Exits: Has this all only been torture?
Joel Embiid as our NBA Prometheus and the Sixers as proof of the human condition.
I think of Prometheus. Not so much in his gifting humanity with modern civilization, but cursed to have his liver eaten by an eagle every single day and in what he’s come to represent. The act of human striving and its accidental consequences.
I think of myself. Laying down on the cool of the leather couch, working myself into a state of standing up, then a state of slowly gathering and putting the things I need into my swim bag. Walking the dozen or so baking city blocks to the community centre, sweating but feeling good sweating, feeling my blood move and work around my body after days where I’ve pictured it gathered and throbbing in the lefthand temple of my head, migraine stubbornly burrowed there. Up to the help desk to buy my drop-in lane swim ticket, where the stern woman I’ve recently graduated to small talk with glances at the clock and tells me, No point buying a ticket, swim’s over in two minutes. Summer hours. Everything’s shifted 30 minutes earlier. Walking home, I think of the timing the momentum took. If I’d only started to work myself into it a half hour sooner it could’ve amounted to at least 20 minutes in the pool.
I think of the human inclination, necessity, of talking ourselves into things. How we would have been long lost as a species if we weren’t imbued with dumb resolve. And I mean dumb kindly, but maybe it’s more advanced than that. After all, the act of willing ourselves forward after defeat, loss, disappointment, let down, and failure speaks to an overriding of logic. Circumnavigating the part of our brains that understands very well our own limitations, and the basic reality of cause and effect. I think of this a little longer and more tenderly, with a good amount of feeling bad for myself, after what’s been a rough recent stretch of getting nowhere, despite my digging in again and again. Not much work, fewer opportunities. Watching things dwindle with the added guilt of whether I’m doing enough. Holding out hope for a different outcome than fruitless. It’s a lot and it isn’t. Another way: it’s a lot, til it isn’t.
I think of the yellow poppy plant I got at the Canadian Tire garden centre, picked from the sad dregs of what was left for the season and discounted at 50%. In our old neighbourhood, the house a few down from ours had big, mature poppies in their front garden, stems standing hip height and unfurling in bright coral palm-sized blooms. I didn’t ever think of them in smaller sizes, fit for a balcony planter, so I thrilled at finding the pot and took care to be gentle when transferring it, not to knock the five dainty blooms. The next day, all but two had dropped their petals. The day after, those went too. I deadheaded, now I water and look for buds.
I think of the concept of jinxing, the fear of naming the thing you want too early in case of nipping the budding promise of it. Jinx from the Latin jyng, and that from the earlier iynx, and that from iunx, the Greek name for a species of small, plain brown woodpeckers that got caught up in sorcery because of their name being so close to the mountain nymph’s, Iynx. For tricking Zeus, he turned her into the same bird. Zeus, too, took to wing. Turned himself into the eagle that came every day to tear Prometheus’s newly grown liver out.
I think of all this as I think of Joel Embiid.
There’s the amount of hope that has to go into every new season for Embiid. Hope that it will be different, that whoever he has beside him now will help to make it that way, that the shortcomings won’t come and if they do, can they at least look different? Then, when it isn’t, when the waking dream of Sixers purgatory jolts back to its start, end, middle — doesn’t matter — that the people beside him will stay.
Equal to the hope is the sulking. Sulking that the outcome isn’t any different despite nothing being done to change the situation. Sulking that the Sixers stubborn and perpetual sameness has now been a runway for five postseasons to send other franchises off to bigger losses or wins. An emphatic way forward they can only stand like neon-vested traffic controllers, shrinking in real time, at the periphery of.
To forgive might be divine but to sulk is human. I’ve got no judgement for Embiid’s version of it. After loss and failure so potent and personal, to retreat inside yourself is a last resort we don’t freely or often allow ourselves. The human inclination to move past, get over, carry on by taking in stride, is what’s given sulking its bad connotations. To sulk is to sit in the loss and feel it, potently and profusely, gluttonously lashing out at the forces that put you there. I want to say that I hope all the lashing out you ever do is in your head, but then I’d be a hypocrite. Embiid, too, who has had his share of knee jerk lashing out on the floor. When his sulking turns into prowling for who he can turn it on, this pent up pouting. The sharp edge of an elbow digging into the soft side of a stomach, hitching up under a rib; or the wall of a shoulder knocking into a chin. I don’t condone it, but I don’t find the impulse unrecognizable.
Watching the Sixers get close and fall away has become idiom. A colloquialism of the postseason. It can’t be easy for them, but then they never make it look very hard. I know the exercise of ‘Exits’ is predicated on writing about the season that was, but the thing with the Sixers, and watching now what Daryl Morey is doing, talking himself out of James Harden who he was so hard-pressed and hell-bent on physically getting to Philadelphia that he put him on his own private plane last February, is that the franchise constantly escapes its past and the pressing parts of its present by looking to an invented future. This is not a team comfortable with the contemporary, with having to answer to or explain the state that it’s in. For the Sixers, the optimal motion is always moving forward, but in doing that without interrogating, even just taking some time to reflect on what’s happened, the only end is ever right back to the very same place. Moving forward, on its own, for its own sake, isn’t direction.
Prometheus’s fate, to be chained down and immobilized while his body, day after day, dutifully regenerated, is Morey’s perfect allegory. Embiid isn’t trapped, but he’s been anchored by the promise that the next season will be different for so many seasons that he’s always going to be the one to work hardest to find any nominal degree of difference. Like Prometheus watching the eagle come around again — this time, the bird banks right, the next, it wheels left, maybe tomorrow it will catch a thermal and float, suspended in place for a few menacing seconds — Embiid has to believe that his and the team’s condition will change, that it’s been more than lazy to shameless vacillation. Otherwise, this has only been torture.
For Morey to keep his self-generative star, he’ll shed Harden, maybe Tyrese Maxey, throw Tobias Harris and De’Anthony Melton’s names in the mix. Those terms leave plenty of room to wonder whether Harden doesn’t have the right of it. That incessant belief, or the ubiquity of what gets classified as “buy-in” by athletes like Embiid in order to compete or be seen as competitive, is an outdated mode of player advancement. And Harden, resolving himself to unrestricted movement, bound only to the best contract until the next one comes along, has found his surest thing to strive for, out of the grasp of wider, moral (in terms of the state of the collective, in this case, the team) consequence.
Is advancement ever possible without being caught for a time in the eddying riptides of repercussion? That is, the part where you take a beat, forced by the threat of a mutilating eagle sent by a vengeful god or not, to think about what’s happened and how you had a hand in it? Someone once unsubscribed from this newsletter and cited the reason as it being “anti Sixers”, but the Sixers were then and are still the only team that forces these kinds of questions in their commitment to frustration and frankly, the human condition. Being strictly anti Sixers would be easier than the alternative, which is being only, tragically, human.
BF is always good but this one is so so so good thanks.
Given that Philly sports fans are notorious for booing even the shadows of their home town athletes, it’s ironic that one would be offended by a journalist who may have been marginally critical of their team.