Review: There's Always This Year by Hanif Abdurraqib

When you love Black men and manhood but you aren't into sportsball

How to tell you I’m tall and uncoordinated and Black in America without telling you: At my peak height, around the time I turned 14, I was 5’11. Thin as the side of a door, bony with legs making up 90 % of my body. It would be 20 years before I understood, fully, that I am an introvert, and that I prefer to do things in the ways that those of us raised as only-children do: alone.

Because of these things, and in spite of them, I tried to be a basketball player. I wanted to love basketball, to feel it with my entire being, even though in my heart of hearts I knew I could never be great at it. When you know, you know. Just because I was Black, raised between Philly and the Bronx and a half-dozen family shelters throughout New York City in the 1980s and 1990s — it was like the grit you need to scrap on a court was embedded in my skin. I could act tough, but by some miracle, I stayed, to my core, exceptionally soft. Quiet, clumsy and a huge Knicks fan.

I came to love Hanif Abdurraqib’s beautiful book, There’s Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension, because my favorite personal sportsball failure took place on the basketball court of St. Thomas Aquinas High School for Girls, when I was told that I should maybe try out for the team, and I proceeded to get knocked around for about 45 minutes before the coach said, “I think you should try something else.”

Thank God for that woman: That’s how I ended up running on the track & field team. It’s how I found serenity and an outlet rowing for a crew in high school and again in college, how I would go on to run four marathons and become a CrossFit lover.

Back to Hanif’s understandably popular, beautiful bestseller. There is a narrative in this country that the brute crudeness of sports is a natural match for the otherworldly physical ability of Black athletes. As with all other things, the legacy of being bought and sold as commodities during slavery in this country without any acknowledgement of how that narrative pervades how we think of competition, of entertainment, still lingers like a cloud over most commentary. I have, in my time, watched some NBA Finals, tracked draft smack talk. Watched Michael Jordan retire the day after a milestone birthday, hungover and sad at the end of a magical era.

In There’s Always This Year, Hanif elevates the discourse by providing the context of a Black fan, a Black man, in a place like Ohio watching the rise of a meteor like LeBron James and other legends of the court. It is complex terrain. To know and witness greatness that emerges from the same place you’re from is not the same thing as being able to be great. There’s a way that poor Black people in particular attach our dreams for ourselves to the ones who actually make it, so when they fumble or misstep, the pain cuts that much deeper.

The beauty of poetry is often reserved for entertainment that is more refined — theater, ballet. Hanif applies the wisdom of his life and experiences, good but mostly a mix of good and bad, to the aspects of someone like Jordan taking flight and the feelings supernatural feats inspire in hood folks who have no reason to believe ascension is attainable. He reflects on Black hair, or, in the case of basketball greats like Jordan and LeBron, lack thereof.

Hanif peels back a layer of our obsession with the language of war and survival this way: “America relies on making the soldier both an inspiration and an aspiration. It relies on making war and surviving war a part of the American fabric by making the aesthetics of war cool.” I love when I am reading a book, digitally or in print, and I can’t keep myself from highlighting whole passages, which happened many times reading There’s Always This Year. To me, one of the greatest gifts of this book is its tenderness applied to Black people, and Black athletes, who are usually only viewed as mere catalysts for the expectations of others. Through his many writing gifts, Hanif offers us infinite restoration. “And so,” he writes, as if that is what shaped this book, his work, “made from the lips of a person who loves us, we’re all one good prayer from being royals, or something close.”