“a practice // we talking about,” – Ross Gay, ‘Be Holding’
The NBA Finals are set: Denver Nuggets vs. Miami Heat. People who enjoy basketball are thrilled, because these are two excellent teams. People at ESPN are pissed because now they have to learn names like “Bruce” and “Caleb” instead of re-skinning some Lakers/Celtics montages to include Austin Reaves and Malcolm Brogdon.
As a guy who watches basketball for aesthetics (read: bad at parties), I’m stoked about this matchup. On the one side are the Nuggets, a genuinely selfless team who plays The Beautiful Game. On the other side are the Heat, a bunch of Dudes Who Work Out doing things like moving without the ball and threading interior passes.
Over at , Tom Ziller has a great breakdown of Heat Culture. Basically, it’s that the Heat do things like “try hard” and “expect greatness out of each other” and “hold each other accountable” and “stay in shape” and “practice basketball.” Honestly sounds like a bunch of undrafted nerds. Nerds who have been to three of the last four conference finals and two of the four finals. This iteration of the Heat plays Ugly Beautiful basketball, in that they beat the hell out of you on defense, and then when they get on offense, they’re setting hard screens and making the right read and attacking off the catch.
Here’a typical action, with Caleb Martin inbounding to Bam Adebayo, who alley-oops a cutting Jimmy Butler:
Hey that wasn’t the right video. How’d that get there.
Anyway, the Nuggets, man, how else to design a team of pure archetypes? Life, The Universe, And Everything revolves around Nikola Jokić, who bruises easily and looks like a bag of milk (h/t to Trey Kerby). He’s like Bill Walton with working feet and three point range, or Arvydas Sabonis born on the right side of the Cold War timeline. We finally get to see what the Boomers were on about, and it’s awesome. It’s not just his infectious passing, though—Jamal Murray is a fancy little trickster making funny faces at defenders he’s whipping, Aaron Gordon has finally found a basketball situation that fits his Shawn Kemp-without-handles skillset, and Michael Porter, Jr. is a 6’10” robot designed to make every shot he takes and play decent defense. Kentavious Caldwell-Pope and Bruce Brown bring ineffable coolness; Jeff Green plays like he says “look out now, young blood” to people. They’re a marvelous team. Here’s Jokic dropping 30 on the Raptors:
Wait my bad. That’s Doug McDermott, who the Bulls traded Jusuf Nurkić to the Nuggets for on draft night, the same draft the Nuggets took Jokić in the second round. Look, it’s not like McDermott for Nurkić and Gary Harris wasn’t a bad trade for the Bulls (it was). It’s more that the Bulls couldn’t even trade for the right Eastern European center.
Anyway, how does this relate to writing?
Maybe because I was an athlete before I was an artist, but these discipline/play the right way metaphors do work for me. Writing is like working out, in that it sucks at first but gets easier over time. Also, it’s way easier to say “I could run an 8k” than it is to run an 8k, as I recently learned, and now replace “run an 8k” with “finish a novel.”
What’s the writer’s equivalent of Heat Culture? The writer’s equivalent of “Pat Riley said I had to run a bunch of laps or else no signing bonus?” Is it writing for an hour every day? Doing “30 poems in 30 days” or NaNoWriMo challenges? Is it always ensuring your metaphors make sense, h/t to Lincoln Michel at ?Is it finally learning that drinking hard liquor the night before games while at your writer’s desk actually makes you worse, not better?
What’s the writer’s equivalent of being drafted in the second round, winning two MVPs, and having people who work for ESPN saying “hadn’t really watched this guy, guess he’s good” during the conference finals? Is it not having an MFA? Is it finishing your novel between eight-hour shifts at a call center and after your kids go to bed? Finishing your poems despite living with chronic illness/chronic pain? Is it winning the National Book Award and then thinking wistfully about all the rejections you got before publication?
For what it’s worth, and this blog is free: five years ago, I wasn’t writing at all. Finally working up the courage to pitch Cracked, starting up The Line Break and meeting the Cotton Xenomorph homies, giving myself the assignment of this blog twice a week: all that gave me things I needed like deadlines, confidence, validation. All of that got me writing again, and man, I don’t have the publications to point to yet, but I have been like this:
During that course of time, I’ve felt myself getting better. Crisper paragraphs, fuller characters, more gooder sentences. I feel my eye for sense-making metaphor sharpening. I’m thiiiiiiis much closer to writing a sincere blog post without backhanded complimenting myself.
But really, I think what I’m most excited about with writing lately is that it feels like trying hard and practicing is paying off. If Nikola Jokić and Jimmy Butler can succeed with head-down hard work, why not anyone who gives a damn about their craft?
Sorry you got an email,
Chris