Gentling

Striking out with Russell Westbrook and lessons in confidence.

Oren was singing quietly through the arena tunnel. Distracted, a bit nervous, I couldn’t place it. I asked what it was and he said he was surprised I didn’t know. It’s from your generation, he said — a tease carried from an earlier one I’d made during the game, when I caught him singing along at a timeout and said I didn’t think he was old enough to know the haunting classic of ‘Like A G6’ by heart.

You really don’t know? His voice lifted, incredulous. It’s Bob Dylan.

It was a good dig.

There was a constant rush of cold air coming up the tunnel at us when we stopped to wait with a throng of people outside the visitors’ locker room, not open yet for media. The doors to the team busses is open, someone said out loud, simultaneously wondering and explaining the same phenomena. My heart was doing tight spirals.

The thing about telling yourself to stop expecting is when you finally do you mostly can because you’ve already considered all the outcomes. All the outcomes that come to mind, anyway.

Daniel Theis came out, changed into a technicolour hoodie. It seemed quick, Ty Lue had just finished his postgame. The locker room was still closed and a new possible outcome came to mind, almost to the second he stepped out.

There’s Russ, Oren said cheerfully.

There was Russell Westbrook. Then, there went Russell Westbrook, down the tunnel and away from us.

I went after him.

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Gentling, a word I hadn’t rolled over in my head since I was regularly handling horses. A word that tumbled into my head one morning earlier this week, with the falling snow.

I was an hour early to an appointment — out of inventing a new time, not promptness — just far enough from home that going back would be half an hour. Dylan texted I should get a shawarma from a good counter spot around there, or go to Book City. It was 10am, I went to the book store.

They’d just opened, were unpacking new books out of cardboard boxes. I went along the outer walls of alphabetical fiction, pulling one title or another down. By the time I got to Z, I had two books and 20 minutes to get back to where I needed for 11am.

Haley ordered me books to the same store for my birthday the year before, and this past October after a diner birthday breakfast on the same block, Dylan bought me Jhumpa Lahiri’s Roman Stories. I thought of both things at the counter when asked what month my birthday was in, because I finally signed up for the store’s rewards. To do that I’d also given my name and email, so wasn’t totally surprised when the clerk asked whether I thought Bruce Brown was going to stay with the Raptors. Toronto is big, but it can also be very small.

I was much more surprised when he (hi, Geoff!) asked if I wrote this newsletter.

It was, I’d think later, such a gentle transition of inquiry from broad to specific, anonymous to confidential. The Brown question I recognized as a first step on a bridge that could’ve been barred or open, the Basketball Feelings question the next and bigger step. I recognize the small act of bravery it can be to strike up on something so specific with a stranger, and always feel lucky and stunned when it happens with this newsletter. There’s a comforting sensation of the world shrinking in, lines of connectivity revealing themselves.

The world stayed small as I went out into the thickening snow, I bumped into Kayla and was somehow the one to break the Kyle Lowry trade news to her when her job is to be — quite literally — standing alongside the team. We were both offended by the deal and destination, and for a second her eyes got worried. She’d just seen Lowry, the Heat had been through Toronto a week before, and said how comfortable and happy he is to hang around and chat now when he comes back. Receptive to the reception and the familiarity, gentle where for seasons that public-facing part was prickly.

It’s funny to witness such opposite experiences of a person, or the public persona of them, registering at the same time. I don’t think there are many (any?) Heat fans or media who would pick the word tender to describe Lowry when prompted, but it’s where I land because it’s how he was when he left Toronto — and is still when he comes back. When he started to call Pascal Siakam and OG Anunoby “beloved” in pressers and captions and out loud; when his area of interest made the distinct shift from self to them, palpable on the floor and off. He was still out there making opponents miserable but there was an easiness that settled on him. I think of the propensity for gentleness that way, not possible without the kind of confidence that comes with being steadfastly settled into yourself, your life. The hardest kind of confidence there is.

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Is it possible to gentle too much? To over-gentle? Given the state of things, I don’t think so. But given the state of things, the state of gentling, existing in it, requires the kind of devout and continual process that active attention does. Before you know it, due to distraction, a psychic or physical bump, and you’re jostled out. So far is it from our automatic mode of being, the way we travel through the world, that the energy it takes to be gentle — to go and be and receive, gently — will knock you on your ass faster than a wallop of anger will.

Gentling an animal is to work with and not against them, and is its own contested school of thought in training and handling. To gentle a horse to ride, or to do whatever work you want to do together, rather than break it. I was once lifted two feet in the air, straight up and off my feet, dangling from a lead rope attached to a horse’s halter as it reared. I never thought to let go, but I also didn’t try and pull it back down to earth. One, because I was maybe 12 and she was a Percheron-cross that stood 5’6 at the shoulder, not mine, and not supposed to be out grazing, and two, because it never occurred to me to treat an animal that was always going to be stronger than me like it wasn’t, like it was never not the one with the power. It goes easier when you square this fact and act from a place of comfortable acquiesce instead of white-knuckling control.

To be gentle is to be perceived an easy target. No wonder, when the operating frequency of the present feels to be set on hostile. If you move through the days combative, you fit right in. Barely a blip of registration. To go gently is to live in a version of the dream where you look down and realize you’re naked, or is a zombie movie scene where the protagonist places a wrong foot or suddenly sneezes more apt? Dylan Thomas cemented it in the literary canon as the most cowardly thing a person could do.

The root of the word aggression is from the Latin aggressio, a joining of ad- and gradi-, meaning “to step at”. The root of gentle from the Latin gentilis, meaning “of the same clan”. The former an action toward exclusion, the latter, a state of belonging. We’ve effectively reversed them.

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Russ, I called, first quiet then forcing my voice louder.

Russell Westbrook, around a basketball court, is kinetic energy personified. All game I watched him fly around the floor — diving, cutting, driving, dunking, falling, bouncing up and back and then bouncing, barely perceptible, on the spot during offensive possessions instead of standing still. Before he even set foot on the floor I watched him on the stationary bike in the tunnel, his eyes trained on the game and legs flying in circles, hopping off to do periodic high-knees beside the bike. Before that, as gouts of flame shot up from behind the backboards during the Raptors player intros, he did squatting side shuffles at the baseline, the shadow thrown behind him by the firelight pitched 10’ tall against the hardwood, spilling over the bench. Before that, as he was stretched out by a trainer, he swivelled his head around to take in the floor and everyone on it, chatting, expansively alert.

Photo by Vaughn Ridley

He never stops, so it made sense that he didn’t right then.

Russ! I called again. He turned to me and smiled, clocked my credential and shook his head gently. Not now, he said, turning back.

The open-endedness of it doing the job of rejection without hardness, of acknowledgement without opening himself up any further. I felt my shoulders sink into the floor. He turned around again and took a step back to me and brightened, grinning. Hey, nice shirt! He said, pointing at the Honor The Gift crewneck I’d debated a good hour over wearing. He leaned forward to dap me and I managed to put my hand out, though I’ve got no bodily recollection of the movement. Great shirt, he repeated with a nod, still smiling, before turning again and really walking away.

I choked up. Felt the rollercoaster of emotion that must have been rattling over my face during the all of 10 second exchange and took a few trailing steps dazed down the tunnel, turning to go down the chute to the court then wincing at how bright and how many friends and family were having a perfectly normal time hanging out once I got there. I turned back, still holding my notebook in one hand with my thumb saving the page and phone in the other, passing James Harden happily carrying his custom clear-sided briefcase showcasing his sneakers and a bottle of his wine. I didn’t think to go into the locker room and talk with anyone else, only passed it again to collect my coat and bag and get the stairs up to the concourse, still trying to process the one outcome I hadn’t even considered.

I made lists in my head once I got home, thought of things I could’ve done or said differently. How I should’ve blurted, “I’m teaching a class on you at Harvard in a couple weeks!” (it’s true, and I guess I have more material now), or teased about getting some HTG stockists in Toronto because the duty is a killer. Lists mostly predicated on my actions, the why and where of them, versus the how of the situation, of what actually was.

What if I was a tall man, I texted Rob the next morning, still mired in a feeling of personal failure and sadness, though softer. It happens to tall men too, he assured me. What has been your most successful exchange with him? I asked Seerat. She said he was really apologetic when he bumped into her once. I was buffing the sharp edges with my friends, gentling by proxy, I knew. Retracing my steps by laying them over the same ones they’d made, in other arena tunnels, after different games. The shared quality of the busts softening what stuck out to me in my own.

There’s a chasm between you, the person covering the athletes, and the athletes, and as strange as it sounds it’s really not often that apparent. You have regular, human and small interactions with them, you understand your lives aren’t exactly parallel but get drawn closer by circumstance and, depending how you handle it, empathy. There’s never a time where that chasm is so apparent as when you are abruptly reminded of it, whether in a still kind gesture or in not being acknowledged at all. Then, it feels like you are all of a sudden standing at the very edge of the chasm, swaying precariously, jolted with vertigo and staring all the way down.

Picturing Seerat, Rob, probably plenty more, mid-the scenarios they were explaining made me feel such a pang of delayed empathy for them and then happiness, to picture them at all, that it set me back to eye-level. Like a finger against a chin to tenderly tilt it this way or that, gentled back to confidence.