moment I can’t stop thinking about, which is where he’s running on a treadmill in the small gym inside the new high-rise building he and his partner moved into and an elderly woman keeps asking him how he’s doing. Is he missing Ohio less today? Her question suggests Abdurraqib couldn’t help from confiding his homesickness to this older woman, almost a stranger. It reminded me of Dwyane Wade checking on the Miami Heat box scores in the locker-room at halftime during Cavs games while he was briefly on the team. When he drives back home to Columbus before Game 5, it’s not just to watch the Finals with friends (an added bonus), it’s to join in the protests of the murder of Henry Green by two undercover (“jumpboys”) police officers. Similarly, Abdurraqib is careful not to forget that 2014 wasn’t just the jubilant year of the “Return of the King”, not when another tragic event occurred then in Cleveland—the brutal killing of twelve-year old Tamir Rice by an off-duty police officer.
Equally thoughtful is Abdurraqib’s impassioned plea for reexamining the concept of failure, particularly in regard to African Americans. Here he shines an honest light on the precarity of success. “The math between who makes it and who doesn’t, or what making it even is. All of it, a series of accidents.” Later, in an attempt to expand our definition of success he cites Columbus City basketball legend Estaban Weaver, who never made it to the NBA despite once being heralded as the next Jordan. If you’ve seen the documentary Hoop Dreams you have an idea of the uphill challenges Weaver faced: poverty, single-parent home, acclimating to affluent or mostly white high schools, mounting pressure to meet expectations, gun violence, drugs and other pitfalls and temptations of street life. “Don’t talk to me about any version of making it that ends with someone like Estaban Weaver being described as a failure.” Something resembling this revisionist debate will be familiar to those who have tuned into sports talk radio over the past few years and heard Jalen Rose lead a charge questioning analysts who apply the words “failure” and “bust,” to the likes of, say, former number one pick Kwame Brown. It’s true a player like Brown never came close to reaching his pre-draft hype potential, but he did earn, as Rose points out, more than $60 million over the course of twelve seasons, creating generational wealth for himself and his family in a society and country that has historically oppressed such economic opportunities for Black people. Certainly, Abdurraqib’s more subtle analysis goes beyond just economics and his lower profile examples (Kenny Gregory is another) offer more sympathy than Rose’s famous multi-millionaires, who can and do fend for themselves.
Applying his triple-threat vision to interrogate the things he loves with a moral, political, and critical scrutiny, There’s Always This Year succeeds as a book about more than basketball. Its free-flowing structure allows for a generous capacity to take on endless topics, and it no doubt marks the author’s most daring work yet, with its fastbreak pace, “time running out” countdown clock, and poetic and experimental sections lenient on grammar and punctuation (which could double as slam poetry). Sustaining such inventiveness, often for urgency’s sake, and at book-length, no less, could easily have gone sideways. Just ask Dan Gilbert and his open letter, famously set in Comic Sans and random ALL CAPS (and rightly critiqued in the book). Those disciples of the old ’90s t-shirt slogan “Basketball is life. The rest is just details,” may leave unsatiated with the sports coverage as promised in the book’s subtitle, but I’d argue there’s plenty of ball here and the details are divine. If There’s Always This Year isn’t a total slam dunk, it’s because Abdurraqib is not just a dunker. He’s got a full bag. Shifty with the midrange, deadly from deep, and equipped with more elegance than a floater, “the most romantic shot in the game when done right, guided toward the rim with a heave and a wish . . . like saying goodbye to a person you never wanted to leave.”