There's Always This Year

How do you protect love in a world that misreads your joy as threat? In There’s Always This Year, Hanif Abdurraqib argues that Black love and belonging have their own codes—rituals, styles, and small choreographies—that build shelter against misinterpretation and harm. He contends that to see this love accurately, you must learn its grammar in both intimate rooms and loud arenas, where basketball becomes liturgy and public grief becomes a chorus. Across barbershops, city gyms, jail cells, parade routes, and YouTube highlights, the book shows how affection, survival, longing, and spectacle braid into a single urban theology.

Abdurraqib invites you to trace how handshakes, beards, black socks, baggy shorts, and bald heads all say we to each other, even as outsiders insist they say danger. He moves from the Fab Five’s finger-twists and swagger to his father’s mealtime blessing in Arabic, from Scottwood’s cracked rims to Cleveland’s smoke-choked streets where men burned jerseys after The Decision. Every place bears a ritual; every ritual bears a claim on home. The book’s wager is simple: pay attention to the codes, and you’ll finally see how a people insist on life.

From Private Signals to Public Panic

You begin where affection is built in miniature—custom handshakes with your boys, a beard comb tucked in a pocket, a father’s sweat shining like proof of pleasure. These gestures are joyful and defensive. They draw a soft border: those who know are inside, those who don’t can only guess. When the guessing turns into fear—as with the Fab Five’s black socks, shoes, and shaved heads—the same signs of kinship are cast as threat. (Note: This reads like a sociolinguistics lesson—misread the dialect, and you misread the people.)

The Fab Five arrive as a cultural referendum. Their look and talk become an argument about who gets to look good and take up space. Jalen Rose’s studied trash talk is read as arrogance, when it’s also craft and care: he learns opponents’ tells to protect his team. Media panic follows, proving a larger point—Black self-styling meets a surveillance that confuses confidence with menace.

Arenas as Cathedrals, Fans as Choirs

From neighborhood courts, you move into arenas where sport becomes a secular sacrament. “We Are All Witnesses” turns a city into a congregation and LeBron James into the sermon you stand for. Miracle enters the civic record: Game 5 in Detroit (2007), LeBron scoring the Cavs’ final 25; Game 7 in 2016, the chasedown block that freezes time. These spectacles don’t replace prayer; they rhyme with it. Chalk dust ascends like incense; a city rehearses hope in unison.

But witness cuts both ways. The same public that sings your name will beg clumsily when you leave and burn offerings when you don’t return. Abdurraqib listens to “begging songs”—Otis Redding’s hesitant timing, Marvin Gaye’s swelling pleas—and hears Cleveland’s awkward “We Are LeBron” echoing the lover’s last-ditch performance. Sometimes the plea seeks repair; sometimes it seeks ego’s reassurance. (Compare to bell hooks on love’s ethics versus performance.)

Longing, Hustle, and the Politics of Place

Longing animates and distorts. It sends you to an ex’s Instagram at 2 a.m., or to a city you said you’d left, or to the edge of a parade, arm outstretched for a hero’s touch. Abdurraqib treats longing as an engine that turns heartbreak into motion. It powers hustles, too: the close read of someone’s wants, the speed with which you sell comfort—whether at a mall kiosk or in a Nike “Together” ad stitched from black-and-white nostalgia. The national hustle rebrands history as absolution. It can be tender; it can also be a trap.

Fire, Fathers, and Mercy

Where institutions fail, a city speaks in extremes. Fire becomes song and baptism—jerseys in gasoline, car bombs in 1976’s mob wars, vigil flames after police killings (Henry Green, Tamir Rice). Not every blaze is righteous; not every blaze is senseless. The book asks you to understand what scarcity of accountability pushes people to ignite. On smaller scales, mercy carries lives: a storage clerk who looks away, a library chair that holds sleep, a gym shower that returns you to a body you can bear. Prayer returns when the bottom drops out; ritual becomes structure when schedules collapse.

A guiding insistence

“With enough repetition, anything can become a religion”—even the ways a neighborhood teaches you to live on cracked concrete, to build a home from a rim, a scream-buzzer, and a promise to show up tomorrow.

By the end, you leave with a reader’s toolkit: decode affection’s codes; hear the subtext of begging; watch how nostalgia hustles you; and measure a city by its rituals of care. If you can read a handshake, a chalk cloud, a barbershop’s scent trail, or a parade’s roar, you can finally see how love endures in the open and underground—stubborn, athletic, and holy.

Abdurraqib teaches you to read love in the small, practiced gestures that communities build to protect themselves. He calls your attention to handshakes invented with your boys—quick slaps, finger-twists, inside jokes at the speed of touch. These gestures are joyful, but also infrastructural: they are passwords embodied, ways of saying, You’re with us, you’re safe here. When outsiders see only choreography and guess at threat, misreading does violence twice—first to meaning, then to those who carry it.

Hair as Language, Baldness as Inheritance

Hair speaks, even when it’s gone. A bald head in this book is light, lineage, and mirror: a father sweating through pleasure at the dinner table becomes a shining text his son learns to read. The beard’s oil arrives before the man wearing it—scent as signature, care as aura. Barbers are kin, and a brother who can cut is a historian, passing down the techniques of looking after yourself and the people you love. (Note: Think of Christina Sharpe’s idea of “wake work”—care as counter-history.)

Public figures fold into the grammar. Michael Jordan’s shaved head becomes the emblem of aerodynamic dominance; Meshell Ndegeocello’s luminous baldness on Bitter reframes femininity as sovereign tenderness, inspiring Leslie to shave her hair. When Jalen Rose and Chris Webber go bald at Michigan, they align look and play—a visual thesis on youth power that the institution hastens to police.

When Style Is Read as Threat

The Fab Five’s black socks and baggy shorts are not fashion accidents; they’re declarations of we. Sitting on the Crisler Arena floor, swapping the same finger-twist, they publish a private grammar in public. Announcers translate it into menace—a familiar sleight in American sports where Black aesthetics are dragged into a courtroom of taste and “character.” You watch a small theater of power: who gets to decide what looks like love, who gets to brand youthful confidence as dangerous, and who profits from that branding.

Trash Talk as Care, Swagger as Craft

Abdurraqib reframes trash talk as affection disguised as provocation. Jalen Rose studies opponents so his words land with precision; attention is a kind of love offered to teammates, a way to make the court feel like a house you protect. Swagger, then, is less disruption than disciplined liturgy. The performance has rules; the rules protect the people inside it. Outsiders hear noise; insiders hear music.

A durable lesson

“Our enemies believe the twisting of fingers to be a nefarious act.” The misreader does the labor of your definition for you—showing what they cannot see, and how much you must protect.

How You Use This Grammar

Carry this framework into your life: treat the laugh only two friends can summon as architecture. Read a comb in a back pocket as a letter from an old world to a new. When a team picks a uniform detail that gets people talking, ask what kinship it declares rather than what rebellion it implies. Small signs are social infrastructure. If you honor them, you honor the care that built them.

In Abdurraqib’s Ohio, basketball is not an extracurricular; it’s a civic language. City League gyms in Columbus hum like churches, where schools argue identity across baseline banners and old heads trade memory for prophecy. Brookhaven matters not only for wins but for the web of kin it tended—players like Andrew Lavender and Kenny Gregory, families who hang clippings beside plastic crosses, and coaches like Bruce Howard who remembered every face and named the city’s priorities plainly: family, academics, basketball.

Lineage as a Neighborhood’s Memory

You meet local deities—Kenny Gregory floating at the McDonald’s All-American showcase; Esteban Weaver, a legend whose star arrived early and dimmed too soon. Brothers follow each other through the same locker rooms; the Lavenders and Turners become proof that the game is an heirloom. Rivalries map geography into feeling: Brookhaven versus Akron SVSM in 2002 isn’t just a matchup; it’s a city arguing for its reflection across from a team carrying the otherworldly presence of LeBron James.

The city’s grief walks alongside its spectacle. In the backdrop of those big games: Jordan 7s slung over wires after a shooting. The book resists neat separations—your loudest nights of joy are neighbors with your sharpest losses.

Scottwood: Building Heaven on Cracked Concrete

Travel smaller and you arrive at Scottwood, the neighborhood court where kids author a world. Three rims, a half-court for the littlest, and a follow-through held like prayer. When there’s no buzzer, they invent one with their throats. That performance of permanence—“we ain’t never leaving”—is a kind of resistance, a way of owning a block that might not be owned by anyone who loves it back. Great games on broken courts feel fuller than empty gleaming arenas; presence, not paint, makes a cathedral.

Homecoming as Sacrament

If the city has a spiritual calendar, homecomings are holy days. A returning player rides through streets where kids chase cars for a wave; a trophy is less important than a crowd that remembers your crossover from junior year. Coach Bruce Howard’s hospitalization and death collapse the boundary between coach and kin; grief here is communal, made of casseroles and whispered stories on bleachers.

Why it matters

To be made by a place—and to help make it back—is a durable form of immortality. The laundromat remembers you. So does the grandmother at the corner store who played the lottery for forty years.

Holding Joy and Risk Together

Nostalgia here is tender, but it isn’t naive. Toy guns, black water pistols, and finger-gun games from childhood sit in uneasy relation to police violence that makes even pretend dangerous for Black children (Tamir Rice hovers like a warning). The book asks you to keep both truths: the miracle of a court that saved you, and the world outside its fence that requires your vigilance.

Sports are the stage where a city practices belief in public. Cleveland’s “We Are All Witnesses” didn’t just sell sneakers; it canonized a way of standing shoulder-to-shoulder and insisting that miracles are possible here. Abdurraqib treats the arena like a cathedral, where ritual arrives as chalk clouds, and the choir swells when a star takes over a game. Game 5 in 2007—LeBron James scoring the Cavs’ last 25—reads like an answered prayer anyone can point to; you can say, I saw that, and it rearranged what I thought losing cities were allowed to expect.

Begging Songs and the Theater of Asking

When belief is shaken, people beg. Abdurraqib curates a canon of “begging songs”—Otis Redding’s tentative swing in “My Girl,” Marvin Gaye pressing from whisper to demand in “Let’s Get It On,” Boyz II Men dropping to their knees in the rain. He hears the same emotional math in Cleveland’s earnest “We Are LeBron,” where anchors and politicians (Governor Ted Strickland included) assemble a clumsy, touching plea. Public begging shares DNA with private: heartbreak dresses itself in spectacle and hopes the performance will become a bridge back home.

But the ask often centers ego—no one will love you like we can—making the theater about the beggar’s wound more than the beloved’s needs. You’re pushed to ask whether your own grand gestures seek transformation or only the comfort of being wanted.

Scripture in Single Plays

Abdurraqib treats decisive moments as civic scripture: Dick Snyder’s 1976 floater; Daniel Gibson’s sudden heat and later quiet; LeBron’s 2016 chasedown block, a collision of angle and urgency that seemed to give a suffering city longer legs. Time changes texture in such moments—seconds stretch, a defensive sprint becomes a parable. You memorize these plays because they say a place like yours is permitted to rise.

The cost of witness

To witness is to tie your story to someone else’s outcome. When the miracle doesn’t arrive, you still have to live in the apartment you can’t afford, or make it through the shift at the diner. The arena’s glow doesn’t follow you home—unless you learn to carry it.

How to Watch With Care

Abdurraqib wants you to watch like a citizen and a critic. Love your underdogs (he does), but recognize how brands turn your tenderness into currency. Hold the wonder, but also question who benefits when your devotion is marketed back to you as destiny (compare to Dave Zirin’s writing on sports and power). The liturgy of fandom can heal, but it can also hustle you. The skill is to stand in the choir without losing your voice.

This book stares hard at the space between fathers and sons—the hope, the ache, the games where love and judgment trade jerseys. Abdurraqib saw his father shoot a basketball once. That absence lingers like a dead patch on a court you learn to dribble around. He collects scenes: awkward heaves at Scottwood, a hoop collapsing under Lorenzo’s dunk, a man handing him a Bible in the workhouse. The stories are tender and unsparing: fathers can be flawed gods, capable of mercy and of harm, sometimes in the same afternoon.

He Got Game as Moral Blueprint

Spike Lee’s He Got Game shows Jake Shuttlesworth bargaining his freedom on the back of a one-on-one with his son, Jesus. Abdurraqib reads this not as melodrama but as ritual exorcism. The son must defeat the father to choose the life he’ll carry forward. Beating your father isn’t cruelty; it’s exit. It’s also how you measure whether mercy is possible after the last whistle. Forgiveness may follow, or it may not. The game still ends with a consequence both understand.

Longing as Engine, Not Synonym

Longing is not heartbreak or loneliness; it’s what converts them into motion. It makes you scroll an ex’s Instagram, jealous at their small joys, or it pulls you back to a city you swore off. Abdurraqib’s parent-image—watching planes tilting up, departures stitched into a day—renders longing as a ritual of looking toward elsewhere. Like that rare warm hour in an Ohio winter, longing fools you into thinking the season changed. Recognizing the engine lets you decide whether to let it drive or to let it idle and pass.

What the One-on-One Teaches You

On a court, advice, violence, love, and survival can live in a single possession. You learn to hold contradictions: a father who stole cars and then tried to get better; a son who refuses to carry the worst parts forward. Abdurraqib prefers exorcism to reconciliation because it frees the son from myth’s weight. Yet he doesn’t demand your contempt. He asks you to witness complexity: the parent as a person, the son as an author of a different story.

Use it off the court

If you’re carrying someone else’s script, write a new play to end it. The contest doesn’t have to be literal; it can be choosing a boundary, naming a hurt, or refusing the hustle you learned at home.

The Compassion That Remains

Even when the exorcism succeeds, tenderness survives. A father’s beard oil, a remembered meal blessing, the knowledge of where to stand on a court at sunset—these are keepsakes you can keep without keeping the wound. The book gives you permission to separate relic from ruin.

Abdurraqib refuses to let sports euphoria float free of ordinary scarcity. He takes you into months of precarity—job loss, eviction, sleeping in a storage unit—where survival depends on ritual and the soft edges of civic life. Prayer returns like muscle memory. He borrows a Quran, buys a compass, and prays five times daily—sometimes bargaining, sometimes grateful, always clocking time by devotion when calendars feel hostile.

Mercies That Keep the City Livable

Survival is stitched from overlooked generosities: a storage clerk who lets you be, a library chair that holds an hour of sleep, a gym shower that makes you a person again. These spaces—church pews, public stacks, locker rooms—become altars. Abdurraqib calls mercy the engine of a certain quiet deception: sometimes a silence protects dignity that a direct ask would wound. You learn to read which edges of a city are designed to catch you without announcing themselves as rescue.

Incarceration as Routine and Imagination

A short jail stretch in 2004 becomes a classroom on dignity’s absence and community’s improvisation. A bunkmate hands him a Bible and a maxim—“Whatever they do to you, they gonna do to all of us”—making harm communal and survival collective. Routine saves your mind; a ball of socks becomes a pretend rim hurled at the ceiling. Even in institutions built to flatten you, play insists on a small heaven.

Prayer’s Ethics in Crisis

Is devotion born of desperation less real? Abdurraqib doesn’t settle the theology; he narrates the practice. Ritual holds you upright when everything else staggers. The repetition—bending, bowing, standing—rehearses endurance, much like a jump shot worked into the bones. (Note: Compare to Mary Karr and James Baldwin on crisis conversions and the return to faith.)

A city’s measure

Judge a place by how it lets its tired people rest. If the library and the sanctuary and the gym make a soft net, you’re somewhere worth saving.

What You Carry Forward

When stability returns, keep the map of mercies. Be the clerk who looks away when looking would cost someone their name. Build rituals before you need them. And when you chant in an arena, remember who slept in the rows the next morning—your civic joy is truest when it accounts for the city’s hungers.

The hustle, in Abdurraqib’s hands, is not only a con; it’s literacy in people. You read what someone believes about you and flip it into leverage before they realize the floor moved. White Men Can’t Jump becomes a boot camp in optics: Billy Hoyle weaponizes expectation, selling softness and surprise to opponents who write him off. The lesson is portable—any space where your body arrives pre-labeled is a space where hustle can free you or endanger you.

Intimacy at Speed

A mall kiosk pitch works because someone locks eyes for a heartbeat too long. Temptation enters through a glance. Hustle is intimacy plus speed: know a stranger’s want faster than they know it themselves. Abdurraqib admits he’s a bad hustler when the mark is his future self—he sets alarms he won’t honor, overpromises willpower he doesn’t yet have. The inward hustle is the hardest; the mark knows your tells.

The National Hustle: Nostalgia

Nostalgia is the country’s most elegant hustle: it edits the reel until comfort feels like truth. Nike’s “Together” ad for LeBron’s return cranes the city into a black-and-white huddle, staging redemption as a group embrace. It is beautiful. It also sells absolution at scale—your wounded civic heart sutured by a brand’s orchestration. Recognize both truths, then decide how much permission you give the ad to live inside your story. (Compare to Ta-Nehisi Coates on memory and mythmaking.)

Choosing Your Hustles

Not every hustle is predatory. Some are survival, some are art, some are mutual aid dressed as slyness. The ethical task is to inventory the hustles you run and the ones run on you. Which narratives do you accept because they feel good? Which performances of unity actually redistribute risk?

A working rule

If a story asks nothing of you but applause, it might be hustling your hunger. If a story asks for practice and repair, it might be love.

Make It Useful

Practice reading rooms as precisely as Jalen Rose read opponents. Learn to decline the kiosk with kindness but clarity. Let nostalgia warm your hands without dictating your map. And when you craft your own pitch—on a court, in a meeting, or to someone you’ve hurt—ground it in change, not choreography.

Abdurraqib treats fire as both weapon and song—a language cities use when other languages fail. After The Decision, men stack jerseys, pour gasoline, and strike a match. It looks like rage; it is also ritual mourning and purification. He remembers Cleveland’s 1976 bombs—Danny Greene’s mob war echoing through neighborhoods—so you understand the old grammar of loudness: sometimes a place speaks with flames because its softer pleas went unanswered.

Who’s Allowed to Burn?

Not every fire receives the same morality tale. A mostly white crowd burning a Black athlete’s jersey is framed as heartbreak theater; a mostly Black crowd burning in protest is framed as riot. Abdurraqib demands that you notice whose flames get empathy and whose get batons. He doesn’t celebrate burning; he interrogates the conditions that make it feel like conversation.

State Violence and the Protest Archive

The murders of Henry Green (2016) and Tamir Rice (2014) live in the city’s bloodstream. Marches, vigils, and murals answer with their own liturgies, insisting on names and stories where the state offers only sanitized reports. Arena stomps that make scoreboards tremble sit beside streets trembling from loss. A coherent city must hold both truths; the book refuses to separate them for your comfort.

Fire as Baptism, Not Redemption

Abdurraqib describes some fire as a twisted mercy—Get gone & we can start clean—even as he refuses romance. If you listen closely, the match says: we have no other ceremony left. The remedy isn’t scolding flames; it’s rebuilding the institutions that starved language to the point of combustion.

What you can do

Before you debate the fire, ask what went unsaid for too long. Before you judge the spectacle, look for the silences that made it feel necessary. Repair starts where listening failed.

Keeping the Whole Picture

Carry forward a double vision: the poetry of a city that sings around flames, and the policy failures that set the stage. Hold people’s grief in one hand and their demand for safety and dignity in the other. That’s the balance the book trains you to keep.

Home in this book is a relationship—you are in conversation with a place that may or may not love you back. Abdurraqib’s father moves from New Jersey to New York to Ohio for ordinary survival, a migration children sometimes misread as disloyalty. Decades later, LeBron’s exit to Miami restages the drama at civic scale: leaving for legacy is cast as betrayal by some, necessity by others. The politics of place unfold not only in geography but in how stories are told about who belongs and why.

Staying as Knowledge

Staying means you know where the city will catch you when you fall. You know which corner bar keeps a forgiving jukebox, which gym has a late shower, which friend will answer at midnight. Abdurraqib prefers the refuge of familiar failure to triumph somewhere cold to his touch. Place is a living thing: a court whose rim you can hit at twenty-five miles per hour; a diner shift that anchors you during the LeBron-less years.

Leaving as Strategy

Sometimes someone like Mr. Riley—the probation officer—says it plain: get out of here and try somewhere else. The book treats departure as strategy, not surrender. You can leave to breathe and come back to be blessed, a ritual Abdurraqib repeats on drives to and from Ohio, especially in spring 2016. Each return is part cleansing, part confession—you can love a place and still admit it limits you.

Underdogs and Redemption Scripts

Ohio loves underdogs—Buster Douglas knocking out a giant, the Cavs’ 2016 comeback. The comfort of the underdog script is its built-in forgiveness; hope is expected to wobble. But beware how easily those scripts calcify into civic nostalgia that dodges harder questions about schools, policing, housing, and care. Don’t let the parade absolve the policy.

A practice for you

Treat home like a person: ask what it asks of you, how it touches you, when it refuses you. Decide when to stay, when to leave, and when to return with better terms.

The Contract You Keep

By the end, the book leaves you with a usable contract: honor the knowledge of staying; respect the risk of leaving; and know that sometimes the most faithful act is to come back with a wider circle, making room for more people to survive the city you love.