Basketball Wife

The New York Knicks and me

Congratulations! You are now living on the edge of a heart attack.

This is not a great look for someone who has publicly claimed (sans credentials) that the sole key to vitality is cortisol reduction. But the day you woke up and put your tiny, plebeian fate in two giant hands capping an eight-foot wingspan was the day you forfeit peace. You became edgy and inflamed but at least now you have something to look forward to, which is probably all anyone wants, anyway. Something other than sex that pumps you with emotion from an Ikea couch. An excuse to order pizza.

And there’s order to it! Order is religion. Order gives the illusion of productivity when your wine is full and your pajamas are on. All these rules that once sounded like Russian are starting to click. You aren’t just watching; you are learning. Question. Absorb. Apply. What’s more productive than learning? You like, really, really need this sense of achievement to curb the shame of choosing basketball over everything else you should be doing. Husband remarks, “you’re picking up so fast.” Praise feels good. “Praise be to God,” says Miles McBride in a postgame press conference. Order is religion.

Your eyes follow each number intently, as if you might be subject to the scholastic misfortune of a pop quiz at any moment: #11 is in the paint. Shot clock at five. And one! You didn’t know what “and one” meant two months ago. Knowing nothing has humbled you into something shameless and malleable. You can’t think of a better way to exist.

Villanova boiz by Nathaniel S. Butler/NBAE via Getty Images, via Posting & Toasting

Here’s a scene I often catch myself in these days: I’m standing when I should be sitting. Of course, the “should” is arbitrary, but on behalf of all sitters, when you know, you know. The couch—my one true love—beckons worriedly with all its blankets and pillows and the snuggly dog, and I cannot bring my body to fold. I’m standing with my hands on my hips, shoulders rounded forward like someone who might, at any second, reach for their clipboard. I wear the classic scowl of an Italian-American mother who’s just learned you’d like to sleep at your friend’s house this Friday.

But this is a matter far graver than slumber parties. This is the playoffs. Game one. And somehow, with Joel Embiid teetering around after landing on his convalescent knee, stars and birds circling his head, the game is uncomfortably close. Tyrese Maxey is tireless. Tireless Maxey. His mouth is always open. I can't help searching for a pattern to his breath, evidence of mindfulness training, like part of his bazillion dollar contract went to breathwork classes under a Tibetan monk and boy, has it paid off. But all I see is the erratic pant of a kid who probably tapped his foot a lot in class knowing, preternaturally, that he was born to ball. That ball was, and is, indeed, life, and that alone is oxygen. (Somebody take this guy’s VO2 max before I lose my mind.)

At one point, Embiid goes down again—this time, in collision with fellow sequoia Mitchell Robinson. In my mind, the sound they make is like a giant dodgeball, a reverberating WHUMP, all rubber and air. “The other day Dia told me Mitchell Robinson loves lifted trucks,” husband says to our guy friend who is over for the game and eight beers deep. He’s communicating a kind of endearment toward my newfound love of basketball. 

Meanwhile, I suspect Josh Hart is the only Knick upon whom my scowl has landed, because he starts hitting threes like a marionette whose strings are being pulled in new directions. He looks as shocked with himself as the rest of us. When we win (I call us “we” now), husband and I shake our heads. That’s not how we wanted it to happen. I guzzle the final Modelo Negra in the six pack—my sixth.

–

I’d spent years listening to Andrew stomp and “UGHHHHHH” from upstairs while I hunched over my laptop and thought, that sounds really frustrating. Then I’d write one paragraph over the course of three hours and realize, through some cosmic artery of despair, through this practice of emptying yourself for little return, that what we were doing wasn’t much different. So one night I said what the hell, why not basketball?

The first game that held my undivided attention was toward the end of the regular season. Playoffs secured, injuries abound. Relatively low stakes. I started to enjoy myself—and I mean, really have a rootin’ tootin’ good time—at an unfamiliar warp speed. Notwithstanding the comfort of my own home and the encouragement of my own partner, I was embarrassed. Why did I care so much about a game that I barely understood? Why was I yelling? Who did I think I was?

That last question is really context-agnostic because it underscores the gnawing anxiety of finding your place in American life, which, between selling your soul to afford a home, or deleting TikTok from your phone for a 24-hour t-break, we all contemplate more or less every day. Sports just might be the least dreadful object of such reflection.

Yet, for me, sports were the one thing that made me feel alone in a crowded room. This was not ideal considering the romantic effect drinking lager and eating buffalo wings in a sports bar has always had on me. Strangers hugging and pounding their chests while buckets of Bud Light clinked about. I’d be the only one without a Phillies tshirt on during the World Series and suddenly, the sexual tension between me and the curved arc of a baseball field became unbearable. 

Sex makes everything more granular, and being an outsider in a place you seek acceptance increases your capacity for observation. No doubt, virgins in strip clubs know each dancer down to the last freckle. So this question, “Who did I think I was?” crystalized into, “If my preferred watering hole leaves ESPN on the TVs, and I can’t dislodge the cheers from my throat for fear of exposure, then what’s the point of literally fucking anything?” These pillars of my existence and thus, my writing—running, partying, love in all its towering forms—well, put them under a microscope and you’ll find all their best parts converge in basketball. 

And so the only question of importance, the one I ask myself every week now, the one that’s been on the tip of my tongue my entire life and only through the enthusiastic teaching of a man who loves me, has finally been answered, is:

Why not basketball?

Go Knicks.