There's Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension

There’s Always This Year is a collection of essays and poems published in 2024 by acclaimed poet and memoirist Hanif Abdurraqib. Acclaimed for its experimental format and exploration of the intersection of race and sports in America, There’s Always This Year explores the influence of basketball on the author’s life as he navigates the cultural and practical struggles involved in being Black in America. Abdurraqib particularly reflects on his relationship with basketball superstar LeBron James, who grew up in Ohio just like the author. The book uses the framework of basketball to order its sections, utilizing “quarters” and a minute-by-minute countdown to organize the work. This type of experimental organization is characteristic of Abdurraqib’s work, which utilizes both poetry and prose to create a narrative. 

This guide refers to the 2024 Random House edition.

Content Warning: This book contains discussion of racism and graphic violence.

Summary

Abdurraqib’s There’s Always This Year is a multi-faceted memoir that weaves personal memory, regional history, sports commentary, cultural critique, and poetic reflection into an exploration of Black identity, longing, and place. Structured like a basketball game—with pregame, four quarters, timeouts, intermissions, and a postgame report—the memoir traces the evolution of the author’s life and consciousness alongside the arc of Cleveland basketball and the rise of NBA superstar LeBron James. There’s Always This Year is both a book about sports and a meditation on survival, grief, and the contradictions of love for a city that often fails to protect its most vulnerable.

The memoir begins with a Pregame section that sets the structural and emotional tone. Here, Abdurraqib introduces the themes of coded communication, communal love, and the racialized misinterpretation of Black culture. Using hand signs, hair styles, and sports rituals as touchpoints, he explores how gestures of intimacy among Black people are often misread as danger by outsiders. He recalls the pleasure he took in watching his father eat, care for his beard, and display joy—small yet meaningful acts that shaped his understanding of love and masculinity. Abdurraqib highlights the cultural significance of Black athletes, particularly the Fab Five—a group of young, brash, talented basketball players at the University of Michigan in the 1990s whose defiant style and coded behavior were misunderstood and demonized by mainstream white culture. He draws a parallel between the Fab Five and Michael Jordan’s famous flying free throw while wearing gold chains, drawing connections between performance, appearance, and transcendence.

In First Quarter, Abdurraqib focuses on the neighborhoods of Columbus and Akron, Ohio, exploring how place shapes belonging and identity. He revisits the imagery of public space—graffiti, sneakers on telephone wires—and argues that such symbols, misread by outsiders as signs of danger, are in fact emblems of grief and love. He shares his memories of high school basketball and of rooting for Brookhaven, a team defined by its underdog status and community spirit.

Coach Bruce Howard emerges as a key figure in the text whose visibility and care for local youth left a lasting impact. Abdurraqib describes the sense of communal loss when Howard died, revealing how place-based mentorship and recognition can shape a young person’s sense of worth. Yet, as Abdurraqib notes, the same neighborhoods that foster support are also marked by systemic neglect and over-policing. His reflections on driving an old car while attending college—juxtaposed with the media’s obsession with LeBron James’s Hummer—underscore how socioeconomic disparity and place affect perception and treatment.

Meditating on the idea of survival as resistance, Abdurraqib describes clothing choices, music, and sports as expressions of inner strength in a world that often views Black existence as a problem to be solved. He links personal narrative to broader structures of oppression while celebrating the ordinary beauty found in the everyday.

Second Quarter centers on the themes of failure, faith, and persistence. Abdurraqib recounts his eviction, homelessness, and time in jail, interspersing these personal accounts with discussion of belief and Black male vulnerability. He contrasts his struggles with LeBron James’s rise to stardom, asking what it means to “witness” greatness when one’s own life feels small or broken. In this context, the slogan surrounding LeBron, “We are all witnesses,” takes on dual meanings—evoking both celebration and longing.

Abdurraqib recounts sleeping in a storage unit, spending time in libraries and fast food restaurants for shelter, and the kindness of strangers who helped him survive. These acts of quiet mercy, he argues, are modern miracles. Through long-form poetic interludes, he blurs the line between prayer and protest, reflecting on the beggarly nature of needing help and still daring to believe in grace.

The section ends with Abdurraqib’s reflection on incarceration, a brief episode that pushed him toward introspection. Watching LeBron on TV from jail, he questioned whether their lives were cosmically linked—his own descent into hardship unfolding as LeBron ascends to global fame. This tension between greatness and ordinariness becomes a recurring motif in the text.

Third Quarter focuses on leaving and staying—the emotional topography of departure. Abdurraqib interrogates the politics of longing through subgenres of music, especially the “Begging Song,” which, like the pleading of fans for LeBron to stay in Cleveland, combines vulnerability and entitlement. When LeBron left Cleveland for Miami, it prompted public mourning, including jersey burnings and a clumsy musical plea titled “We Are LeBron.” Abdurraqib sees these acts not just as displays of sports fandom but as communal expressions of grief.

He also examines protest through the metaphor of fire. Setting something ablaze, he argues, can be a language of mourning and catharsis, an assertion that suffering should not be ignored. Protest, unlike revenge, asks whether suffering is necessary—and why it always seems reserved for certain bodies in certain places.

The memoir returns to Abdurraqib’s post-incarceration years: working at a diner, saving money in a shoebox, and finding joy in the lackluster Cavaliers team after LeBron’s departure. He finds beauty in the team’s failures, particularly in Boobie Gibson—a talented, flawed player who represents human vulnerability more than athletic perfection. Abdurraqib says that he, too, was trying to rebuild his life, clinging to ordinariness as a path forward.

The Fourth Quarter examines the mythologies cities tell about themselves and how those narratives obscure deeper truths. Abdurraqib returns home to mourn Henry Green, a young Black man murdered by police in Columbus, and reflects on how cities like his mask violence behind claims of decency. He critiques the “magnificent lies” (283) cities use to maintain the illusion of safety for some while endangering others.

The memoir builds its analysis of systemic racism, highlighting the murder of Tamir Rice, a 12-year-old child killed by police for holding a toy gun. Abdurraqib reflects on how Black children are denied childhood, framed as threatening to white, adult police officers who claim fear and innocence. The memoir’s title—There’s Always This Year—suggests the painful optimism of the underdog, the ever-renewing hope that things might change, even when history says otherwise.

A Nike commercial featuring LeBron, where his whispered words reach an entire city, prompts a wave of emotions. Abdurraqib realizes he is crying—not only out of admiration, but because LeBron could return home triumphantly, and he could not. His own return is haunted by memory and grief. Yet, he ends with a vision of his childhood friends on a basketball court, waiting, playing, loving, even when the world refuses to see their joy as innocent.

The memoir ends with two biographical poems—one for LeBron, one for Hanif—celebrating them as legendary “aviators” of Ohio. LeBron is a monarch awaiting defeat, but undefeated still. Hanif is a survivor, resurrected so often that it has become unremarkable.

Together, these closing pieces encapsulate the memoir’s argument: greatness and ordinariness are not opposites. Whether you are a king on the court or a poet in the corner of the city, living—especially as a Black person in America—is a form of flight, a struggle to stay airborne against the weight of history.