Madeline's Reviews > There's Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension

I was initially a little hesitant to seek this one out, because despite loving They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us and A Little Devil in America I know basically nothing about basketball, and was worried that this specific book had been written for an audience that didn't include myself.

Obviously, I should never have doubted Abdurraqib's incredible talent and ability to make me cry over things I never would have imagined getting emotional about. I will admit that some knowledge of NBA history definitely helps during certain sections of this book, but rest assured, this is about a lot more than basketball. Among other things, this collection of interconnected essays is a kind of love letter to Abdurraqib's home state of Ohio, and in a larger sense, a gentle rebuttal to the idea that success means leaving the place where you grew up. (Oh, to be a fly on the wall and see what happens every time someone has ever suggested to Hanif Abdurraqib that he should really move to New York or LA).

There are a dozen excerpts that I wanted to quote, but this was the first lengthy passage I marked:

"Three days after Christmas in 2002, a white pair of kicks, clean enough to still be worn, swings from the telephone lines a few blocks outside of Value City Arena in Columbus, Ohio. Jordan 7s. White and blue. The pair that had just dropped two weeks earlier. If one looks long enough, the thin wires blend into the dark sky and the shoes emerge as though they are swinging from nothing, ornaments at the mercy of the clouds. There are a greater number of older white people than usual in this neighborhood today, a cluster of them walking ahead of of me, nervously trying to make sense out of the mythology of the sneakers swinging from phone lines, rattling through rumors they'd heard from their kids or things they'd read on the corners of the still-young internet. Drugs, they decided. People sell drugs here.
...I didn't know the kid who was shot a few blocks south of here on Christmas Eve. I knew he was younger than me, and he could hoop. I'd seen him at the park in my old neighborhood once or twice. Quick first step, never passed but could get to the rim anytime he wanted. The bullet that hit him wasn't meant for him, but the bullet doesn't apologize and isn't especially discerning. The bullet only knows what is in front of it. I don't trust people who don't love a place to understand how that place remembers its dead. The living who throw an item the dead once cherished toward heaven, wrap it around the highest wire. So high that it looks like the shoes are swinging from the sky itself. Like two legs are hanging down from the edge of a cloud."