Want to spend the best portion of your day watching highlight reels of Steph Curry’s long game? Me, too. Kiese Laymon’s essay-meets-group-text at The Believer is a loose, uplifting tribute to Curry’s final three-point shot at the 2024 Olympic Games, to clinch a gold medal for the US men’s basketball team. It’s also a sly bit of craft, a team game in which Laymon sets himself up for a spectacular final shot.
A few years after that football game, my mother gave me a painting from Barnes called In the Beginning. Foregrounded in the painting’s worn wheat-colored grass is the back of a Black person rocking a dark red hat and a white T-shirt tucked into their sky-colored blue jeans. One long leg is straight. One long leg is bent, distorted. Both arms are elongated. Like the characters in The Sugar Shack, the person is stretching for, and accepting of, a peculiar kind of spatial freedom. The fingers of both hands show an exaggerated extension, a perfect follow-through, while a brown basketball heads toward a makeshift basket nailed to a square piece of plywood. The land in the painting is flat. There are no mountains or hills here. In the background, there is a two-story house with a porch.
Cradling it all is space.
I understood, the very first time I saw the painting, that wherever there was space, a ball, a hoop, and one human, there was the possibility of a miracle made possible by human ritual.
More picks about basketball
When My Father Talked About Larry Bird
“The Boston Celtics legend was the north star of my youth, present in every debate and stretch of silence with my dad. This was true on the night when my world stopped, leaving me on a sidewalk seeing stars.”
The Wild West of NBA Jump Balls
“Basketball’s most iconic tradition is also one of its oldest and most curious events, characterized by the same foggy rule interpretations, quirky styles, and chicanery as the first jump balls ever tossed.”
Bonefishing Off Bimini With Bobby Knight
“In 2015, I spent an intense, hilarious, and occasionally challenging week in the Bahamas with the legendary Hoosiers basketball coach, who more than lived up to his reputation.”
