As you move through the quarters that divide There’s Always This Year, timestamps appear like the ticking clock of the scoreboard. 12:00. 8:32. 6:00. 3:42. 0:03. The times don’t appear equidistantly, there is no clear mathematical division happening between text and time. They appear when you least, or sometimes most, expect them to, like in the middle of a sentence or a train of thought, or at the end of a paragraph or a transition to a next topic. The timestamps in the book, like the countdown of a sports game and the actual ticking clock in our lives, simply appear when they naturally do, whether at a perfect transitory point or the most inconvenient series of events possible.
The timestamps are one of the many different techniques Hanif Abdurraqib uses to not only clarify his message, but make them jump out of the page and manifest inside your soul. Not only does Abdurraqib describe the reaping and sowing in his life through the view of basketball, he makes vivid the push and pull every year brought upon him, whether that be through the victories of the local high school basketball leagues and his stints in jail, the victory year of the Cleveland Cavaliers and his commute back and forth from Ohio to catch even a glimpse of the glory, or the killing of Tamir Rice and his hope for the fires that burned in his wake.
“There’s Always This Year” is a book about basketball, LeBron James, and Columbus and Cleveland, Ohio, but it is also a book on grief, spirit, time, community, and religion. Just as Hanif Abdurraqib’s words on Chance the Rapper warped into an exploration on thriving in an unsurvivable time and his book on A Tribe Called Quest zoomed out into a hollistic homage to a sound, an era, a culture, and a passion for it all, “There’s Always This Year” ties the material and the spiritual together in a web that is both impossible to fully map and easy to digest through Abdurraqib’s words. Hanif Abdurraqib’s incredible acumen to make striking prose out of the disjointed thoughts that plague all of us through ever-evolving times has made him one of the most significant writers, poets, and critics of our time.
[Note: This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.]
I looked up the phrase “there’s always next year” and I never realized it’s a Cleveland specific term. Can you talk a little bit more about the significance of that phrase to you, either in the context of Ohio, sports, or as a general outlook on life?
For a long time I didn’t even know it was a phrase that existed outside the confines of Ohio sports. Ohio has its fandom divides between Cleveland and Cincinnati, but most of my friends are Browns fans, or Cavs fans, or Guardians fans, and so there was this pessimism, particularly with Browns fans, where they would lose the first two games of the year and everyone would say “Oh there’s always next year.”
The title “There’s Always This Year” acts in opposition of that, and it comes from a banner that was unfurled during the NBA Finals, Game 3 in 2016, when the Cavs were up against the mighty Warriors who had won 73 games that season and were seen as titanic and undefeatable. There was a banner unfurled that said “there’s always this year,” which was a “we’ve made it this far, so why not?” approach, and I loved that. I wasn’t in the arena when that happened but I loved the photo of it, I loved the ethos. Not just as a sports thing, but as an everything – this idea that we’ve made it this far, so why not push a little bit further.
I want to return to the title a little later, but a bit about the behind the scenes process of the book itself: within the book I found the idea of the different timestamps of the countdown clock very intriguing, I really appreciated, specifically, the volatility of them. None of them where super even, some felt like I was reading an eternity of happenings before the clock changed, some were milestone times and cut paragraphs in half, some were specific times rounding out a point. Whatever it was I just loved the unpredictability of it all. Can you talk about your process behind the timestamps and the significance of the clock in the context of the book?
The process of the stamps were to create at least in part what you described. The feeling is like a basketball game, or any sport, where it does feel like, at times, things are moving in slow motion, and other times, you look up, and five minutes have passed and it’s almost halftime. When your team is winning, perhaps against a team they have no business beating, there’s a slowing down of the clock that doesn’t feel real. And I thought, “what if I could simply project that onto the experience of this book?” So much of this was about time and the relationship of time and fighting through time that you did not expect to have. Living beyond an expiration date that you set for yourself, so you’re effectively stealing time every moment you live beyond that date. The stealing of time means that time is happening at a pace that, at least in my experience, feels out of my control. It does feel sometimes like we’re racing, or sometimes feel like I am walking. People who, in the heaviest throws of the pandemic would say things like “the days go slow but the months go fast, time is elastic,” and I would understand that, but I would say for me, it’s been like that for over a decade. I’ve really felt equal parts, the time I’m stealing back is slipping away from me, and in other moments, it feels like the time I’m stealing back is anchoring me to a place, or a time, or a memory.
I want to continue down that path, because in the way you depict time, or occurrences across time, it’s not very even across the book. You dwell much on The Decision, but only really mention LeBron’s return to Cleveland in passing, and you apply a similarly disproportionate amount of attention to the lead up to Cleveland’s reverse sweep, but you don’t spend a long time talking about when they won, you pivot to this story about Tamir Rice. Was it a very intentional decision to focus more on these plateaus and shy away from the peaks?
Yeah ’cause everyone knows the peaks. The peaks are known quantities. I did spend a lot of time talking about walking through Cleveland after the championship parade. But, one, I didn’t want to write a book that was just recounting the news stories of any time, particularly of that time, but I wanted to write a story that was getting into the crevices of things that perhaps did not have as adequate of a narrative attached to them. I didn’t want to make a book about LeBron, or the Cavs. The book was wrestling with many things, and perhaps using Lebron, basketball, the Cavaliers, or Cleveland itself as a vessel to get to some of those grander ideas. At the end of the day the ideas take precedent.
Going back to the structures of the book itself, you said in an interview “there’s something really celebratory about coming to the page and knowing that you’re in conversation with someone who trusts you, who understands that you do not need to be walked through something that you lived, and who isn’t trying to waste your time.” One of the things I really appreciate about your writing are some of these more experimental structures. Either the time stamps, or your use of really long sentences only separated by ampersands. For those experimental structures, what do you decide what works and what doesn’t in the process of writing?
It’s a question of pace. You can teach people how to read urgency into your language by adapting the form to that urgency. Form responds to sound, messaging, urgency, all of these parts, and there’s a way to show up on the page with that. Using the ampersand, perhaps, as a bridge that quickens the pace.; removing punctuation that quickens the pace, and not really separating that either. There are parts of the book where I flow formally from one mood into the next without any breakage because that’s how we speak. We sometimes speak slowly and thoughtfully and then burst off into a rush of excitement because it’s just what we know and understand and for me it’s important to write as I speak, as I would speak.
But more than that, I’m teaching people how to read the quickening or slowing. There’s a part of the book where I recontextualize a Dick Snyder shot from three different angles. I am trying to use that form and repetition to get that image to crystallize and clarify in people’s heads. because most people don’t have that YouTube clip at their disposal, and most people maybe don’t even know who Dick Snyder is, and most people aren’t going to remember a shot from the Eastern Conference Playoffs in 1976. But what I’m doing is, not only firm up the image, but recontextualize it and say, “maybe if we look at this long enough, it is not about the image at all.”
Pace and form and structure defines for people how you want the work to be read and appreciated and understand. To play with that is to invite people into my brain a little, but also to invite people into how I might tell them the story if they were sitting in front of me. Formal expansiveness, or experimentation for lack of a better word, for me, represents a form of intimacy, because you’re welcoming people into the way that your brain works and you’re saying “I would like you to sit here with me and make sense of what I know.”
One of the first things I noticed when approaching the book was how stream-of-consciousness it was, but also how natural it felt to go from topic to topic and find the through lines that others normally won’t. A lot of formal writing education tells you “be concise with your points and structure, but that goes against this ADHD brained, stream-of-consciousness, “let’s just keep going.” Is that something you had to figure out how to really articulate properly?
There’s maybe a fortunate thing for me in that I don’t really have any formal education in writing at all. I don’t have an MFA, I didn’t study writing in college, and definitely didn’t study it in high school much, and so there’s a freedom that comes from teaching myself in real time. That’s important because it allows me to not be beholden to any ideas about how writing is best presented, but another thing that’s good is that I can just play, and see where play takes me, which doesn’t always have good results. Hopefully, what people are reading in the book is a good result, but it took a lot of practice to trust myself to get this right, which it’s uh, haha- that’s hard. I will say, this book was hard.
I’ve been trying to talk about this book really easily and how it was easy and smooth, and that’s true, but there was an early part in the draft where I didn’t know what the fuck I was doing, and I needed to write my way past not knowing what the fuck I was doing, to trust myself in these free flowing state of writing.
I think had I had some kind of formal restrictions or education telling me what I was doing was going against cohesiveness or coherence, I would’ve paused myself. I’m trying to work against anything that would have me pause myself.
You’re on book four or five, you’ve been doing this a little more. Are you more willing to trust yourself and create with instinct because you know that you’ve created an audience who trusts, in your own words, that you’re not wasting their time?
Yeah, but also, people come to me expecting, now at least, to have their concept of what they’re arriving to the page broken open a bit. I hold myself to that standard. I’m also not doing this just to show off. I’m doing this because I also want to have my understanding of what brought me to this work broken up and challenged a bit, so that if I say “I am writing a book about basketball,” which I was when I came to the page for this, I want to have that flipped on its head a bit. I want to have that upended in a way that surprises even me. In order to surrender to that surprise, which is a delight for me, I have to be able to say, I am going to be wrong several times in the making of this thing that was one thing. I’m not interested in being right, and I’m certainly not interested in imposing my will upon the things I make. I am interested in having the work speak back to me and complicating even the things that I love or witnessed so that they take on a different state.
Not to bring your work into this, you wrote that thing about Crazy Rich Asians that I read a couple weeks ago. You understand this approach because what I pulled from that essay was the same thing. This is a person who, at some point, enjoyed that movie, or was curious enough about that movie to offer a contextualization of it that actually pulls us away from the film itself. But the distance we have from the source material, nothing suffers. The film doesn’t suffer through that distance. The distance is still present. Distance is where critical language flourishes. So I look at it the same way maybe you looked at it in that essay, which is to say I am wrong to think I want to write a book about basketball, I need to distance myself from the basketball, which I know already. I know the inner workings of the 2016 NBA Finals. I know the inner workings of LeBron James’ rise through [St. Vincent-St. Mary] High School. If I put some distance between myself and these things that I know, then, curiousity can really flourish and I can really play. In that play, I think, there is critical realigning and transformation of that idea.
That’s really an honor for you to say that, I really appreciate it. I wanted to talk about LeBron a bit, because I think you contextualize him in this book in such a brilliant way that I never see him, or any other king of their profession contextualized, but I want to talk about the “We Are the World” parody song in the book.
It’s funny because it was one of those things where you have to do historical research when you write things and sometimes you have to do emotional research and sometimes those things collide. That was one of those things where they collided, because it felt like that song did not exist, it felt like a fever dream. I hadn’t thought about it in so long that I was like “did I imagine this? Did I completely dream up the fact that this song happened?” Because if I were to explain this to someone who perhaps didn’t remember it or didn’t hear it, they would not believe me, I feel like.
A “We Are the World” parody trying to coax LeBron James to stay in Cleveland. I had to go back and find it, and when I went and found it, it was even more fuckin’ wild than I remember. There were sitting senators in there next to meteorologists.
You know what’s funny, the local reaction to it – I’m in Columbus but I know a lot of people in Cleveland – it barely registered, which is why I’m happy I found a copy of it on YouTube. It wasn’t a big deal when it happened. What people don’t remember about that time, or what I sometimes don’t remember about that time, is that it was such a panicked time and people were just throwing everything at the wall. That song was just one thing in a larger tapestry of many things to try and get LeBron to stay.
I think what helped me contextualize it in the book is that it’s actually a little heartbreaking, it’s a little sad. Once I get past the complete absurdity of it, and once I laugh at it, it’s a little heartbreaking. To even put it in this container of songs about leaving and exits and begging people to come back, it’s heartbreaking to see, even playfully, the lengths people will go to in order to keep someone or something close to them that is familiar. I know that pain, it was important for me to look beyond the goofiness of it and ask myself “can I relate to the impulse that would cause somebody to go to those lengths emotionally.” That’s a much more interesting conversation than just “look at this goofy-ass song.”
The two words you used to describe it that stuck out was “pathetic” but “effortful.” There’s a lot of pathetic and effortful music that is regarded as great, but I think the question this song dares to ask is “what happens when you take pathetic but effortful and it’s bad.”
Yeah, I don’t mind pathetic and effortful. To be clear, as much of an emotional connection I can affix to this song and put my own self in it, it is bad.
Past the time when he left, you describe the LeBron-less Cavs as a team that you adored, as a band of misfits you could always rely on to be a mess. Is that a reaction that you hold because of the timeframe that this happened in your life, or that an energy that you appreciate about any home team you really deeply care about?
The funny thing about me is that I’m a Timberwolves fan. Because I’m a Timberwolves fan, what I’m saying is that I adore that impulse even now. It was more revenant/relevant at that time in my life, but I adore it, even now, for any team I don’t root for. The Timberwolves have had many years where their rosters have been a bit hapless, but perhaps no years where they have been as hapless as those Cavs. I mean those Cavs…recently I think the post-LeBron Cavs are maybe the worst roster of any team in my lifetime. I really think it is.
I look back at that roster; Kyrie wasn’t there, Ricky Davis was washed up. You look at that roster and there’s nothing there that could work. There’s nothing that the team could do to make themselves good. You’re not tanking, you just straight up cannot win the game.
I liked watching that unfold. You would go to those games early in the season and see some hope, and then you would go to the games later in the season, and see that everyone has just clocked out. There were people who would go through the motions of wanting to be elsewhere. It was mostly fascinating to see how that played out in the fandom. To see fans starting to slowly dream of what could be next year. There’s that “there’s always next year,” which was a sign of hope attached to LeBron James.
When Dan Gilbert said “we’ll win a championship without LeBron,” did that sting more than the mess of this Cavs team bombing out of the season. Is the premise of stability in strife better than a false hope of success?
I mean no one believed that. What was so great about that Dan Gilbert thing was that no one believed it, but I think people wanted to. I don’t fault people for wanting to.
So much of this book is what you can be convinced to believe, what you can be seduced into believing. I kind of love that, I appreciate that. I’m not far behind when it comes to being seduced to believing a number of things that might simply never come true for me. The level of belief is what interests me I think.
Returning to your intentional focus on The Decision but not the return, or the Finals but not the championship, do you intentionally subvert the fulfillment of hope in this book because you don’t feel the need to remind yourself of it, or because you don’t think the fulfillment is worth dwelling on, or is it something else entirely?
It’s something else entirely. I was trying to operate, not in full opposition to hope because I think this is a massively hopeful book, but I was trying to ask myself, and ask readers, if they could find hope in something beyond what they already know to be true. If you can find hope in a city transforming itself into a newer place after a championship or if you can find hope in something beyond the chosen one returning home. Then we can actually see a place clearly for what it is and then we can ask questions of the people who are dedicated to that place. If they never want to leave it, if they didn’t want to leave it when the teams were bad, when the heroes were gone, who made heroes out of themselves – there’s a bit I go on at the end about how there’s Michael Jordans at the bus stop – people who made heroes out of the magical people around them, or have created an impenetrable kingdom of affections they don’t ever want to exit from. That, to me, relies on the stripping down of known and widely accepted hopes and dreams of a place, and instead, hones in on a more individualized story on what hope looks like when it is decentralized or democratized, and the people are in charge of it, and the people who live in a place, who are not always champions, have built championships for themselves to pursue.
The decentralization, or the democratization of hope, it’s also evoked in this part of the book where you’re describing riots and fires that were started in reaction to Tamir Rice’s killing, and you begged for these fires to be viewed as hope. You understand that it’s small businesses and the elderly having their property taken away, but to view the fire as hopeful. Does that also extend to hope for the people willing to stick with a city, or its champions, even if there are none?
Of course. I think it’s important for me, as a fan of sports, to ask myself what I am willing to endure in the name of something as fleeting as sports. To accept to the pleasures that come with that endurance, but also to map that same veracity onto how I am choosing a place and how I am shaping that place in the image I would like it to be shaped in. Which isn’t always my choice, but I try and be thoughtful about it. It all speaks to that, but I’m glad you mentioned that fire thing, because I was getting at; if it’s all just burned down emptiness at the end of the night, then we can start again. Which is saying “there’s always next year” in a way. Of course, I was being very literal with my talk of fire, but it is not impossible to apply that metaphor broadly across the central concerns of this book.
Going back to the title, “There’s Always This Year,” is that, to you, a matter of confronting, dissecting, and critically inquiring in the hope?
Maybe, but it’s also about applying a clock to it, it’s about applying a clock to the present pleasure. Applying an urgent clock to the present pleasure
That this is the year it must happen?
Not even must, that it will. When that banner unfurled in Cleveland, no one really knew or believed that they would win that finals, but they decided that this will be our year. And if the approach is saying this will be our year, then we know the exact container of time in which we can make this happen. I think it’s important to me, at least in the making of this book, to affix that urgency to it as a project. The book’s central concerns are all around time; how much we do have left, how much we don’t have left, all of it. There’s Always This Year is mostly a deconstruction of affixing a clock to an existing pleasure that may be slipping away.
One of my favorite parts of the book is when you repeatedly state that “With enough repetition, anything can become a religion.” As someone who was raised Christian, the terms of religion to me were always very literal. When I read that it opened my eyes to that idea, that anything can become a religion. Are these religions, whether it be our heroes, or these gods in general, different to you than the various capital-G Gods we nominally and officially worship. Do these feed to the same spirit, the same hope? Or are these different categories in your mind?
In my mind, as someone who’s not intensely religious, these are marginally different for me, but the way I see them manifested in the public is similar. People pray to their pleasures or the unknowns that might come, the joyful knowns. People do make gods of the living because it’s easier to touch them. It’s harder to hold accountable a god you cannot see or have a reciprocal conversation with them. It is easier to project your hopes and rages and frustrations and pleasure and gratitude onto the visible, the tangible, the tactile. Whether or not people believe it, and I’m sure whether or not I even believe I’m doing it, you transform things into gods, you transform the touchable into a God, the things you can speak to and hear from into a God. You transform the work into a God, whatever the work is for you. I don’t know if that’s a useful practice, but that is a practice that, for me, seems it is acting in real response to a grief that comes with what sometimes, even for the most faithful among us, must be a little bit lonely. And I am sympathetic to almost all forms of loneliness, even if they are built by a pursuit of a God that one cannot see or speak to or touch.
A quote of yours that stuck out to me is “my spiritual identity is so inextricably linked to loss and the amount of people I’ve lost.” In tandem with the gods we build in our lives to get a reciprocal out of, I think that dynamic plays a really interesting conversation in the things we hold to the losses that we have but the gods we hold based on their successes. Do you view this as dangerous? But also necessary? To hold these gods in our eyes that aren’t necessarily worthy of being gods?
Of course it’s dangerous. To idolize anything, to idolize anyone, means that you can cross a threshold, where you, the person idolizing, is beholden to that person, that thing, even that place, no matter what they do or it does. It’s dangerous to surrender yourself to your pleasures and your excitements, it’s dangerous to surrender yourself to your impulses, all of it’s dangerous.
Do I think it’s necessary? I don’t know, I don’t wanna be the arbiter of what is and isn’t necessary in terms of these pursuits, but I will say, it’s almost a requirement of our condition as humans to operate in a way where we seek answers that we otherwise could not find elsewhere. I think it is fully within a part of the human condition to seek a euphoria, brief as it may be, that comes with an achievement you yourself could not access or get to, but someone can get to on your behalf. Which is all sports fandom is, which is putting your – I don’t wanna say wellbeing, but some people wellbeing – putting your hopes and dreams and eternities into wishing for a very fleeting moment of pleasure that you yourself cannot get to, but that someone might be able to get to for you on your behalf, and that is, of course, immensely dangerous. But, it is also something I have done and will do again, as a sports fan, a music fan, as someone who is invested in the many ways the outside world can offer me some miracle that I otherwise could not get to on my own. and because I cannot get to it on my own, I require others, in the pursuit of the miracle on my behalf. That does feel like, for better or worse, a spiritual practice or a religious practice. Is it dangerous? To some degree, sure, but it does feel like it is almost a requirement of the human condition.