Exits: A live thing
Drawing cards for the Denver Nuggets future and a reflection on our interpretation of bodies: competitive, celestial, our own, someone else's.
(Thank you to Ariana Lenarsky for her steady hand and perceptive observations in pulling tarot cards for her and your 2023 NBA Champions, the Denver Nuggets. Her questions to the deck are captioned in bold under each card, followed by the name and position of that card, and her interpretation of it)
There is the isolation of bodies. Everyone knows that.
How a body will set you apart, as a shield and a universe to sink into. How a body will set you apart, as a conduit, as a visible minority, as other. How a body will set you apart when it’s considered to be no longer your own, how the permissions blur. How the body in motion is viewed as active, the body at rest as passive, when all the while there are things going on throughout it. How and when boundaries of the body, its inherent autonomy, dissolve. When and where the lines shift and how, usually, they shift with what’s considered — correctly or not — performative. When the body enters public domain.
There is the accessibility of bodies. Everyone has known, intimately, that.
In the final nine seconds of Game 5, when the Heat didn’t foul after Kyle Lowry’s missed shot and let Kentavious Caldwell-Pope cut unhurried with the ball across the floor, Nikola Jokic hung alone beside the scorers table. As the seconds ticked down he drifted closer to Miami head coach, Erik Spoelstra, and turned to him with two seconds left in the game. As his teammates pogoed toward each other on the floor Jokic shook Spo’s hand, and before the buzzer even sounded he was moving down the sideline to the Miami bench, pulling every player in gently to hold them. His hands slid easy and sure around the backs of their heads, shoulders, necks, he leaned to their ears to murmur private consolations. As more Heat players drifted off the floor wearing the vacant, hollow expression of defeat, they seemed pulled to Jokic’s tender orbit, and Jokic made a point to track each one of them down before looping gradually back to Denver’s side of the court. By then, the earliest pieces of confetti had made it from the rafters down to tickle Jokic’s shoulders.
He’s at once integral to the action and wholly apart from it. He knows so much of this is for him. He blinks around the arena, waits for interviews, bends to hear Lisa Salters questions over the persistent, ambient roar of the arena. He praises the Heat, calls basketball a “fun sport”, says of being a champion that it’s good, the job is done, “we can go home now”.
The most interesting thing in that brief exchange is Jokic’s answer to the adjustments the Nuggets made. He said of the game, of basketball, “it’s a live thing”, and in being one it’s also made impervious to examination after the fact. “You cannot say, Oh, this is what happened,” Jokic continued. Rendering useless in one brief summation an entire industry predicated on explaining what happened.
The double meaning of what Jokic said is more interesting to me. The liveness of basketball being that way because of the people playing it, the bodies there on the floor. The aliveness of it. It is only ever action, fleeting and immediately ceasing to exist after each sequence, every movement. When we trace the movements, the action, we are mapping bodies, but in that corporeal cartography we also intentionally erase them. The action, the plays, the sequences, those become the point, the body bearing them out vanishes whether it’s just happened or we’re recalling it hours, days, months or years later. We take the body away.
To Jokic, to any athlete in the moment, there’s nothing but the body. The action springs from it but for any action to continue the body must be propellant, working, live, the person — with their churning blood and revving breath — furiously present. We are then, player and viewer, existing in alternate planes. Their action never ours and our interpretation of action always destined to be a little off.
It’s no wonder the concept of bodies in basketball, in any pro sport we endeavour to become beholden to, has grown so warped. Basketball’s great gift is suspension — of time, disbelief, impossibility, real life and our place inside it — but within that can be the temptation to skip over borders, like between care and spectacle.
That we can talk of strangers bodies with cold remove and comment on their efficiency, veracity to form, note where they’ve broken, where they exceed timeline (not to mention, how bizarre and grotesque it is to impose timeline over another person, over the whole of a sport, any strict parameters bound to become redundant the moment they’re set down), where we wish they could grow, shrink, straighten, quicken or else, stay exactly and precisely as-is.
Where we would freeze a body so it could better deliver to us what it is we want from it, always.
There are people who make your physical boundaries blur. People for whom you can feel the tethered down, well-constructed parts of your identity scatter like a bloom gone to seed and come to burst, lifting away with the barest breeze.
People who erode time, fold all what happened before them to meet the present moment. People for whom you can’t intellectualize away the urge they well up in you to be led, to hand yourself over, the way your body responds suddenly the only logic you know.
Bodies are what make us human, what remind us of that fact every day we’re in them and in varying states of hitting us over the head about it. Time, rendered on a body, unmistakeable. Pregnancy, in a body, changing that very body’s DNA. The basic functions of your body taken for granted until, through one malady or another, those functions are disrupted.
In athletes, the body becomes what sets them apart (talent, too, but the body’s the conduit). For them, the body must be greater than. A division so clear that the rest of us recognize the distinction on sight.
And we are happy to remind them. To let them know they should be working on it, remind them when they aren’t. There is nothing that stirs up so much animosity in fans and viewers as when an athlete’s body isn’t primed to perfection. And to go the other way — total adulation when it appears the body in question has been thoroughly tended to.
Historically, it goes back to godliness. To mirroring ideal forms. What I wonder is how much of it is projection? If I had a body like that I’d… The desire is to role-play god.
For most, we strive to connect with our bodies. Seek out means to soften toward them depending how long and how far we’ve drifted or been more forcibly removed from them. Athletes, so long as they are athletes, we want mastery from. Synergy, harmony, is indulgent, untrained. We like mental health stories in context. That is, off the floor. On the floor, we want the body and we want it dominated. We don’t even care which one.
There was that photo of Jokic that started circulating a month before the Bubble. He was thin, jacket hanging loose from his arms, his jawline sharp. The jokes came and in them, a nostalgic mourning for the former body, its softer edges. Mourning too — though premature because this body nobody had seen play basketball yet — of how the former moved, or “was able to” move, as has always been the strange refrain for Jokic.
A little over a week later it was reported that Jokic had tested positive for Covid-19, around the same time the photo had been posted. The weight loss and the positive test weren’t necessarily related, though the ESPN story noted how Jokic had “transformed his body” in the NBA’s hiatus all the same. Either way, his body was there again, standing in our attentions.
Covid was a lot of awful things but it was also a duration where we were made, terrifyingly and all at once, bluntly aware of our bodies. We thought about them every day, even hourly, down to a cellular level. An intimate awareness of our inner-workings and how they might revolt.
With less terror, more willingly, we give the same intimate attention to athletes’ bodies. We think about Michael Porter Jr.’s back every time he hits the floor, the three times his spine has been exposed on an operating table. Jamal Murray writhing on the ground, sliding with his good leg under the basket when his ACL was torn, how for so many long seconds his teammates and Warriors players stood bent at their waists in a semi-circle around him, keeping their distance before team staff ran over. How the announcers, amidst lamentations, said, “That is a talented young man, 24 years old”, as if they were already footnoting this moment for future reference on the timeline of his recovery, or, in the event that he didn’t. And then, when Murray refused the wheelchair and opted to instead walk with support off the court, a brief celebration for the toughness, the mastery.
Covid may have made Jokic lose 40 lbs but it definitely made us all look at him, harder, once again. There are times when I wish it had made us, as a result, easier on our bodies and the bodies around us. Easier still on the bodies we don’t even know.
But then this should be uplifting, right? A championship title doesn’t settle in scattered festive clumps like confetti, swept up at the end of the night. It imbues a franchise with a golden undertone so no matter the light it gets held to, there’s a glint, a glow. Imbues too the bodies that made up that roster so that no matter if they stay or go, they tend to scatter the light and demand a little something more. In the strictly tangible sense, better contracts; in games, sometimes, it can feel like there’s a little comet tail of light trailing the winners, a glimmering wash of confidence.
Jokic and Murray for the most part already moved like that. With Murray there were occasional snags, catches in frustration. Partly his manner. He’s a willer, can speed or slow a game to go his way. Now, he’ll gain a new lift as he and Jokic thrum in twin orbits, eclipsing and slingshotting the other with ease.
Bruce Brown I can now see so clearly ducking into a tunnel at Gainbridge Fieldhouse and dusting off his cowboy hat of an early December sprinkling of Indianapolis snow, shining for a second like stardust as it drifts to the cement floor. Aaron Gordon — it already looks like there’s a release there. A burden of proof left over from putting himself forward for February spectacle — dunk contests that ironically only dragged him back down to earth again and again — lifted. And within Porter Jr., fair to say, a new ferocity. Quiet until you look closer and see luminous flares and bursts of liquid heat roiling off him.
There is one place where the borders of bodies are unknowable to us. Where, impossible to fathom even through our own terrestrial advances, they can’t yet be co-opted. Celestial bodies. Planets lobbing around an invisible axis, intermittent asteroids, nebulae, galaxies, stars in varying states of collapse. We rove as close as we can to the borders of these bodies, hoping to push past the point of matter, the means of ourselves. Tied up in that, agnostic or otherwise, what our bodies mean.
We don’t need to make it to the edges of space to grasp or remind ourselves that borders of the self are the easiest to collapse. That reverence can harm us (staring too long at the sun heats the retina). That just because some bodies come to bathe us with light doesn’t mean we need to do anything more than tilt our faces to bask, a little, in that glow.
Watching Jokic — a person whose body has been a never-ending source of fascination for fans and media alike since he got here — move through the suspended time such a prolonged postgame celebration as a Finals win offers, is escape. For him, for us. Consideration to his body moving over the floor, in games, through space, is relinquished. He’s just a guy going around taking other guys into his arms, looking for his family, happy when he finds them, lost in confetti so dense he cuts a glowing negative against it.
We can shrug away, as Jokic does, any concept of his body as means or ends, as mystifying. Not because he has landed here with it, through the medium of it, at the perfect ending to an NBA season, but because here’s Jokic lifting his little daughter into his arms and hitching her against his hip before he ever hoists the trophy.
It’s maybe the only constructive kind of bodily erasure, because through it we remember right, this is a person, at once deeply familiar and foreign to us and in that suddenly rendered personhood finally comes the mental switch — this body is none of our business. It never was but funny what seeing a life out of the context we know it best in, as a body released, can do.
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I love this so much in thinking about next season for the Nuggets: “Remember that too much passion without enough support will get you the opposite of what you hope for. Channel what you can handle. ‘Share the load.’ As with the rest of life, the burden is meant to be shared.”
amazing piece!!