non-romance romance, #6: There's Always This Year by Hanif Abdurraqib

how can you not be romantic about bas(k)e(t)ball

Another entry in my Non-Romance Romance series, where I talk about literature/film that is not typically classed as romances with romance as a framework. Now a monthly series! This one is about sports, but also one of the best books I’ve ever read. Happy NBA Playoffs to you all—the best time to be on Twitter and one of the worst times to be a Philadelphia sports fan.

Sports romances are not, expressly, my thing. I’ve read a handful and enjoyed them. KD Casey’s gay baseball romances are very fun and I think Alice Coldbreath’s Prizefighter series counts. Even in an effort to prepare for the way I am cleaving this review with the topic of this newsletter, I read Nobody’s Baby But Mine by Susan Elizabeth Philips, of her Chicago Stars series, only to realize twelve hours after finishing it that it still was pretty tangentially related to sports and I could not shoehorn it into my thesis as hoped.¹ Though this subgenre is not one I am seeking out, I do think sports are very romantic. Or Romantic. Or that the teams themselves are romance novels. 

The capitalization and parts of speech are intentionally imprecise here. Because obviously when I say “the 2022 Philadelphia Phillies were a romance novel,” a 26 man baseball team is not a genre fiction romance novel. They didn’t even really get a happy ever after anyway (they lost steam/luck/magic after Game 3 in the World Series and fell to the Astros).² But I found them incredibly romantic, like a form of synesthesia where watching a bunch of himbos go yard was the same experience as reading a romance novel or falling in love. The 2023 team was less romantic (maybe the absence of beloved son, Rhys Hoskins, all season from a spring training injury, contributed to that). The 2024 team’s genre distinction remains to be seen. As ever, I have high hopes. 

I didn’t invent calling things romantic that have nothing to do with Romanticism, romance novels, medieval romances or interpersonal entanglements. I’m not using it wrong for rhetorical effect; the term has had this slippage since at least the 1600s. In the OED’s entry for ‘romantic,’ the fourth definition is “[c]haracterized or marked by, or invested with, a sense of romance (romance n. A.I.5a); arising from, suggestive of, or appealing to, an idealized, fantastic, or sentimental view of life or reality; atmospheric, evocative, glamorous.” The related definition for the noun is “The character or quality that makes something appeal strongly to the imagination, and sets it apart from the mundane; an air, feeling, or sense of wonder, mystery, and remoteness from everyday life; redolence or suggestion of, or association with, adventure, heroism, chivalry, etc.; mystique, glamour.”

This is what I imagine Brad Pitt at Billy Beane meant when he said “how can you not be romantic about baseball?” in Moneyball, the great statistics movies of our time about the Oakland A’s trying to build a new kind of baseball team on a shoe string budget. It is also the definition I think Hanif Abdurraqib invokes in many of twenty-one times he uses the word “romantic” in his newest book There’s Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension.

Like a lot of Abdurraqib’s writing, there’s the subject, providing the structure of the essays, and then there’s what the book is about. There’s Always This Year uses basketball as a backbone (and a literal game clock on the pages, pacing the book and providing enjambment to thoughts) to Abdurraqib’s stories about growing up in Columbus, Ohio, an experience inextricable both from being a basketball fan and from watching LeBron James’ rise to greatness, first in Ohio, then out of Ohio, and then miraculously, romantically, back in Ohio. 

“The floater, the most romantic shot in the game when done right, guided toward the rim with a heave and wish, how the follow-through after the ball leaves the hand can look like an overeager wave, like saying goodbye to the person you never wanted to leave.” ³ 

Me reading the book was always going to be filtered through baseball, my favorite sport, but the connection was amplified because I picked up my copy of the book at an author event at the Free Library of Philadelphia where Abdurraqib spoke the night before opening day (the Phillies got rained out and wouldn’t play their first game until two days later. I was there and it was a 9-3 loss to the Braves). At the event, he said something along the tweet below, to acknowledge the potential energy in the room that of course related to the themes of his book he was about to talk about. 

Sports teams, and their fans possession of them, are irrevocably tied to place, until some billionaire decides they need a new place. The Braves⁴ are the oldest continuously operating team in major league sports, but they only became the Atlanta Braves in 1966. I don’t fully understand how this counts--nobody who was watching them in Boston or Milwaukee could go see them in Atlanta and that seems meaningful. Some cities have two fan bases that have historic geographical splits (Cubs to the North, White Sox to the South of Chicago), though some have so much overlap, the splits happen in households instead of neighborhoods (Yankees/Mets, Liverpool/Everton). 

Abdurraqib now owns a home in the Eastside neighborhood of Columbus, where he grew up, a neighborhood that has remained a black community, even as Columbus experiences the glimmering threat and encroachment of millennial gentrification. There’s Always This Year focuses more on the love of place as expressed through sports than loyalty to any one team. Abdurraqib calls his relationship with the Cavs “geographical” rather than “hyperemotional.” The stories are grounded in settings, whether it is pick-up basketball courts where Abdurraqib and his peers parse social hierarchies, or high school gyms where the best players of those pick-up games start getting state-wide and national attention, or Akron, Ohio, home of LeBron James the Cleveland Cavaliers’ number one draft pick. James’ place in Ohio is all the upward momentum leading to three-almost championships, until there a rejection of place when he goes to Miami and actually wins it, until again there’s a return and finally a Cleveland championship in 2016. 

I didn’t grow up in the place of my sports loyalties, which were adopted from my dad, who also is not from Philadelphia and has in fact, never lived here long term. The sports team that I mostly associate with Abdurraqib is the Minnesota Timberwolves, given that I’ve followed him on Twitter for years and he tweets through the highs and lows of the Wolves fandom. (The Sixers seem actively interested in killing the city of Philadelphia right now, so I’ve adopted a soft spot for Abdurraqib’s Wolves.) He did the hype video for their playoff run this year and it made me cry in my office. I’ve looked and I don’t know why Ohio-native Abdurraqib is a Wolves fan especially, but I also know that all the geography in the world can’t fight what feels like fate, landing on a team that is yours.⁵

“I’m not especially easy to fool, but I am a romantic, which I suppose means at the right hour, I’m everybody’s fool.”

Romance is a genre that sometimes feels removed from place. We call the world of romance “Romancelandia,” a proper noun place name both meaning the space we occupy together as a community and the world of the novels where a Duke can not only fall in love with a serving girl, he’ll marry her too. The term is playful, winking and nodding at the mythic scale of romance’s stakes, consequences and that fictional guarantee of a happily ever after. The book may be set in England, but it takes place in Romancelandia. 

But reading There’s Always This Year and getting those synesthesic sensations of “this is a romance, between Hanif and Ohio, and Hanif and LeBron, and Hanif and basketball, and Hanif and jumping high in order to land in the exact same place,” I feel like I have counter that idea that things are more romantic when their spatially untethered. I think they might be easier, but they’re not inherently more romantic. Hanif and Ohio/LeBron/basketball/jumping is not a romance without a violence, borne by the body of the author and with him bearing witness. There are the romantic coincidences of Dickens, like the Cavs getting the number one pick the year LeBron would be drafted, and there are the alignments that are so violent and painful that no benevolent controlling destiny can be credited, like the killing of Tamir Rice by a white police officer, the night of a regular season game the year LeBron comes back to Ohio.

In a book about place, Abdurraqib cycles through time fluidly. There’s a linear progression in the book that follows the game clock and his childhood into teen years into adulthood, but stories will jump time forward or backward in a controlled sort of stream of consciousness that has always been a part of all his books that I have read. The game clock, one of the formal values⁶ of a basketball game keeps ticking away as you read, but much like an NBA game, where two minutes can take two minutes or two minutes can take a half hour, the clock does not interrupt at regular intervals. But like a smart coach,⁷ Abdurraqib makes the pace match his game narrative, so you are experiencing time horizontally with him, expanding backwards and forwards, as opposed to the vertical slice of a moment that happens when we are in our lives, beholden to linear time, where time literally moves at one rate, independent of our experience of it.

One of the framing stories in the book is about the inability to imagine a younger version of those we love, even if we knew when they were young. Abdurraqib tells about seeing his best friend’s daughter make the same face he has seen on her mother, but also knowing that he struggles to imagine his friend at the same toddler age. Even photos of young LeBron, who Abdurraqib watched play, compound with the age that he knows is there on the player’s face and body now. I won’t spoil the language of how Abdurraqib returns to this image in the back half of the book, of fragmented memories of other people’s youthful visages. But something about it suggests to me that time is not the expansive x-axis of infinity, and cannot be, for any one person’s life, any more than a singular place can be. But there are moments where they expand into the romantic infinite. And sometimes those moments are playoff games.

“The long way home is still a way home. I am a devotee of these politics, overly romantic as they might be.” 

I loved this book, as a sports fan, as a poetry fan, and as a romantic, three things that I can’t even begin to separate into disaggregate identities. This is my third baseball season living near my favorite team and I hope I always find romance in being able to go see them hit a bunch of home runs or make a bunch of boneheaded baserunning decisions. The home runs will be easier to keep rose-colored glasses on for, but the Phillies are the losingest sports teams in the history of sports, so there is certainly more bad baserunning in my future. But the year I moved here, I got to take my dad, life-long Phillies fan, to a World Series game. How can you not be romantic about that?

Don’t tell them what happens for the rest of the series. Suspended in time and air, like a ball going yard!

recommendations and upcoming

Bull Durham (dir. Ron Shelton, 1988): It’s getting warm: watch the hottest movie of all time. Baseball also happens in it.

The Right Stuff (dir. Philip Kaufmann, 1983): Another one of the conceits that I won’t spoil exactly in Abdurraqib’s book involves John Glenn. If you are still wondering if a romance can be a team of guys, sharing a goal, watch this. If you watch it and still disagree, we’ll never be on the same page.

Secret Base documentaries on YouTube: Just pick one that seems interesting based on your scale of time commitment/one about one of your hometown teams. The Phillies one tend to involve the Phillies losing (seeing: losingest sports team in history), but this one is about a wild win of theirs. I’m committing myself to watching The History of the Seattle Mariners this weekend—much beloved by my little intersecting circles at film and sports. There’s a romance to all of them!

Following a NBA Twitter account in a foreign language: the scale of the NBA season grinds me down and I always lose steam following the Sixers. But you know what I love? French slang and curses being hurled at the Sixers in praise or in detriment. I get a lot of joy out of this. The only problem is for the first six months I followed them, I forgot about time zones and regularly thought the Sixers were playing afternoon games that I kept missing.

The Windflower by Tom and Sharon Curtis: This is a romance about what would happened if pirates kidnapped you and they were all in love with you. They’re a sports team, but their playoffs is pillaging the British Navy. Also look for a Reformed Rakes episode on this book with a very special guest next week!

And just speaking of a bunch of boys being in love with you, when’s the last time you listened to One Direction’s Four, a perfect album?⁸

La Chimera (dir. Alice Rohrwacher, 2023): Not strictly a sports romance at all, though there is a team of dudes with a common goal in it and some trick plays) But the next newsletter will be about ghosts! And this movie that I love, which is my new favorite ghost romance.

1. The hero is a quarterback and this role is involved in the meet-cute-disaster, but the bulk of the book takes place during the off season. Football is really just a stand-in for “male anxiety about aging and performance,” which is not to say that this is not a theme in sports narratives, but it felt substantially further removed from football than any of the KD Casey baseball books I have read.

2. Maybe don’t tell any Phillies fans, including my dad, but I don’t think I would trade getting to go to Game 3 of this series with my dad for the Phillies actually winning the Series. So who is to say what the HEA is. 

3. All the block quotes are quotations from There’s Always This Year.

4. Don’t explain it to me. I’ll also fully cop that surely one of the reasons I think this is a little stupid claim is that I hate the Braves and I am a fan of the longest operating, one name, one city team in all of professional sports. That seems more romantic to me! 

5. I woke up one day and decided I was going to get into soccer, the only game the next day was between Tottenham Hotspurs and Liverpool. Liverpool won and I’ve been blessed/damned ever since. That “only game” was the 2019 Champions League final, the game immediately after the greatest comeback in Champions League history, when Liverpool returned to Anfield down 3 on the aggregate and scored four unanswered goals, without their best player, Mohammed Salah, and with two of the goals coming within two minutes of each other and the last goal coming in a beautiful, tricky way that still makes me cry when I watch it. Despite the fact that I didn’t watch the game live and in fact became a fan a little over a month later.

6. Sports have different values. I think we can think of them in terms of modern formalism an sometimes they are as distinguishing at the rules of play are from each other. One of soccer’s minimizing is stops, this is why we have time added at the end, rather than stopping the clock. There are out of bounds in soccer, but if the play keeps going after a ball goes out an inch, play keeps going. This is unfathomable in something like American football, the game of inches and of starts and stops, where the review cameras are usually for checking that extra inch of in and out.

7. The only sport I know less about strategy than basketball is football, but I do know when to comment about how much time is left on the clock and various coaches’ reputations for managing the time.

8. I’m not saying soccer replaced One Direction in my life, but I did pick my favorite Liverpool played based on who was dating Perrie Edwards.