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This is a reading list about basketball, which is also to say, this is a reading list about love, loss, and heartbreak.
I’m 15 when I experience my first heartbreak. It’s Game 5 of the Western Conference Semifinals, and we’re tied 2-2 with the Spurs, the defending champions. I say “we” are tied, because are you even a sports fan if you don’t consider yourself part of the team? My heartbreaker is Tim Duncan, future Hall of Famer and my personal nemesis, who makes a fadeaway jump shot over two defenders and puts the Spurs up by one with 0.4 seconds left on the clock.
0.4 seconds.
We’re in the living room when it happens, my parents and I, crowded around our silver box of a television. In my memory, our cats are there, too, because who in our household would miss such a big game? But it’s more likely my wailing has scared them far away—because I’m not just crying, I’m truly wailing. I’m one of Homer’s grieving women, I’m Alice in Wonderland crying an actual ocean between hiccups, I’m Diane Keaton weeping then whooping in her Something’s Gotta Give breakup montage.
My team, the Lakers, has lost.
It’s not over ’til it’s over. My mom keeps repeating this refrain, and I’m not sure what frustrates me more: that she actually believes in miracles, or that she thinks some platitude can comfort me. I don’t want false hope. Let a girl grieve the way only a teenager can.
And it’s over, isn’t it? There’s no time left. Well, 0.4 seconds. That’s—quite literally—the blink of an eye. Maybe two if you’re quick.
Still, I don’t leave the room when we take a timeout to draw up a final play; I pace, I cry, I rage, I wail. But I stay. I will watch the game through.
Gary Payton, inbounding, looks for our star player. But he’s unable to get himself free, swarmed by a double team. For a moment, it looks like we may not even get the ball in, like we may not even make a final play, like it’s over before it’s over, like I should’ve walked away. But then Payton finds an improbable passageway. He passes to Derek Fisher, his back to the basket. And in one fluid motion—
He catches. We—the players, the crowd, the heartbroken—hold our breath.
He spins. Wait, why am I holding my breath when I know we’ve lost?
He shoots. That feeling, that swelling in my chest? Surely Emily Dickinson wasn’t watching a basketball game when she wrote that hope is a thing with feathers, but then again, maybe she was. Because here we are, all of us, on our feet like we too might take flight with Fisher—Fisher, who is midair, watching the ball (or is it a winged thing?)—as time slows, because isn’t ‘millisecond’ just another word for infinity? Open-armed, like we’ve never known pain, or loss, or—
Swish.
Just like that, the ball becomes two game-winning points. And with it, my broken heart is born again.
Time moves on, even when our affections linger. Twenty-odd years later, halfway through the 2025 WNBA season, I find myself watching nearly every game, even though I’m in a time zone that makes watching them live a rarity. And sure, I enjoy the game itself—the behind-the-back passes, the logo threes—but in this moment marked by personal and global uncertainty, when it feels like time is running out, I find myself reaching for something beyond the box score. Maybe that’s why I keep watching, even now, where a midseason order has started to settle and my team sits squarely in the middle of the pack. Given the league’s record viewership this season and last, I don’t think I’m the only one hoping that, despite everything, there’s more to play for.
Now, listen. I’m not going to pretend that in real life there’s a game-winning shot that can turn everything around, because if you’re anything like me, you don’t want to hear about miracles when you’re down, and I respect that. But I will say this: The game is never just about the game. It’s where you play it, and who you play it with. It’s where you watch it, and who you watch it with. And, sometimes, it’s a reminder that even though there are no buzzer-beaters in real life, there is momentum, and it can still swing in our favor.
For fans and hoopers alike, this is a reading list that goes beyond the game: toward community, toward identity, and when you’re least expecting it, toward that thing with feathers.
Loving a Sport That Doesn’t Always Love Me Back (Mac Crane, The Sun, March 2024)
As former Division 1 basketball player Mac Crane writes, there’s a “sudden poetry” to a game of pickup basketball, an “immediate bond and intimacy as strangers.” Unlike a formal game of basketball, with set teams, known teammates, and familiar rhythms, a game of pickup is more spontaneous, with teams decided on the spot. But as anyone who has been picked last in gym class knows, there is a game within the game: choosing, and getting chosen, is a silent negotiation of power, status, and respect. So, how do you get yourself noticed? How do you get chosen?
Basketball, like all sports, is a microcosm of the world at large, shaped by the same injustices, hierarchies, and exclusions. On the court, especially in a men’s pickup game, being anything other than a man means having to make yourself legible to those in power, often at the expense of your own identity and well-being. Reflecting on their experience as a nonbinary person perceived as a woman in male-dominated pickup spaces, Crane considers what it means to be “on the outside looking in” of the sport they love. Crane grapples with having to “beg for inclusion” and returning to a game that might not love them back, all for a chance at the same thing every player wants: “to know transcendence.”
It’s easy to pick out the alpha. The others circle around him like hungry planets, asking when we’re going to start and who he’s picking for his squad. He’s the one I start rebounding for. Maybe even compliment his jumper while I’m at it. This doesn’t necessarily mean that he’ll pick me for his team, but it gets me on his radar and shows that I’m willing to be a team player. I do this even though it makes me sick to give up my power so he can keep his. While I’m here, I put a bit more swagger in my walk. I deepen my voice, try to act like one of them. Because, let’s face it, masculinity is rewarded. Maybe I am doing a disservice to femininity by feeding that beast, but it’s the only way I know how to access the game I love in a gym full of men; the game that is never just a game but a domain in which people are sorted and categorized from a young age: by ability, by neighborhood, by income. By gender. There is a certain queerness for me, as a nonbinary person, to playing pickup basketball with all men. It’s the queerness of yearning, of loving a sport that doesn’t always love me back; a sport that doesn’t know what to do with me, where to put me.
Have I Even Told You Yet About the Courts I’ve Loved? (Ross Gay, Literary Hub, September 2020)
The basketball court I played on most growing up was less a court than a sloped driveway, a hoop mounted above the garage at a height that was almost certainly not regulation. My stepdad and I would play H-O-R-S-E (sometimes P-I-G when we were tired), taking shots and accumulating letters on misses (me more quickly than him, except for the times I suspect he went easy on me). There weren’t many places to shoot from—there wasn’t space for a free-throw-length shot, let alone a 3-pointer—but enough room to develop my confidence in a bank shot, and more importantly, the space to bond with a new parent, even during the years most pre-teens would rather be with their friends.
Basketball courts are usually seen as the backdrop to the main event—if they are seen at all. But they all have their own quirks, colors, sounds, smells; they invite different crowds and hold different memories. In this tender meditation, Ross Gay recalls the intimacies of the courts he has known and loved, even down to the “beautiful rank smell of gym and fabric” of a college gym in Pittsburgh. Gay’s love letter paints courts as sanctuaries, small and sometimes smelly and rusty miracles, worthy of celebration in their own right. “A good court—maybe this is the definition of a good court—helps you witness the catalog, the encyclopedia, of tendernesses it is,” he writes. This essay is an invitation to pay attention, to witness, and find that tenderness, not just on the court but in any place you just can’t bring yourself to leave.
At one end of the court a loose ball rolls down into a playground and then the street (good for those quick sprints to keep it from escaping), at one end into a little mown field. On one side it rolls beneath a picket fence into someone’s yard, on one side it rolls into a thicket of honeysuckle, redbud seedlings, that creamily fragrant climber I just learned is a clematis, poison ivy, and autumn olive, which is one of my very favorite berries. Autumn olives are sweet, especially the longer they are on the bush, and they are among the most beautiful flourishes in the kingdom. I don’t mean the kingdom. Fuck the kingdom. I mean earth. Little silver speckles on the bright red fruit subtled into shimmering the leaves.
On Sneakers (Hanif Abdurraqib, The Paris Review, June 2021)
There’s no basketball reading list without Hanif Abdurraqib, poet and author of There’s Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension—and just as importantly, a sneakerhead and lifelong Minnesota Timberwolves fan, who wrote and performed a poem that was produced into an official video for the team’s 2024 playoffs push. In this lyrical essay, Abdurraqib recalls his childhood memories of the Jordan Era, including Like Mike, which he affectionately dubs “a silly little basketball movie about a silly pair of shoes.” He traces his personal history alongside Michael Jordan’s mythology: his magic shoes, his rising (then diminishing) coolness, his comeback years, and poignantly, his public display of grief after winning his fourth title. Although Jordan is a public icon for so many, for Abdurraqib, he also becomes a mirror for his own loss and longing. Weaving personal memories with cultural commentary, Abdurraqib explores how a material object, like a pair of Jordans, can act as a vessel for desire, grief, and loss.
But because I firmly believe in wearing the sneakers I purchase, I chose to wear the black and red Jordan 11s from 1996 out of the house during one of my weekly batches of errands. The soles, softened from years of inactivity, crumbled while I walked through Trader Joe’s. All before I got whatever special powers or before I unlocked whatever special magic was inside. As I walked gingerly back to my car, I figured maybe the magic was in the crumbling. The message that whispers a reminder: nothing from the past is as glorious as I remember it. If I get close enough, the memories fall apart.
Fever (Kelsey Mitchell, The Players’ Tribune, November 2024)
Known for her speed and rainbow threes, soft-spoken WNBA all-star and Indiana Fever guard Kelsey Mitchell tends to do her talking on the court. And in 2024, as one of the league’s top scorers, her game was loud. With the spotlight shining around her brighter than ever—her team had just drafted the phenom Caitlin Clark—it may have looked like all smiles and rainbows. But behind the scenes, Mitchell was navigating the darkest corners of grief: Just before the start of the 2024 season, her father suddenly passed away. In this deeply personal essay, Mitchell opens up about the loss of her “OG best friend,” as she calls him, and navigating playing basketball without the one person who was always there.
For a while, I would shoot cryin’, trying to grasp such a big transformation. But things got a little easier as I got closer with God and started to see my purpose. I knew I had to keep going. There were games that I cried in the locker room before tipoff. But you wouldn’t have known. I wasn’t letting people see me like that.
Like many others who started watching the Fever last year, I quickly fell in love with Mitchell, who regularly starred in the team’s highlight reels: catching Clark’s full-court dimes, racing past defenders with her signature speed, and laying it up and in like she’s been doing it all her life. There’s an infectious joy and bounce to Mitchell’s game. And as she shares in this essay, a lot of that love—and how she plays the game—is rooted in her dad’s influence. When we watch her shine, we see a little bit of him, too.
At The Precinct we played against every kind of walk of life. Respectfully, we were going up against dudes from the trenches. My dad wanted us to experience that, I think. He wanted us to see that basketball was universal, and we weren’t the only ones who played it. Now, I’m not sure why my mama let us go … but she trusted our dad. So he’d take us to the courts at night, and that was kinda the worst time cuz ain’t no telling what’s poppin’ off. I came from an atmosphere that was different from what the vibe was at The Precinct. I learned a different type of street knowledge those nights. What to do, what to say, and how to move. I think Pops was trying to instill in us a certain kinda survival mode. But we’d find ourselves playing eight or nine games till one o’clock in the morning.
The Portland Bar That Screens Only Women’s Sports (Hannah Goldfield, The New Yorker, June 2025)
There are no sports without sports fandom. But what happens when there’s nowhere to watch the games? This feature by Hannah Goldfield profiles Jenny Nguyen, a basketball fan and regular pickup player, who opened The Sports Bra (or “the Bra”), a Portland-based sports bar that exclusively screens women’s sports. At the Bra, fans aren’t relegated to the corner of the bar to watch WNBA games with the sound muted, like Nguyen and her friends once were. In fact, requests to watch anything else (including important NBA playoff games) are likely to be politely declined.
The bar’s resounding success—Nguyen has plans to expand to at least four other cities across the US—challenges the tired myth that no one watches women’s sports. Part of this achievement has undoubtedly been filling a gap in sports coverage and paying attention to a long-overlooked fandom, especially in the growing WNBA. But in doing so, it has tapped into the desire for something even bigger: community. As this feature highlights, the bar has become a community hub and queer haven, especially for lesbians, at a time when such spaces are dwindling.
When Nguyen told her parents, who immigrated to the U.S. from Vietnam in the seventies, about her plan for the Bra, they were skeptical. “The very first thing my mom said was ‘Do you think right now is a good time to open a lesbian bar?’ ” Nguyen said, laughing. “At no point in the conversation did I say I was opening a lesbian bar, but Mom knew that that Venn diagram looks very much like a circle.” The moment proved to be the right one. Not only was there a dearth of places to watch women’s sports—as far as Nguyen could tell, hers would be the first bar in the U.S. devoted to screening them—there was also a lack of queer and specifically lesbian spaces, even in a city as progressive as Portland.
What the NBA Championship Means to Me (Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Jacobin, July 2021)
Kareem Abdul-Jabbar knows a thing or two about winning. With six championships, a record six MVP awards, and 19 All-Star appearances—to name only a handful of his accolades—Abdul-Jabbar is one of the most decorated basketball players of all time. For decades, he held the NBA scoring record, surpassed only recently by Lebron James. Although his career ended shortly after I was born, Abdul-Jabbar was still an icon in my household. According to family lore, at almost nine months pregnant, my mom was jumping around and cheering for Abdul-Jabbar and the Lakers while everyone begged her to sit down, worried she might De-fense! De-fense! herself right into labor. This was the year the Lakers defeated the Pistons and Abdul-Jabbar won what would become his final championship.
But Abdul-Jabbar’s legacy began before his tenure with the Lakers. He led the Milwaukee Bucks to their first—and his own first—championship in 1971. For decades, that remained the only title in franchise history. (Things changed in 2021 when the Bucks finally won a second championship.) In this essay, the legend reflects on both historic wins and explores how basketball mirrors the social and political challenges of its time. From upheaval and war to pandemic lockdowns and racial justice movements, Abdul-Jabbar considers how the game is never just about the game: It’s a conduit for “embodying America’s social conscience.”
In 1971, we were in the midst of civil unrest in America. The Vietnam War deeply divided the country. There were protests against the war, against racism, against sexism. The year before, the Ohio National Guard shot to death four protesting students and wounded nine others. A month before our Finals, the Weather Underground detonated a bomb in the US Capitol Building men’s room.
And we played basketball.
What did it feel like to play basketball during all this civil unrest? It felt like we were helping to keep the lid on, to give people something to cheer for rather than just protest against. This wasn’t to minimize the righteous need for those protests—I had participated in some myself—but to remind everyone that life was a balance of joy and sorrow and that it was our job to bring some of the joy.
Caitlin Clark and Iowa Find Peace in the Process (Wright Thompson, ESPN, March 2024)
Although much of her impact remains future potential—she’s only in her second WNBA season—there’s a new sensation already being compared to and embraced by the all-time greats: Indiana Fever point guard Caitlin Clark. Lebron James wished her good luck on social media before her 2025 season opener, and her competitive fire has been likened to that of six-time Olympic gold medalist Diana Taurasi. (When asked what success looks like for her team ahead of the 2025 season, Clark replied, “A championship,” before the journalist could even finish the question.) Sports journalist Ben Pickman said the WNBA is already being defined by two distinct eras: B.C. (Before Clark), and A.C. (After Clark). And like any rising star worth her salt, she’s acquainted with “overrated” chants from opponents’ fans and internet trolls alike.
But what goes into the making of a superstar? And what does it mean to chase greatness while still figuring out who you are? This profile pulls back the curtain on a then-21-year-old Clark, before some of her biggest moments: becoming the first pick in the WNBA draft; before winning Rookie of the Year; and before playing—and ultimately losing—her final NCAA championship game. Years from now, I imagine this profile will look like a time capsule, capturing a great on their way to unprecedented stardom.
The past is dangerous to an ambitious 21-year-old. It was a struggle to get her on the plane to New York City to accept the AAU’s prestigious Sullivan Award. She asked whether it couldn’t simply be mailed to her instead. In the end, she and her family had 12 hours in the city so she wouldn’t miss any class. Michael Jordan talks about this—the speed at which things come at you, the way, when you look back, it becomes hard to remember what happened where and when. That’s Caitlin Clark’s world right now, and inside she feels both like a superstar and like the little girl begging her father to expand the driveway concrete so she’d have a full 3-point line to shoot from. She references her childhood a lot in public, revealing comments hiding in the plain sight of news conferences and one-on-one interviews.
Rachel Dlugatch is a UK-based writer, researcher, and fangirl. She holds a DPhil in anthropology from the University of Oxford and probably has a WNBA game streaming in the background.
Editor: Carolyn Wells
Copyeditor: Peter Rubin
