There's Always This Year : : on Basketball and Ascension

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Includes index.
Pregame -- First quarter: City as its true self -- A timeout in praise of legendary Ohio aviators -- Intermission: On fathers, sons, and ghosts, holy or otherwise: He got game (1998) -- Second quarter: Flawed and mortal gods -- A timeout in praise of legendary Ohio aviators -- Intermission: On the darkest heavens: Above the rim (1994) -- Third quarter: The mercy of exits, the magic of fruitless pleading -- A timeout in praise of legendary Ohio aviators -- Intermission: On hustles: White men can't jump (1992) -- Fourth quarter: City as its false self -- A timeout in praise of legendary Ohio aviators -- A brief postgame scouting report in praise of legendary Ohio aviators.
"While Hanif Abdurraqib is an acclaimed author, a gifted poet, and one of our culture's most insightful music critics, he is most of all, at heart, an Ohioan. Growing up in Columbus in the '90s, Abdurraqib witnessed a golden era of basketball, one in which legends like LeBron 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 tensions between excellence and expectation, and the very notion of role-models, all of which he expertly weaves together with memoir: "Here is where I would like to tell you about the form on my father's jumpshot," Abdurraqib writes. "The truth, though, is that I saw my father shoot a basketball only one time.""-- Provided by publisher.

REVIEWS & SUMMARIES

Booklist Review
Publishers Weekly Review
Summary / Annotation
Table of Contents
Excerpt
Author Notes

COMMUNITY REVIEWS

My god, this is a gorgeous book. submitted by redwood on July 16, 2024, 10:58am I do not know or care much about basketball. I think that Indiana’s reputation as the basketball state is overblown—when I was growing up, the attention on football was far greater. Here, Hanif Abdurraqib makes a good case for Ohio being the real basketball state.

If this were a novel, its overarching plot would be LeBron James’s career arc as seen through a distinctly Ohioan lens. But it’s not, so it’s just as much about the nature of Columbus and Cleveland, Abdurraqib’s relationship to love and the criminal justice system, and what it means to be alive. James and Abdurraqib are about the same age, and the book ends with short poems on both of them.

The book feels like kin to Ross Gay’s Be Holding (2020). Both books are undeniably about basketball, but are magical for how they make basketball the foundation of revelatory insight into Blackness, masculinity, and various kinds of flight.

Some books create their own time zones, and this is one of them. From the first sentence, it sang, and it restructured my weekend. It’s also preoccupied with time, divided into four quarters with subsections that count down like a game clock. This is a book-length essay with propulsive momentum. I love prose by poets, but I’ve never seen prose that so effectively makes use of stanza breaks. My heart lifted whenever Abdurraqib carried a sentence across sections—I was constantly

underlining sentences that were beautiful and true. Sometimes, poems sneak in. There’s music, there are transcendent moments of basketball, there’s the sweat on Abdurraqib’s father’s head when he eats good food. There are odes to longing, love letters to urban Ohio that stand in opposition to enemy characterizations of it; there are paragraphs on the nature of an enemy. It’s about faith, whether in a religion, a team, or a place. Most of all, on leaving and the ascension of return.

Read this whether or not you like sports.

Beautiful, Deep, Not Really About Basketball. submitted by cdeusen on August 19, 2024, 1:36pm This book is about basketball but it is also very much not about basketball. Like an ice fisherman, Abdurraqib takes the chisel of basketball to open up emotional depths not evidently connected to the sport. His warm prose and inviting tone speak equally to readers who hoop and those who don’t. Abdurraqib explores legacy, community, freedom, and other topics, spending time to explore and explain his experiences in ever-unfolding detail. I’m not sure that I understood this book entirely, but I certainly enjoyed reading it.