The Monolith And Me
When the sun goes down, there it still is, looming in the edges and boasting against the moon’s reflection. The sun is always on you, even when you haven’t seen it in days.
Somewhere tropical I hope, Russell Westbrook will turn 38 in November, having found peace in retirement and purpose in the many extracurricular ventures he can now pursue full-time, at his leisure. He and I are not the same.
Today I aged out of this country’s most desirable advertising demographic and turned 35, or at least that’s approximately the number of times I’ve now seen every side of the most prominent being in anybody on earth’s known life, the sun. Eventually the sun is going to die, although that target time period has shortened, fortunately for analysts’ cost projections. Mine have been a little uncertain for a while.
I’ve never actively thought about shuffling off this coil voluntarily; I try not to. Even so, I think often about where that line is and think even more often about how it is that I haven’t found yet it. Though I haven’t seen it, I know it’s there.
More than any other lasting feeling I’ll have about him is that Russell Westbrook believed in himself. Never for a second did he think that he was anything other than himself, the only basketball player who had ever lived. Anybody who watched him play is better off for it.
He was a steam engine, and he would get ornery, generating energy from either crowd willing to give it. Didn’t you exercise the righteous power of your selfishness for the greater good on at least one occasion?
Kevin Durant doing it all and giving some rise to the newly-relocated Oklahoma City Thunder probably made Sam Presti’s job easier out of the gate; it lays runway when an instant four-time scoring champion shows up, especially scoring like that. Feral eyes, always looking for the opening, never really needing one given his length and shot-making ability. Easy to like. KD was both the hood and the one under it, even in that Nick Collison could hold the wrench most of the time.
Pulling in Serge Ibaka and Westbrook the following year, and then you-know-whom the year after that, built the team. Horrendous out of the gate, uh-huh. A little better the following year, uh-huuuuuh. Get to the conference finals in 2011, get to the Finals proper in 2012, eventually get traded for pennies in Clay Bennett’s wallet. Strategic contention under “the new CBA” would loom forever.
After we got back from volunteering out of a fucking Hyundai hatchback at Bonnaroo in 2012, we watched the last Finals game at Trevor’s house, the one where Russ went jumpshot gawd futilely, the one where they all hung their arms around each other. We thought they’d be back. We knew we would be to watch.
Then: James Harden did that, which, sure, fine, but. $5 Million?? Clay Bennett, hello: other billionaires would like to know if you’re serious about their life because it sure doesn’t look like you’re serious about your own.
Then: the coward Pat Beverley then hacked Russ down in 2013, when the Thunder might’ve, maybe, against that Heat team… anyway, now we’re subjected to Pat Beverley’s conscience, which is not a place I ever want to inhabit.
Instead, here’s mine:
2014 was the year I graduated college. I had moved home in order to both beat the chill of the north to which I’d fled – seasonal depression is real – and to take on the first and worst real job I ever had, as an analyst in my hometown, which I was more than happy to accept because I had home-away from-home-that-became-home. The game stays the game.
Immediately following a wedding that July, the person I had been seeing, you know, socially, stepped out of the car I had parked in front of her house, over there in our hometown, and that was that. My mom took me out to a steak dinner the following night, both to ostensibly cheer me up and, more importantly, because it was Charlotte Restaurant Week. Do I ever remember that steak.
In September, after moving out and then in with this site’s co-founder, Kevin Durant broke his foot. In college I’d made as big deal of KD as I tend to make of things I like, through his scoring titles and his graceful, punctuating fluidity. Do you still see him now? Forget whatever burners he’s got going: KEVIN DURANT PLAYS BASKETBALL IN FRONT OF YOU IN 2026, and losing KD right then, fresh off the REAL MVP speech, was dismantling.
Durant wasn’t coming to save us. I leaned into the singularity that Scott Brooks afforded Russell Westbrook in Durant’s injury and, eventually, his departure. The 2014-’15 season was when I fell so terribly hard for Russ, as I’ve a habit of doing: his style of play, his tenacity, and his wherewithal meant he could swivel his way to victory.
It was the same season Russ discovered fire, racking up the triple-doubles on his way to victory at what would eventually become a 74% or so clip for his team.
It was the same season Steph Curry got ahold of himself, too. Steph was ridiculous that year, sure enough, and in hindsight some heads would’ve been better satisfied giving this first MVP to Westbrook, whose team ended up missing the playoffs, than to Curry, who ended up winning his first title. They both might’ve been better off, given the circumstances surrounding their respective MVPs over the next two seasons. This is not necessarily a credit to Russ, but few things have easily been over the past eighteen years.
In the same season preceding the draft in which the Knicks missed out on KAT, falling to 4 and selecting a different guy who also became an NBA champion (it was all by design), the Thunder, via Russell Westbrook, became a proxy. “Same old Knicks,” I sighed through a PBR filter of one or two or several while watching the draft lottery, before walking to a bar or two or several to watch the Knicks lose 76-71 on an antennae feed to the hometown team, and after a few more or two or several, here or t sere, eiher drivsdn or walkfsgf or
The nights out that year, numerous. “Nobody likes you when you’re 23” is the same ha-ha, get through it in order to be somebody else-type of mead that suburban parents don’t mind their kids being fed because then they can renege on responsibility. I was still flying standby, still getting away, still making promises I wouldn’t keep and spending layovers in friends-of-friends’ shared front rooms.
With the Knicks in complete shambles, why should I be any different? I could even start to plan for the late games. Bars in Charlotte close at 2 am, typically plenty of time for the west coast games and Inside The NBA to finish. They’re on twice a week on a channel I don’t have, but! I had a car. As long as I made it anywhere else, it didn’t matter if I made it home. Ah, just once, I could make a CN2 news break, right where my parents would see in in the year before they themselves skipped town.
I was leaving people behind because I didn’t think I would ever have anywhere to be, or I didn’t want to ever have to be anywhere. The parties and the bars would always be there; the personal transience, implied. I wanted to be everywhere because I never wanted to be anywhere. Cowards lie, unaware that it matters. Much has changed, but not so much has.
I was taking no care whatsoever of myself. I try not to. More and again: most nights I went out that year, whether in Charlotte or New York or otherwise, I didn’t care what happened to me, where I’d end up or with whom. The bad brain found this thrilling and inviting. Everything else inside, knowing where it goes, taking the physical brunt of it, did not.
At that point, I was firmly in the mode of the former, never expecting it to go on for much longer anyhow. None of this does, right? The ephemerality of it is the appeal. This is the kind of thing that would make it to Tumblr so long as I made it to the gate and got the hell outta there, wherever it was.
Contemporaneously, we were firmly in the Twitter alert, text alert era: “Do you see Russ,” “Brodie wtf,” “Westbrook??” became the real invitations. We started adjusting the ratios, from something like 2:1 good play to bad, to 3:2 now he’s got a handle on this, to 16:9 let’s get the best possible look at this, however insanely good or mind-numbingly bad it may be. By the time you got anywhere, no matter who you were or where you thought you were going, there he was, somehow ferociously soaring above the rest.
For the entirety of the 2014-’15 NBA season, it was a mission to, at the very least, be alive for Russell Westbrook’s next game. When the Thunder played, no matter how they did, it was thrilling, it was brilliant; it was novel. In the mornings after, nothing was. In the nights after, the Warriors might be on, letting Steve Kerr finish the promised flood – perhaps Mark Jackson heard too well.
His discipline, so obviously in contrast to mine, captivated me then and still does. The precise times of his shootarounds, the strawberry PB&Js, his commitment to tying your own shoes, the fact that he tweeted his own name and it somehow made perfect sense: Russ would’ve been an oddball journeyman, somebody mistimed to have played in the ABA, had he not been the player he was.
On court was more of what I admired, though it skewed a little closer. Even when his more reckless plays resulted in turnovers the likes of which the game of basketball could never have anticipated, Westbrook seemed to have a very firm idea, a vision, a way that he felt a certain play should go. Sometimes, of course, he wouldn’t develop this idea, this vision, until he was halfway down the lane, with three defenders between himself and the basket. That was the fast-twitch beauty of it.
Only on the final night of the 2015 season were the Thunder eliminated from playoff contention. By then I was already laying plans to move back to New York, poorly. Despite the ruinous team I would be going back to watch on what was going to be the last of standard cable, toiling their way through the end of Melo’s prime, at least the Oklahoma City Thunder would grind on against the current.
Durant and Russ rode forward, challenging Golden State and giving us the stylistic variance needed to cut through the noise in the mid-aughts West. They did! They did do that. I was with Trevor at a hotel downtown during Game 7 of the 2016 Western Conference Finals, drinking wine product. Klay had already had the reply.
The faith that everybody had in watching the 2012 Oklahoma City Thunder gradually and conclusively left the day Kevin Durant left OKC. It never left Russell Westbrook. I think he thinks he could go and win a series by himself right now or nine years or nine galaxies from where and when you and I are.
Westbrook’s MVP season, though justifiably contentious, was the validation. He knew they never stood a chance against the Warriors in the West, or whatever else. We all knew that, but Russ had a way of inspiring belief in the impossible because he so often touched the sun with his index finger that you started to think it wasn’t that. Knowing and believing are two separate things, and Russell Westbrook’s MVP season is some proof of that concept.
He kept going, to the tune of a second scoring title along with the first triple-double seasonal average in 55 years. Counting stats versus advanced stats and all that: aren’t YOU counting something? Look at the numbers, then look at him nailing a game-winning three against Denver. It looked like history to most of the rest of us. It looked new enough, novel enough.
I didn’t think he was going to win, its own personal invalidation of faith among the many others. Standing in my Hoboken apartment and watching Russ accept the trophy in discreet attire during the first NBA Awards TV ceremony with time limits felt a little underwhelming, a bit degrading. “The Real MVP” speech had only been three years prior; of course KD should have all the time in the world. Putting Russell Westbrook on a time limit felt contradictory, an indignity. Triple-doubles don’t happen in words.
Following the Knicks title this year, which is a thing I can type because it is a thing that actually happened, I felt a similar – albeit, MUCH lighter – comedown to the Thunder’s 2017 season. To accompany Westbrook, Sam Presti got PG and Melo, who got themselves sullen playoff reputations and into an all-time team-destroying circumstance in Dame’s three for the Portland Trail Blazers in 2019. He put on for the Washington Wizards, to the tune of a fourth-straight triple-double season, earning a final all-NBA selection that nobody except Brad Beal and I watched.
I still bought in. If not for an especially viral breakout at Rudy Gobert’s behest in 2020, maybe the version of the Houston Rockets that fitted Westbrook at center would’ve been the one that figured out the Bubble Los Angeles Lakers. Alas, he instead ended up traded to those very Lakers the year after, a story continuing to play out in LeBron James’s departure and the ongoing governorship transferences between hands that aren’t yours. Going full-circle with the Paul George-Kawhi Leonard LA Clippers was something that team didn’t believe in at all. Don’t do that to a guy like that, okay?
Then Denver brought him in. Yeah, sure, he blew Jokic’s 60-10-10 with his rushed layup on national TV, we all know, but (now we get to play this game) not nearly as badly as any of Iguodala against the Cavs in Game 7 in 2016 (or, for that matter, Kyrie, a little later on in the same game), nor as De’Aaron Fox would eventually in Game 4 in 2026. Nevertheless, Russ was magnetic for the Nuggets in the playoffs before doing the mentor gig in Sacramento last year. He was still solid, still serviceable, but definitely “still.”
If no prospective contender were to sign him going into the age-38 season, that was something like the bill coming due, but the bill coming due had been signing the largest contract in league history on his arch rival’s birthday. It’s been turtles all the way down since. If you can’t be a champion, become petty, especially if you can afford it. Then become the MVP. Russell Westbrook saw his D.O.A. awaiting in San Francisco and decided he was going to be himself for as long as he could.
I needed Russell Westbrook to be who he was. That is someone who believes in himself so wholeheartedly that I can’t help but be literally dumbstruck by it: how can that dude, all of 6’4″ in a field of Sequoias, be so foolhardy? This guy’s an idiot, or he’s got a screw loose. Let’s watch him try anyway.
This is the path of the stupidest and most courageous people that you know. When was the last time you tried something you weren’t absolutely sure you could accomplish? Ah, then the purpose finds you: until 2017, only one NBA player had done what another then went and did several times consecutively, and with a rather contemptuous joy.
Parasocial relationships, look: don’t do that, but Russ needed fans as much as they, we, needed him. He invited us. Openly, for the most part, he relished in an opposing fanbase’s vigor, usually directly to their pocket of fans. At home, he drew on the power of the crowd as a singular force of energy, chaotic and focused. When KD went upright on the scooter, it was the fans’ due diligence to rise up and see what the next, in that case, could look like.
There is a man without ((0)); here is a man without a championship. Westbrook was decisive in so many ways I am not because he isn’t afraid of the many failures he’s stacked against the many, many more successes he’s achieved. In openly weaponizing his emotions, he leaded into his combativeness. Russ couldn’t help but be anything other than himself and didn’t have much interest in curtailing what he thought the maximum of that could be.
He vocally cared about some things close to him and tried to eschew the rest. Russell Westbrook is on record as not caring about a great many other things.
He’s a liar. Russell Westbrook will never stop caring. That’s why I will never stop caring about Russell Westbrook.
Tuesdays With Horry 