say that sport imitates life.

But today's guest traces the intimate details of basketball legends and faded schoolyard stars in an unforgettable book about sport life in the places we all call home.

He's Hanif Abdurraqib this week on "Story in the Public Square."

(bright music) (bright music continues) (bright music continues) Hello and welcome to the "Story in the Public Square" where storytelling meets public affairs.

I'm Jim Ludes from the Pell Center at Salve Regina University.

- And I'm G. Wayne Miller, also with Salve's Pell Center.

- And our guest this week is Hanif Abdurraqib, an award-winning writer whose latest book is, "There's Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension."

He's joins us today in the studio.

Hanif, thank you so much for being with us.

- Thank you so much for having me, both of you.

I appreciate it.

- The book is remarkable, and we wanna note that it is the selection for this year's Reading Across Rhode Island, sponsored by the Rhode Island Center for the book.

For the folks at home, though, who maybe haven't had a chance to read it yet, do you wanna give us a quick overview in your own words?

- Yeah, you know, that's been the great challenge of this book's life for the past year.

You know, it's been out a year and a couple weeks.

And the real challenge is giving a quick summary, but I will say that if you go into it, you may go into it thinking, "I don't know anything about basketball."

And I promise you, once you get deep into it, you'll realize that not only is basketball knowledge not required, it's actually not needed to traverse, you know, the kind of many things a book is offering.

I think it's offering a lot about fatherhood and loss and place and time and the loss of time, and basketball is mostly just kind of a container that all exists in.

- Yeah, I'm glad to hear you say that it's difficult to characterize.

'Cause when I thought about how might I characterize it for an audience, I struggled with it because it's about you, it's about basketball, it's about, as you said, fatherhood and place and all these other things.

But basketball does provide a lens and almost a metaphor for life.

Why did basketball work on that level in this book?

- Well, there are a few reasons.

Other than my basic passion for basketball, the fact that I grew up playing it and watching it and loving it and all of these things, basketball, to me, if the central concern of the book was time, which for me it is.

The central concern of the book is actually the loss of time and all the things that get lost in the slipping away of time.

Basketball offers a really interesting framework to press that against, in part because as people who watch basketball know, I would say in any sport, but basketball feels to me the most, like, it has an elastic relationship with linear time.

The end of a basketball game can feel like an hour.

And, you know, the first quarter can feel like a three-second burst.

And I wanted to kind of press that reality up against the reality of living the reality of linear time and how there are, I think particularly right now, there are moments in my life that feel like milliseconds, and then there are, you know, the thing that I say often is that there are years that feel like, you know, hours and days, that feel like years.

And I think basketball offered a really good fun bit of experimentation for that, particularly within the form of the book with the time clock.

- Can you get into time a little bit more?

- Sure.

- How things pass.

I mean, everything passes eventually, but give us a little bit more about that, because what you just said sounded right on.

But I'd like to hear more from you.

- Yeah, you know, I think a lot about being a child, and I think the way that I consider...

So much of this book is about looking backwards and looking back at a past self and the many elements of my past self that made up my present self.

And I realized in the writing of this book that many portions of my past life felt hazy, as they do for a lot of us, but I also just could not pinpoint the pace at which they happened.

A good example of this is I write about being unhoused for a bit in Columbus where I'm from, where I live still.

And I was trying to remember if it was a number of months or a few weeks that it all felt to me like it was one long moment, one long generation of my living.

And so I've internalized this part of me, I think, where the most painful parts of my life are the ones that feel like they have extended for years and years and years.

And the most pleasureful ones are the ones that feel almost inaccessible in terms of how much time I got to bask in that pleasure.

And so I would spend a lot of this book trying to square that, and trying to square it in a moment where, as I mentioned, time feels especially elastic and bewildering.

I think lockdown perhaps did a lot of things to our brains, but one thing that I did to my brain was really kind of mess up my relationship with linear time.

And so a lot of this book was trying to not only be nostalgic for the sake of recapturing the past.

I'm not that interested in that.

But what I was more interested in was kind of fragmenting the time I spent in moments of anguish and trying to square that with the time I spent in absolute pleasure, which is an interesting thing to do, particularly when thinking about Cleveland basketball.

(Jim laughs) Because much of the time that Cleveland fans spent were in anguish.

Or to be a fan of any team, you spent a lot of time in anguish to be clear, and then every now and then, something happens, and it's miraculous.

- When you were writing this book, did you do a chronology of events in your life or events in the world?

I mean, how did that come together?

Did that frame the narrative or... - No, and this is where basketball came in handy.

I was, instead of kind of making a chronology of my own living, I kind of made a chronology of my living as lens through basketball.

And you can kind of tell the book, you know, for example, when I'm writing about being unhoused, the big way I squared that time period was by saying, I remember the Cavs were in the playoffs playing this team because I remember, you know, I offered that scene in the book of me walking by the bar and looking in the window and watching the game.

And so, in a way, basketball, my relationship with basketball also helped me in terms of memory recovery.

- [Wayne] Wow.

- And grounding myself in time.

And some of this historical, you know, I talk about the bombings in Cleveland, and the only way that I was able to unearth that history was by thinking back to those 1976 Richmond Colosseum Cavs and Dick Snyder and those guys and squaring the reality that while this miracle season was happening, the city was also exploding.

You know, these kind of contrasts.

- So, Raymond Antrobus, in his review of "There's Always This Year" for The Guardian said this.

He described your previous book, "A Little Devil in America" as quote, "Conjuring the feeling of a writer running for his life, running out of time, running circles around his traumas and joys."

Now, I think that same characterization of the energy in the book is true also for "There's Always This Year."

How do you react to Antrobus' observation?

- I think it's true.

I mean, I think actually it's more so in this book, you know?

I think the pace with which I write, and I think as people saw last night if they were at the Richmond Auditorium Pace at which I read is this kind of, there's a eagerness to it.

It is almost like, you know, a big part of this is, in a way, I came to writing much later than I think a lot of other writers, you know?

I didn't go to school for it.

I was not great at school.

You know, I didn't study it.

I have no, quote-unquote, "formal education."

And so I kind of, my path to writing started, in earnest, maybe like 11 or 12 years ago in terms of writing books.

And one thing that brings me to the form of a book specifically is that idea that I am urgently attacking something that I feel like I have to kind of get outside of me, so it lives beyond my own mind.

I met someone last night who was talking about their issues with journaling.

And they said, "Well, the longer I go through a day, the more things kind of just fill up in my brain.

And then I sit down to write and I don't know which thing to extract."

And I think that was a great, you know, for me, I'm like, that is the process.

That is the process of my living where I feel like I have lived an entire life that allows me to kind of turn to the page and say, "I need to get this somewhere other than my own head because I have kind of a backlog of excitements and a backlog..." It's not just traumas, quite frankly.

I have a backlog of excitements and pleasures and interests and obsessions that if I do not extract them and evangelize about them, so to speak, then not only do they kind of grow stagnant in my own mind, but then I can't make room for any other pleasures, you know?

So, it's an ongoing process.

- Your writing is unflinchingly honest about your own life, brushes with the law, struggles with faith, relationships and more.

How did you find the courage to write that?

I mean, that would intimidate...

I mean, that would intimidate or stop many, many people from even wanting to attempt that.

I mean, the result is an incredible book.

- Thank you.

- But how?

- Well, I will say, I mean, before I pat myself on the back, this is my sixth book.

(group laughs) It took, you know... Yeah, it took a while.

- (indistinct) to have you pat yourself on the back.

- I feel like if this were my first book, I wouldn't have been able to do it.

You have to, for me, I think through everything you create, you teach yourself how to make the next thing.

And through every story I tell, I teach myself how to kind of conquer the next story.

And I found that in my early books specifically, I was kind of shying away from and running away from these parts of my history, specifically my incarcerations or run-ins with law and my being unhoused and all these things.

I was running away from sharing that part of my story I think because I felt that in my sharing it, it might diminish what people believed me to be.

You know, I worked kind of hard to get to this place where despite not having a, quote-unquote, "formal education in writing," I was seen as, you know, I thought, "Oh gosh, well, if people knew these things about me, well..." But also those things define me as much as anything else.

In a way, you know, that was my school.

Some of the earliest writing that I learned as one of the earliest people I learned from were people I was incarcerated with.

I wrote alongside them.

You know, it's a part of my narrative, It's a part of my history that I'm very proud of.

And I also wanted to put it in this book because I wanted to really be clear about the fact that this book is about, one, the miracle of making it many times over.

And two, redefining what making it is.

Making it is not only to be someone who is like LeBron James.

Making it is sometimes surviving in a place that you love and not leaving.

- So LeBron James is one of the recurring characters in the book.

And you come back to him again in multiple different ways.

One of the things I, as we were walking in, I told you that one of the things that really resonated with me was your reflection on when he decided to leave Cleveland for Miami.

So two questions.

One, what did it mean to you personally as a young man, but also to your community, when he decided to leave?

And then, what did it mean when he decided to come back?

- Yeah, well, the leaving... You know, I was...

I'm not a Cavs fan.

I like the Cavs, but I'm a Minnesota Timberwolves fan, which is not always good news.

(Jim and Wayne laughing) Certainly was not good news last night.

But I really, as I wrote the book, I really kind of loved watching my friends rapidly go through the stages of grief, especially because I think one thing that people don't remember about the decision, as it was named, was that it was kind of a prolonged, dramatic thing.

- It was torturous.

- It was torturous, yeah.

I mean, massively.

- Particularly for the people in Cleveland.

- Yeah, because there was a point where, early on, I think people in Cleveland, they were grounded in the reality that he was gonna leave.

And then the longer it drew out, they're kinda like, "Well, you know, maybe there's a chance," (Jim laughs) which made it so much worse when he left, I think.

I was of the belief that he was gonna leave all along.

However, another part of the decision people don't recall is that people in Cleveland were not, they wanted him gone for a while, which is funny to fathom now.

But after that last Celtics series, there are people who are kinda like, "Ah, we're not gonna get anywhere with this guy."

"You know, he's maybe not..." As sports fans do, you know?

- Yeah, yeah.

- "He's maybe not our guy."

- "Eat their own."

- Yeah, yeah.

And so I took a lot of pleasure in watching my friends maneuver those stages of grief, and then nudging them and saying, "This is a little bit your fault."

(Jim and Wayne laughs) But I will say I was so much more moved when he came back.

And I was more moved when he came back because I wasn't at home at the time.

I was living in Connecticut.

I was home of your precious Whalers.

Once precious Whalers.

- He never gets over that.

- There's book my shoulder.

- Yeah, yeah, yeah.

(group laughs) And it felt like his homecoming, and I was not happily living in Connecticut, you know?

I longed for home.

I wanted to go home.

And his homecoming felt like something that I wanted but could not access.

And I got to watch the early stages of it from afar and feel like I was a part of something in Ohio where I dreamed of being.

And that was meaningful to me, significantly more meaningful when the championship happened, which I still think is maybe the greatest NBA championship I've witnessed in my lifetime.

I mean, it's just singularly impressive.

- So one of the recurring characters in your book is your father.

- Yeah.

- Tell us about your relationship with him and his relationship with basketball.

- Yeah, my father and I have a very interesting relationship.

I think that I admire him greatly.

And I think, too, that the way my brain works, I mean, I think that I'm obsessive about things and I am hyper-focused on the things I'm excited about and I go down rabbit holes with ease.

All these things I realize I'm pulling from my father.

The degree to which I talk with my hands and the way I kind of meander, all these things are things I pulled from witnessing my father, paying close attention to my father.

And so I think I owe him a great deal of my actual material living.

And I think we find each other perhaps hard to relate to, as, you know.

And I also think that to have lived the life I lived, where my formative years, my teens, early 20s, I was constantly in and out of jail and constantly, you know, it creates a level of anxiety and obligation and duty and frustration, I'm sure, for any parent with a child who's constantly in the throes of literally needing to be bailed out of things, you know, or needing a place to stay.

And so I think that, I often joke, but it's not a joke in a way that my life doesn't make a lot of sense to me now.

Because, you know, if I even think back to 10 years ago, this is not what I envisioned.

And I think that specifically projected onto my father, I imagine my life makes even less sense to him.

You know?

And I try to honor that, you know?

Through whatever complications our relationship may have, I try to honor the fact that he probably is looking at my life and saying, "I didn't expect this."

You know?

(Jim laughs) 'Cause I didn't expect that.

- Well, so what did you expect?

10 years ago, what did you think the next decade was gonna look like and what changed?

What turned?

- This is a great question, and I'm glad you asked it.

I had, at this point, about 10 years, or maybe a little before, maybe '11, '12, I had just gotten a full-time job with benefits, which I know doesn't seem like much, but I had a pretty extensive record, you know?

So it was hard to get, you know, I worked retail, I worked in diners, and I had finally gotten, you know, I was like serving all the time.

And I loved serving.

I was good at it, actually.

- Yeah, that's cause, it's always, always hard.

- Always hard, yeah.

- Always hard.

- So I'd gotten a job with benefits.

I was working in a healthcare startup.

And because of that, I only ever wanted to write one book.

At this point, I was getting heavily into poetry.

You know, poetry was kind of, I had fallen in love with poems, and I had an opportunity to publish one poetry book.

And that was in about 2014.

So I wrote it, it came out in 2016, and I thought, "That's it."

Because, you know, my thing was I can't leave this job.

You know, I had so much anxiety around the scarcity.

I had seen it play out.

I had seen my applications get shoved to the side, I'd seen my interviews get kind of shoved to the side.

And so I thought, "I'll write my one book, a poem, then I'll stay at this job."

And what happened was an old friend of mine you know, came up on bands on the scene.

I was on music scene, I was was working for a local publisher in Columbus named Two Dollar Radio.

And they wanted to publish a book of essays for me and I was like, "Well, no, you know, I got this job.

I gotta stay in this job."

And at this point, I was living in Connecticut working remotely, and I eventually gave in and they published a book of mine called "They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us."

And we at the time thought, you know, this book will sell maybe like 500 copies in Columbus.

That'll be a real success.

Really, I mean, genuinely, you know?

- Yeah.

- And that did not happen.

You know, it sold significantly more.

- Took off.

- It took off in a big way, and I think it had to make some real decisions about what I could do.

And me being of that scarcity anxiety mindset, I saved up enough money.

At this time, I was also writing part-time freelance for MTV News, New York Times.

I saved up enough money to, I moved back to Columbus and saved up enough money to pay my rent for a full year.

And so I paid my landlord my rent for the full year, which I'm sure he was thrilled about.

(Jim laughs) And I told myself, you know, if after this year, I don't make it with writing, I'll go back to...

I'll go back to whatever.

- I want to get back to your father.

Has he read this book?

- No.

I don't know.

- No?

- He's not.

I don't think he reads much of my work.

He doesn't know of its existence because a part of it was excerpted in the New Yorker, and it is a part about him sweating while he eats.

And as funny as a New Yorker, they had to fact check that.

You know, they had to call him to fact check like, "Are you (indistinct)?"

So he knows of its existence.

I don't think he spends much time with my work though.

And I think maybe that's for the better.

I don't know... You know, I don't know... To be the subject, even though I think I write about him lovingly in the book, I think even that, you know...

I don't know if I had a child, I don't know if I would want to read their memories of me.

You know?

I don't know if I would want to read the version of me that exists in their memory.

- So the book is not just about LeBron James, right.

You also pay homage to a whole universe of star basketball players who are dominant on the playground, dominant in high school arenas, but that was as far as their star traveled.

The question that I wanna pick up on something you said earlier, do we define ascension wrong?

Do we define who succeeds wrong?

- I... One, I love that question because it allows me to say in part that, when going into this book, I wanted to alter perhaps the definition of what ascension is.

Oftentimes we think of ascension as an upward rising motion, which is I think literally by definition, right?

But when I was working on this book, I began to redefine my understanding of ascension as anything that takes you from the place you were to the place you are not anymore, the place you want to go.

And so, you know, for me, yes, I think the idea of making it is warped in this way where it does favor these narrow pathways to success, capital S, success, that leaves so many people behind.

When, in a way...

In the book, I write about Estaban Weaver, who's, you know, one of the great legends of Central Ohio and all of Ohio basketball, who never made it beyond high school, right?

And he hasn't played, you know, he played when I was a kid.

You know, when I was, in '96, '97, '98.

There are kids in Columbus who weren't even born when he played who know his name, who revere him, who love him.

That's making it to me.

If your voice, if your name kind of echoes generously on the playgrounds that you played on when you were young, and if your game influences players who weren't even alive when you played, you've made it to some degree.

And it doesn't matter if you got to the league.

It matters how you touch a community, you know?

I grew up watching all...

I grew up watching a lot of college basketball, a lot of high school basketball, and I love the college players who were just kind of legendary at a school for four years.

And, you know, gosh, I mean, you know, we're kind of in Big East country here, and there were so many guys like that.

And, you know, not everyone came through here like Lamar Odom and played the... You know, there are guys at Providence.

I remember like God Shammgod.

Like, folks like that who were so unique and had an impact on the communities that they were in.

And that's making it.

- Yeah.

I was tempted to ask you this, but I didn't put it into the battery, but Name, Image, Likeness is changing the college game in profound ways.

- Yeah.

- What's your thoughts on that?

- I think it is great that players have autonomy and access and all these things, but I also think that... Gosh, I'm trying not to be an old school purist, but it's too... (Jim laughs) - It's hard not to.

- It is hard, yeah.

I really love seeing guys, you know, not everyone's gonna make the league.

And so it's really cool to have guys stay at a place for four years.

And I know it still happens every now and then, but now, you know, the transfer portal is growing every year, and I think it's- - And whole teams turnover season to season and it's like... - Yeah, I mean, Cincinnati right now.

You know, if we're thinking about Ohio (indistinct), Cincinnati's whole team is pretty much out the door, you know?

It's like, I don't know how they're gonna feel the team or put a team on the floor next year.

- So I...

There's a section of the book where you describe the block at the end of game seven in 20... What is it, 2016?

- Yeah.

- The NBA finals.

- [Hanif] Yeah.

- I went back and found it on YouTube and watched it.

And it's as dramatic a moment as you describe it to be.

- Absolutely.

- What is it about sports that makes it so compelling for so many of us to be fans and to watch and to get lost in those moments?

- Yeah, well, I think it's the drama of devotion.

You know?

One, a funny thing about that block is the way that it built... First, I misremembered that game.

I mean, if we're talking about basketball memory, I used to think...

I went so long think.

Gosh, the game was so back and forth.

It was so, you know, chaotic and hectic.

(indistinct) But no one scored.

No one scored for several minutes in that fourth quarter, which made that block so massive, you know?

But largely, and I mentioned this last night when I was at the auditorium doing my reading, there's only one championship, right?

Only one team wins it, so the vast majority of teams do not.

And so the odds are, you are rooting for a team that is not going to win a championship.

In odds even more, you're rooting for a team that doesn't even have a chance to win a championship.

I know that right now, geographically, I'm in a place where people are rooting for a basketball team that does have a fair chance winning championship.

(Jim laughs) Most of us don't have a Jayson Tatum.

You know, we're not as lucky.

- Right, right.

- Yeah.

- But still, one has to kind of decide through their longstanding tenured affection that they're gonna keep returning to this thing.

I'm a Minnesota Timberwolves fan.

They've been awful most of my adult life.

And I still return every season because of the power of devotion that says, "I believe in this team and I want to tie myself to their fortunes.

And if that leads to heartbreak, then that's an easy fix.

It's an easy repair."

- So one of the things that, you also reflect on a really powerful Nike ad when LeBron came back.

We had Robert Putnam, a Harvard political scientist at the university just last week, talking about the loss of community.

And one of the things he did not talk about was sport.

How important is sport, whether we're rooting for our local team in whatever league or even sport on a playground, in building that sense of community?

- You know, in the book, I talk about Scottwood, the school that was across the street from my father's house that was a basketball court as well.

I mean, it was a school, but it was our community court.

And I also write in the beginning of the book about what happened early in lockdown, at least in Columbus, where all the rims were taken off the backboards.

I think that happened in a lot of places.

- [Jim] A lot of places.

- Yeah.

- Yeah.

- And Scottwood is one of those places where the rims never came back on the, you know, goals.

And the decision it seemed was just like, "Well, no one plays on this court anymore, so we don't need to do this."

"We don't need to repaint the court and put the rims back up because no one plays on this court."

So that decision is made.

And when that decision is made, the community reflects that decision making.

So I say this to say, last year, when this book came out, I had to go to Scottwood to do some press thing.

And they had, just a month earlier, decided, now we're gonna put the rims back up.

We're gonna put the rims back up, put fresh nets on them, repaint the lines on the court.

And I walked back out there and there were kids playing a full court game, you know?

And there were not only kids playing five on five full court, there were kids waiting for the next, you know, there were five kids like we got next.

- [Jim] Yeah.

- And so it's important for... And it actually didn't matter how good they were or were not.

It was that they were there because they had the tools they needed to be there.

So it is important, I think, for communities to at least not make those decisions and say, "We're not gonna take care of this hollowed ground that folks can play upon because no one's gonna play on it anyway."

It's important, I think, for communities to say, "We're actually gonna care for this and give people the opportunity to arrive to it," because that there are folks who are eager for that opportunity, who are turned away from it by merely not having what they need to engage in what they want to engage in.

- Hanif Abdurraqib, the book is, "There's Always This Year."

It's masterful.

Thank you so much for being with us.

- Thank you, yeah.

- That is all the time we have this week.

But if you wanna know more about "Story in the Public Square," you can find us on social media or visit pellcenter.org where you can always catch up on previous episodes.

For G. Wayne Miller, I'm Jim Ludes asking you to join us again next time for more "Story in the Public Square."

(uplifting music) (uplifting music continues) (uplifting music continues) (uplifting music continues) (lively music)