Hanif Abdurraqib

LONGLISTED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD • NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • #1 NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A “powerful” (The Guardian) reflection on basketball, life, and home—from the author of the National Book Award finalist A Little Devil in America “Mesmerizing . . . not only the most original sports book I’ve ever read but one of the most moving books I’ve ever read, period.”—Steve James, director of Hoop Dreams ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: Vulture, Chicago Public Library, BookPage A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: The New York Times Book Review, Time, The Washington Post, NPR, The Boston Globe, The New York Public Library, Chicago Public Library, Publishers Weekly, Kirkus Reviews, Book Riot, Electric Lit WINNER OF THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD Growing up in Columbus, Ohio, in the 1990s, Hanif Abdurraqib witnessed a golden era of basketball, one in which legends like LeBron James were forged and countless others weren’t. His lifelong love of the game leads Abdurraqib into a lyrical, historical, and emotionally rich exploration of what it means to make it, who we think deserves success, the tension between excellence and expectation, and the very notion of role models, all of which he expertly weaves together with intimate, personal storytelling. “Here is where I would like to tell you about the form on my father’s jump shot,” Abdurraqib writes. “The truth, though, is that I saw my father shoot a basketball only one time.” There’s Always This Year is a triumph, brimming with joy, pain, solidarity, comfort, outrage, and hope. No matter the subject of his keen focus—whether it’s basketball, or music, or performance—Hanif Abdurraqib’s exquisite writing is always poetry, always profound, and always a clarion call to radically reimagine how we think about our culture, our country, and ourselves. LONGLISTED FOR THE ANDREW CARNEGIE MEDAL FOR EXCELLENCE IN NONFICTION

On Basketball and Ascension

There's Always This Year

Lindsay

The right hand fashioned in the right way is a signifier, an unspoken vocabulary. Let us, together, consider any neighborhood, or any collective, or any group of people who might otherwise be neglected in the elsewheres they must traverse for survival, be it school, or work, or the inside of a cage. Let us consider, again, what it means to have a place as reprieve, a people as reprieve, somewhere the survival comes easy. Should there not be a language for that? A signifier not only for who is to be let in but also, who absolutely gotta stay the fuck out. There are a lot of things our enemies get wrong, to be clear, but one thing they most certainly get wrong is the impulse that they should be 'in' on anything, and that which aren't in on is the result of some kind of evil.

In their sophomore season, the two left no doubt: clean shaven, shorts so baggy that the fabric trailed behind them like a herd of horses during a fast break. And there were many fast breaks.

Let it be known that the fab five were always what some would consider brash, which is to say they came through talking shit from the word go. Talking shit to anyone who happened to be within earshot and that sometimes meant talking shit to each other. You can always tell who did or didn't grow up playing the dozens by who clutches their pearls when they see some Black folks talking shit to each other, to their competition, to the world. All kinds of affection tucked underneath the talking of shit. ... And listen, ain't that a kind of love? To say 'you are worthy of the time it takes to dismantle you.' Yes, do not waste language on our enemies. But an enemy, to me implies a permanence. A thorn that cannot be removed. An opponent is different than an enemy, even if you see that opponent twice a year. If you know you're good, an opponent is a temporary roadblock, something to be taken apart and moved out of your way. Before the fab five knew this, Ali knew this. Even in the years before Ali knew this, Black folks who couldn't talk shit to their bosses or whoever presided over their lives knew this, because they'd run home and talk their shit to anyone who would listen. Shit talking is a right, a gift, a mercy with a lineage all its own.

So much of the machinery of race and/or culture driven fear relies on who is willing to be convinced of what. How easy it is to manufacture weaponry out of someone else's living if the emphasis is placed on the right or wrong word, or if that word is repeated enough, perhaps in a hushed tone.

If I had any heroes at all, I know none of them gave a fuck about the targets being stitched to their immaculate garments. The first way I felt myself operating on the other side of America's fear was being young and idolizing the people America was trying to convince me to be afraid of.

This is what propelled my love for the fab five the most in their sophomore season. In the Fall of 1992 and early 1993, when announcers sometimes talked about their black socks and baggy uniforms, and bald heads and trash talk and the music they listened to and the clothes they wore before and after games and the way they walked into arenas with a lean and a slight dip and isn't it funny the lengths our enemies go to in order to say 'I am afraid I am being left behind, and then who will love me'?

I have better than I have wanted to be at giving in to the foolishness that allows us to sometimes mistake the desire to not be lonely for love.

Convenience is also mistaken for something a little bit like love or a lot like love, depending on what is at stake and what part of a life is being made easier.

When a city names a place 'unlivable' it suggests that there is something wrong or damaged with the people who do love there. It suggests that their lives are expendable down to the homes or apartments they live in. And just like that, the lens turns toward property, toward land, toward the value of vacancy. Don't play like you haven't heard this one before. When you create the conditions of war, you get to name the places it happens.

But 'is real' and 'not real' is sometimes a matter of who is witnessing the miracle and who can be tricked into a suspension of disbelief at the alter of light.

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