Charizard, Patrick Ewing, and the Fickle Meaning of a Moment

Fall 2019

Excerpt

Basketball was my first love. Most who know me now would think that an absurd or melodramatic sentiment, but it's the truth. I am not especially athletic, and I don’t intuitively identify with your typical sports guy, but before I knew anything about anything else, I knew as much as I could about basketball. I started young, insatiably absorbing excessively esoteric shit, digging beyond the numbers and names in an effort to excavate the spiritual architecture of great men and great moments, at first relying on technical familiarity and keen recall to emulate empathy, vicariously experiencing things that of course I only vaguely understood. But this era was short-lived. My peak performance as a player was behind me by the time I entered adolescence, when the gravity of the game shifted consciously from intellect to emotion, and eventually subconsciously receded into a territory of Freudian significance, deeply felt but seldom considered, until much much later.

I was a kid of the late 90's and early 00's. For most of my peers, Pokemon was this period’s pinnacle of entertainment, creating that vicarious adventure that kids crave. In ways both refreshing and weird, basketball filled that niche for me, card collecting and all. Patrick Ewing was my Charizard, Reggie Miller my Blastoise. The long narratives of the regular season and the climactic battles of the playoffs contained all of the thrill and world-building I needed. I didn't appreciate these parallels until my early twenties, when Pokemon made the sort of nostalgic resurgence that shamelessly reinvigorates young people's affections for when they were younger people. And oddly enough, or unfortunately enough, another thing that my relationship to basketball had in common with my peers' relationships to Pokemon was that it faded away. When I stopped playing basketball competitively, upon entering high school, my focus was shifting to music, and the two seemed irreconcilable. There's no good reason why they couldn’t coexist, vying for affection from moment to moment, but I, like many, picked one over the other. And so began my thirteen-year hiatus from basketball.

Of course, none of this changes the truth in my emotional chronology - basketball was the first thing I loved, was obsessed with, knew too much about, and it was the first thing I ever quit. And there's something nice about that. Like many first loves, it was also my first break up, and it was the type that years later you know was completely your fault. That's an important part of growing up. Still, as evolved as we may get, we never fully shake the allure of what first captivated us. Rekindling the flame with basketball is fortunately far less precarious than doing so with real live people from primary school, but some of the dangers are similar. I reconnected with basketball in a meaningful way not until I was twenty-seven years old. My fiancée, who was then my girlfriend of just over three years, was installing her Masters' solo exhibition and borrowing a television to run a loop of one of her video pieces. We spent a few days getting the gallery fully set up, but it wasn't until the night before the opening that we realized the hackneyed wall mount provided for this particular television was far from functional. I was mounting a speaker higher up on the wall when I got a nice bird's eye backstage view of the television, which looked like it could not be more than a couple of hours away from falling to the floor and taking a healthy chunk of wall right down with it. As calmly as I could, I let Nicole know that we needed to take that television down. We did so without causing any further damage, but it was the evening before the show, and we seemed to be shit out of luck. So I did what anybody would've done. I drove to the nearest Best Buy and bought a television. For this particular piece, it needed to be a big television. Of course I needed to make sure that I purchased an appropriate wall mount, and of course I opened a Best Buy Credit Card on the spot in order to save what maybe amounted to $100 or so. I kept the receipt, vaguely intending to return the TV once the exhibition was done.

Spoiler alert: we didn't return the TV.