There's Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension

LeBron James, a central athletic and symbolic figure in There’s Always This Year, is a basketball phenom from Akron, Ohio. LeBron’s rise from a highly publicized high school star to one of the greatest NBA players of all time forms a parallel narrative to Abdurraqib’s own life story throughout his memoir. For Abdurraqib, LeBron embodies a complex kind of Black achievement: one that is simultaneously celebrated and burdened, mythologized and misunderstood. The parallels Abdurraqib draws between himself and LeBron introduce The Tension Between Black Excellence and Ordinariness as a central theme in the text. LeBron’s career moves—especially his departures and returns to Cleveland—mirror the author’s own fraught relationship with home, longing, and the notion of return.

LeBron is significant to Abdurraqib not only for what he achieves on the court but for how his story is told, consumed, and weaponized by national media and local communities. His 2010 departure from Cleveland is met with public mourning and rage, while his triumphant return is celebrated with near-messianic enthusiasm. In these emotional reactions, Abdurraqib sees the projection of collective grief, racial expectation, and civic identity. LeBron is a vessel for hope and abandonment alike, and his narrative arc helps Abdurraqib explore themes of belonging, betrayal, and the tension between personal autonomy and communal expectation.