There's Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension

In Second Quarter, Abdurraqib utilizes a collage of autobiographical reflection, poetic interludes, and cultural commentary to examine how memory shapes self-understanding, how location informs personal growth, and how Black excellence and ordinariness exist in constant negotiation. The central figure of LeBron James—elevated in this quarter to godlike status—serves as a touchstone throughout, but Abdurraqib’s true concern is the ordinary human striving that surrounds and supports this mythology.

Structurally, Abdurraqib begins the section by drawing a stark contrast between the absence of personal memory and the cultural imperative to witness greatness. Reflecting on his eviction in 2007, he struggles to remember anything from that time, apart from LeBron’s game highlights and albums that defined the music of the period. He positions this selective memory as a survival mechanism in a world hostile to Black existence, asking: “What good is a witness in a country obsessed with forgetting?” (116). Yet, he notes, even amid such erasure, the collective declaration “we are all witnesses” to LeBron’s feats offers a counterpoint: witnessing can be an act of solidarity, even transcendence. This duality between erasure and witness extends to other recollections, such as Abdurraqib’s father teaching him to pray, and, after seeing his reluctance, warning him not to “turn back toward Allah when you need something” (118). This memory, initially a lesson in integrity, gains new resonance during the period when he lives unhoused. When Abdurraqib finds himself sleeping in a storage unit, relying on the quiet mercy of strangers, the memory of his father’s warning becomes both haunting and illuminating.

Throughout this section, place functions as both a setting and a shaper of identity, highlighting The Impact of Place on Personal Development. The city becomes not just a backdrop, but an active participant in Abdurraqib’s personal evolution. The McDonald’s employees who let him linger, the storage unit receptionist who protects him from discovery, and the quiet corners of the public library where he seeks refuge—all constitute a geography of survival. These are spaces of tenuous sanctuary, carved out in a city that otherwise offers little formal support. Such acts of anonymous mercy are, for Abdurraqib, miracles—small and vital gestures that sustain both body and spirit.

The motif of incarceration carries far-reaching implications for place and selfhood within the text. The prison library, where Abdurraqib finds a half-desirable nook with a view of the television, becomes another unexpected site of personal development. Watching LeBron on the screen, he wonders if their lives are cosmically entangled—his descent mirrored by LeBron’s ascent. The ritual of his grandmother’s lottery tickets and his own inherited belief in the impossible reflect how place fosters a complex blend of realism and irrational hope. The NBA draft lottery, with its cruel arbitrariness, mirrors the lives of those watching it—people long conditioned to loss and suspicious of joy. “Believe me, it gets less funny the more time you spend thinking about it” (163), Abdurraqib remarks, illustrating how personal and communal development are shaped by recurring disappointment within spaces of intense poverty or strife.

Abdurraqib reiterates The Tension Between Black Excellence and Ordinariness, evoking the examples of LeBron James and everyday acts of survival and grace within Black communities. He juxtaposes LeBron, whose rise earned him the nickname “King James,” with Terrance, the subject of a prose poem, whose sole job is to monitor soda machine use at McDonald’s. He acknowledges that though some might see Terrance’s job as mundane or demeaning in comparison to LeBron’s, his poem frames Terrance’s quiet dedication as no less miraculous than LeBron’s jump shot, positioning survival as a form of excellence. The poem moves fluidly from Terrance to the speaker’s own story of theft and escape, and finally to a theological debate with a childhood friend turned preacher. By layering these memories, Abdurraqib makes a distinction between accomplishments the world views as extraordinary and ordinary people for whom each day is an act of survival.  

In Second Quarter, Abdurraqib affirms that memory—however fragmented—is vital for self-understanding, especially in a country eager to erase the realities of Black life. He underscores his point by making a distinction between innocence and goodness, writing: “I have never been innocent, but I have tried to be good” (164). Innocence, he argues, implies an absence of wrongdoing, often used as a precondition for receiving empathy, whereas goodness is an active striving—a distinction especially poignant in communities where individuals are criminalized regardless of behavior. Place, he asserts, whether oppressive or redemptive, shapes the contours of identity and possibility and, within this landscape, Black excellence is not solely the domain of mythic athletes, but of all those who endure, and, against odds, strive to be good.