There's Always This Year
Home, longing, and trauma bonding with the Milwaukee Bucks
There were points while reading Hanif Abdurraqib’s latest, There’s Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension, that I had to put the book down and just stare into space, overcome with longing. Or longings, I should say. Abdurraqib is a merchant of longing, so appreciating the nuances and variations here feels appropriate.
First and most basic, I longed for my own copy. My fingers twitched with the urge to highlight and underline and dog ear the pages of this library book. Scrolling through photos just isn’t the same as flipping through pages, letting your hands skim over the lines until you find the one you’re looking for.1 There was a sweet kind of anguish in interacting with it this way on first read.
Then there was the longing for just a fraction of Abdurraqib’s generosity and skill, the way he weaves together seemingly disparate threads so that when you arrive wherever he ends up taking you, it feels inevitable. You wonder why you ever thought these threads were disparate in the first place because now you see how obviously connected they are. This is an ambitious and experimental and poetic book and it’s just such a pleasure to read.
Then there was the longing for my own midsized Midwestern city, for Milwaukee, for home. So much of my teens and 20s were spent thinking life would only really happen once I left. My love for Milwaukee only grows as I get older and move further away and wonder if I’ll ever move back, if this is all just a detour on my own long way home.
Strongest of all there was the deep longing for my hometown to have a champion of its own. For someone to love it so boldly and with such clear-eyed grace. I long for that love to be such a consistent through line of our champion’s work as to be inextricable from it, the way it is in Abdurraqib’s work, and to have it praised and embraced at every turn. Give the haters2 no choice but to cast an appreciative eye, even briefly, on our otherwise overlooked city.
Cleveland3 is a city that is overwhelmed by a desire to believe in something beyond what people outside of the place have ascribed to it, he writes, and for a second I was blinking back tears.
And, of course, I was the longing for the 2020/2021 Milwaukee Bucks, but we’ll come back to them.
My own love for the place didn’t crystallize until I left it the first time, in 2006. As a teenager, I understood Milwaukee as a place to leave in the way Abdurraqib talks about Cleveland and Columbus being places people leave. Part of that probably had to do with a sister who moved to Chicago and a brother who moved to New York and cousins who moved all over despite, it should be noted, a whole throng of aunts and uncles who never left, maybe never wanted to leave. Part of it had to do with the big mass of grief I was running from. Part of it had to do with the fact that DePaul was the only school I’d applied to that offered any money.
So I found myself in Chicago. I loved Chicago — still love it, to be clear — I would have stayed if it hadn’t worn me down and made leaving feel necessary. But it was there that my sense of self as being from Milwaukee really started to form. Mostly this happened in response to a low stakes antagonism from Chicagoans. You can only hear so many jokes about Milwaukee being Chicago’s biggest suburb before you get a little defensive.
I was never a big football fan until I moved to Chicago and suddenly found myself confronted with Bears fans and Bears paraphernalia at every turn. I hate the Bears, I found myself thinking, irrationally, god I hate them.4 I delighted in their misfortune — and what misfortune it was! — bantering with the die hard regulars at the cafe where I worked. Then Rodgers became a starter (he wasn’t yet the Rodgers we know now, at least not publicly) and it was a good time to be a Packers fan. My hate for the Bears became a love for the Packers,5 a love for Wisconsin, something like pride. I know it’s silly. What was I proud of? I had nothing to do with it. But that’s the alchemy of sports.
I’ll always love the Packers and what they say is true: if you ever get a chance to go to Lambeau, you really should. That said, I have a pretty hard time watching football these days, knowing what we do about CTE. Jordan Love seems pretty great though and after enduring the bitter and ugly end of the Rodgers era, his whole vibe is such a balm. And he’s good! The absurdity of the Packers once again having a talented quarterback makes me delight in the Bears misfortune all over again.
So, yeah, I still get sucked into games when Ben has them on and I still keep tabs on how they’re doing, but I don’t go out of my way to watch them anymore. Once the love for sports has been awakened in a person, however, it needs somewhere to go.
Enter: The Milwaukee Bucks.
An important sidebar before we leave the topic of Chicago: Here’s another work that overwhelms me with longing for a champion, especially being from a place that can never quite get out of Chicago’s shadow.
Like…come on!!! Is there a better city poem? God, I’m jealous. And Carl Sandburg even lived in Milwaukee, he worked for one of our socialist mayors, and he couldn’t direct some of this poetic might our way??? 😫
Now, I won’t pretend to be a lifelong Bucks fan. For most of my life, they weren’t very good. Their Wikipedia has a section titled 1990–1998: The period of struggles. That kind of says it all, no? (To make matters worse, let’s remember what the Bulls were doing in the 90s.) There was that window in the 00s when Ray Allen stirred up some excitement but then he got traded and they went back to being bad.
Forgive me for being late, forgive me for being a bandwagon fan, but I never knew a version of the Bucks to get excited about in the first place and I don’t know how you become a fan who can weather the dark days without at least a faint memory of winning. So I was slow to take interest when there were early rumblings of them possibly being good again. I viewed my brother’s cautious optimism with the same skepticism I viewed anyone’s faith in the Brewers (sorry).6 They actually have a shot this year. Mhm, sure. I’ve heard this before.
But this change in fortune coincided with my own move back to Milwaukee, when I was feeling particularly unmoored and badly in need of something to grab on to. Even if I wasn’t fully invested yet myself, seeing the city get excited about something was itself exciting. And then they really did start to get good. And then I, fair weather fan that I am, finally got on board.
And then: Pandemic.
Dramatically increased time online, at home. Time spent scrolling and desperately looking for any glimmer of something good. This is when I jokingly (but maybe not so jokingly) say I trauma bonded with the Milwaukee Bucks.7
And then: Leaving.
It was an unceremonious leaving. We had only just gotten vaccinated and been able to hug our loved ones again, only to hug them goodbye. It felt like betrayal. It felt like abandonment. It felt selfish, like I was running away. And in part it was; I was. But it also felt like something we had to do, something we’d talked about doing for years and now had the chance. So we left.
Can you break up with a city? Can you lose a city? That’s how it felt and still feels. Part of me is always reaching for Milwaukee. Part of me never left and is waiting for the rest of me to come back. How long do you get to call a city your city after leaving? How long is it home? How long does it belong to you and you to it? I hope forever.
Abdurraqib talks about the Cavs winning the Championship in 2016, just after he’d moved to Connecticut and the way it felt to watch it all unfold from afar and it brought me right back to those first few months away.
The 2021 NBA Finals were just a couple months after our ill fated move to Salt Lake City. Watching Milwaukee come back to life and finally — for once! — getting its moment in the sun made me more homesick than anything else. I could almost taste the jubilance as we watched people pour into the Deer District through a screen 1,500 miles away. It felt like if I watched enough clips I could touch it. I could convince myself I was there, had never left. I couldn’t believe my city was finally, finally, finally having its moment of glory, of destiny, and I wasn’t there for it. I couldn’t stand it. I honestly don’t know if I’ll ever get over it.
And so almost as soon as we moved into that apartment in Salt Lake, we put out our Milwaukee flag and our Bucks flag. We screamed and agonized and exploded with joy in front of our little tv. The words “knocked away and stolen by Holiday” still give me goosebumps. But it was a party of two compared to the thousands at the Fiserv.8 We could only follow along with the city’s antics on Twitter. We could only exchange excited texts with our friends and family back home, we couldn’t grab them by the shoulders and yell joyously into each other’s faces, hopping up and down. As soon as we left the apartment, the spell of our little bubble was broken.9 We were still 1,500 miles away. No one cared about the Bucks, no one cared about Milwaukee.
Later that week I feigned a doctor’s appointment so I could take off work and watch the live stream of the championship parade. I felt so happy and so sad as it wound its way through my city’s streets, streets lined with ecstatic crowds. Abdurraqib describes the same scene in Cleveland: From high enough above, it is hard to tell the difference between people and the street itself. It isn’t so much that people have taken over the street; it is that people have become the roads, become the grass, become the trees even. A city is its people, and in watching this parade I felt the acute separation between me and mine.
Later that night we hiked up into the foothills and looked down over our new city. Even as I appreciated the view I knew beyond the shadow of a doubt it would never be my city, it would never be home. I longed for Lake Michigan, a real lake, one that didn’t blow arsenic dust all over the place. It’s not fair to Salt Lake City, but it is what it is. It’s like the rebound after your heart gets decimated for the first time. It’s never gonna work but you have to lie to yourself a little bit, try to convince yourself you’re trying.
We’ve since moved on — not back to Milwaukee, but on. I really do like Bellingham and think over time it will feel like home. I know to give this place an actual shot, I have to make space in my heart for two cities, two homes. But at least part of me will always belong to Milwaukee. I don’t know if that will ever change.
My chest aches when I think of Milwaukee and though his city is not my city, reading There’s Always This Year — which is about so much more than basketball — was the closest I’ve ever heard anyone put into words the way it feels to give your heart to a place. I just hope someday my city has its own champion, someone to write it a love song even half as beautiful as the one Abdurraqib has written and continues to write for his.
The only thing that’s left thing left to say is this:
Bucks in 6.
Ok I lied, one more thing. I couldn’t figure out how to work this passage in but I can’t bring myself to publish this post without it.
For god’s sake. Go buy this book!
Although being able to keyword search your photo library is pretty nice.
Just to be clear: While much of the book waxes poetic about Cleveland, his love for his city — Columbus — is ever present.
Stephen A. Smith, I’m looking at you.
It must be said: Their colors and logo are legit. Credit where credit is due.
Maybe it’s more accurate to say it awakened a dormant love within me, one that every Wisconsinite is born with.
When the Brewers finally do manage to make it happen again, the emotional payout is gonna be huge for so many people. But I just can’t get myself invested in that much heartbreak. Or that many games.
What’s the proper use of this term, btw? I always thought it meant the bond people share by going through a traumatic experience together, but when I did a quick Google search it seems more akin to Stockholm Syndrome. So what’s the word I’m looking for?
Sometimes three if one of our friend’s, a fellow Wisconsinite, came over for the games
Speaking of bubbles, remember how weird the Bubble games were? With those fake crowds? There was so much weird shit from that first year of the pandemic.
Loved this piece. This town deserves the best in all things- including diasporic longing. Bucks in six forever.
Unsurprisingly, I am obsessed with this! Beautiful writing/reflections. <3