What kind of business
Kyle Lowry sat for his postgame and the sky opened up. He spent 25 minutes answering questions that circled the obvious, reporters getting close and shying away like animals in the dark, Lowry the bright flame sitting, sparking, smouldering. Outside my bedroom window, cracked for petrichor, the thunderstorm hammered steady for his entire availability and I sat cross-legged in my pajamas, chin in my palm, unable to get my head around the possibility that this could be the last time Lowry sat for Toronto even as he answered question after question angled toward that end.
It was dramatic, but that’s how it went.
I forget what the week of the trade deadline is like. Free agency too. An amnesia that holds comfortably until 48 hours before the cutoff and then suddenly slips, leaving me with the full weight of writhing nerves. At least, this is what it’s been like the past several seasons with the Raptors. What kept hitting me at different points this past week — driving home from the grocery store the morning of the deadline, sitting there around midnight with the rain outside and Lowry’s birthday about to ring in — was that for me, if he left, it would have been the end of something. A great team but maybe not “my team”, not anymore. Everyone has their lines of disconnect and you don’t always recognize them until you’re in the process of stepping over and past.
I got caught up on the call the same way everyone else did. Vivek and Will asked the last two questions and a panicky surge welled up in my chest when I realized Toronto PR was going through every hand and I hadn’t lifted the dumb little Zoom emoji for my own. Was I really going to ask one, in the half-dark with the bedside lamp on and the dogs snoring on the floor, wearing a worn-thin Knicks shirt riddled with holes? Inching for the camera on button I veered, then it was over. I sunk between the sheets and closed my laptop, clicked the lamp off, promised in the dark (to myself? The universe?) that if he stayed I’d ask something of him every time going forward.
And then he did. By the time it was official I felt wrung-out. Sean and Joey asked me to leave a message for their show and I ran through two gibberish voicemails before I got through a third that, listening back a day later, still made hardly any sense. And I didn’t do anything. Nothing had happened to me.
“Obviously it’s a business. You’ve gotta remind yourself of that sometimes because as players we put our heart and soul and blood, sweat and tears into this and sometimes you lose sight of the fact that it’s actually a business.”
That’s what Fred VanVleet said after his first game without Norman Powell. What catches me particularly hard is where he catches himself in real time and backtracks on his own feelings. What snags me second is the catchall of “it’s a business”, and how encyclopedic it’s become. Not just in our own lexicon as consumers of the NBA, a sieve through which we process what’s difficult about the business itself, but as prelude or postscript in the language of players describing their own experiences and emotions. It’s become a handy flag to wave, a signal that even as you let empathy, sympathy, sentiment, these softer, more difficult things to find consistent places for in sports come to the fore, you are not so yielding that you’d lose your allegedly anchored, cooler senses.
Because what kind of business is this really that we’re working overtime to uphold? What kind of business is it that it asks of a player to adjust the scope of how they see and experience the world, their world, as it’s happening, to something more coldly manageable?
A cyclical one, for sure, otherwise the need to tell oneself, to signal your understanding, that it’s a business would at some point stall. Like most small phrases meant to shut down larger, difficult, more complicated conversations, it’s endlessly handy. Adaptable to what you need from it.
I’ve used it in situations where I feel keenly aware of being a woman in sports media the same way I’ll catch myself wondering if I need to pad a story out with stats, as a kind of distancing, dispassionate proof that I understand the relentless churning of the larger machine at work. I’ve said it on shows, radio, in conversation when I’ve been asked for emotional insight because of the fact that I have newsletter called Basketball Feelings. My own measure of widening the lens in which I’ll be seen through, adding another dimension to the way that I’m going to be taken. When really the nuance of emotion, feeling, offers the widest possible range of ways to observe and be observed, to understand or be understood. It’s so dumb, and here we all are.
When you hear stories about players being traded who, days or even moments before, sat in front of a GM who played along with plans of their future. Rookies being treated as leverage, picks like pooled resources — the language of the “pick” itself is so cleanly scraped of any acknowledgement that it’ll eventually refer to the person behind it. This kind of hardening up that’s expected not around on court action, where in-game energy flares do call for a kind of personal tempering, but the reality and anticipated bad behaviour of the leverage holders off of it. It’s a business as a shrugging, life-altering wink.
Even in thinking about an alternative the statement offers a handy backdoor to slip out of. What alternative is there when the reality of it is so ingrained, second nature, symbiotic; when a feeling is encouraged to be mistrusted, or the toll of still-warm blood splattered on hardwood wiped away in three words. It’s the business we’ve built alongside the actual enterprise, the exchange of excuse for explanation as structural support so that neither can really, completely be dismantled so long as apathy continues to be the reinforcement.
There are sometimes nudges to the structure.
Last night, watching Suns-Raptors via a Phoenix broadcast, Eddie Johnson and Kevin Ray spoke at length during an early timeout about Toronto’s seasonal situation, urging empathy to guys gone so long from home and far from their families. It was the first time I’d heard it earnestly, for longer than a glancing beat by anyone outside of the market and after watching Powell stand there in his pregame interview like an island; nervous, unsure, excited, ready and also not at all, it was the exact right kind of acknowledgement, a tentative and refreshing step away from easy excuse.
It depends who you talk to and who you’re talking about. It shouldn’t, but it still does. It’s hard to drop safeties, to move away from where you know you’ll be understood by many to where you might have to explain yourself to a few. What’s good isn’t always easy but my hope is that it starts to get harder, especially after this season, in all its juddering stalls and collapsing of glossy, easy facade, to listen as people catch themselves when they’ve shown their softer parts and rush away from vulnerability as reality just to make it easier on everybody else.