The bullying ease of distraction
It seems almost ruthless to slip into the easy, dulling boundaries of basketball when considering everything that’s happened to Karl-Anthony Towns
James Harden on the Nets podium, unsmiling, hood up. The first time we’re seeing him here and considering all that went into it, his reticence is understandable. Until he’s asked off the bat how he’d describe his conditioning level this season. Then comes a smile as telling as his answer.
“Great.”
He grins.
He relaxes, cheshire. Shoulders visibly slouching.
Because here is Harden admitting his season, his real season, has just started. That whatever duplicitous toil, whatever exasperation, whatever waning streak of leniency he was abiding in had ended. Forced, as final decisions of the heart usually are, by his own hand. And if you needed more proof that he’d put whatever that all was in Houston behind him like packing away vacation clothes — shoes with sand pooled inside them, a jacket with pockets clinking with unfamiliar currency — then his first game wearing the new metallic sheen of old New Jersey — 32 points, 12 rebounds, 14 assists — was it.
Harden in Brooklyn, for now anyway, won’t bring the kind of roil and instability so many seem eager for. His tantrum was the slow boiling kind and the top of the pot’s come off. We’ve seen the release. It’s not to say that I think the Nets make sense yet, only that Harden will settle quickly into the familiar cadence of the one concurrent thing throughout all of this: basketball.
And the same almost went for me.
Through the trade, its prolonged speculation, the weeks of will he or won’t he, and then, would a team risk the kind of chance it would be in getting him and having enough to do it, there was an undercurrent to the occasionally strange season. If not the glaring reality of a pandemic being pushed under the proverbial rug then how juddering a start for a lot of teams, or how, either from new timelines or the reverberations from the world at large and largely in chaos, persistently bleeding into the league’s carefully constructed, albeit rushed, restart — the rhythm felt off.
Through Harden I felt, at least for the week, the bullying ease of distraction. The four-team trade felt gravity forming. So many players moving around, so many future players in draft picks slipping from one GM’s hands to the next that the whole thing felt shaping and cosmogonal. A dumb little rush in dissecting the trade for every team involved, this act of picking winners and losers. I called the situation the Cavs found themselves in a smiling train heist and I still agree with it, but the exercise existed in a world of its own insular engrossment.
Before this season, before the bubble, that’s what basketball was. The love and belief in a separate world with the fervor enough to sustain it. The real world in enough of a steady state that the make-believe of an NBA season could ebb and flow and with it, us, happily slipping in and out. At the tapering end of the Harden trade, his first game mid-way, the ruse of the rhythm it had eased me back into was knocked away.
Since April, Karl-Anthony Towns has lost seven family members to the virus, the first was his mom. Reading what he wrote as Harden took the floor, and then reconciling it with the notion that he felt he had to write anything, I felt an already tenuous thing in me crumpling.
Towns, who has had to watch not just teammates and other players in the league question the reality of the virus, shirk its severity, but watch the league itself do the same, was asked at the start of the season how he felt. Not just how he felt, but of course, how he was feeling about basketball.
“I play this game more because I just loved watching my family members seeing me play a game I was very successful and good at. It always brought me a smile when I saw my mom at the baseline and in the stands and stuff and having a good time watching me play,” he said. “So it's going to be hard to play. It's going to be difficult to say this is therapy. I don't think this will ever be therapy for me again. But it gives me a chance to relive good memories I had.”
Reading what he said it’s like he was living in every part of his life but the present, wading in and out of past and future, predicting that at the very least the act of playing basketball, its present and direct action, might rekindle better memories of it, might ground him someplace else.
"I've seen a lot of coffins in the last seven months, eight months," Towns said. "But I have a lot of people who have, in my family and my mom's family, who have gotten COVID. I'm the one looking for answers still, trying to find how to keep them healthy. It's just a lot of responsibility on me to keep my family well-informed and to make all the moves necessary to keep them alive."
This was in early December. Knowing how he’d turned the grief and frustration into personal responsibility, a vigilance for his family against the virus — an action that would be impossible for anyone if their family continued to live, generally, within the world — and then hearing about his positive test, all I can think is how personally he could have taken it, how collapsing to his current sense of the world through that lens of watchfulness, and how immeasurably the league has failed him.
It seems almost ruthless, for the league, for us, to slip into the familiar and dulling boundaries of basketball, its easy routine, when you consider for a second everything that’s happened to Towns.
Towns who, not being hyperbolic, you’d be hard pressed to picture without that big, beaming smile, or his kind of shrugging, smirking pout, a breathless shout over the shoulder, one of the most expressive players in the league, that version, going by what he’s shared, a figment now.
We’ve all got our own personal lethargies when it comes to Covid, how much we’ve slipped from our April 2020 resolve plus why, where and when it happened, and the NBA has counted on that, a prerequisite for pushing ahead with this season. There’s no other explanation for the 180 that’s happened from a league that quickly and concisely shut down last spring at even the suggestion of infection to the same league that is operating now amidst cancelled games because there aren’t enough non-infected players on those teams’ rosters to play by its own rules.
And the murkiness, the half measures, colluding so easily with our own negligence. The stipulations that players can only fist and elbow bump pre and post game in greeting, or that there are “cool down chairs” where players will sit subbing out of play to catch their breath before putting a mask on and rejoining the bench, as if they have not just been ricocheting in and out of each other’s close orbits, twining, tumbling, shouting, inhaling each other. While all along fans, where allowed by market, sit 30ft back from the floor because the league understands very well the science in protecting the players, the product of basketball, even if those fans sit plenty proximal to each other.
It is hard for me to see how I’ll be able to watch basketball the same way again. With the same slippage of reality when handing myself so eagerly over to the pulse of gameplay, the undercurrent of narrative, the comfortable, lazy lilt of immersive fluency. The joy. Even projecting ahead to a world with wide immunity, inoculations, fans packed somehow safely into arenas, media back huddling in locker rooms loose with steam and game worn voices, there’s no skipping past this point of severance when tracing the line from before to after.
The remnants of this are going to be carried in our bodies, our brains, deep in our subconscious, revealed in dreams and fears, and generationally so. They aren’t things possible, or meant to be, so quickly, conveniently, pressed and packed away.