In November, at the invitation of a good friend of this site, I attended the Knicks-Cavaliers game at Madison Square Garden, my first NBA game in 22 months. Naturally, the Knicks lost in blowout fashion, with Ricky Rubio, of all people, setting a career-high in points with 37.
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Franck Fife/AFP/Getty
Two years ago, my oldest, not older, brother brought up a point I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since[1]. He was thinking about patriotism, and how it presents a weird proposition when an American athlete does something extraordinary on a grand stage, and you aren’t especially proud of what your country has or is capable of accomplishing as you see it. Borders are troublesome in their very existence, and trying to adhere to them is a worry of people who can afford homes within their borders, or people who aspire to
In fairness, as someone who was born here and has no connection to my heritage other than the aspirational and that which is skin tone-related, I’ve been a lot more Republic of Ireland-forward than he has, but I think I get it, to some extent – the United States isn’t the greatest breeding ground for pride in anything you like unless a lot of people like yourself enjoy it, and even then, it can be a dogfight.
Graphic by Brian Kraker
Another year down. Another year older, but perhaps none the wiser? Maybe that decision doesn’t belong to you alone. It felt like nothing did, most of the time. From Tide Pods to the Philly Special to countless acts of cruelty and many more of plain senselessness to the continued existence of the Golden State Warriors to having 12 years left to stop the sun to inexplicable blue lights over Astoria, everything that happened felt like it was going to happen anyway, sooner or later, and we were all left to bear it as best we could. Same as it ever was, but different.
Still: we would be equally bereft of sense to assume that darkness would drive out darkness. You may have heard that only light can do that. For all the bad and rot everywhere, urban, suburban and rural, at home and abroad, there were the moments in between that made everything we experience every day that kept us together, however briefly. If we experienced them together? All the better.
As Bootsy Collins said in 1972, “Balance is my thing/The snow, wind and rain must come.” With that, we delve into the year that was, with an eye toward the twelvemonth ahead.
Fate of the Rebel Flag, William Bauley (1861)
It’s a curious thing, this American exceptionalism. It always has been, even before we inadvertently and loudly made this country the most exceptional nation in the world this side of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, and even that bit is becoming questionable. Ego begets ego, and the hot air balloon rises seemingly infinitely, toward the clouds, toward the moon, toward the fully-visible sun. In any case, it’s getting away from here.
Every country is exceptional from the jump, at the most basic level. Any country can be exceptional in a next-level, “people are discussing this thing’s exceptionalism to a tautological degree in a bar over high-ABV motor oil right this second” sense. The logical next phrase there should’ve been “if it tries hard enough,” but then, that’s part of what got the United States into this in the first place, constantly feeling like the lights were turned on an hour ago, but you’re still at the aforementioned bar.
Have you ever won 100 of anything, consecutively? Have you ever won 100 of anything at all? How many things have you ever even done 100 times that don’t involve opening your eyelids for the first time during this rotation of the earth?
If you’ll allow a phone-a-friend: my guess to all of the above is somewhere in the neighborhood between “nothing” and “cooked Ramen.” Nowhere in your lexicon of activities performed to the century can you list “won a basketball game,” because the only people alive who have done that are involved with the women’s basketball team at the University of Connecticut.
Brian Kraker / Tuesdays With Horry
Right from the very start, 2016 stood to challenge us. From the very start, we knew it wasn’t going to be a run-of-the-mill annum, from North Korea’s interstellar aggravation to the deaths of every stranger we thought we knew, from our laughter at nationalistic shortsightedness abroad to the joke turning on us with an apolitically exhausting election cycle that, even now, seems interminable, this year has cast shadows into every corner and fear into every heart, asserting its overwhelming pessimism past the point of absurdity and into realms of dystopian ennui.
But then, light is said to shed out of darkness; without the light, we wouldn’t know dark from darker, and pitch blackness would be broad daylight. As historically low as some of the valleys insisted upon going, a great many peaks, more than we’ll care to recall, shot up with a distinctly human, distinctly empathetic vitality. 2016 was the equivalent of the Gordie Howe hat trick: a goal first, an assist next and one giant, inevitable fight, with indescribable rage having finally boiled over to manifest itself in hideousness antipathy. It is with this in mind that we at TwH look back, one final, bitter time at the insanity of the preceding twelve months, with an eye toward what society has constructed as 2017. If Earth is really dying, and if we’ve only got five years left to cry in, U better live now.
Nearly three-quarters of the way to its conclusion, #manypeople seem comfortable writing off 2016 as a failed experiment, the kind of revolution around the sun we’d sooner edit-undo than save as draft so that we know not to make the same mistakes twice. Not that it isn’t tempting, given the tornado of seemingly every sociopolitical attitude storming past social courtesies on its way to enraged prominence, the tortoises of Twitter emerging only to present a counterpoint to happiness and the deaths of nearly every celebrity you never expected to let you down, even against the undefeated specter of mortality.
Largely overshadowed when set against that intense bleakness is the fact that 2016 has been a banner year for redemption. In the last eight months, we have borne witness to: Nick Saban’s Alabama going Omar for the ring[1], Villanova stealing the highest-stakes game of H-O-R-S-E in college basketball history, an outstanding Broncos defense carrying Peyton Manning’s rotten skeleton to a walk-off like no other[2] only two years after an historic Super Bowl humiliation, LeBron James delivering the city of Cleveland a more thrilling high than anything you could read about in VICE[3], Michael Phelps death-staring down Chad Le Clos and, just a week ago, Neymar exacting some revenge against a team which had bestowed such a beating so comprehensive that one hand was not enough to denote it with accuracy.
One could be forgiven for assuming that the next reclamation in line, at the top of her game and coming off a disappointing Olympics, belongs to one Serena Williams.
I was at a party my senior year of college when a freshman girl paused after taking a long sip from her PBR tall boy to tell me I reminded her of Miranda. A noticeable chill fell over those involved in the conversation; it was clear to the group that I had been insulted. When I recounted the story to friends over breakfast the next day, the reaction was more of the same.
It was universally understood that the only “good” results when taking a “Which Sex And The City Character are You?” Quiz on Buzzfeed were Carrie and Charlotte – Samantha barely acceptable, if you reported your results with tongue firmly in cheek. But God help you if you got Miranda. Most likely you’d refresh the quiz and start over, settling for Magda or Stanford, and never speak of it again. But we live in a post-“Lemonade” world now – the idea of feminism and the unruly woman go hand in hand. I couldn’t help but wonder…is Miranda actually the most modern gal of the bunch?
Getty Images
On Wednesday night, the city of New Orleans will host the final game in the illustrious career of the greatest American soccer player ever. If, despite the header image, you are still confused as to the antecedent of that phrase, here is another: the all-time highest goal scorer in international play for both men and women. No? This was the only soccer player listed on the TIME 100 list for 2015, and that was prior to the World Cup victory.
For over a decade, Abby Wambach has been the talisman of American soccer excellence, not unlike Serena Williams in tennis. While the men have had their moments of individual brilliance – Landon Donovan against Algeria in 2010, Tim Howard becoming the Secretary of Defense against Belgium in 2014 – Wambach has sustained her knack for goal-scoring and competitiveness, finally seeing through her destiny in 2015 with a World Cup victory in Vancouver, the ultimate revenge against Japan, the country which had stifled a seemingly relentless American machine in 2011. Though the USWNT will continue without her, it would be unfair and callous to casually dismiss the contributions of Abby Wambach to her sport in this country.
Tuesdays With Horry 