There's Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension

“King James” is a moniker popularly associated with LeBron James, the basketball prodigy from Akron, Ohio, whose extraordinary athletic talent elevated him to global stardom. In There’s Always This Year, Abdurraqib interrogates the implications of the title, drawing historical parallels to the Scottish kings of the same name, whose rule ended in bloodshed. By emphasizing that no one he knew “wanted the head of King James I from Akron, Ohio” (141), Abdurraqib contrasts the destructive legacy of monarchy with the community’s protective reverence for LeBron.

The NBA, or National Basketball Association, serves in the text as both a literal sports institution and a symbolic stage where narratives of Black performance, labor, and expectation are constructed and contested. Abdurraqib tracks the rise of players like Michael Jordan and LeBron James within the NBA to examine how Black excellence is commodified, scrutinized, and racialized in American culture. The NBA Draft Lottery, for instance, is portrayed as a ritual steeped in hope and futility—akin to the purchasing of lottery tickets by his grandmother—with the Cleveland Cavaliers’ rare win in 2003 standing out as an almost miraculous exception.