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

Fall 2019

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. 

In a surprise to no one: we didn't return the TV. Along with flowers and cards and various manifestations of glory and exhaustion, it came home with us after the show. And once there, you bet we turned it on, and in my memory, it feels as though somehow magically the NBA Playoffs automatically appeared. With a TV in the house and at last a dignified way to watch basketball just as I'd watched it in my youth—better, in fact—there was no slowing us down. Both of us quickly became enraptured by the drama of the 2018 postseason, and in the background, our lives kept going on and on. On June 18th, 2018, the Warriors won their second consecutive championship, against an inevitably itinerant Lebron James. The next week, Nicole and I took a mini holiday to Montreal. On July 18th, Masai Ujiri orchestrated a trade that sent Demar Derozan and Jakob Poeltl to the San Antonio Spurs in exchange for Kawhi Leonard and Danny Green. I promise the dots will connect.

Basketball came back into my life, with a vengeance. But this time around, the emotional magnitude of the sport that I had worked so hard to study as a child came more intuitively. The season started on October 16th, while Nicole and I were in Peru for a work trip. Kawhi scored 24 points on October 17th in his first game as a Raptor. I asked Nicole to marry me on the ninth of November. On the 3rd of December, I received the eighteen-month work permit that brought us to Montreal, Canada, just in time for the holidays. We moved the TV up on our second carload. Our place in Montreal—where I’m writing this—feels like a palace: bigger, nicer, more modern and somehow also more charming than a sub-six figure income could even fathom to deliver in Brooklyn, where we fantasized about a second bedroom and maybe a fire escape at our next apartment, whenever we made the move. Winter's a tough time to move from the northeastern United States to anywhere in Canada, but once we got here we felt like we had truly accomplished something, earned something, like we had somehow successfully orchestrated a superbly romantic and impressive version of our futures that most don't get a chance to create. We would wear huge and heavy coats. We would eat fatty, aromatic soups. We would guzzle wine like water. Learn French? Bien sûr. Visit Vermont? Souvent. We would indulge in affordable health care and ogle spiral staircases and be abundantly, brutally, spitefully happy. This was the plan. 

But everyone knows what they say about plans. Nonetheless, what mattered most as we acclimated to our new home was that every night, no matter what else went well or poorly that day, there would be basketball to watch. January. February. March. April. The NBA regular season receives reasonable ridicule for its onerous, tedious duration, but Nicole and I would have endorsed a baseball season’s helping of basketball that year. Life was tiring. I won't belabor the sentiment, but we were especially primed to enjoy the blissful frivolity of sport that year, and it felt stunningly appropriate that the year we move to Canada, the first full year of my return to basketball devotion, Nicole's first year as a true hoop head, the year we were bound more homeward than any other, that this would be the year that Canada's only team would make a title run. 

I was born in 1990. If I hadn't been such a weirdo, this would make me functionally too young to remember Michael Jordan. Thankfully, I remember him well. I was watching the NBA as early as the start of the 1995-96 season, at age five, with legends of the Knicks’ near-glory calcified into my core neural architecture despite no firsthand recollection of it happening. But I do remember the Flu Game. I remember The Shot, in 1998, which I watched on a tiny TV from my parents' bed. Their comforter had a sublimely ugly dusty pink and gold floral pattern and was a shiny, terrible material for a bed, coarse and cold against the skin. When the shot dropped I jumped up and slapped the comforter like I was sending a horse to gallop. My mom was falling asleep, but she woke up and reacted how she thought she was supposed to without really knowing what had happened for at least a minute. I was seven years old and a Knick fan by blood, but I still worshiped Jordan—in his triumphs and tribulations, every childish fantastical thirst was quenched, and I laughed at paltry imitators. There was no Pokemon MJ. 

Larry Johnson's four-point play against the Pacers in 1999 was the culmination of my childhood. I am not exaggerating. After that, in a post-Jordan world devoid of Knick relevance, I latched onto the lowest hanging fruit for a nine-year-old hoops devotee: a flying dinosaur. I probably had two or three Vince Carter posters in my room over the years, and I took to Tracy McGrady as well. The Raptors became my team 1b. I gave them all the gusto I could muster for a few good years, but sadly, by 2004, the year that Vince moved from Toronto to New Jersey, I was beginning my exodus from basketball. I suppose this was as good a time as any. I didn't truly experience it in the moment, but the game was going through some weird shit while I was trying to figure out the swiftest means of shaking my virginity. 

It's funny how these things happen. One minute mounting a speaker for an art exhibition and the next a fawning over a television with constant access to the ultimate muse of your youth. And so the conflation of circumstances that followed guided my dormant affections toward the closest thing I could get to a hometown team, the team that I'd found the most fun and snappy, the team that fortunately did not delve into its darkest days until I turned the other cheek. Much had happened to the Raptors since I left. Much had happened to the entire league, of course, and though I never retreated into the woods or lost touch with national sports news completely, I really didn't have proper context. I just knew that I loved watching basketball, and the flame was rekindled with a fury. What's nice about basketball as opposed to, say, Pokemon, is that I was able to reenter its universe earnestly and without irony, accompanied by an abundance of journalism, podcasts, talking heads, etc. The sports media circus is its own subject altogether, but for me, the ease of access and acclimation ensured that I knew what was going on just four weeks into the first season I’d paid attention to in fourteen years. I was ripe to be wrapped up. Ready for the moment. And moving to a cold country with no friends while that country's cold streak starts warming up? Hell of a feeling. 

For most of the season, the Raptors have the second-best record in the league. Kawhi Leonard, most stoic of superstars and fellow newcomer to The Great White North, is taking it easy but creating a deserved crescendo of credibility as the wins keep piling up. Pascal Siakam is making his way toward a well deserved Most Improved Player award. Kyle Lowry is being Kyle Lowry. Serge is hitting fifteen footers. Freddy isn't performing like he will against the Bucks, but he's doing a hell of a lot better than he will against the Sixers. It's all shaping up nicely. Nicole spends the month of February at an artist residency in Vermont. Kawhi and Kyle make the All-Star Team. My first French class goes well. I have a slight crush on the teacher–embarrassingly predictable. Nicole's working part-time remotely for an American company, making $50/hour. After weeks of injury, Jonas Valanciunas is dealt to the Grizzlies for Old Man Marc Gasol, just before the Trade Deadline. Nicole finds a job in Montreal, mine keeps rolling along. Raptors wind up the two seed. 

Playoff basketball creates a different dynamic at our place. It's more thrilling, of course, and much more tense, but there are nights off now. Nights when we listen to podcasts about the games rather than having any games to watch. We're in a different French school that meets three nights per week for three hours per session. No one has any crushes. Sometimes we miss a first quarter. We take it out on the language. The Raptors lose their first game of the playoffs, then win the next four. Somehow we each score about a 90% on our Examen Final de Niveau Deux. 

Beating the Sixers somehow felt more important than any other series. The last time I'd felt this way about a matchup was twenty years earlier, when Larry Johnson hit that three and got fouled. Before he'd even clinched it with the free throw, I leapt off the couch and called my uncle. That couch, like my parent’s comforter, was terrible. I don't know how to describe it. It was the color of sand on a busy beach. It had punctures and gouges all over it, places where its intestines unfurled. It was not comfortable. There was a wooden rocking chair and a classic lazy boy recliner in that same room, and there was also the computer desk. The room was way too small for all of that furniture—its only redeeming quality was that basketball was on the television, and that the Pacers were about to lose. When my uncle picked up my phone call, we exchanged no pleasantries—I screamed DID YOU SEE THAT! He confirmed. I was eight years old, he was in his 40's. At that moment, we were on the same page. 

The room where Nicole and I watch basketball now is gorgeous. We sit on a tan leather couch that is among the most expensive singular items either of us have ever purchased. We invested in it because we didn't want another couch decorated with pet hair, forgetting that our cat would still be inclined to scratch it when we weren't around—even worse. But while the Raptors were winning, the couch was still new—unscratched. The couch and rug and marble coffee table and credenza and windows looking out to the terrace and dining table with views of the game—none of it had anything in common with where I grew up, but moments like Kawhi's corner buzzer-beater feel just about the same whether the couch is silk or sandpaper. Just like twenty years before, I jumped up when it happened. That series had been a slog of slogs. Seven games. Three losses. An apocryphal shot and a bright blue tongue. You can't sit through moments like that. I told friends who would listen that I just wanted to beat the Sixers—that was all I wanted. I didn't care what happened after. Let the Greek Freak go on to topple the Warriors’ dynasty, or let the dynasty have a death rattle. Que será, será. Toronto besting Philadelphia was my Knicks beating Reggie Miller. Let a moment be a moment, but don't get greedy. That’s how I felt. That’s how I force myself to feel.

Outside of the television, Nicole's job was mediocre, but soon she'd have health care. Mine was a career step backward, but I was exercising more and sleeping easier. The Raptors lost the first two games to the Bucks, but then won four straight, clinching their first finals berth on a Saturday. A little over two weeks later, they'd hold the Larry Oh Bee. Nobody can take that away from them. Nobody can take that away from us, whoever us is, whichever us we can claim to be a part of. Victories are like that. Endings are like that. But as our lives went on in the background of these games, I can’t say for sure that victory was what we wanted. Like when I was a kid, flexing my trivia muscles and hoping beyond hope that they’d bring me closer to meaningful moments, we were looking for something heavier, less tangible, less logical, more important.

More vividly than the clincher I recall the game before it. Game Five of the 2019 Finals was a mess. Its implications grossly outweighed its plausible singular significance, and in many ways, this is what made its myriad twists and turns so dizzying. I will not bother to retell the entire game in great detail, or to outline its ramifications for the sport. Instead, I'll tell you where I was. I've already described the place. Home, on the couch, with Nicole, our dog, and our cat. Throughout these playoffs I'd developed a nasty tendency to drink too much and get too riled up, scaring our dog out of the room by the second half. This bothered Nicole, so by the Finals, I was doing my best to avoid it. I don't remember how well I did during Game Five. Presumably not too well. I know that by the fourth quarter there was a glass of watered-down whiskey on the table, and no animals filling the ample space on the couch between Nicole and me. 

At the start of the fourth the Raptors were down. The cosmic ebbs and flows of the game thus far did not point in Toronto's favor. Winning that night would mean winning their first-ever NBA championship, at home. If the Warriors won, they still needed another victory after that just to tie up the series, and then a third consecutive win in a game that would once again be held in Toronto. This type of resurrection has happened only once in Finals history, but it did not seem illogical to bet on the Warriors doing it. They were a team that sometimes seemed to allow their opponent into the final quarter of the game with a lead, luring them into vague comfort just to amuse themselves with a slyly inevitable victory push. Why not magnify that approach in this series, coming back from 3 - 1 to devastate an entire country in two home defeats? That’s getting ahead of ourselves, but it's what a lot of us were thinking as we headed into our fourth-quarter deficit that night. Kevin Durant's brief incendiary return from injury already seemed like an odd dream. His cinematic perfection for a few fragile minutes, his unpoetic stumble and doomed drag back to the locker room, the momentary monstrous Romanesque reactions of certain Raptors fans, the sudden inversion of the underdog. Never have I wanted to describe a basketball game as Lynchian, but this one was. And only more and more as the Raptors thrashed into the final stretch, Serge Ibaka became our first hero, playing with the sort of late game aplomb that our opponents were better known for, with two brutish buckets to open the quarter and an authoritative block a couple minutes later. 

The gap was still six points when Kawhi returned to the floor, with about nine minutes remaining. Kyle daggers a three, and then it's three. Curry drives for two. It's up to five. Kyle snakes around the paint to feed a dunk to Serge. Three again. Timeout. Curry misses a three. Nothing on the other end. Curry drives and gets blocked. Danny Green misses a three, Kawhi claws a rebound and hits a two to bring the lead to one. Draymond hits a three and smirks with sinister dignity no other man can muster. Four points separate. Kawhi misses a two. Draymond travels. There are six minutes left. Kawhi drives but loses it. Klay misses a three, and Kawhi brings it down to Norm for a dunk. Two points. Warriors miss. Kawhi rolls across half court and lobs a three. He does it like he's tired. He does like late era Eastwood. He does it like a father who doesn't feel like wrestling with his kids anymore but knows that somebody's gotta win before he can sit back and crack a beer somewhere dark and quiet. So of course he hits it. And now the Raptors are up by one. Back the other way, Steph tries to answer, misses. Kawhi again, hunkering his way toward the baseline, somehow suddenly too old for this shit, wills a bank to drop. The Raptors are up by three. Other way, Draymond hits a two. Everyone knows at this point where the ball belongs. Kawhi is not clever now. Kawhi is not flashy now. Kawhi is heroic only like an old man in a western. This type of heroism is not universally appealing. Its sheer disinterest in accessibility is what nonetheless makes its heartbreak so transcendently beautiful to those whose temperaments are vulnerable to it. When Kawhi rises to launch another three, several feet beyond the arc, there is a certainty enveloping the air around him. The ball will go into the basket. Momentum is now on Kawhi's side. This is no longer a logic driven sequence. Or maybe it is a sequence solely driven by logic—it is either pure mathematics or pure poetry. This is the ending of an era. This is an era unto itself. This is a fleeting fragment of eternity that defies traditional temporal metrics and can be described as nothing more or less than A Moment. If this is not A Moment, then something indelible yet intangible has disappeared from my spirit since the days when I jumped off of my parents’ bed or our sandpaper couch. And things like that can't disappear. And Kawhi makes the shot. And the Raptors are up by four. This is A Moment, so I leap off the couch. On the next Raps possession, Kawhi batters down the lane and daggers another two. He does not want to fly to California tomorrow. Scotiabank Arena is a kaleidoscope. All of Canada is shaking, even the feral Francophone limb of it I’m calling home. 

At that point, maybe breath did need to be caught, maybe not. Curry misses another shot, Raps get the board. The ball makes its way across half court, and a timeout is called. There's barely three minutes left. Every Raptors fan in the world is holding breath while the players struggle to catch theirs. The game resumes, Kawhi gets another shot off. Air ball. Odd. Hiccup. Ripple. Warriors bring the ball the other way, and Klay hits a three. Fair enough. On our end, Kyle misses one. Equilibrium is tenuous. Both teams make egregious mistakes. 90 seconds remain. Curry hits another three. Tied. Kawhi takes one of his own—short. Instead of leaping off my couch I begin sinking into it. Klay hits a three. Fifty seconds, Raps down by three. Somehow, Draymond commits a backcourt violation. Three points, 35 seconds, Raptors ball. Demarcus Cousins goaltends a layup. Now it's a one point game. Absurdly, Demarcus gets called for an offensive foul. Raps down by one, another chance, twelve seconds. Kawhi has it. Six seconds. Five. If this is not a moment, then what is, and what the fuck is this? But nothing opens up for Kawhi, and he passes. A touch for Freddy, then the ball goes to the corner, to Kyle, one second, shot up. The ball touches nothing but Draymond's fingertips. It's over. Today is not the day the Raptors win a championship—the moment is over.

. . . 

Of course, the Raptors win the next game. They have their moment, and I suppose we have ours, but it wasn’t the one we thought that destiny was taking us toward, it wasn’t the one our hearts howled for just days before. It hasn't been that long, but it feels like ages ago. It’s September now. It’s bizarre and a bit pathetic to sit here and acknowledge that what I remember most vividly and viscerally was not winning game six, but feeling the inevitability of victory in game five, only to be betrayed by that all too familiar gutwrenching collapse. I blame the Knicks—this is the feeling burned into me as a kid. The impending Moment, the near Moment, but ultimately the moment never coming. What they did to me, those heroes and villains mythically metastasizing in my not-yet-ten-year-old-mind, remains inescapable. When the Raptors did win, no matter how much joy I felt, no matter how carried away I gleefully allowed myself to get, it did not take long for me to realize that even when we were having A Moment, it wasn’t mine. Not really. Not quite. Who knows if it ever will be.

This off-season has been especially noisy. Kawhi's gone. The league's north star has corrected its orientation back to Los Angeles. Nicole and I are thinking of moving back to Vermont. The Knicks remain depressing. The Raptors are projected to be a middling playoff seed. Our French is getting better, but for some reason we feel even less comfortable using it. Nicole's private health insurance has kicked in. There will be pizza at the wedding. We'll go to a Raptors game this season, but Kawhi won't be there. Maybe we'll move to LA. Why not follow him? Why not keep moment hunting? Why allow the illusion of one time and place’s unrealized jubilation to obliterate the potential of finding it somewhere else? Sometimes, for a moment, this makes as much sense as anything else.