58 pages • 1-hour read
There's Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension
A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Part 1Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 1: “Pregame”
Part 1, Minutes 5:00-2:23 Summary
Pregame introduces the organizational system utilized in the rest of the book. Structured like the timing of a basketball game, the book is organized into a “pregame” and “quarters,” with sections of poetry and essays separated by minute and second counts. Additionally, the “quarters” also utilize organizational breaks called “timeouts” and “intermissions” in which Abdurraqib presents poems.
The author begins Pregame by asking the reader to “commiserate, here and now, about our enemies” (3). He states that knowledge of one’s enemies requires an understanding of what is beloved, since an enemy is any person who cannot recognize why someone or something is loved, and shows no inclination to learn about it. He points out that people often treat hand signals used by Black people as signs of ill intent or criminal activity, instead of signs of affection between individuals. To think of private gestures as uniformly sinister is to deny the humanity of those gestures, the practice they take to get them right, and their ability to signify intimacy, trust, and a space of sanctuary. Hand signs prove that “we’ve put some work into our love for each other” (5), states Abdurraqib.
The narrative moves to Abdurraqib’s memory of his father during dinner times. He writes that he “loved being an audience to [his] father’s pleasures” (5). His father blessed the food in Arabic and took a few seconds to decide what to start on. As he ate, small beads of sweat appeared on his bald head, which Abdurraqib saw as evidence of the intense pleasure his father felt in eating and the labor it took to get to that place of pleasure. Though his father was bald, he assiduously cared for his beard, and the author remembers understanding this state of bearded hairlessness as a “sacrifice in the name of loving well” (8).
He then discusses the singer James Brown and his signature pompadour of thick hair. The elaborate care he took of his hair also signified “a language, a code” (9) that indicated a striving upwards, even higher than God had intended the head to be. Abdurraqib muses that Black hair has a language of its own, and even among Black folks, some hair can speak more loudly than others. He connects this idea to the hand signals discussed earlier—“a code [others] cannot decipher, no matter their desire to” (9)—a discomfort that fuels the rage and distrust of white people.
He discusses the Fab Five, five young Black athletes whose remarkable talent made national headlines out of the University of Michigan intercollegiate basketball team. He discusses his tangential relationship to them through his community and two powerful photographs of the five athletes, the first artificially posed and smiling with their coach, and the second unsmiling, with each of their right hands held in the same outspread gesture, fingers stretched but with the index and middle finger twisted up.
Later, the Fab Five ruffled feathers in the sports community by all wearing black socks and sneakers and shaving their heads. They also invited critique by being brash and vocal while playing, Abdurraqib points out that their trash-talking was an expression not of disrespect but of their culture, “all kinds of affection tucked underneath the talking of shit” (12). For Abdurraqib, this kind of verbal sparring is a show of love and respect, since it indicates that in the competitive space, there’s an intimacy that transcends race. Shit talking implies that both people have equal power—opponents, but not enemies.
White college basketball experts and commentators seemed to feel threatened by the Fab Five, their public comments indicating that “these weren’t the people who were supposed to make it” (13). Abdurraqib remembers the vitriol aimed at the team as the moment he realized that anyone who did not love the Fab Five, and anyone who wished them to “tame or temper their flourish” was his enemy (13).
He notes that when the Fab Five rose to prominence, the media seemed to already be searching for concrete ways to cast young Black men as villains, specifically ginning up panic about the ways in which those young men refused to apologize for existing. Abdurraqib points out that many of the complaints levied by mainstream culture involved superficial aspects of appearance or behavior, like elaborate and beautiful hair, no hair at all, sneakers that were too white or too Black, the way they talked, or the music they listened to. Abdurraqib learned to pity those people who showed their fear, stating that they were really saying “I am afraid I am being left behind, and then who will love me?” (15)
The author then introduces Michael Jordan, who, in the early 90s, was already a basketball superstar. Jordan’s bald head was part of his signature look at that time, but Abdurraqib was most affected by a photo of Jordan in 1985 when he entered a dunk contest. He had hair and wore shoes banned by the NBA, as well as two gold chains around his neck. He jumped and dunked from the free-throw line, a jaw-dropping distance, and the photo captures Jordan in flight. Abdurraqib points out the golden glint in the photo and draws a parallel between Jordan’s airborne gold and the golden morning light from heaven, which he imagines is the glitter of the golden adornments of Black people in heaven.
Part 1, Minutes 1:49-0:00 Summary
In the ensuing decades, the Fab Five developed more uneasy and acrimonious relationships with each other. One of them, Chris Webber, stated on TV that no one ever loved the Fab Five. Abdurraqib states in response, “I loved you // I’m sorry // I loved you” (20).
In childhood, the author didn’t have the money to get professional haircuts, so he made his older brother cut his hair. He states that it’s best to have a family member cut your hair, so that there’s an incentive to do a good job, since their name will be attached to it. Abdurraqib covered his hair most of the time with a kufi, a short, brimless, round cap common in many Islamic cultures. His hair was not often seen, but still, his brother took fierce pride in maintaining it. Abdurraqib remembers feeling proud that his covered head sparked curiosity in others, and “became a source of wonder for the people around me” (22).
In seventh grade, the author attempted to impress a crush by showing up to school with his head uncovered for the first time ever. He tried to cut his own hair to prepare for it, but his lack of experience resulted in a horrific cut. His parents gave him money to go to the barber and get it all cut bald. When looking in the mirror later, he realized how much he looked like his father and his grandfather, though he thought that his elders’ heads were shiny and more beautiful, while his was darkened by a bit of fuzz.
He then remembers an old girlfriend, Leslie, with whom he maintained a clumsy, surreptitious physical relationship. She kept a “stunning” poster of the singer Meshell Ndegeocello above her bed, in which the singer’s bald head was on full display. Leslie wanted to go bald and finally asked the author to cut her hair for her. Though they had had sex before, Abdurraqib reflected that this moment, where she sat before him wrapped in a blanket and he prepared the clippers, felt like a new level of intimacy. Leslie stopped him right before he started, and asked “what if I’ve got, like, a fucking weird-shaped head?” They both began to laugh uncontrollably, and Abdurraqib draws a parallel between their fits of laughter and their earlier lovemaking: both physical, inevitable, and somewhere between joy and pain.
Abdurraqib then discusses the gray patches in current basketball superstar LeBron James’ beard. He remembers when LeBron’s face was clean-shaven and states that “it is a strange miracle” (31) to be able to watch someone his own age, from the same community, grow and age on television. He reflects that LeBron’s and his own childhoods must have had many elements in common, since they both grew up as Black boys in Ohio.
Abdurraqib notes that as LeBron’s beard grays, he also finds grey hairs on his own head. Mindful of the instructions of his old barber, he doesn’t pluck them. His barber told him not to “make an enemy out of the grays” (33) and instead just be grateful that you are alive to see them at all.
Abdurraqib draws a parallel between the signs of his aging and the “thick, heavy gold” worn by Michael Jordan and other Black men. Though its weight makes it a burden, it is a welcome and blessed type of work, a type that so many Black men never have the chance to take on.
The author ends the pregame by recalling his experiences during the COVID-19 pandemic. In the beginning, Abdurraqib was stunned by the sheer silence of the city he lived in. Taking advantage of the lack of people, he took his basketball out to the public park and shot hoops by himself, loving “the violence of the sounds” (37). Later, to discourage public gatherings, the city took down all the hoops, leaving the author to wonder how he could survive without basketball. He reflects that throughout the Pregame, he’s been talking about absence and how absence “requires an understanding of what should be” (37).
Part 1 Analysis
In Pregame, the author initiates a layered meditation on Black identity as a blend of memory, place, and performance. At the heart of Pregame lies an engagement with The Role of Memory in Shaping Self-Identity. Abdurraqib’s memories—of his father, his brother, his childhood, and his lovers—do not exist in isolation; they are lenses through which he examines the emotional architecture of his selfhood. For instance, the recollection of his father blessing the food and the sweat gathering on his bald head isn’t a neutral remembrance but an interpretive act—an affirmation of familial intimacy. His father’s carefully tended beard, despite his bald head, becomes a metaphor for the sacrifices made in the name of love, and in turn, an image that Abdurraqib internalizes to make sense of his own appearance and gestures of care.
Abdurraqib’s memory of attempting to impress a girl in seventh grade by removing his kufi reveals both adolescent vulnerability and the stakes of visibility for a Black boy in America. The self-administered haircut gone awry and the ensuing trip to the barber do more than recount an embarrassing moment—they reflect how personal identity is constructed and deconstructed through performance, expectation, and familial resemblance. In the mirror, Abdurraqib sees echoes of his father and grandfather: an intergenerational continuity that bridges memory and the present self.
Abdurraqib asserts that memory is inseparable from place, highlighting The Impact of Place on Personal Development as a central theme of the text. Abdurraqib’s reflections are grounded in his experience growing up Black in Ohio—a locale that shapes his cultural sensibilities, his aesthetics, and his understanding of community. For Abdurraqib, basketball courts are sacred spaces where language, performance, and self-expression converge. The court is not simply a setting but a participant in his development. His reminiscences about shooting hoops during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic evoke both solitude and a sense of geographical estrangement, framing the silence of the city as alien and disorienting. His lens positions the removal of basketball hoops not just as a civic decision but as a personal injury, a rupture of place from identity.
The Fab Five’s legacy emerges as a shared cultural experience that linked the author’s childhood community. Though Abdurraqib did not know the players personally, their presence—articulated through fashion, posture, and hand signs—was formative for him. Their physical gestures and confidence became signposts in his coming-of-age landscape, symbols of what it meant to grow up Black in America in the 1990s. These men helped inscribe a sense of place that transcended geography—a cultural place where Abdurraqib could see his own identity mapped onto the national stage.
Abdurraqib treats The Tension Between Black Excellence and Ordinariness as both poignant and politically charged in Pregame. Abdurraqib refuses the binary between exceptionalism and everydayness, instead suggesting that both exist simultaneously within Black life. His reflections on figures such as James Brown, Michael Jordan, and the Fab Five are not mere celebrations of greatness. They are examinations of how performance, presentation, and style operate as coded expressions of self-respect, communal pride, and resistance. For example, James Brown’s pompadour and Jordan’s gold chains are symbols of a language—“a code” that can only be read accurately by some, and are often feared by others who view them as a threat to their own institutionalized power.
Abdurraqib positions The Fab Five as particularly emblematic of this tension. Their brashness, their unity in appearance, and their cultural style (black socks, bald heads, esoteric and personalized gestures) drew criticism precisely because they blurred the lines between extraordinary talent and familiar Black youth culture. White media pundits, uncomfortable with this convergence, sought to “tame or temper their flourish,” revealing an unease with Black people who insist on defining excellence on their own terms (13). For Abdurraqib, the Fab Five were loved precisely because they were themselves, not because they performed palatable versions of Black success. Their trash-talking, their fashion, and their gestures were not distractions from their talent but integral to it.
In the intimate scene with Leslie, a girlfriend who asks Abdurraqib to shave her head, the theme of Black ordinariness reasserts itself in the form of vulnerability and mutual recognition. The physical act of hair-cutting, charged with cultural and personal significance throughout Pregame, becomes a moment of shared trust and awkwardness. Their laughter, “somewhere between joy and pain,” reflects a mode of Black intimacy that exists outside of spectacle and athletic triumph.
By organizing the text like a basketball game—with time-outs, intermissions, and quarters—Abdurraqib suggests that Black life, too, is a performance of tempo and rhythm where beauty and pain coexist. His experiences act as a case study for memory as both individual and collective, shaping and shaped by the places one inhabits and the people one admires. Place, far from being a static backdrop, is alive with cultural and emotional resonance. Black excellence, far from being monolithic, is shown to reside not only in high achievement but in the gestures of care, affection, and style that compose everyday life.
Unlock all 58 pages of this Study Guide
Get in-depth, chapter-by-chapter summaries and analysis from our literary experts.
- Grasp challenging concepts with clear, comprehensive explanations
- Revisit key plot points and ideas without rereading the book
- Share impressive insights in classes and book clubs