Altitude, slipping air

Winking dispatches from All-Star in the mountains.

It feels in stark contradiction to this newsletter to skip a week writing it — for the first time in its history — because of the chaos and not-really-a-spare-minute-to-sit-and-write in the all-hours roil of NBA All-Star, but I did consider it.

But I won’t. Instead, I pulled up the garishly upholstered armchair in my hotel room to its floor-to-ceiling windows, views on all sides of the mountains and right down below, the Salt Palace Convention Center (a name I can’t get enough of) taken over and turned into the NBA Crossover space. There, a never-ending line of fans waiting to get inside, and the Starry street-team hucking now ubiquitous cans of the soda that’s marked this weekend, e.g. the case everyone in the media hotel found waiting in their rooms on arrival, the same can I just hesitantly cracked because I needed something to wash down the badly flavoured migraine meds I hope will coast me through to the All-Star Game tonight and then, whatever another bracingly crisp night in this town has got for me.

This is going to be a collection of stray thoughts and winking memories, like the planes I can see taking off from the airport and banking away over the snow blanketed hills. It’s the best I can do.

• Rolling into town on Thursday night, the whole of Toronto sports media seemingly on the same flight and mesmerized by the airport. It’s sculptural benches like miniature buttes rendered in clean white plastic. It’s seperate, vertical luggage carousel dedicated just to skis,

• Walking what seemed like long blocks in the dry cold with Jerome to find any place with food still open. Streets quiet, all but empty, holdover holiday lights dripping down from the trees. Tacos at the end of the hunt in a spot with lights like a surgical theatre, cheery salsa cart with more kinds than we could try and big chunks of lime for the taking,

• Waking the next morning to purple light creeping through the cracks in the hotel room’s heavy curtains, yanking them open to find the mountains, pitch dark and yawning like empty space the night before, now lit up soft gold and blushing pink, mouthing, "Whoa” over and over like an incantation to the west,

• Sitting in a booth in the hotel lobby and seeing in quick succession all the people I was wondering after seemingly within minutes of thinking of them, a convivial conjuring, plus Hall of Famers helping themselves to complimentary hot apple cider,

• Finding Taylor and Holland without their cameras and by accident at credential pick up, cramming in a car to Rising Stars practice, cramming in a car back with Dave and an NBA accountant who flagged us on the University of Utah campus and asked us to just please take him back downtown if we had the space,

• Running into Dan on the way to find coffee and something quick to eat, him yelling from a block away, “It’s my favourite New York Times writer!”,

• Bursting through lime green and yellow flaps of an indoor Starry pop-up tent to find Tyrese Maxey beside a barrel of the cans on ice, smiling up at me, while the event space DJ cranked up that grab somebody sexy Pitbull song from somewhere outside,

• Running back to the same tent an hour later to talk to Buddy Hield and worry over the fact that an interview spent laughing, while perfect for me, transcribes to something fleeting and flashing, like panning gold,

• Jordan Clarkson taking my hand and helping to pull me up on stage. His eyes, after he considers questions and looks back to answer, these wide open wells of soft brown and ease,

• Feeling the familiar sustained high-frequency buzz and pull of pain as I get a tattoo of a cactus, my adrenalin rallying for its first push of the weekend,

• Being ambushed back in the same hotel lobby booth by Seerat recording on her phone, playing at TMZ reporter with a weird knack for keeping in character, shouting, “Is that Katie Heindl? Were you in the New York Times?”,

• Dinner in a cellar with vaulted ceilings, surrounded by mounted animal heads and basketball rims dripping crystalline mesh by candlelight,

• Watching Nikola Jokic at his All-Star presser booth try to play it straight but ending every question grimacing like the Thalia and Melpomene masks, our most perfect tragicomic superstar,

• Realizing that the coach buses that shuttle media to and from events, as Seerat, Michael, Kyle and I are trundled from a practice arena back to the hotel, are a brief segue of infantilization; everyone on board silent with their eyes closed to the high desert sun flooding the windows,

• Altitude, slipping air, doubly aware of how thin and how fast it leaves my lungs,

• Somehow ending up on the floor as All-Star Saturday night starts, sweating, in my gigantic puffer coat beside dancers ready and waiting to rush the stage,

• Somehow ending up standing beside Michael B. Jordan and retreating, overwhelmed, into an arena tunnel like Cerberus with several tails tucked,

• Missing the Skills Challenge trying to instead get to the upper arena levels, where all the other media are cordoned in nosebleed rows like gargoyle statues, squinting and content,

• Watching Damian Lillard win the 3-Point Contest in a state of suspended disbelief, a living déjà vu, like are we sure he hasn’t done this, won this, before?

• Feeling very dumbly proud, like I had anything to do with it, when the Dunk Contest started and person after person yelled, “It’s happening!” to me,

• Crying at the dunkers,

• All the dunkers, dude,

• Mac McClung blinking up to the podium, carefully setting down the trophy that seemed oversized in his hands, himself somehow shrunk back to his regular size after taking off time and again like a perfectly timed human fireworks show,

  

  Photo by Jerome Cheng

• A whole room of people, enamoured,

• Creeping back onto a quiet court to take photos under the net still tangled and snagged from McClung’s last dunk, my red cowboy boots clomping over hardwood with a blunt satisfaction after two days in a time warp, grounding,

• Snow coming down light and urgent at 2am after days of bright, clear skies and sun, blinking into it from a basement club shoulder-to-shoulder with GMs and team-sided people enjoying the anonymity of the dark and hauling a deep, fortifying breath,

• Trawling up and down Main (literally Main St.) trying to find the Sunday Times, Jerome spotting a small pile behind the cash in Walgreen’s, the woman who gets it for us gasping when I shyly admit I have a story in there, her beaming, demanding, “Show me!”,

• Watching the light slide down the mountains from Vivint Arena’s upper reaches, snow gone gold; watching the same light slip across Michael, Jerome and Andrew’s faces as we try to piece together the last three blur of days as noise from the floor of the weekend’s last game getting set to go drifts up disjointed,

• And still, one last night in the city, settling down.