i just want to make sense of things (May 21)
I grew up a Raptors fan in the Vince Carter era. More than any other NBA moment, I remember Game 7 against Iverson-era Sixers like it was everything. When Carter missed the buzzer-beater that would have gotten us to the final-finals, I swore I would never forgive Vince. I held a grudge. I was eleven. So much was different. So much was the same. Dell Curry was playing for us and, to be honest, that site of patrilineal is still the only reason I hold any kind of soft spot for the Curry fam.
Back then I didn’t know what “load management” meant. This time, I’m mom-worried that Kawhi Leonard played 52 minutes last game. Growing up is the only thing that makes me feel like health is something to think about. I used to be ready to die. After Leonard’s spellbound left-handed dunk in game three, in the second fucking overtime, I saw him limping. We all saw him limping. Even before that. I don’t watch football but I have enough friends who do, and am bombarded with enough news to know the politics of black bodies in sports. I felt like crying. Kawhi played Fifty-Two Minutes total, a career high, and the way announcers pronounced “two” gave me chills in my toes. I don’t know. I don’t take basketball for basketball but I take it as life. (Isn’t it not only a game but also life??) I mean, we all know how to push ourselves. I mean, overtime?? Twice???? I hate to quote Drake but there’s never much love when we go there…
One day I will write more about Raptors myth, Raptors lore, you know, like, playoff performance, the collective trauma (lol) of our very specific fandom, our traditional “refs you suck” chant, as my old friend Coburn put it. There is this feeling that we are playing ourselves, that we deserve better, that we are choke artists, making the most fan thing of all is a kind of roller coaster. One minute I’m so pissed and disappointed I want to turn the game off, the next I have all the love and hope in the world.
Isn’t this what they mean when they say ball is life???
you drive me crazy (May 16)
It’s game day, so let’s remember that glorious last one. Sunday. Game seven.
I woke up at my grandmother’s house in Mississauga. Mother’s Day. My mom picked me up and we drove to the village where we went out to eat and watched a play. The rain, soft and slow, never stopped.
In the city (my hometown) for an academic conference at the University of Toronto, I had an uncanny feeling (as in unhomely) being on a work trip in the place I was born and lived most of my life. The Raptors really shouldn’t have been there either, i.e. game seven against the Sixers, but there we were. And there I was. I figured it was a cheap blessing I could be home for the occasion. I got my flight and a couple of nights at a hotel paid for so I was sleeping in a location I never have, right where east meets west. Depending on who you ask or when you ask me, I was either at Yonge and Carlton or Yonge and College. I grew up on the west side and so obviously walked west when I started to wander to find somewhere to watch the game.
I walked in the misty rain waiting for a place to appear and a text from my childhood friend. Toronto is a city in which you need to know where to go. I didn’t know where to go. I walked. I ended up at a bar I hadn’t been to in years. They had a million TVs and four friends joined me.
There we were! A group of orphans, Mother’s Day exiles, and too-grown kids who had stolen away at peak dinner hours through lies or pleas or bargains. It didn’t matter how we got there: we were together.
Raptors fans know that there are no guarantees. There was not a single moment in the entire forty-eight minutes where we felt safe or secure. And with four seconds left, tied at 90 points, a potential OT didn’t feel like a chance to win but another risk of failure. Yet Kawhi’s buzzer-beater gave that precarious feeling life. It all felt worth it.
But it took forever. The ball looked like it was bouncing in, and then it looked like it was totally all the way out, and then, miraculously, it was in again. What was it? Four bounces? The longest seconds in the world. I mean it.
There we were: ecstatic, mouths open, phones held high recording the glee, everyone jumping up and down. “I can’t believe it, I can’t believe it,” I kept saying, to no one in particular.
It was perfect. I really mean that.
xxx
My friend from high school ordered shots to down the energy. Right away the bar turned from game day into karaoke night. I stuck around and sang Britney Spears’s “Crazy.” I thought of someone, but I mostly thought of our team. I was utterly flushed out.
You drive me crazy, I just can’t sleep
I’m so excited, I’m in too deep
Game one of the Eastern Conference finals is in less than ten minutes and it’s clear to me that I’m only now coming down.
Subscribe to “Fan Mail”–Tiana Reid’s blog about “the Raptors and other desires” here.