There's Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension
58 pages • 1-hour read
Hanif AbdurraqibThere'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.
Themes
The Role of Memory in Shaping Self-Understanding
In There’s Always This Year, Abdurraqib uses memory as a framework through which he constructs his understanding of self. Rather than treating memory as a static archive, he reveals it to be a dynamic, often fragmented process essential for personal reckoning and cultural survival. Throughout the memoir, memory is both a refuge and a burden, shaping the way he interprets his past, confronts his present, and imagines his future.
Abdurraqib’s experiences of incarceration and living unhoused provide key examples of memory’s shaping power. In this period of crisis, he found himself recalling his father’s words about prayer: “Don’t turn back toward Allah when you need something” (118). The memory haunted him, and he began praying five times a day, not out of devotion, but desperation. In that period, he experienced both a religious reckoning and a realization of how the lessons of his childhood echo into adulthood. Similarly, when his brother visited him in jail, the memory of his expression—the simultaneous shame and fear in his brother’s eyes—forced Abdurraqib to reconsider the trajectory of his life. This painful recollection became a catalyst for change, pushing him toward a more stable path. Memory, he argues, is an act of moral self-confrontation, enabling self-understanding by offering moments of painful clarity.
Abdurraqib’s longing for a city he cannot return to—not because it is inaccessible, but because he is no longer the boy who lived in it—reveals how memory shapes identity through both presence and absence. Through the lens of place, even Abdurraqib’s joyful memories are double-edged. In the memoir’s closing pages, he recalls riding bikes with childhood friends to play basketball. Though this memory is filled with affection, he also notes that “people’s faces blur together,” highlighting the effects of trauma on memory and the impossibility of fully preserving the past. Abdurraqib presents memory as a layered emotional landscape, a tool for survival, a source of longing, and a means of transformation. By revisiting formative experiences—whether joyful, painful, or mundane—he articulates a sense of self shaped not by a single narrative arc, but by overlapping moments that reveal how memory, even when fragmented, is the foundation of self-understanding.
The Impact of Place on Personal Development
In his memoir, Abdurraqib returns again and again to Ohio, positioning it as a fundamental part of identity. He describes Columbus, Akron, and Cleveland are not passive backdrops but active agents in his development. Place, in Abdurraqib’s memoir, informs how he views community, how he navigates survival, and how he reconciles loyalty with disillusionment.
Columbus, his hometown, functions as a site of formative memory and persistent contradiction. In First Quarter, Abdurraqib describes the impact of Coach Bruce Howard, who recognized him in the neighborhood and reminded him, simply through his acknowledgment, that he wouldn’t allow Abdurraqib to “move through this city and be forgotten” (49). This small moment becomes deeply significant in Abdurraqib’s life, reflecting how place-based care can affirm a young Black man’s sense of worth. The community shaped by Howard’s presence taught Abdurraqib that identity is not formed in isolation, but through mutual recognition within a specific geography.
Abdurraqib affirms the support and care of his childhood community while also acknowledging Columbus as a place of violence and denial. In Fourth Quarter, Abdurraqib returns to the city for the memorial of Henry Green, a young Black man killed by plainclothes police. He notes that the bloodstains are still visible on the sidewalk. This confrontation with place as a site of state-sanctioned violence shatters the city’s myth of decency—an indictment of the “magnificent lies” cities tell themselves to avoid acknowledging systemic racism (283) that challenges the idea that peace is proof of justice.
Even when physically removed from Columbus—living in New Haven, Connecticut—Abdurraqib feels the magnetic pull of his hometown. He drives nine hours home on a whim, unable to resist its emotional gravity. Despite the pain his memories of Columbus hold for him, he declares, “I have carved out a corner of these skies and they are mine” (229). This declaration represents an act of reclamation, asserting ownership over a place that both raised and hurt him.
Across the memoir, place is not only a geographic location, but also a spiritual and psychological notion. Abdurraqib portrays the basketball courts of his youth as sacred spaces where community, joy, and identity were first cultivated. These courts are remembered not just for the games played, but for the love exchanged and the selves built upon them. For Abdurraqib, personal development is inseparable from place.
The Tension Between Black Excellence and Ordinariness
While There’s Always This Year is both a celebration and interrogation of Black excellence, it’s also a tribute to Black ordinariness. Abdurraqib refuses to confine Black identity to the narrow parameters of genius or martyrdom. Instead, he explores the full spectrum of Black existence, recognizing that dignity, beauty, and power reside as much in the flawed and everyday as in the iconic.
LeBron James is a recurring symbol of Black excellence, from his early days in Akron to his return to Cleveland. Yet Abdurraqib’s relationship to LeBron is not merely celebratory. In Third Quarter, he reflects on crying during a Nike commercial in which LeBron leads the city in a communal chant. Abdurraqib writes, “When LeBron came home, all I understood in the moment was that he could return and I couldn’t” (308). LeBron becomes not just a symbol of athletic brilliance, but a representation of something inaccessible: a triumphant return, unburdened by grief or shame.
Conversely, Abdurraqib finds profound meaning in more “ordinary” figures like Boobie Gibson, a mid-tier NBA player whose inconsistency made him more relatable. “When Boobie was on, he could make you believe” (218), Abdurraqib writes. His affection for Gibson stems not from perfection, but from visible struggle—a mirror of his own post-incarceration efforts to rebuild his life. Abdurraqib also honors anonymous figures—fast food workers, local legends, and young protestors—whose contributions are overlooked by dominant culture. Through poetic interludes, he elevates people like Lonnie Carmon and Scott Mescudi (Kid Cudi), whose flights, both literal and metaphorical, embody a quieter kind of greatness.
Black excellence, in Abdurraqib’s hands, is not an escape from ordinariness—it exists alongside it. For him, survival, care, protest, and dreaming are all acts of excellence, even when they go unrecognized. By placing LeBron and Boobie, poets and preachers, mourning and joy on the same continuum, Abdurraqib resists hierarchy.
Unlock every key theme and why it matters
Get in-depth breakdowns of the book’s main ideas and how they connect and evolve.
- Explore how themes develop throughout the text
- Connect themes to characters, events, and symbols
- Support essays and discussions with thematic evidence