58 pages • 1-hour read
There's Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension
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Background
Authorial Context: Hanif Abdurraqib
Hanif Abdurraqib is a poet, novelist, essayist, and cultural critic from Columbus, Ohio, whose work frequently interrogates the intersections of Black identity, music, memory, and place. His upbringing in a predominantly poor, Black neighborhood during the 1980s and 1990s—coupled with his experiences as a devout Muslim, a survivor of grief, and a lifelong lover of basketball—deeply informs his memoir, There’s Always This Year. Abdurraqib describes his identity not as an abstract backdrop to the book but as the foundation upon which its architecture rests.
Throughout the memoir, Abdurraqib reflects on the racialized scrutiny that Black children face, particularly Black boys who are denied the innocence afforded to their white counterparts. His memories of growing up under the specter of police violence, poverty, and systemic neglect function not merely as personal anecdotes but as windows into the broader social realities shaping Black life in America. These experiences enable him to write with both vulnerability and political clarity, drawing connections between the murder of Henry Green, Tamir Rice, his own incarceration, and the legacy of LeBron James.
His deep connection to Ohio—its communities, basketball courts, and cultural icons—offers a localized lens through which national issues are explored. His perspective as a poet brings a lyrical, layered quality to his prose, allowing him to elevate ordinary moments into meditations on survival, mourning, and joy. Ultimately, Abdurraqib’s lived experience gives There’s Always This Year its distinctive voice.
Historical Context: Race and Basketball in 1990s America
In the 1990s and 2000s, basketball became a central site for negotiating American anxieties and aspirations around race, particularly through the careers of Michael Jordan and LeBron James. Both men emerged not only as transcendent athletes but also as cultural figures who tested the limits of Black visibility, excellence, and autonomy in mainstream media.
Michael Jordan’s rise in the 1990s coincided with a broader push to render Black athletes “marketable” to white audiences. His image was carefully curated—charismatic but apolitical, competitive but affable. Jordan’s brand was synonymous with dominance, yet his silence on political and racial issues allowed corporate America to project a universal appeal onto him, even as his Blackness remained central to his style and cultural influence. Media narratives often celebrated his greatness while subtly erasing the racial and cultural contexts from which he arose.
By contrast, LeBron James entered the NBA in the early 2000s under intense scrutiny. Coming from a working-class background in Akron, Ohio, and bypassing college, LeBron was viewed simultaneously as a prodigy and a potential risk—the media monitored his behavior, spending, and performance with an obsessive gaze, especially when he defied the mold of gratitude and humility often expected of young Black athletes. His decision to leave Cleveland for Miami in 2010, for example, prompted a racialized backlash that revealed the extent to which Black athletes are expected to perform loyalty and deference. In both cases, media coverage of Jordan and LeBron reflects deeper racial tensions, revealing the ways Black excellence is celebrated only when it conforms to the expectations of a media space that privileges whiteness.
Literary Context: Blended, Genre-Defying Literary Formats
Genre-defying literary formats integrate elements of various literary genres, making them difficult to place in one specific category. Examples include Han Kang’s The Vegetarian, which blends literary fiction with elements of horror and surrealism, and Octavia Butler’s Kindred, which incorporates facets of science fiction, historical fiction, and social commentary into a single narrative. Resisting the traditional boundaries of genre offers opportunities for innovation and experimentation with fragmented, hybrid forms that mirror the complexities of lived experience. Such innovation can also facilitate multiplicity and authenticity, privileging voice and form as integral to meaning.
Hanif Abdurraqib’s There’s Always This Year is emblematic of this trend. Structured like a basketball game, the book unfolds across “quarters,” “timeouts,” “intermissions,” and a “postgame,” blending personal narrative, lyrical meditation, sports commentary, and elegiac poetry. This non-linear, mosaic form allows Abdurraqib to fluidly move between reflections on LeBron James, memories of childhood in Columbus, Ohio, meditations on protest and mourning, and philosophical inquiries into longing, survival, and Black identity.
Abdurraqib’s genre-defying structure is both stylistic and thematic. The book’s fragmented form mirrors the fragmentation of memory and the intermingling of trauma and joy in Black life. It reflects how a story can be told through rhythm rather than chronology, echoing the improvisational quality of basketball. It challenges conventional expectations of memoir, refusing to offer a single, coherent self in favor of a self built from cultural references, remembered gestures, and public grief.
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