Let Us Now Praise Giant Men | The Sacred Geometry of Kyle Lowry
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Let Us Now Praise Giant Men is a basketball column by Liam Baranauskas. This edition is about a shot from 2012 that didn’t count, how to telekinetically manipulate time, and the fear of what comes next.
In one of my favorite basketball videos, Kyle Lowry is fouled curling off a screen. Knowing it won’t count, he shoots the ball almost straight up. It looks like a 1930s lawyer sending a document through a vacuum tube. The ball leaves the top of the screen and doesn’t come down for a long, long time, to the point that you wonder if it ever will.
The “floater” is the strangest of shots. In its ideal form, it looks like something from a cartoon—a smaller player gently flicks the ball in a very high arc so it reaches its apex just over the outstretched fingertips of the leaping behemoth protecting the rim. It’s a triumph of craftiness as much as athleticism, a rare joke of a shot where the punchline is funnier because you know it’s coming.
But if you’ve ever tried to shoot a floater, even messing around by yourself on a playground, you know how difficult it is. You have to slow your body’s horizontal momentum to project the ball almost vertically. What happens is that the flight of the ball takes on as much importance as its destination. The geometry of the court expands upwards. You aren’t shooting at anything so much as into the air. It helps to pretend you’re moving against a stiff wind.
This means that the singular moment that defines the floater isn’t when it goes through the hoop (or doesn’t), it’s when it reaches its highest point, the moment of zero-slope on its parabola, when it is neither ascending nor descending. If you remember high school trigonometry, you know you can almost ascertain this moment when the ball is vertically motionless, but you can never cut time into a small enough slice to pinpoint it exactly. That doesn’t mean the moment doesn’t exist.
Practically, of course, where a floater ends up is determined by how it starts. It goes where it was always going to go. But a good floater—and “Kyle Lowry CRAZY floater” is one of the best—gives the illusion of possibility, that maybe just this once, during that uncanny pause in time, something will happen that you’ve never seen before.
I’m writing this the day after the NBA suspended its season, which may wind up being one of the more banal details from this particular historical moment. A travel ban has been enacted between the United States and Europe and cases of COVID-19 have been increasing exponentially. As of this exact moment, the number is 1,215 in the United States. That will probably seem ridiculously low soon. If you’re reading this a week or two after I wrote it, it means you’re alive. Maybe that thought will seem silly by the time this is published. I hope so.
If the basketball season has ended, these are the important moments in the closing pages of this year’s arc: Vince Carter ended his career by hitting a three-pointer in the closing seconds of a loss to the Knicks. Joel Embiid went for 30 and 14 against Detroit. Rudy Gobert of the Utah Jazz tested positive for the virus, days after mocking it by touching a bunch of reporters’ microphones. The climax of the season will be an anticlimax, resolving none of the questions set up by its beginning. The story will have gone off the rails, its path no longer determined by the old narrative rules.
It’s easy to want real life to follow a predictable arc. So when the world becomes unrecognizably strange, rivaling the tales our most imaginative authors think up, we recast the stories we’re living to make them less bizarre. What once were endings become plot points in longer narratives. The point of zero-slope changes. We adjust to how gravity works now.
Because of COVID-19, you are not supposed to touch your own face. The problem, of course, is that you are your face.
Someone recently told me how to control time. What it takes is to be “a person seriously working on your energy field and the purity of your chakras and then to take on more light and elevate the purity of your physicality.” That is also I was told, how you can bilocate, teleport, or walk through walls. It’s all a matter of having a high frequency, which is a matter of being around other people (or beings) who have high frequencies. Telekinesis, apparently, is a form of joy. It is contagious. In the good way.
Imagine Kyle Lowry’s floater when the ball has stopped in midair, somewhere off the top of the screen. At that point (which does not exist), it could go anywhere. It could bounce off the roof of the arena, or even break through the roof. It could keep ascending like it’s entered the Carousel in Logan’s Run, exploding as it passes through the stratosphere. Or please, imagine with me a basketball that escapes Earth’s gravitational pull and mounts itself on the night’s ceiling, a new star in the firmament, twinkling orangely down on us from the dark.
I do not believe Kyle Lowry was attempting to “take on more light,” but there’s something joyful and pure about his shot anyway. The whistle had long since sounded before he shot his forever floater, and Lowry, in a moment of play, gave us a gift. It shows possibility. I would go so far as to say it has a high frequency.
I am scared right now, but my hope is not for a happy ending as opposed to a tragic one. Right now, I don’t know what a happy ending looks like. My hope instead is that we do not know the story that is being told.
Kyle Lowry’s CRAZY floater finally drops, rattling through the rim. The camera (the impatient videographer apparently sick of waiting) cuts away to Brandon Jennings’ back as it does. “No basket!” declares the announcer. The shot doesn’t count. It never would have, from the moment it went up. That wasn’t the point.
Liam Baranauskas is a writer from Philadelphia. He is currently working on a novel.
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