I’m not a huge basketball fan. A casual one, mostly. But it’s become more central to my sports interests over the years. When I was a kid, baseball and football were the only sports and baseball was … well, baseball. What else was there to say? At least in our home that’s how it was. But I’ve been pulled in the same way as the whole society has by the rise of American basketball over the course of my lifetime. And I’ve been pulled hard into Knicks’ destiny run. You’ll see other commentary about last night’s game, literally the biggest comeback in NBA playoff history. But I wanted to share one moment with you, one that came after the game when Knicks captain Jalen Brunson went on ESPN’s Inside the NBA post-game show.
Brunson got asked about the game. And then he got asked a series of questions that were on the order of, was there a moment when you thought we’ve lost this game? that you started to lose hope? Brunson made some general comments and then he said this: “You’re allowed to think about the worst possible scenario. But you gotta go out there and do something about it.”
I heard it and it immediately clicked for me on many levels: clarity, epiphany. I rewound the YouTubeTV feed a couple times because I wanted to get the wording exactly right. Perseverance and loyalty and dignity have always been very important to me — the values or totems through which one can come into alignment with oneself — probably for reasons tied to childhood experiences but unfolding from there into a general outlook that infuses how I think about politics and, more broadly, how to think about and act in the world.
When I heard this I thought, This is a good mantra for fighting fascism, too. But it applies to every part of life.
