Come Together

     Generally, and as I've mentioned before, my wife and I are not big sports fans; that is, weekends are not spent watching college ball or pro matches, not even the big playoffs.  More often, it's the You Tube highlights of a series or final (although we did watch the very exciting World --at least to the US-- Series last year between Toronto and LA).  And basketball?  Well with a zillion teams and a zillion games, it's a wonder that nearly every game can draw so many to each game; and let's face it, sports are indeed a big draw.  But the Knicks...it was the final quarter of the fifth game and with a possibility that the Knicks could maybe win a long-awaited championship, we decided to turn it on and indeed watched the Knicks go on to win the championship for the first time in 53 years...bravo.  Interesting, and happy for them, but not riot-in-the-streets happy.  But their victory shadowed an even larger happening, that unity of people from many parts of the country.  And it seemed that we were all more than ready for that...didn't matter the team, or the underdog comeback, or the sport.  It felt as if people just wanted something --some thing-- to bring them all together for a small bit of time.  To forget all the political nonsense and fighting that was wearing thin, especially as our dollars stretched thin while the news reported on billionaires not feeling rich enough.  This was nitty-gritty in the street stuff, the million dollar athletes now bringing us back to the playgrounds where they started, and now showing kids everywhere that this could be them, and that this victory was theirs.

Editorial cartoon: Dave Whamond

     Here's how editor Hanif Abdurraqib put it introducing the Best Sports Writing of 2025: It is easy for me to become cynical about the limits of language and the limits of storytelling.  I don't like to make grand proclamations about what will or won't save humanity, because at times I feel like there's no magic potion to it all.  But I do like that there are ways people keep showing up for each other, with each other.  If I am going to buy into the mythology of sports, and the lectures of old once-beloved coaches, I suppose it will be in this way, in the way that so many of these selected stories hopefully echo with you: there is a miracle in showing up to a place, and doing something alongside someone else for a while.  There is a miracle in showing up to a place and doing something alone, just for yourself.  In the grass, somewhere beyond here, there is perhaps someone stunned by the gratitude of having moved beyond the place they began, which is also a miracle...The sports stories offer a window into the hyper specific.  The communty within a community, where the playing of a game is a show of solidarity, or perseverance.  The interior struggle of the athlete or the fan, the person who is fighting their own contradictions or their own unique aches to make sense of why they keep returning to the rigors of sports or the rigors of fandom....I suppose, if there is to be a theme I would name for the work selected, it is, broadly, a theme of community and survival.  What good miracles can be made out of a patch of grass or a bit of blacktop, what universe can exist while others are sleeping or turned the other way, barely noticing what might be unfolding at their backs.

     It seemed that we were all ready for a break, a glimpse of what we, as a country, were.  Enough of the no-bid contracts that do sloppy work painting pools, or the trillionaire buying back over 1300 of his cybertrucks so that his company could show less of a loss (sales of the trucks otherwise would have shown a 51% drop, wrote CarBuzz).  Enough of hearing that of the 4,499 refugees Trump allowed into the US this year, only three were not from South Africa (and not white), wrote the Christian Science Monitor.  Enough of the inside traders making money on their Polymarket betting while the majority of bettors lost over $131 million, wrote Bloomberg.  I mean really, aren't you growing tired of watching this cartoon channel that now seems to be our government in action?  Europe, South Korea, and Ukraine are publicly saying that they feel that the US may no longer be a trusted ally, nor one capable of actually defending them.  Iran apparently feels more emboldened than ever as even the Pentagon feels that Iran may have replenished most of their weapons, including ballistic missiles.

    We need to start talking, or maybe talking again.  And not so much just on the world stage but among each other, to let down our insulating and "don't tread on me" shields.  Here's how New York writer Melissa Kirsch expressed it in her column: Everyone in New York City is talking about the Knicks, but perhaps as notable as the team’s winning the N.B.A. championship after a 53-year drought is the fact that people here are talking to one another at all.  The city’s famous indifference, the anonymity-preserving armor that most inhabitants wear every day, has been disintegrating since the N.B.A. finals began, and seemed to disappear entirely after the Knicks won the chip.  In this transformed city, previously forbidding strangers are transformed into fellow fans.  A blue-and-orange hat is a symbol of fellowship, license to start a conversation in line at the deli.  You could stand in silence while waiting for the elevator, or you could ask the person next to you if he saw the game.  You could let the old man in the Knicks Forever tee with matching neon sneakers shamble on by, or you could nod and give him a thumbs-up, which, miraculously, is returned.  The feeling is one of temporary wonder: Can you believe Brunson and Co. came through?  Can you believe you and I are talking to each other right now?  New Yorkers mythologize their tendency to mind their own business as a form of self-sufficiency and sophistication.  Unflappable, unconcerned with others, a perfect performance of what the sociologist Erving Goffman called “civil inattention,” acknowledging strangers with a respectful glance that never engages.  Elsewhere this behavior would be seen as cold, antisocial, but in New York it’s become a modus vivendi.  But regardless of where you live, you’ve likely experienced that feeling of separateness from the people around you.  People are going about their lives, busy with their families and jobs, often too preoccupied to acknowledge others.  It’s only when that invisible armor falls —when someone ventures a “How are you?” at the gym, when the cashier asks if the probiotic soda you’re buying is any good— that you realize you’ve been keeping yourself separate.  New York in the thrall of the Knicks presents this shift in the extreme.  It’s a crucible, a laboratory of connection made all the more notable for the trademark dispassion it’s replaced.  I want to bottle this connection, this communal experience that’s so precious because it is, as my colleague Matt Flegenheimer put it, “good, gleeful, uncomplicated.”  Knicks fever has given people an entrée to communicate with people they wouldn’t otherwise, a rare pathway to intimacy.  Now that we’ve experienced it, now that we’ve admitted we want to connect with one another —that it feels good to chat and high-five and smile at people we don’t know— how do we perpetuate it?  The British anthropologist Victor Turner called it “communitas,” that feeling of ecstatic kinship when our usual scripts are dispensed with, when we replace society’s regular structure with this warm “human kindness.”  I’m already grieving the return to normalcy that will follow communitas, the inevitable retreat back into our eyes-down, you-talking-to-me bubbles of self-regard.  But Turner cautioned against trying to institutionalize the good feeling.  He saw resumption of normal life, with its clear boundaries and customs, as essential for a functioning society.  People, he said, “return to structure revitalized by their experience of communitas.”  If we can remember what it felt like to be this uninhibited, if we can remember that the guy we’d never in a million years think to talk to was once the guy in the OG Anunoby jersey we spent 10 delightful minutes dissecting plays with at a street-corner watch party, who knows what else is possible? 

Editorial cartoonist: Dave Whamond

     For some, this return to everyday life may mean heading back to our shells of comfort, of tuning everything out and using that silence to listen to that swirl of thoughts and emotions still in our heads.  One story I enjoyed from the sports collection was by Nick Hunt which he titled, Traveling At the Speed of the Soul: In the West, pilgrimages are much in vogue these days, often stripped of religious baggage and repackaged as "slow travel."  Spain's Camino de Santiago, by far Europe's best known pilgrim path, was tramped by more than 446,000 pairs of boots in 2023, double the number from a decade before and six times more than two decades ago, according to the Pilgrim's Reception Office in Santiago de Compostela.  Of course, many of these peregrinos, bearing their traditional scallop shells, go to revere the shrine of Saint James, but increasing numbers are drawn to the walk for secular reasons.  The British Pilgrimage Trust, a charity formed in 2014, talks of a "global renaissance," enthusing on their website: Today's pilgrims have often come to a crossroads in their life, and want the slowing down, socially leveling and revitalizing benefits that pilgrimage brings.  Others want to connect with themselves, others, their ancestors, spirituality or nature.  Pilgrimage is, at its essence, the story of discovery and quest -- of Odysseus, Aeneas and Frodo...The journey is not a straight line but a completed circle.  The supposed destination --whether Rome, Jerusalem, Mecca, the banks of the Ganges or anywhere else-- is not the end of the road but the exact halfway point.  The real destination is your own front door.  But then he added this quote from philosopher Alain de Botton: While most of us are led by the strict demands of timetables and diaries, our soul, the seat of the heart, trails nostalgically behind, burdened by the weight of memory.  Author Hunt carried on: Rebecca Solnit put it much the same way in her history of walking, Wanderlust: "I suspect that the mind, like the feet, works at about three miles an hour.  If this is so, then modern life is moving faster than the speed of thought."  In other words, thoughts --or souls-- can get left behind if their hosts move too quickly.

Editorial catoonist: Michael de Adder

    And speaking of being left behind, I find that I am always curious as to what books and stories others find captivating.  Not the usual book club fodder or the seemingly endless best-sellers, but the five or so books you would personally rescue if you had another few minutes after safely evacuating everything else when your house was on fire.  What are the books you would tell a close friend about, and how much of an impact they had made on your life even to this day.  To be honest, some of my favored authors have proven disappointing, while a few scientists or movie stars have surprised me.  Here are a few recommendations from an actress I'd never heard of, Jamie-Lynn Sigler: (on War of Art by Steven Pressfield)  This is the book I return to when I can feel myself slipping into hesitation, distraction, or self-doubt.  It tells us that showing up consistently, imperfectly, is the work.  It reframed creativity from something precious and intimidating into something sturdy, almost blue-collar.  You don't wait for the muse -- you just check in.  (on The Untethered Soul by Michael A. Singer)  This one really changed my life when I learned how to step back from the voice in my head and realize that I am not my thoughts.  It gave me a sense of internal space I didn't know was possible -- that peace isn't something you earn but rather something you just stop interrupting.  It changes how you relate to anxiety, fears, even joy -- less resisting, more allowing.  (on The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho)  If I had to pick one book, this would be it.  it quietly rearranged how I move through the world.  It taught me that purpose isn't something you chase at the expense of your life; it's something revealed through paying attention to your life.  (on Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl)   This is one of those rare books that doesn't just change how you think; it changes what you believe you can endure.  It strips life down to the (in my opinion) most essential life question: not "Why is this happening to me" but "What is being asked of me now?"

    Finding yourself.  Finding ourselves, as a people and as a country.  If there was one speech that recently encapsulated this (in my opinion), it was that of Michelle Obama bringing tears to her husband's eyes, and to those in the crowd.  Perhaps it was because her orator style had equaled or even passed that of her husband in so many ways: its sincerity, its urgent message of hope, its clear and understandable message to everyone, its welcome manner of all that we had missed in the past few administrations, its simple rhetoric of how a president should and could sound.  Her speech brought it all back, how we in the crowd would nod our heads with pride when she was spoke of the values and morals we all believed in, and those that yes, we still held.  That we, as America, would come back from this pit we didn't realize we had fallen into, but that our fall was likely over and it was time to check our cuts and bruises and that it was now time to stand up and start crawling our way out, and that it could and would be done, that the Bozo days of the circus government were now doing their final evening show and attendance had already dropped off; it was time to pack up and move on to the next city or country (or Mars).  

                         

     But back to the Knicks.  Sentenced to life in prison, Darrell Powell was a life-long fan of the Knicks since his childhood days in Harlem, recalling players such as Walt Frazier and Earl "The Pearl" Monroe.  Wrote Powell in The Prison Journalism Project: Like the Knicks, I'm searching for some comeback magic myself.  I'm searching for a buzzer-beater at freedom.  There are two possible avenues.  I can be resentenced by the Manhattan district attorney's office.  Or I can be granted clemency by the governor...One of the first things I want to do when I leave prison is see a game there with my 79-year-old mother.  I hope my nieces and nephews whom I've never met will come too.  I want them to learn the life lessons that basketball taught me: toughness, resilience, determination.  While I wait to learn my fate, I will keep rooting for the Knicks and rooting for myself.  If they can beat the odds, maybe I can too.  So can we all...