A Vivrant Thing
There’s Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension, Hanif Abdurraqib (Penguin, 2024)
Reviewed by Elizabeth Stice
There’s Always This Year is many things. The narrative is part autobiographical coming-to-age story and part coming to terms with being a young black man in America. It is a love letter to basketball. It is a love letter to a time and place—1990s Columbus, Ohio. Abdurraqib’s part of Columbus was a “war zone” to some outsiders, but he always knew better. His Columbus had troubles, but it also had basketball hoops, and coaches, and players whose greatness could never be understood by outsiders. As writes, “We loved MJ. But there were Michael Jordans on our block. There were Michael Jordans walking among us. Jordans four houses down, Jordans at the bus stop.”
Hanif Abdurraqib is a poet, an author, a MacArthur winner and much more but There’s Always This Year takes us back to before any of that. He opens up his youth, sitting at the dinner table, enjoying watching his father enjoy a meal. He describes the ways in which progress from one basketball court to another reflected the aging process. We learn what it meant to cheer for his own high school against LeBron and then to cheer for LeBron when he became a professional and represented more than Akron to people in Ohio. As Abdurraqib describes his neighborhood and the local legends, he chronicles some of his early attempts to forge a life for himself. An obvious point of comparison is Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Between the World and Me, but Abdurraqib’s memoir does more to explain the ways that we are shaped by our worlds.
The book’s title tells us that we should expect basketball and you should. Basketball is the red thread in this narrative. Abdurraqib writes about professionals like Jordan and LeBron and college players like the Fab Five at Michigan, but also about the guys in his neighborhood who were so good you can’t imagine it and the guys in his city who didn’t make it out. In a very moving section of the book, Abdurraqib explains why—even though he normally could not be moved to cry for any kind of commercial—the 2014 LeBron “Together” Nike commercial can provoke tears. It is not just that LeBron signified something as a kid from Akron who came from nothing and became the hope of a city to provide everything. It is the way that the commercial shows an entire city chanting “hard work, together” and how that represents the kind of hope that sports can help us visualize and the ways in which sports can help fulfill that promise. But this is not Ken Burns’ Baseball—no disrespect—it is not just a paean to basketball.
There’s Always This Year is an account of what it means to be a witness, not just to LeBron but to a city and a place and a time period. Throughout the book, Abdurraqib reflects on what it means to come from a place called a “war zone” and what it means to be part of a conversation about who “got out” while not particularly wanting to get out. It may not be an immediately obvious point of comparison, but There’s Always This Year speaks to the same sense of belonging seen in the 2021 film Belfast. In that movie, set in 1969, we see a young boy named Buddy, who belongs in his city and is surrounded by people who know and love him. But his city is also an actual war zone, divided between Catholics and Protestants, with those tensions erupting into The Troubles. Buddy’s parents are divided, too, on whether they should leave Belfast. His father thinks that the best way for their family to survive is to move away somewhere else, anywhere else. His mother worries that nowhere else will allow their family to flourish and for the children to know who they are.
Columbus is a main character in There’s Always This Year. Abdurraqib leaves it at times, but he keeps coming back. When he is somewhere else, he wants to be home. Despite its reputation, he knows his part of Columbus is a very desirable place to be and be known. But it is also the kind of place in Ohio where a young kid could be shot by the police just like Tamir Rice was in Cleveland. In that way it is just like many other places, too many places.
As much as Abdurraqib excels at portraying his place, he excels at capturing the power of a point in time. That is true in this book and in Go Ahead in the Rain: Notes to a Tribe Called Quest (2019) and They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us (2017). Born in 1983, Abdurraqib and hip hop grew up together and his works revisit the 1990s in ways familiar to those who were there and introductory to those who were not. Early in the book, he talks about the Fab Five at Michigan in the 1990s. He writes “I don’t recall when I first heard of the five black boys who made their way to Ann Arbor in 1991, but I know I heard of them before I saw them. This is a miracle of the past—one that many young folks might not have the opportunity to indulge in now. Hearing words of something, someone, some brewing storm. Hearing before seeing, building up the myth before confirming it.” (Loc 166 of 508)
The children of the 1990s are old enough now to be parents and to reflect on their own childhoods. As Abdurraqib notes in They Can’t Kill Us, those who were young then were growing up in a time when people killed each other for sneakers. He first watched Boyz n the Hood on VHS. All of us who were young then listened to tapes and CDs before we ever heard of streaming. We existed before cellphones. We saw the beginnings of bands that were famous later. We knew our friends before they turned out how they turned out. As the new generation adopts our misguided fashion sense—they know not what they do—it is a good opportunity for us to look back in wonder.
There’s Always This Year is not a first book and is, in some ways, a continuation of the literary journey Abdurraqib has been on for some time now. He draws on his personal life and his knowledge of music and sports to offer readers something very personal but also something which speaks to what is shared—maybe not by everyone, but by enough someones. The risk run by There’s Always This Year is that is could be criticized in the same way Abdurraqib recounts someone criticizing the Tribe Called Quest album The Love Movement as “more beats, more rhymes, more life” rather than a good follow-up to Beats, Rhymes, and Life. There’s Always This Year just manages to avoid that criticism, in part by being even more personal than Go Ahead in the Rain and by bringing in more sports than the essays in They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us and by showcasing the next stage of development of a great American author.
For those already familiar with Abdurraqib or who love basketball, There’s Always This Year is an easy sell. But its excellence can and should appeal to others. Abdurraqib’s books are all, in many ways, love letters. They are love letters not to a specific person, but to places and bands and moments in time, some of which have received praise already and some of which have been shortchanged. And Abdurraqib writes his love letters without downplaying the grief and the sadness associated with those people and places and times. And so his books offer us something real, not just from the author’s life, but from the ways in which we have to both make peace with this world and love it at the same time that we must occasionally curse it under our breath. This is a challenge shared by all who live and is a challenge worth pondering even if not all readers share the circumstances which have shaped Abdurraqib’s life and work.
Elizabeth Stice is a professor of history and assistant director of the honors program at Palm Beach Atlantic University. When she can, she reads and writes about World War I and she is the author of Empire Between the Lines: Imperial Culture in British and French Trench Newspapers of the Great War.
