basketball: it just means more

“This is ekphrastic and evangelistic about basketball,” I scribbled, pretending not to notice the person next to me reading everything I wrote in my journal.

I was at a reading by Hanif Abdurraqib, who is currently touring for the paperback edition of one of my top books of 2024, There’s Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension. It’s a book about basketball—but also not, which is the point Abdurraqib was making.

The extraordinary book of nonfiction includes writing about family, mortality, aviators, grief, hair (or lack thereof), music and more. I highly recommend you read the book, but if you’d like a little taste, this excerpt was my first introduction to Abdurraqib’s writing: “The Fab Five and Hair that Does the Talking” in The New Yorker.

One of the things that draws me to nonfiction—as both a reader and a writer—is the way seemingly disconnected things can be connected. I love to read my way through Abdurraqib’s mind, tracking how this thing reminds him of another thing reminds him of that thing.

Hanif Abdurraqib and me in Cincinnati on Tuesday, March 25, 2025.

One of the things that draws me to this book is that I, too, love basketball and I, too, think basketball connects to family and grief and music and history and food and love of place. I guess the SEC marketing team got it right: It does, indeed, just mean more.

(There’s an alternate universe in which I’m writing this as a much happier Kentucky basketball fan, but I suppose writing this after a Kentucky loss further proves my point that it’s about more than the scoreboard.)

Several years ago now, I wrote a story about one way in which basketball means more than what happens on the court: In a state as crazy about basketball as Kentucky, the sport actually impacts politics.

More than five years later and it’s still one of my favorite things I’ve ever written, and you can read it if you’re interested: “Basketball, politics bump elbows in Kentucky” in The State Journal.

I just shared this story with my students, hoping to teach them how to use their own interests and observational skills to develop story ideas. No one assigned that story to me or even knew it was a story before I convinced my editors—and, hopefully, readers—that it was.

I told Abdurraqib about this story, in the signing line after the reading. I told him that I hoped to write something like his work someday and that this story was, I thought, a step in the right direction.

So was listening to Abdurraqib speak about writing for an hour or so—the couple of pages I wrote in my journal are a master class.

I’m excited to keep reading Abdurraqib’s work and to apply what I learned from him to my own writing. You might be thinking, “Sure, basketball connects to a lot of things, but does it connect to the first Black woman journalist to be credentialed to the White House Press Corps?”

It absolutely does—in one of my favorite short anecdotes in Alice’s long book. She wrote that she often covered the Harlem Globetrotters, “going out to Uline Arena and climbing up the iron ladder into the press box with the male reporters.”

And, yes, of course there’s a Kentucky connection, too. When the Globetrotters played in Washington in April 1957, she went into the dressing room for an interview with Clarence Wilson and Henry Arthur Kean, Jr., two players from Kentucky.

The feature story was published in the Louisville Defender, with Alice described as “Washington’s only female sports writer, and one of the very few in the nation.”

As I walked away after getting my books signed, I thanked Abdurraqib one more time.

“Good luck,” he said, “with the writing.”