Let Us Now Praise Giant Men | Kyrie Irving Has Saged the TD Garden
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Let Us Now Praise Giant Men is a basketball column by Liam Baranauskas. This edition is about quitting a boycott against the Brooklyn Nets from a Covid-19 isolation hotel.
When my test comes back positive, I decide to check into one of the city’s free isolation hotels to avoid infecting my wife and son. Isolation hotels are normal hotels that New York has repurposed in the wake of the tourism industry’s collapse to quarantine Covid patients from their families. Before I leave, I write down my usernames and passwords for my wife in case things go bad. I’m supposed to be there for ten days. A chartered Uber carries me from my apartment to the Laguardia Plaza near the airport. The driver, double-masked, pushes seventy-five on the BQE, his window open the whole way.
As far as I can tell, the LaGuardia Plaza is a much older hotel that’s been retrofitted for Instagram: clean lines, neutral colors, sharp angles. Thousands of spaces all over the world now look like this, stripped of any detail that might differentiate them—it’s as if they’re meant to exist as backgrounds and geotags, machine-learnable representations of the concept of “hotel” more than an actual hotel. But Covid’s redifferentiated the space: a brusque security guard at a plastic folding table checks off names in a three-ring binder, mid-century modern couches have been rearranged into barriers, nurses in scrubs and masks replace obsequious hotel staff. “The Pavilion Grille” and “Elements Lounge” are dark, their chairs up for a night that’s not going to end. A possibly homeless teenager with clothes in a clear plastic bag waits with me, along with a woman who tells me she knows she got exposed to the virus at rehab and a man so sick he can’t stand without help from his companion.
The doors don’t lock on our rooms. Our meals are delivered, there are twice-daily temperature and pulse ox checks, and at one in the morning and again at five, a member of the nursing staff opens the door and yells inside to see if you need medical attention. You’re not supposed to leave your room except for regimented “fresh air” breaks, which are only used by smokers and me. The rest of the time, the nursing staff holds on to their cigarettes so no one smokes in their rooms. I hear one patient tell the nurse his cigarettes are “Blue Glove,” which the nurse thinks is the brand, but it turns out the patient has his cigarettes stored in a blue surgical glove.
It’s mostly younger people who go outside, though that might be a reflection of who’s still well enough to smoke after getting Covid. There’s a tubby Puerto Rican guy in an Aaron Judge jersey, a dude with a spread-winged owl tattooed across his throat, the girl who says she got sick from rehab. Everyone seems dazed; no one talks much to each other, and the few people who do speak, speak in torrents, seemingly talking not to communicate but just so their words can spend some time outside, too.
This hotel isn’t just an algorithm you can sleep in anymore; it now seems like a reflection of the city during the pandemic: repurposing its own ruins, isolated, smoking cigarettes even though it’s a really, really dumb idea to do so. There’s something elegiac and beautiful about this to me—the threat of death breathing life into life’s imitation.
One day it snows, fat flakes against the hotel’s boutique geometry. The guy in the Aaron Judge jersey phones his friend, asking him to come to the window so he can wave at him.
One night in isolation, I decide to watch a Brooklyn Nets game. This is not a decision I make lightly. I haven’t watched the Nets since they moved from New Jersey, where they’d been an afterthought of a franchise—forgettable players in anonymous uniforms dribbling off their feet in an arena sinking into a swamp. Then a real estate developer named Bruce Ratner partnered with Mikhail Prokhorov, a Russian banker who made his fortune auctioning off a formerly Soviet-owned mining company to himself for pennies on the dollar, in a scheme to buy and move the team. Ratner and Prokhorov secured a half-billion dollars in public funding to take possession of a huge swath of Downtown Brooklyn, much larger than the arena’s footprint. People were evicted, their apartment buildings razed to make way for leaning glass condos. Local businesses were replaced with chain stores. The new Nets weren’t a basketball team; they were an eminent domain ruling. Prokhorov forced his new players to watch him dribble two miniature basketballs at once while sitting on a regular-sized one.
But now, after years of mismanagement, the Nets have somehow pulled together a roster that’s a) good, and b) led by players with public personas that are oddly representative archetypes of Brooklyn émigrés. In Kevin Durant they have a guy with business tattoos who’s made overly emotional by social media; when they acquired James Harden, they got a guy hiding his lack of personality behind a comically voluminous beard. Add in DeAndre Jordan—I guess he’s there because he’s someone’s friend?—and the Nets lineup is a party in Crown Heights that you arrived at too early.
The most interesting of the Nets stars is Kyrie Irving, maybe the most iconoclastic player in the NBA. Irving was the leading voice against the NBA’s return last summer, saying it would distract from the anti–police brutality protests. He donated 1.5 million dollars to support WNBA players through the pandemic and bought George Floyd’s family a house. He has also said he thinks the earth is flat and, at least in interviews, often doesn’t sound like he enjoys playing professional basketball very much. Prior to a game in Boston earlier this year (Irving played two dispirited seasons for the Celtics before leaving for the Nets), he marched around the baseline, smudging the court with sage. Not long after, he took an open-ended leave of absence from the Nets, popping up (maskless) at his sister’s birthday party and at a Zoom meeting supporting progressive Manhattan District Attorney candidate Tahanie Aboushi. He was gone from the team for two weeks. Upon returning, he did not explain why he had left.
The Nets are wearing their Nike-designed “City Edition” uniforms, allegedly inspired by the work of Jean-Michel Basquiat. The lettering mimics graffiti. Thin Basquiat-style crowns are painted on either end of the court, near the Barclay’s Center logos. My first reaction is that this is deeply and predictably corny, but it also makes me question my reflexive distaste. Maybe my self-righteousness concerning branding that uses antiestablishment aesthetics is now itself a mark of the status quo? And maybe, I don’t know, this whole thing might make some kid look up Basquiat and want to start making art? The court’s varnish has a greenish-white sheen to it, kind of like a gessoed canvas, which I admit is a nice touch.
And despite the clammy, appropriating vibe of the team’s presentation, the Nets’ style of play reflects something oddly genuine. They resemble a playground squad; not in the fun, pejorative way the term is often used, but in the way that no one seems to know each other very well, so whichever player brings the ball up tries to beat his defender, and if he can’t, he passes to someone else, who does the same thing. I’ve played in plenty of games like this. No one cuts. The few pick-and-rolls are desultory. It’s like they’re doing that dance in which the dancers pass each other imaginary basketballs. It’s an imitation made real.
Only now it somehow . . . works? Against Los Angeles, Irving shoots the lights out, and on the rare occasions he can’t create space, he passes to Durant, whose entire body is a thin arm that can drop the ball through the hoop from directly above, anywhere on the court. Harden’s nitpicky, obsessive game seems out of place, but he still does his job when the ball comes around to him. No one on either team plays much defense. The Nets drop thirty-six points on the Clippers in the final quarter to win.
I’m lucky. Despite boredom manifesting as hypochondria (Do my lungs hurt today? Can I still smell?), I’m not that sick, with symptoms that feel more like a mild hangover than a deadly disease. My room is clean and comfortable, with deep red walls and USB inputs in all the lamps, and the staff is nice, especially considering the environment they’re working in. I get used to the twice-nightly check-ins quickly, half-waking a minute or two before the nurses open my door, stepping out of my dreams long enough to yell, “I’m fine!” before returning.
I write, read, I text friends, I talk to my son on FaceTime. From my window I watch planes landing at LaGuardia Airport, and the Grand Central Parkway wrapping around Flushing Bay. Someone posts Frank O’Hara’s “Poem [Lana Turner Has Collapsed],” and as it always does, it knocks me flat like it’s my first time reading it. The difference this time is that I’m usually most affected by the wistful bragging in the lines “I have been to lots of parties / and acted perfectly disgraceful,” now it’s the breathless closing that gets me: “Oh Lana Turner we love you get up.”
There’s an artificial construction to celebrity that I think O’Hara’s getting at, even celebrating, in the poem. We’ve agreed on the shared reality of a desperate machine that validates a secret and holy light inside us. The light exists in everyone but the machine, a construction of our collective belief, only sees it in those we point it at. Which means celebrities aren’t gods: they’re angels. We’re the gods, because we’re blessing their light. And there’s a weird simultaneous joy and sadness in that realization.
Kyrie Irving is a shadow, existing only until we decide to flick a switch.
I think I know why Kyrie Irving (thoughtful and flawed, miraculous and human) saged the TD Garden, and then made himself disappear.
In the past year, something’s happened to Barclay’s Center. People have been reclaiming it. The large pavilion outside the entrance on Flatbush Avenue became a de facto rallying spot during the summer protests. It was still a bit of a push/pull between grassroots organizing and corporate appropriation—Doritos billboards using BLM hashtags popped up immediately, and Uber used scrolling LEDs on the arena to promote itself as somehow being antiracist—but the space was open and centrally located, so it developed a second kind of gravity, a centripetal pull resulting from movement, not merely from weight.
And when the presidential election was called in November, streams of people flowed to Barclay’s Center to celebrate. I was there, driving home from meeting friends in the city, the threat of Covid still making me squeamish about the subway (I rarely go to Manhattan but like everyone else, still call it “the city”). I was stuck in traffic but did not mind. I honked my horn. Everyone did. Even MTA buses were honking their horns, joyfully. People on the street cheered back. And the weird, brick spaceship of the arena seemed to fade into the background.
In my room I think about the man who drove me to the hotel, the machinations that have given him this job that clearly terrifies him. And I think how we’re all victims of scale, the incomprehensibly vast, the terrifyingly small, and how it feels to be caught in between.
My body is a host, for a virus, yes, but for other things, too. I spend a lot of time meditating. I try to channel Whitman’s multitudes. I imagine my body as a city, my consciousness as people who live there. I do not want the virus to build a condo inside me. I do not want the virus to open a Shake Shack. I do not want to be gentrified. I do not want my light to go out.
I too have acted perfectly disgraceful at lots of parties, but I also never actually collapsed.
I watch another Nets game, this time against the 76ers, propping my computer on the circular coffee table in front of my room’s scratchy armchair. The Nets are without Durant (Covid contact protocols) and Irving (leg injury), and their performance is dismal. Harden scores efficiently, but no one else can, and Brooklyn doesn’t have any big men capable of stopping Joel Embiid, the Sixers’ skilled center. The Nets keep it close for the first half and then give way in the third quarter. Philadelphia switches long-armed Ben Simmons onto Harden, stifling him, and begins to pull away when Danny Green hits two corner threes in a row. Soon the Nets are down sixteen, almost certain to lose.
There’s an aura of a façade chipped away, a swamp-born New Jersey heart visibly beating beneath a replica Coogi sweater. This is good, too, to be the thing and its imitation at the same time, to lay that sad heart bare.
If I’m honest, I don’t remember what used to be on the site of the Barclay’s Center. Maybe it was the Pathmark that played Hot 97?
Oh Kyrie Irving I love you come back.
Liam Baranauskas is a writer from Philadelphia. He is currently working on a novel.
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