An entry from Bryan Harvey’s Kawhi-ary, an ongoing diary about a season without much basketball.
This is a true story.
Outsiders to the franchise never knew what to do with Duncan either. He was a seven-foot dullard who didn’t really want anyone to know he was seven feet tall. He lacked style. He enjoyed Dungeons and Dragons. He played basketball and cared deeply about it, but he didn’t live and die by it. He was a nerd with a post-up game and an array of other skills that time wore away.
He retired on July 11, 2016; the same day my first daughter was born. A few weeks later I wrote a long blog post in which I tried to capture the essence of his maternal leadership. In doing so, I contrasted his Beta personality with NBA Alphas and compared him to both my wife and (at the time) helpless daughter.
Read More: A year without a Kawhi Leonard
What follows from here alternates between thoughts on Kawhi Leonard and broken passages from that earlier article, between what was and what was supposed to be.
"Many of the farewell salutes to Timmy explored his vapid vacancies on and off the court; hisdeer in the headlight complaints and silent quotations. He barricaded himself within the game’sdimensions, and, as McGowan writes of him: “Style can be alienating, but its complete absenceproduces the same effect. Tim Duncan started out exhausting and stayed that way for a longtime.” I think of what life was like before my daughter was born, and I know McGowan isright—those decades were exhausting, but in a different way than the last few nights. Now I’mjust sleep deprived and, like Duncan, her clothes refuse to fit her."
Kawhi Leonard wears athletic gear, like all the time.
"To many, Duncan came to the game already old and full of wisdom, like a basketball Athenasprung from Gregg Popovich’s imagination. And this all makes sense. Duncan’s professionalcareer unfolded less like Gospel and more like Ecclesiastic white noise. His greatest rival,Shaquille O’Neal, roared through the league like a gas-guzzling Humvee, until expenses forcedhis handlers to always discard him. Meanwhile, Timmy’s invisible hand cranked a mechanicalwindmill on which the Don Quixotes of the world might perish for all eternity."
The Golden State Warriors are good, but they are not invincible. Steph Curry’s own foundations are not so sturdy. With a healthy Leonard, the San Antonio Spurs could easily be this year’s Houston Rockets, which is to say, they could easily be more like themselves. However, if basketball karma exists, then the San Antonio Spurs are due to ride with Don Quixote for a spell.
"But then I read Roth’s critique of that awkward yearbook photo of an MVP presentation, whereDuncan sits grinning in a baggy red shirt and denim shorts. And there is something incrediblyjuvenile about it all, from his wardrobe down to the whole arcane idea of grown men posing forthe record books. About this photo Roth concludes: “It’s clear from the photo that Tim Duncandoes not really care much about how he looks. There’s just more than one way to read it.”"
One of the best frames in Citizen Kane for conveying the film’s meaning occurs right after Kane’s second wife leaves him and he trashes her dollhouse of a bedroom. After looking like Frankenstein’s monster, he gathers himself by gathering up her snow globe, which really isn’t his boyhood home in miniature, except that he sees it that way. His lips then whisper “Rosebud” for the second time in the film, but for the first time in the film’s chronology. This second “Rosebud” is also the only time those cryptic syllables are witnessed by others. He leaves the wrecked bedroom, walks out into a corridor filled with Xanadu’s house staff, keeps walking, and then pauses for a moment so the film can, ever so briefly, crystallize one of its signature concepts.
On either side of Kane is a mirror. He is framed by an infinite number of Charles Foster Kanes on either side. Everyone, including Fargo’s third season have paid homage to, if not this precise frame, then the idea behind it. I think athletes are this way too. Each play framed by all the other plays and perceptions, how many Kawhi Leonards can there be? Who are his referents? If they are artifice and iconography, will he share a similar fate? Is this how people grow old?
"Only two kinds of people truly care so little with such oblivious ease. The very old do not care,and the very young do not either. The former supposedly earns the right to indifference, and thelatter simply lacks awareness. Because Duncan and the Spurs have been so good for so long, the focus of the conversation has almost always featured the team’s impending infirmities. Such labels began under the Admiral David Robinson’s good graces, were assisted by winning the franchise’s first constipated title and were carried into perpetuity by Pop’s ongoing crankiness."
Stephen Jackson, who would fight an entire arena in the defense of a teammate, has surfaced in the game of smoke and mirrors being played in San Antonio and, as a former wildcard in the Spurs’ locker room, perhaps his words carry more weight than the typical outsider.
As ol’ Captain Jack reads it, the player led intervention in regards to Leonard’s health and return was not player led at all: “Y’all might not believe this, but the meeting that was (thrown) on Kawhi after a game, that came down from Pop to those guys.”
Further in the quotation Jackson questions the guts of specifically Parker and Ginobili, but especially Parker, and speaking as someone who is feared, states how they are leaders to be feared.
Somewhere in my not so large house I drop a snow globe and whisper, “Duncan.” No one hears me; we scrub our own toilets.
"But the Spurs didn’t stay good by staying old. They stayed good because of the team’s dexterity. And no player’s role changed more often and more dramatically over the last decades than Duncan’s. I could keep trying to say what I’m trying to say, but here’s the assist from SheaSerrano: “One day your baby is a baby and the next day it’s 13 years later and it’s just like, ‘Oh,fuck, you’re as tall as I am. What happened?’”"
That last question on repeat.
"The answer: The Spurs matured under the constant illusion they were antiquity personified.When one could just as easily surmise that already old, they were always younger than any of us and therefore always changing."
Not all change is good change. Screw change.
"Serrano describes having watched Duncan over the years without a conscious understanding ofhow TD’s body and game were always inching towards that final play when he wouldn’t be ableto clear Ibaka’s arm. I do the same thing now when my daughter’s arm bounces around her head all jittery and not giving a fuck about political parties or the weather. Death and taxes do not register on her radar. I wonder what Duncan thought when he first released a basketball towards that red square on the backboard and the geometry of it all sent the ball sailing through the hoop. Did he feel joy? I wonder what her first word will be when she discovers the precision of syllables or, better yet, a bank shot.I re-watched Duncan’s final game the Sunday after my daughter’s birth. At six days old, she layin my arms, and I barely even thought about how much she’d already changed. She was justthere, eyes closed and ignorant of her father’s strange obsessions. And there was Duncanyounger on the screen than the day he retired, but older than when he’d started."
Sequels are difficult. I was totally going to teach both girls how to make Kawhi puns. Kawhi is this happening?
"In his salute to the power forward, Serrano shares an awesome anecdote about seeing his father react to the Spurs winning their first title. The story is about community and ends with Serrano writing, “It was just a whole bunch of horns being honked by a whole bunch of Mexicans. That was the first time I understood that people could be truly tied together by sports, and that San Antonio was tied together by basketball.”"
This all seems to be falling apart without basketball.
"These two views of Duncan always existed; one just as likely true or false as any other. But bothperspectives labeled him as the Greatest Power Forward of All-Time. For some that title readswith little nuance and positions everything about Duncan behind a façade as lacking inhumanitarian concern as an Aztec altarstone. Through this lens, Duncan was always an old andunrelenting desert. However, the other viewpoint of him found a way to grow maize in thatbrittle soil, and that’s about something more than sacrificial deaths— that’s about love.“If you love Kobe, it’s because you love Gordon Gecko. If you love LeBron, it’s because youlove Jay Z. If you love Steph Curry, it’s because you love Rudy. But if you love Tim Duncan, it can only be because you love Tim Duncan,”writes Jared Wade. I would add that loving Duncanrequired seeing poetry in household items — perhaps it required a parent’s blindness, or a bookby Pablo Neruda."
Do San Antonio fans love Kawhi Leonard because they loved Tim Duncan or because they love Kawhi Leonard?
"Words cannot describe the shape of her fist, which she tightens into the nucleus of an atom.Most tellings of Duncan’s NBA origins begin with ping pong balls and a back injury. Then theymake mention of a coach walking with him on a beach. They have a conversation. Theconversation is a good one. Championships are won over eons. The wet footprints in the whitesand fossilize.Yet that can’t be the all of it."
So Stephen Jackson, who is on the outside looking in, studies the situation and based on some five to fifteen year old dossier asks of Kawhi Leonard: “why would you want to be there?”
But that’s projection, right? That’s bad blood for being waved before the 2013 Playoffs, right?
This can’t be the end of the sacred lineage. Oh, shit! it’s like Cormac McCarthy’s The Road–Kawhi’s going to live with another family. His ending is somewhere else.
"Babies are, for lack of a better word, shapeless. After they eat, they become wet noodles. Whatthey produce in the first week barely even qualifies as real shit —it’s all black tar paste andyellow seeds. They cannot focus, as their eyes dart in unpredictable patterns. Heck, their eyesmight even change color by the time they exhibit a personality beyond a beating heart andsleepiness. Yet all this uselessness makes them helplessly adorable. And they endear themselves to parents and strangers through their vulnerabilities."
Every time I see Leonard and want to hope in the future, I hear Carrie Coon’s voice in her role from Fargo describing that animated robot MNSKY: “A prototype, singular in his design, created to observe and report, his programming not yet complete, he was a child.”
And then I reflect on how condescending such a thought probably is. What if Leonard’s just hurt and needs time and all this other stuff is simply the whir of content creation?
"At age 13, Duncan the basketball player still lacked form. An oft-cited footnote in hisdevelopment is how Hurricane Hugo forever deterred his dreams of becoming an Olympicswimmer. When the storm destroyed the pool, Duncan gave up the sport because he would notswim in the ocean—he was so afraid of sharks. Conventional narratives would have the hero face or conquer his fears, but Duncan became great by running from them.Then, at age 14, his mother died of breast cancer, and he embarked on the journey of becomingthe Tim Duncan we recognize—that tall silhouette cradling a basketball to his chest before each and every game. And, as my wife holds our daughter to her chest, I cannot help to reflect on Timmy’s relationship with his own matriarch. I cannot help to think about what worlds theabsences might create. Love always gives birth to fears that are fortunate to have. Duncan’s fear was perhaps his greatest blessing."
I don’t know precisely what Kawhi Leonard fears, but I do think he fears being hurt again and of being hurt worse. So I know he fears losing the game of basketball. However, I don’t know if that fear stems from some naïve stance toward the game a la Bill Walton, a loss of opportunity at money and fame, or a legacy he and others have built slipping away. The answer could be one of those just as easily as none of them, or all of the above. But fear has taken root in an individual who for seven seasons always appeared fearless and ready for more. Watching that happen to another human being is not fun.
Then again, Kawhi Leonard, like Tim Duncan before him, is a resilient individual, who after losing his father to gun violence, probably has a more grounded perspective than most on what does and does not matter. Such a perspective probably empowers him to make difficult decisions about what is best for his career and his family, and while there may be an infinite number of Citizen Leonards, no one probably knows all those Leonards better than Kawhi.
Duncan never really had a lost season like this one, and so I’m not sure he ever went through this kind of process. Sure, he eyed Grant Hill’s still healthy ankles on an Orlando tarmac, but he also chose to stay in San Antonio. His size also prevented him from ever having to assume the marketing mantles of Michael Jordan (and Kobe Bryant). He could let Shaq chase that pipe dream.
Duncan and Leonard are two ghosts in the machine with similar demeanor and comparable pasts, but that does not mean Leonard wants to play out Duncan’s string to the very end. Only Leonard knows his answer to that dilemma, and that answer could very well still be beyond his reach.
Pessimism is easy; optimism is hard.
But, in the eternal words of former Police Chief and eternal mother Gloria Burgle, here’s for trying: “Probably we should all have a milkshake, maybe some curly fries, and ponder all future moves. We may solve this thing yet.”