
Hanif Abdurraqib’s latest release, “There’s Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension,” challenges revered American myths about talent and prosperity while troubling the ground lying between fathers and sons.
Structured in the style of a four-quarter NBA game — complete with intermissions and countdowns — “There’s Always This Year” places readers in the audience of an unyielding full-court press of cultural analysis. The familiar motifs of Black life and family in Abdurraqib’s earlier work continue in this memoir while sharing space with his chilling explorations of American prosperity. When the final quarter of the text finishes, readers must wrestle with their acceptance (or denial) of heartbreak and melancholy in the shadow of dreams.
Abdurraqib’s experiment with form and subject pays off in “There’s Always This Year.” In this text, he opts for quarters of prose split amongst the staggered minutes and seconds of a countdown clock. This inventive frame is reminiscent of the innovative structure of his last release, 2021’s “A Little Devil in America: In Praise of Black Performance.” Both are creative works fashioned around personal and public memories, in which Abdurraqib combines nostalgic storytelling about various moments in Black American culture with his intimate recollections about living in the United States. One consequence of the avant-garde structure is that as the literary clock runs down, some quarters feel rushed. The clock is unforgiving even when mapped on the page. Luckily, intermissions and other clever breaks allow some reprieve from the hasty endings—these breaks also introduce readers to local Ohio legends as Abdurraqib invites his audience into the history of his midwestern coming of age. In these brief breaks, the audience is presented with invitations into Ohio’s vast history of basketball, abolition, and aviation. By the fourth quarter of “There’s Always This Year,” we explore pieces of Abdurraqib’s childhood and young adulthood set against the larger backdrop of basketball as performance and (sub)culture.
The strength of this book lies in Abdurraqib’s ability to assess basketball as a game and culture subject to the same myth-making as other performances in American society.
The strength of this book lies in Abdurraqib’s ability to assess basketball as a game and culture, subject to the same myth-making as other performances in American society. When he writes “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” in the Pregame, he is setting his audience up to receive chapters full of stories about the cultivation of fear in service of domination.
While the subject of his analysis is ever-changing, Abdurraqib is constantly assessing how class, race, and desire shape the narratives formed around basketball players in US mainstream media coverage. He reminds us that stories — like the ones crafted about the Fab Five and LeBron James — serve a purpose. In writing, “It might do all of us some good to consider what making it means,” Abdurraqib is interrogating how media outlets, as for-profit corporations, want the public to engage with athletes. This book dives into the myths that make and break us and outlines how those myths dictate who among us — on and off the court — gets to be a superstar.
Alongside basketball, ascension is a resonant theme for the duration of the book. Abdurraqib’s word choice, metaphors, and visual imagery carry the ascension motif in every quarter of the text. By the end, it feels like a book about faith, just as much as a book about basketball. On the one hand, Abdurraqib references ascension as young basketball talent ascending through the ranks and becoming legends equipped with nicknames and highlight tapes worthy of their mysticism. On the other hand, he broadens the topic of ascension by including brief stories about masters of aviation, odes, and prayers for the dead, laying bare the fears of the dying. This way, ascension is not reserved for storytelling about American prosperity and triumph. Abdurraqib leads readers to a path of critical inquiry and reflection where we’re left to contemplate the cost of American ascension in basketball and in every other area of life. The text is clear that ascension may come with sacrifice — through isolation, systemic conformity, and a commitment to public performance — or it may not come at all.
This book’s themes are especially relevant to our present moment as stories of basketball stars such as Kamilla Cardoso and Angel Reese are minimized in comparison to their peer Caitlin Clark.
In “There’s Always This Year,” the audience is a congregation. Both the in-book audiences and us, the real-world readers, witness Abdurraqib’s chronicle about what it takes to “make it.” Throughout the text, we witness the creation and destruction of many messiahs whose stories are molded to captivate us. After reading this text, prepare to think more acutely about the myths perpetuated in tandem with any sport you enjoy. This book’s themes are especially relevant to our present moment as stories of basketball stars such as Kamilla Cardoso and Angel Reese are minimized in comparison to their peer Caitlin Clark. Cardosa, who separated from her family for years after moving from Brazil to the U.S. at age 15, is one player that is heavy on my mind after reading this memoir. In the end, Abdurraqib’s latest release is a critical lesson in myth-making and grief that leaves readers wondering if the joys and triumphs of sports are worth the melancholy.
Hanif Abdurraqib will be in conversation with Teri Henderson, Baltimore Beat’s Arts & Culture Editor, as part of his “There’s Always This Year” Tour on Tuesday, April 30, at The Garage at R. House. For more information, go to greedyreads.com, call: 410-878-0184 or email: info@greedyreads.com.
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