War and Basketball

Even in the darkest times, we need reminders of the wonder here and there.

by

Like an awful lot of people, I sometimes dream of flying. It’s a common enough trope, as dreams go: You leap into the air and discover that gravity’s taken a holiday. You find a current and you glide, swooping a few feet above the earth or a few hundred, looking down on rivers and rooftops, still near the world but tethered no more. In the logic of dreams, flying seems quite natural and unsurprising: why wouldn’t I be able to do what any old sparrow can? Among waking activities, running’s the closest I can get, earthbound and on my own steam, to flying. I savor the moments when I can stretch time mid-stride, between when my feet leave the ground and when they touch down again. Something like flying.

I have my dreams. Ja Morant has … just about every game he plays. The Memphis Grizzlies’ current roster is rich with talent, personality, and verve. I believe that even without Morant, I would have been following the team’s progress this spring. Steven Adams, Desmond Bane, Jaren Jackson Jr., De’Anthony Melton, and more perform impressive feats on a weekly basis. Each deserves to be written about, I’ve no doubt. But you have to understand that I am, most of the time, not someone who pays much attention to sports. I am certainly not someone who texts basketball highlights to her husband with lots of exclamation points. Watching Morant leap and soar and stride through the air is only sort of about basketball, for me. It’s also about those dreams of flying. Morant manages so many twists and turns while aloft, he looks to have mastered temporal manipulation as well as, you know (no big deal), flight.

It’s not lost on me that I consume news about the Memphis Grizzlies and Russian missiles in the exact same manner: while scrolling my phone. How do our devices not combust from the sheer volume of disparate information we ask them to deliver?

At the heart of it all, Morant gives me hope that maybe, just maybe, the edges of the possible are more flexible than they typically appear. Maybe he can manage one more mid-air stride before gravity reasserts itself, and then another, and another. Maybe he can show the rest of us how. Those highlight clips bring joy, too, and hope in all its stubbornness. News alerts flash on my phone with more and more distressing updates from Ukraine, and what the devastation there portends for the rest of us. And then there’s Ja Morant, sailing above the rim like a ballet dancer, like a bird out for a joy ride. Time stops. The noise stops. All that matters, for a moment, is: how the heck did he just do that?!

It’s too soon yet to say what we’ll remember of the spring of 2022. Even the more cautious among us (such as myself) are beginning to walk into public settings with our full faces on display, maskless for the first time in two years. The people who produce this magazine are (most of us, most of the time) back in the office. I won’t tempt fate by claiming the pandemic is winding down, but the threat seems, for now, abated. People are congregating, if they ever stopped. With any luck, the small local businesses that are still here will find more steadiness ahead.

We’ll remember those sighs of relief. But I know we’ll remember, too, the sharp intakes of breath when witnessing history unfold 5,500 miles away. Missiles ripping into apartment buildings, civilians shot dead while trying to flee, NICU babies being tended by brave nurses in basement corridors, and on and on. Thanks in part to social media, we’re seeing that Kyiv and Kharkiv aren’t so very far away at all. (It’s not lost on me that I consume news about the Memphis Grizzlies and Russian missiles in the exact same manner: while scrolling my phone. How do our devices not combust from the sheer volume of disparate information we ask them to deliver?) Even or especially in the darkest times, we’re reminded of humanity’s bold, brilliant spirit. The Ukrainian people are outnumbered and outgunned, but they aren’t giving up.

I don’t know what’s to come; none of us does. But I think it’s a safe bet that we’ll need reminders of wonder here and there.