‘There’s Always This Year’ goes beyond the bounds of basketball

At first glance to the uninitiated, the book “There’s Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension” might appear to simply be an ode to playing hoops.

In the very first lines, the reader places their hand in the author’s and is guided through four quarters – complete with a 12-minute NBA countdown clock in each, as well as timeouts. But the ensuing meditations across these sections span not just the game, but themes of mortality, of place and the concept of “making it.”

That author is Hanif Abdurraqib, a New York Times bestselling author, MacArthur Fellow and National Book Award finalist, with “There’s Always This Year” also named to the 2024 longlist. He was also recently named the University of Texas Press American Music Series editor and is part of the lineup for the Texas Book Festival set for Nov. 16-17 in downtown Austin.

He joined the Standard to talk about the book, his new series editor role, and why his favorite Spurs teams are from the post-Tim Duncan era. Listen to the interview above or read the transcript below.

This transcript has been edited lightly for clarity:

Texas Standard: The book is about so much more than basketball. It’s also a little hard to categorize. I mean, this is part memoir, part poetry collection, part cultural criticism … What did you have in mind when you sat down to write this book, or did you actually sit down with a book in mind?

Hanif Abdurraqib: Well, I think this is no different than my usual process, which is I sit down with something in mind, and then once the work begins, those plans shift.

You know, I wanted to write kind of a straightforward basketball book. I wanted to write a book about coming up in Ohio in the era of LeBron James – LeBron James coming up as a young player. We’re about a year apart, and so I really got to witness his rise through high school, which I think is really fascinating.

I didn’t really appreciate it until now that I got to watch LeBron James come up through high school in a way that, of course, we can watch high school players all around the country just on our phones or with their Instagram clips – but in 2002/2001, that wasn’t the case. And so it really allowed me to appreciate the fact that I got to witness something great.

I kind of wanted to write about that. But then I realized what I was actually writing about was childhood and the passage of time and what it means to make it out of a place and what it means to stay in a place.

When you were growing up, were you a fan of basketball? Did you know about LeBron James at that point?

Oh for sure, yeah. I played. I love the game. Nearly everyone in Ohio, if you even remotely liked the game of basketball – even if you didn’t – you knew about LeBron James. You know, he was ever present. He kind of hovered over our landscape here.

So you also tackled the theme of immortality and legacy through, in a sense, this character that LeBron James plays as a kind of fixture here in this book. Obviously, James is still playing in the league, but I wonder if you could talk a little bit more about the connection that you personally felt toward him as he was beginning his rise, so to speak.

There was a sense of pride, but there was still some envy. Not in a sense that I wanted to be an NBA player – I had no illusions about my abilities to be an NBA player.

But a lot of it was that, you know, he was making it somewhere. He was making it out of a place when I was definitively kind of not. He had options for exit at a time in my life where I was struggling, quite frankly.

And so, you know, it was pleasure and joy, but also some envy, if I’m being honest. And that was my own and not anything he was doing. My own youthful foolishness, in a sense. But, yeah, I’m so grateful that I’ve gotten to watch his career become his career.

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Let’s talk more about this theme of ascension, which sort of permeates the book. I’m thinking of your examination of Michael Jordan in the 1985 dunk contest toward the beginning, where it seems very much about immortality.

And then there’s the parts where you talk about watching airplanes take off with your father, or your meditations on your definition of heaven in the book’s third quarter.

Is there a thread between these and other examples in the book that you wanted to bring out? And I’m curious, why was this such such an important part of the narrative here?

Well, part of the book, too, is me trying to redefine what the definition of ascension is for myself, you know?

What does it mean to get better or bigger or where are you headed?

Yeah, I think for many people, ascension means to rise upward.

But for me, some of this book was me considering what if I defined “ascension” as just simply moving from the place you dreamed to the place that you are – you know, moving from the place you were to the place that you dreamed. Which happens in smaller increments, I think. In this book, I think it’s trying to honor those increments.

So yes, there is a lot of very literal imagery and questions and narratives around flight and movement. But there’s also, for me, you know, I’m writing about the kind of minutia of essentially smaller parts of ascension, the moments that are steeped in kind of … I slept in a jail cell and got to dream myself shooting a basketball, and eventually I would shoot that basketball – these kind of things.

So, yes, “ascension,” in a large sense, moving upward, flying, exiting a place, but “ascension” also being grounded somewhere and loving that somewhere and moving forward in small moments.

Another big theme in this book is place. You talk a lot about your hometown of Columbus – which you, yourself, moved back to a few years ago – and how many people leave Columbus. And you consider notions of how “making it” are often tied to leaving.

You know, here in Texas, obviously one of the top-line stories in recent years has been about all these people who move here in search of opportunity – I can’t help but think that that notion has a lot of resonance. But it seems like you want to redefine what it means to “make it.”

Can you break down this new definition that you’re putting forward here?

So, yeah, I mean, I think coming from where I’m from, so many people have put it in my head that to make it was to leave. You know, you have to leave to make it. I still get asked sometimes if I’m going to move to, say, New York or L.A. – these kind of things.

So “making it” is placing oneself in proximity to a geographical location. To do that strips away any kind of emotional definition or spiritual definition. And I grew up watching a lot of talented basketball players who never “made it,” therefore they never made it to the NBA or anything like that. But they’re so revered and beloved on the courts in this city, on the courts where they were once children and once played.

There are now new generations of children still revering their name, which that, to me, is a form of making it. Yes, it does not come with the same kind of financial windfall that making the NBA would come with, but it comes with a real emotional weight that ties you to a geography’s history. You are an eternal part of the fabric of a place. And that, to me, is a form of making it.

You’ve talked before about this being a book you’ve dreamed about writing, and I know in this book and previous ones, you’ve often written about dealing with grief. And I wonder, as you’ve wrestled extensively with that theme of dwindling time, do you feel like your relationship with that notion of mortality has changed now that you’re on the other side of writing this book?

I think it’s gotten deeper and more comfortable, which, you know, can’t always guarantee that. But I do think my relationship with time and mortality has gotten more comfortable.

This book showed me many things. But one thing it showed me is that I can really slow time down. Through memory or through just the kind of tenderness and attention and focus on attention, I can slow time down and sink more generously into the memories that I have and the people I love who are no longer here and all these things.

So I think that has softened my relationship with mortality – in part because, quite simply, I’m thinking more generously about moments in increments and not a big-picture thing where time is slipping away rapidly.

One of the overarching themes of this book is the dwindling of time. And I can’t help but think of that notion and how you write and speak about beauty. With this book, and especially with the countdown clock that spans each section, it feels like you’re pushing us to remember that countdown clock that I guess we all must ultimately defer to. But in doing so, also consider the moments – the now, if you will.

Would you say that’s a fair statement? What were you getting at?

Yes. You know, so much of the pace modulation of the book … You know, if you’re thinking about the countdown clock and the way that in some notions, there’s a large chunk of paragraphs – even pages – before another timestamp emerges, and sometimes the timestamps emerge in rapid succession. Even that pace modulation is asking a reader to think about what they prioritize in terms of the passage of time, for example.

It bears mentioning, too, that I began writing this book around 2021 where, you know, this thing had happened to me – and I think happened to a lot of people during lockdown or even after – where at least for me, it felt like the days were going by very slowly, but the weeks were going by very fast. And that was extremely disorienting for me, where it felt like my days were taking months. I would blink and a week would be over and a month would be over.

And so I was asking some real questions of my own brain in this moment of “how do I prioritize and how do I not prioritize my time,” but how do I kind of cherish the time that does feel long instead of treating the length of the days as a punishment – you know, treating them with a sense of gratitude instead of feeling feeling punished by them.

And so, yeah, I was asking people through all of these kind of time modulations and pace modulations saying, “I know that I can make, on the page, this book feel both overwhelmingly fast and incredibly slow.” And I guess the question I have is, what do you cherish about the time you have? What do you cherish about the time that feels even long and brutal?

I have to ask, do you think that that’s something unique, metaphorically speaking, between that perception of the passage of time and basketball as a game? Or is this just something that you knew well? And obviously, LeBron James being from your hometown and all that. Is it something about basketball per se?

Yeah. I played the game, and I’m an avid watcher of the game. And what I love about basketball is that much like the modulation in the book, the pace of a game can sometimes … Gosh, depending on what the score is and what the circumstances are, the last like three minutes of a basketball game can feel like an entire universe, you know?

So intense. Yeah.

Yeah. And I love that. In that time we kind of get to build a world around what’s happening.

A great example of this is in the book I write about the Game 7 of the 2016 [NBA] Finals, highlighted by, of course, LeBron’s chase down block and the big Kyrie Irving shot. And I misremembered that game. You know, I was talking about that game and I watched it many times, but I had to rewatch it for this book. And I was talking and I was saying,  “the last five minutes of that game was so back and forth. Everything was so fast. Everyone was scoring.”

That’s actually not what happened. It was a slog. It was just a real, you know, carrying this heavy burden of who could score. It was this intensity. And I had realized that I had built a world around LeBron’s chase down block and Kyrie Irving’s shot. I had built an entire universe around those things.

And that’s kind of miraculous, you know, that we can sit in the slow moments of a game and build a narrative that suits our dreams, even if we have to go back and watch the game and say, “Wait, that’s not how I dreamed it.” But it’s still miraculous nonetheless.

Basketball is not the only sport where that happens, to be clear. But for me, it’s the one that I’m most tapped into and the one that I’m most fascinated by when it does happen.

Not to put you on the spot here, but I feel like I have a duty here at the Texas Standard to ask you about one of the instances in the book where you talk about a certain Texas team. It’s in a passage where you’re talking about the Miami Heat’s 2014 series against the San Antonio Spurs.

And you write, “The Spurs were, at least to me and my crew, a boring squad, a squad devoid of star power and flair.” Now, of course, we’re talking about one of the last hurrahs of the Spurs’ Big Three of Tim Duncan, Tony Parker, Manu Ginobili – not to mention the Finals MVP season for –

Young Kawhi.

Yeah, Kawhi Leonard. You do mention how many Ohioans at that time became Spurs fans out of a desire to root against LeBron.

Now, I don’t want to get you into trouble with Spurs fans or anything, but I’m curious if you could talk about what are the aspects of basketball and traits behind players that define the beauty of the game, when beauty is obviously a major element in all this.

Yeah. I mean, I will say now, you know, I kind of aged out of that. You know, back then we were coming off of those kind of exciting Cavs teams.

The Spurs were – I think at least to a lot of us in Ohio, even before LeBron had to face them and everyone became a fan – I think the Spurs represented … You know, “boring” is maybe harsh in retrospect, but you know, we’d seen Tim Duncan for so long. And I think for me and a lot of my friends, there was just fatigue. It was like, “okay, these guys are back again.” And “we have to watch the style of play again.”

But, I mean, my favorite Spurs teams were those kind of like in between the post-Duncan teams. Like I deeply have a big affection for the brain and strategizing heart of Gregg Popovich. And I think there’s something fantastic about just watching him work with a talent that is less than perhaps what he has been accustomed to in his championship runs, which is why the current Spurs team is exciting.

I feel like last year was a wash. It felt like he was kind of just experimenting with Jeremy Sochan at point. And I feel like this is the year where we get to kind of see Popovich’s genius projected. I mean, he’s an absolute genius and has done it with so many different levels of talent, and I just hope he sticks around.

I mean, I know that he could retire and be a Hall of Famer instantly, but I hope he sticks around to really see through whatever this Wemby era is going to be, because I think that Wemby needs a coach like that, who can build so thoughtfully around him.

So all that said, those are my Spurs thoughts now. I will say back then, I wanted the Heat to win. You know, I love Tim Duncan, but I was like, “I’ve seen enough.” You know, it’s like sometimes you can love a band, but you’ve seen them so many times you’re kind of like, “I’ve seen enough to be able to skip a show this time around.”

But to be clear, as I wrote the book, I was very much in the minority there. People turned into Spurs fans really quickly because seeing LeBron lose was the primary.

I know you were recently named editor to the University of Texas Press American Music Series – this after your 2019 contribution to the series, “Go Ahead in the Rain: Notes on A Tribe Called Quest.”

I know music’s been a hugely important force for you – not just in your work, but your life. Can you say a little bit more about that relationship and how it might inform your approach to your role as series editor?

Yeah. I mean, you know, for me, one: it was just great to work with the team back when I had the book come out. It was such a wonderful experience working with that team and the work they do is really special.

I love music, of course, but I also crave thoughtful, insightful writing about music. I crave the kind of writing about music that extends the life of a song or an album or makes us reconsider a band that has been beloved for a very long time. And I think that honestly, the opportunities to do that are dwindling. The spaces where people can do that are dwindling.

You would think that that would not be the case, especially these days. So what’s going on?

I think there’s just less platforms for people to write. When I was coming up as a music critic freelancing, I could write for a massive amount of publications. And now the editorial staffs are shrinking at places. The writing staffs are shrinking at places. There’s not a lot of opportunities for people to share expansive thoughts on music and writing about music.

And so, you know, there’s a real challenge there. But University of Texas Press is one of those places that has been massively generous in the kind of expansive thinking they have around what kind of books that can have success in the world. And to get to join that staff and help move that mission forward is a real pleasure.

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