On Distance Traveled

When I was a teenager, I fell in love with basketball.

There were a number of factors. The NBA was full of colorful characters in that era, from Michael Jordan to Dennis Rodman to Shaquille O’Neal. My height was an advantage enough to make me adequate at playing the game in a way I was at so few other sports. And there were the friendships.

My best friend Mike introduced me to basketball through shooting contests on his driveway hoop, mashing Super Nintendo buttons while we played NBA Jam, and cheering on our beloved New York Knicks. We graduated before long to collecting trading cards for what we thought of as a financial investment, and playing pickup games at the park near our street.

I developed a circle of high school friends I played basketball with all the more as we dubbed ourselves the Hoop Squad, after what one of those friends claimed to sincerely think was the title of the basketball-themed teenage romance novel I was writing at the time (the actual title was Free Throw).

Fast forward fifteen, twenty years and I only followed basketball cursorily, and hadn’t played the game for a period of years. But after graduating from my MFA program, on the front end of a cross-country road trip that I knew might mean not writing much for weeks on end, I thought of a new project.

It started with a prose poem about Toni Kukoc and how he was a big fish in a very big pond with Jordan’s Chicago Bulls during the best years of his NBA career. I scrawled it in a notepad at a hotel gym in between sets, the workout expanding far longer than I’d intended and setting back the day’s drive. Then there was a late night session of writing on my phone at a friend’s house, while others watched TV or nodded off. Sitting on an easy chair, I drafted a poem about Magic Johnson and believing in magic, and all manner of innocence and love lost.

The project grew into thirty-ish poem-long novella about a divorce, a cross-country road trip, and most of all making sense of basketball fandom from that era, from Latrell Sprewell strangling his coach, to Reggie Miller embracing the role of villain, to remembering Mike telling me about catching a game, twenty years after he stopped following the NBA, and how he didn’t know who Steph Curry was, but remembered his coach Steve Kerr as a Chicago sharpshooter.

And I wrote about the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame. In those teenage years, it was a dream destination that it seems absurd to think, now, was only three-hour drive from my childhood home.

Mike went there on a family trip that I was envious of, just as I was starting to fall in love with the game. He went again years later, an ill-fated trip when he and his girlfriend from that time wound up breaking up, thus tingeing the Hall with a bittersweet lens I doubt he’ll ever shake altogether.

My first trip to the Hall was in my early twenties, one of my last happy memories of a long-term relationship. We scheduled the trip after I’d accepted a job that would take us from living together to three hundred miles of long distance. I don’t think either of us saw visiting the Hall as a last hurrah in the moment, and we hung on for the better part of a year, but the relationship wasn’t meant to be.

The last time Mike or I visited the Hall of Fame, to date, was on a road trip through New England together, that I charted ostensibly to check off a bundle of states up there in my unending quest to visit all fifty. That Mike and I finally went there together iseemed like it ought to have been a trip of destiny—the two of us revisiting all of this history, and all of these things so important to our youth. Whether it was the ghosts of ex-girlfriends, or the degree to which the Hall is geared toward much younger people, from the perspective of our thirties, it was a letdown.

So it may be that I arrived at writing the last of the poems from this series, “Hall of Fame,” in which the speaker visits the Hall and imagines a Hall commemorating not the game, but his broken marriage and busted dreams.

It’s not a happy poem.

I think it’s better for that.

I revisited these poems a year and a half after I’d first drafted them, at a point when my life was so opposite that of the speaker in the poems. Where he was wistful, I was as hopeful as I could ever remember being. Where he was jaded and broken, there I was—happily married with a son on the way any day.

I stayed close to Heather those last weeks of pregnancy, in no small part for the practical reason that if she were to go into labor, I didn’t want to worry about covering distance between us. So, when she had a work obligation an hour away in Atlanta, I holed up at a campus eatery and organized these poems into a chapbook manuscript (and flash fiction pieces from another linked project into another chapbook—but that’s another story for another day).

The result is Distance Traveled.

I’m so grateful for Distance Traveled, a twenty-two poem chapbook, to have found a home with Bent Window Books, and it goes on sale today. Five bucks Australian (which I understand converts to about $3.50 US) will buy you your very own PDF of it. You can check it out here. Thanks to those who buy, and no worries to those who don’t. As always, I appreciate you reading to the end of a post, and I wish you all the best.