There's Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension
Hanif Abdurraqib
A poignant, personal reflection on basketball, talent and allegiance, and of course, LeBron James—from the author of the National Book Award finalist A Little Devil in America While Hanif Abdurraqib is an acclaimed author, a gifted poet, and one of our culture’s most insightful critics, he is most of all, at heart, an Ohioan. Growing up in Columbus in the 1990s, 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.” There’s Always This Year is a classic Abdurraqib triumph, brimming with joy, pain, solidarity, comfort, outrage, and hope. It’s about basketball in the way They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us is about music and A Little Devil in America is about history—no matter the subject, 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.
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0I don't know why I didn't think that this book would talk about Cleveland basketball. I know of Abdurraqib because he's a fellow Ohioan. I knew that this was about basketball (and not about basketball). "There's always this year" is clearly a play on every Cleveland sports fan's favorite phrase: there's always next year.
I also don't know if I liked this so much because I am an Ohioan, even though I'm not from Columbus (or Cleveland, but neither is LeBron). But hearing someone from Ohio talk about their life, even one so different from my own, is so familiar.
But I also don't truly believe that I liked it so much because I'm from Ohio. Abdurraqib works hard to bring you in so that his personal moments and the moments he was talking about the NBA all carry the same weight, the same emotional investment. So, whether you're in love with the mistake on the Lake that became the city of Champions (Cleveland against the world) or not, he'll bring you in—romance you by calling you his beloved so much that you want to believe him.
I really loved it. I loved it when I was crying through it and when I was laughing through it and all of the moments in between.
And though I cannot boast, like Abdurraqib, that I never wanted to leave my corner of Ohio, I know what it's like to long for it.
0It's rare for me to encounter prose written by a poet that sounds completely like a melodic poem throughout. Even though this book covers tough life topics beyond basketball, the writing sounds beautiful. This book contains so many well-devised sentences that I felt bad for listening to it in audio rather than annotating a physical book for later reference. I am not a basketball fan and I grew up far away from the places where Hanif or most players he mentions spent their childhood and early adulthood, but he brought close all the struggles that a person can inherit solely based on their skin color and neighborhood. He is an exceptionally good writer!
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