You can't hand-wring away a threat to shoot somebody in the head, sorry
Last week I wrote something that felt bone-close on what had been hanging heavy for me with DeMarcus Cousins’ latest injury and what it meant for his stalled-out career. To me, at the time, I felt a kind of ache around it, at the idea of promise slipping away for him, of not having enough years left, really, after what recovery could take to come back to a league accelerating by the season.
This week there was audio leaked of Cousins threatening to kill his ex-girlfriend, the mother of his son.
Look—Boogie was one of my forever fight for guys. Without much reasoning, just the kind of response you hold for some people, the space you allot them in your heart, head or gut, like a protective circle. I’ve been transparent about this before but it’s worth saying again, there’s a thing that all sports, or anything requiring fandom, does to us. There’s an even further thing it does, I really think, when it comes to basketball.
What makes basketball so great, what gives it this charged undercurrent, is because it consistently feels so close to us. So much more than other sports. The players are right there, bare of equipment, their entire reactions—from faces to full body language—for us to see. The NBA propels this further by the way it encourages players to maintain their lives outside the game. For some that’s in private, for others it’s exploring their voices and what they want to speak out about, to riff or express grievances. It’s in how they choose to share their lives with us in their downtime, through their own social platforms, or writing via places like the Player’s Tribune, or LeBron Jame’s own Uninterrupted, in endorsement deals as far ranging as there are personalities within the league. The fact that we even make equivalencies to the NBA and personalities, we just know it as plain fact, is testament to how close it has become for us, fans of varying frequencies and tendencies.
There can’t help but be an emotional element that affixes to all this given how much on a daily and weekly basis we consume when it comes to loose or extra content around players. It’s not like we are actively trying to equate one with the other, it’s that they have never, not really in the modern NBA, existed apart.
In the car coming back from my friend Richard’s cottage this past weekend we started to talk about Andrew Luck. Specifically, the kind of bodily entitlement most often put on display by NFL fans. It’s a league where, more than others, bodies are the tithe to winning, so when a player decides to take theirs personally the entire antiquated, brutal model becomes threatened. The response from fans is a snarling, lashing out at the athlete, the response from commentators, or “experts”, who are oftentimes ex-players is a less saliva-strewn but typically still falls on the bristling side of fear. Maybe it’s bound up in regret, that they couldn’t do the same, or maybe it’s aversion to deviate from what is familiar, whatever it is reads too close to not be personal in some capacity.
It’s not the same for NBA fans and followers with physical entitlement to basketball players. For all they’ve revealed to us, how proximal they are, there is a relatively healthy boundary when it comes to our take on their bodies (save for the occasional weird dietary monitoring stuff). But there’s still an entitlement problem and if anything it’s more encompassing, because it’s emotional.
With Cousins, these kind of underdog outliers who we want so badly not just to win, but to get and be better, there is an emotional investment that we place upon perfect strangers with the expectation that if we buoy them up enough, build them into comprehensive composites of physical and mental best-practices, they will deliver. In a way it’s worse than projected ownership of the physical, because somebody’s psyche, their whole entire emotional makeup, can’t really ever be known by anybody other than themselves. To oversimplify, to project, alleviates us, as fans and observers, of emotional responsibility while placing that weight squarely on the shoulders of guys we do not know. It’s delusional.
You have to be ready to write people—strangers—in these kinds of powerful, public positions all the way off. There isn’t a halfway anymore. You don’t get to waffle. Not with all the other shit ostensibly coming at us tomorrow and the next day. It doesn’t matter what somebody wrote, music they made, a movie they did, or how you enjoy watching them explode down the long stretch of a blinding bright hardwood court in a way that makes it look in the moment like the rigidity of that whole rectangle is curving to them like a cat weaving lazily around the ankles. Because all these things are just aesthetics, they carry no weight. Even the things we love, way too close, that we tie up formative parts of our lives in, are only ever a way to capture a moment, a feeling, a sensation too big to hold onto all the way. People, art, places, all of them essentially talismans infused with what we couldn’t or can’t still put exactly into words. Fragments of our lives that we can hold onto to prove that they happened. Cutting the representations loose, if they’re things made or performed by people who turn out to be shitty, not worth the ornaments we’ve turned them into, can be tough I guess.
I say I guess because I can’t say I’ve ever had a hard time letting them go.
With Cousins, I was hard upset for an evening. I listened to the audio clip as I was crossing the intersection out of the subway station at the top of my street, walking home. I stopped for a second in the middle. I felt a lurch. I won’t lie and say I wasn’t upset. I was even kind of surprised at how upset I was. That boogie audio is fucked, I texted Sean and Joey. I got home and I asked Dylan if he’d heard it and we talked about what we’d talked about in the car and also, how everyone has a life you hardly know a thing about.
All that is one part. The other part, what I think is different for women and men when shearing a person from how they have become important to you, and why men seem to have a harder time not just letting go but believing first that it happened and second that they have to, is that men have experienced less what it means to assume the worst about someone. And in these cases, in most cases, the worst about men. Not in a way that limits how you learn someone, but in a way where you hold room for belief and doubt with equal weight. Like Themis, Maat before that, you watch and you listen and you take in what a person tells you, but you never do it without reserving room that at any moment there could come a time when your scales, your gut, tips. I don’t think it is inherent, a magic sixth or feral sense that women have one up on men. What I do think, real plainly, is that women have more experience with being let down by men. For men, maybe that’s where the hesitation and confusion can stem: to not have been let down by men in every aspect of one’s life—lovers, friends, partners, colleagues, perfect strangers—from the mundane to the very violent, or very targeted, or both, or more, on a regular enough basis that it tunes, quite reliably, your moral compass.
There’s a statue called the Goddess of Winged Victory on top of the Princes’ Gate, a big stone archway that marks the entrance to Exhibition Place in Toronto. She was based on a similar statue, The Winged Victory of Samothrace, or, basically Nike. That statue, the original, is a headless and armless woman about to be, or mid, flight. The one on top of the Princes’ Gate (I have always thought, until right now, it was called the Princess Gates) has her head and arms intact, and is holding up a laurel wreath in triumph and is usually inviting people who live in Toronto into the screaming midway of the Canadian National Exhibition, a yearly—city version of a state fair? Carnival?—18-day long lead up to Labour Day and what essentially marks the end of summer in the city.
Dylan and I went this week, after it rained all day and cleared into a gauzy, bruised purple evening, and found it emptier than I ever have in my life. There were no lineups for anything, not for food or ride or games. The teenagers working the midway were miserable. The ones doing the mini-donut conveyor belt line at Tiny Tom’s in the Food Building languid. But getting off the streetcar and coming up to the Gate, the sky south over the lake so moody and shifting as the sun sunk and rain clouds scudded off, plus an otherworldly LED lighting system installed across the belly of the archway, the Goddess was practically glowing white. I pictured for a second her holding a sword, a severed head, or nothing, just her entirely intact arms able to reach up and out. But women can so rarely fling up their arms like that for no reason other than to do it—even in triumph there’s a time limit to how long women can hold a pose—let alone at the top of an archway meant to welcome people, without it bringing to mind putting up a posture of defence. That’s how history has drawn, painted or carved it, how we still do. Stay away, she’d be signalling, when all the blinking lights and corn dog fumes are shouting for you to come in. They had to give her something up there if she had both her arms. A bouquet? Oh, how ‘bout a wreath, I can picture the dudes nodding, that oughta do it.
The hand-wringing that’s come since the Cousins audio has is gross and dangerous. First, where were these vocal supporters of his, sure in their argument as their footing, when he couldn’t scrounge a contract to bail his next season but was otherwise, at least morally and to the optics of the zero tolerance policy of the league, correct. Second, what is the practical point of drawing out the legalities around how the audio was recorded, whether it was lawful, did Cousins consent to it, or the almost antiquated assumption that it might not be him we are hearing. It’s not a fucking prank call and I can’t think of a way that, even out of context, what Cousins said would not be precisely, chillingly, exactly threatening. To tell someone in no uncertain terms that you’re going to put a bullet in their head—I can’t even finish this thought, and how the fuck do you joke around with people you love if you can?
Writing someone all the way off doesn’t mean they can’t come back. They can. We just haven’t really gotten there yet in terms of what feels right with public figures who get cast out. Athletes, especially those of Cousins’ stature, still get granted the gloss-over. Kobe Bryant is in the news again because of his own inserting of himself into it—his absolute favourite hobby besides seeing how many times he can casually reinvent himself from rapist to misunderstood, to mogul, to Oscar winner, to children’s author, etc., for all eternity it seems like—in case you needed another example of this. The Lakers have said they’re looking into it. Sure. Like they looked into the allegations against the golden understudy of Steve Kerr, Luke Walton. Looked at them as long as it took for Walton to walk a little ways north into a new franchise and then promptly dropped them. For Cousins, who has little and lesser value now as someone who is hurt and dragging vitriol like what came through in that call behind him, the league could and might make an example, or allow a quiet exit. Then again, a year can do wonders for someone looking to duck out of the public consciousness and come back triumphant on the bare minimum—like Derrick Rose did, when he played a better than average night of basketball. While Cousins isn’t on par with Rose, Walton, Bryant, this is exactly where the cyclical, persistent, erasure inducing narrative of levels of harm starts to pyramid scheme from. To say one thing is worse than another is to pit harm against itself, demanding that the damage we can’t stand be rabid and everything else merely teeth flashing in the dark, a warning.
The galaxy of abuse, of leveraging pain inflicted on women for the benefit of men, despite some false-starts and staggered leaps, is expanding. There is always going to be more of it exploding in real time, refracted back to us in the light of the last big, shocking thing, so long as the same things continue to mean different depending on who is doing them.
It’s weird. The worst things that have been done to me by men I’ve trusted have been blunted faster than the sleights of strangers. Your brain has a way of speeding emotional erosion when needed, propping up things you can handle as a distraction against what you aren’t equipped to. Harm can be so obtuse. Varying on the day, the quality of light, what you did just before it showed up. The reaction Christy West has to Cousins’ threat, the clipped, casual, “Alright” to being told, with menace, how Cousins wants her life to end, the distance she’s already placed between them when that call is happening by how she is focusing on her son in the background, active, separate from what is happening so immediately in her ear, all of it as gruesome as it is natural in the way women understand how to hold the line of balance with both hands at all times between themselves and men. You keep an even pulse, you keep an eye on the door, you keep a clear head though the rest of you could be keening. You handle rage like a wild thing you can soothe because most probably, up to now, you have, in some way, every single time. It isn’t magic to become practical with ferocity, just like it isn’t magic to learn how to shed the arbiters of it. It’s practice. You fill the lack with better weight, better ways to say what matters, with yourself.