Let Us Now Praise Giant Men | Watching the Penguins Play

Let Us Now Praise Giant Men is a basketball column by Liam Baranauskas. This edition is about fantasies, voids, assholes, and the Minnesota Timberwolves.

I was on the subway when my friend Dan texted photos of me and Randy on a day trip, accompanied by the message “RIP.” I wasn’t sure at first if the obvious meaning was correct. I hadn’t seen or spoken to Randy in a long time. He’d moved back home to take care of his sick mom, and it seemed to speed up an ongoing journey down a long path of bitterness and depression that alienated him from a lot of people. It seemed plausible that Dan was burying the ashes of a burned bridge. But even before returning to Pittsburgh, Randy was the type of dude who lived on his deathbed, constantly dredging up better days long past, a repository of convoluted, Randy-centric stories in which he name-dropped mid-to-low-level musicians that no one else really cared about, even then. These stories always seemed kind of made-up until later, when someone would in passing confirm their unlikely details: Randy had been the singer for Don Caballero before they went instrumental; there was an archived clip of John Peel saying Randy’s name over and over before playing the Solex single they’d named after him, he had dated Cat Power (“Charlene,” per Randy) before she became Cat Power. There was a running joke that Randy was an indie rock deux ex machina, revealing, in his nasal whine, how he’d Forrest Gumped himself into any number of infamous moments far beyond the grubby fabric that made up our mutual time and space. “So then I told Krist he could borrow my bass, but I warned him not to throw it.” Or “I figured, yeah, no, she’s already in the bathtub—why not make Mama Cass a ham sandwich?”

In the photos, Randy and I are in our late twenties but still hadn’t put away childish things. That day there had been a bone-colored sky and a lake and a high sheer rock face from which to jump into it. You jumped because the frayed end of the rope you could once swing from now dangled from an overhanging tree branch twenty feet above the water and far out of reach, a small story like never-worn baby shoes. The water was freezing. We tried to catch fish using a safety pin baited with a Cheeto. A fish ate the Cheeto but wouldn’t stay on the safety pin. In one of the photos, Randy is shirtless, his belly as white as a formaldehyded frog’s. I remember that Randy was embarrassed to take off his shirt.

To me, that time now seems to have been made of discrete moments disconnected to anything before or after. While it’s now apparent that a lot of people I knew then were thinking about their futures, they did so furtively, as if goals were shameful and devoting effort to days that might never come showed insufficient commitment to the ones we were in right now. Right now was everything. Or should have been. This wasn’t an idyllic state—living in a constantly regenerating present requires convincing yourself that you’re invincible, and deep down, you know that’s a lie. But when it hits right, oh man. It feels like everything is possible.

The counterweight to all that was Randy, shuffling past the divide between now and later like Mr. Carmichael in To the Lighthouse, never fully there even when he was, trying to tell you some bullshit (again) about the Karl Hendricks Trio. Even when he integrated newer material into his rotation, stories that took place closer to the present, sometimes even ones I had been there for, he did so with a sigh of nostalgia, as if the only way he could see himself was through the wrong end of the telescope.

What do you dream of when the future keeps getting further and further away?

I texted back, “Did Randy die,” not sure if I was joking or not.

This has been a hazy year in the NBA, one vacillating between endings and beginnings. Curry, LeBron, Durant, and the league’s other fading stars are firmly in their county-fair years, occasionally showing hints of past brilliance but mostly just imitating themselves, while their immediate generational successors—Giannis, Jokić, etc.—play for mediocre teams that, despite their varying individual levels of mastery, they aren’t fully capable of elevating. Many of the best young players are doing wonderful things with nobody paying attention for long-ignored franchises. What’s your mental image of Alperen Şengün? Of Evan Mobley? What’s your opinion of the Shai Gilgeous-Alexander discourse?

Of course, for connoisseurs of stuff no one else really cares about (hi!), this kind of collective, contextless storytelling is an opportunity. Without a self-destructing superteam or oblivious star to funnel all possible narratives into its gravity, there’s a sense of mystery about what might happen next, a reprieve from overarching either/or reductiveness, leaving the possibility of something formless, something weirder. It’s a plotless ensemble piece of a season, one for the real heads. Let’s write Cam Johnson/Cam Thomas fan fiction! Let’s consider Jay Huff’s creaky-ass jump shot that looks like computer animation circa the video for “Money for Nothing!”

The NBA, unsurprisingly, has little interest in selling a plotless ensemble piece.

The league’s marketing is instead situating Minnesota’s Anthony Edwards as the face of this transitional era. It makes some sense: Edwards is a comforting archetype for uncertain times, a long, springy wing who seems most comfortable cooking a defender in isolation, a familiar figure you can trace from Durant through Jordan through Elgin Baylor through, probably, some Jewish guy in comically enormous kneepads. Edwards differs from this archetype mostly in degree, with everything in his game amplified to the point that its parameters seem limitless—now he’s hitting his head on the rim, next year he might reach over the top of the backboard, maybe someday he’ll touch the arena’s roof. He’s also an inveterate shit-talker, someone whose loudmouthed dismissal of Durant in last year’s playoffs started to collect a few nails for the coffin of the NBA millennial, even if we’re not quite yet at the point of hammering it shut.

But the collective forces that shape our perception of celebrities aren’t quite sure yet how to frame Edwards’s story. In a soda commercial, Edwards skirts the bowl of the uncanny valley, his face more like an emoji representing “sympathetic disappointment” than an actual human face as he looks down at the prone body of a teenager who’s tried and failed to be like him. Meanwhile, the Netflix docuseries Starting Five presents him as an amiable, childlike cipher, playing hours of videogames in a dimly lit room that clearly smells like farts, while his somewhat exasperated partner, like a sitcom wife, wonders when he’ll grow up. It’s hard to reconcile this anodyne image-making with the charisma Edwards shows in a pre-stardom performance as an antagonistic, blue-chip jerk in the middling 2022 basketball dramedy Hustle, or to ignore the revelation, concurrent with Starting Five’s filming, that Edwards pressured a separate partner to terminate a pregnancy, which he acknowledged in what might have been an AI-generated public apology, claiming that text messages like “Get an abortion lol” and his demand to see video of the pregnant woman taking Mifepristone in exchange for $100,000 were “not aligned with who he wants to be as a man.”

They’re showing us the void, but Anthony Edwards doesn’t seem like a void. He seems like an asshole.

Of course, it’s stupid to attach moral qualities to real people based on snippets of available information. Assigning a personality to someone you only know through their public face is really about yourself, not them, a mirror rather than a window. So when I say that Anthony Edwards seems like an asshole, it’s not wholly a condemnation. From Charles Barkley to Draymond Green, the NBA has a long tradition of compelling heels, who (like all villains) project the shadowy outlines of our own sins on theirs. L’asshole, c’est moi. The point of this isn’t to judge Anthony Edwards, but to say that the story we’re being told about him doesn’t ring true. The story tells us that Edwards hasn’t learned yet that he’s a fledgling hero, yet it shows us shit-talking that reads like bullying more than rebellion, his preternatural ability an entitlement he wields like an heiress berating a Sweetgreen cashier. We’re not supposed to see ourselves reflected in the conflict between hero and heel, but only in Edwards’s moments of blankness. This story assumes we’re sociopaths, divorced from our own actions, looking into a mirror with no one staring back.

Lately, I’ve been trying to spend more time fantasizing, going so far as to write it into my daily schedule. It’s an opportunity to embrace narcissism, to create worlds that exist only to validate me. I fantasize about egotistical things, the spoils of success rather than the means of it—not of writing a brilliant novel but people telling me how brilliant it is, the money I’d make from the recognition of my talents rather than the talents themselves. I fantasize about sex. I fantasize about never getting old. I fantasize about joyless pleasure, and the act of turning myself over to these fantasies is like meditating but also its opposite, since instead of trying to empty my conscious mind, I’m trying to fill it with the dissolute dreams my subconscious won’t let me dream at night. In my fantasies, I can be an asshole. In my fantasies, everyone fucking loves it.

Sometimes I wonder if Randy trapped himself in self-centered nostalgia because he didn’t see a future he could fantasize about, attaching himself to (at best) E-level celebrities out of a sense that he was a minor character in his own life, that he had no control over the things he loved. It’s a self-protective mechanism, one that would only work, to a point, because the past leaves no hint of the powerlessness that runs through the future’s uncertainty.

But the past is a finite resource. It only changes as much as you shift your own focus on it. And I think, for Randy, as the past began to run dry, it became both a symptom and a cause of his depression, building a wall around his kindness and generosity and humor until he couldn’t see over it anymore.

In the offseason, Minnesota traded Karl-Anthony Towns, the face of the franchise for almost a decade, making this the first year that the Timberwolves are unquestionably Anthony Edwards’s team. Karl-Anthony Towns always looks kind of sad. He was supposed to be the next great “unicorn” center, a designation that he never really attained despite holding a plausible claim to being the best-shooting giant ever. In the inane vocabulary that’s invaded popular basketball discourse, this is because Towns isn’t an “alpha.” This means that you never watch him and think about what an asshole he probably is.

Minnesota traded Towns to New York for Julius Randle, a move that ignored the obvious fact that Randle’s throwback game, full of bully-ball post-ups and iso midrange jumpers, closes off the open court where Edwards’s nascent ability shines brightest. Thirty years ago, Randle might have been Edwards. Now he’s walking nostalgia, Sha Na Na at Woodstock frantically harmonizing and twisting while Jimi Hendrix is backstage soaking his guitar in lighter fluid.

I love Julius Randle. His regressive style is off-tempo with the rhythm of the modern game and only works sporadically, so despite being selected to the All-Star Game three times (crazy, right? I looked it up!), he’s often popularly derided, or even worse, ignored. He refuses to play differently, which doesn’t seem like obliviousness but an almost-artistic expression, one born of deeply held beliefs that he can’t express any other way. When Randle shit-talks, it seems both funny and menacing, his prematurely old man’s face contorting into an expression of mild bemusement that always seems on the verge of curdling, like the face of a character in a Walter Mosley novel. He’s out of time in both appearance and action, a figure from the past stuck in a present that’s the future only to him, a future that he may have manifested from his fantasies, and now he has to deal with the fact that it’s nothing like he expected.

It’s nice to think that maybe my friend Randy would have recognized a kindred spirit in Julius Randle, except Randy didn’t give a shit about basketball. Randy liked hockey. Sometimes he and I would go get cheap tacos for lunch and I would ask what he was doing that night and he would say, “Oh, I’ll probably go watch the Penguins play.” I knew he meant he was going to a bar to get drunk and watch the NHL on TV, but I always pictured Randy going off by himself to watch a secret colony of frolicking penguins.

And maybe, for Randy, it kind of was like that—an act of witnessing, like a trip to the zoo, not self-projection. I never heard Randy name-drop Mario Lemieux or tell a convoluted story involving himself, Kurt Vile, a game-winning goal by Jaromír Jágr, and, like, a potato or something. Maybe he was just watching the Penguins play, and I think it told him a story he loved not because he saw himself there but because he didn’t. There was nothing there to leave him behind.

Dan answered my question with a single word: “Yeah.”

There’s a moment as you drop toward the water from a cliff or a bridge or a broken rope when you realize that you might have leapt from too great a height. You don’t fear the rocks or monsters that might be below the water but the surface of the water itself, the moment of transition from one state to another, and how much it’s going to hurt.

Liam Baranauskas is a writer from Philadelphia.

Illustration: Arunas Kacinskas.

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