molded from clay; forged by the gods

My heart used to ache all the time.

I used to dream that some cosmic being would perch on the roof outside my bedroom window and whisk me away to a world softer and more magical than mine. They'd take my hand, and suddenly – my cats could talk if I really made sure they knew I wouldn’t tell anyone. My plushies had feelings. I’d descended directly from the goddesses and heroes of Greek mythology. Every necklace was an amulet. My favorite pair of Converse gave me power-ups. In my imagined universe, the members of my favorite band or the characters from my favorite media series surrounded me constantly, even when I couldn’t sense them. Everything was a sign.

By the time I was eighteen, I’d calmed down a little, but the special interests continued. This time, the cosmic being was Dario Šarić, my favorite player from the Sixers team I’d fallen in love with two years prior, and the better world was the NBA – my imagined version of it, at least.

It was March of 2020. COVID-19 had just begun to rock the world and shake the certainties of my life from their foundations. Eighteen years old and stuck in my parents’ house, I turned to basketball. I had no other choice. That's how my special interests always go – some divine force compels me towards whatever it is that piques my interest, and there is no option to ignore it.

I spent my days and nights daydreaming about this softer NBA – my NBA – an imagined universe where the players really were all best friends, they lived together, they wove myths of the mundane, they went through the same things I did. I missed my friends from school; Dario missed his old teammates in Philadelphia. I couldn’t bear the uncertainty of not knowing when I’d finally be able to go to college; Dario couldn’t bear the uncertainty of not knowing where or when he’d be signing his next contract. He tore his ACL in the 2021 Finals and I imagined his teammates comforting him – comforting me, in a sense. I knew none of it was real, yet it felt like I’d tapped into a universe right next-door to mine. In a sense, I was grieving, though I didn’t realize it then. Imagining Dario’s life as a parallel to mine in real-time offered comfort. It offered closure. In a sense, it offered justice.

Last week, I finally got to see Dario play basketball for the first time since developing a special interest on him four years ago. It was a big deal. Every time his team – whichever team it was – came to DC, where I’d ended up living, I would miss it by a day or two, whether it was due to Greek Easter or Thanksgiving or some other obligation I at-all-costs could not miss. I had to go this time. There was no other choice, in my mind.

Midway through January, Dario lost a close friend – Dejan Milojević, a Warriors assistant coach who Dario credited with keeping him in the NBA after a disappointing final season with the Phoenix Suns.

Dario immediately entered a slump after Dejan died. For the first half of the season, Dario was on fire. Some fans even said he was the second-best scorer on the team after Steph Curry himself, the prodigal son of the three-point revolution. When the Warriors returned to the court after a week reserved for mourning, none of his shots landed. They continued not to land. They’re still not landing.

I wanted to give Dario a friendship bracelet. He’d – in theory, in my head – helped me through some of the worst times of my life. Why not return the favor? Why not pull up to the game in platform Converse and a bright purple-and-orange Suns jersey bearing Dario's last name and let him know that no matter how hard it gets, no matter how bad he plays, someone cares about him?

That night, Dario scored five points, logged two assists, and stormed back to the locker room before the clock even hit zero.

I got near-trampled by Steph Curry fans before I could even think to send my pathetic little friendship bracelet sailing over the barrier. I don’t know why I thought it would have worked.

Last year, I wrote about my sudden disenchantment with the NBA after covering a Wizards game courtside for the first time. “I’d been so used to following the NBA from childhood bedrooms and college apartments that I’d failed to realize that this is an industry, and the players are real, and they make millions of dollars to blow on glitzy outfits to wear to press conferences and penthouses in cities I’ve never been to,” I wrote. “Am I just jealous that there’s a world I’m not part of?”

I’m not sure if envy is the right feeling anymore. Actually, I’m not sure envy was the right feeling then either. Both of these nights at Capital One Arena were surrounded by an absent sense of mythos that I’d expected to find myself overwhelmed with, and the realization that basketball was no longer mine – it never was in the first place. From my seats – good seats, by the way – I watched the players chop it up with the millionaires sitting courtside. I watched the Wizards dancers serve champagne to men in suits and their teenage sons in the courtside table-service section. My ticket – all 250 dollars of it – still wasn’t good enough to warrant being treated with humanity by the league I’d spent so much time humanizing. I thought about the kids with Baltimore accents sitting behind me and my friends in the nosebleeds last year at Wizards versus Heat, yelling “BEWWWWW!!” when Tyler Herro stepped up to the free throw line. I thought about their dad telling them stories of John Wall, of Gilbert Arenas, of Michael Jordan, of this building when it was called the Verizon Center, the MCI Center, when the Wizards were still the Bullets.

The Leonsis family was about to move the Wizards and the Capitals out of DC – out of Gallery Place, out of Chinatown, into the suburbs of Virginia and out of reach of the working class fans who can’t pay to win. The state of Virginia ended up shutting it down. They didn’t want basketball in their suburbs. They didn’t want the types of people associated with basketball — Black and brown and working class — attending games in their suburbs. It’s a lose-lose. Residents of Chinatown already complain that Capital One Arena is pushing them out. They closed the McDonald’s on F Street and the Walgreens is on the fringe. They turned Carnegie Library into an Apple Store.

I wondered if the NBA, the idea of it, at least, was mythological to those boys in the nosebleeds, too. I wondered if their favorite players ever perched on the roof outside their bedroom windows and offered to whisk them away. I wondered if their dad felt like that in the 90s, and I wondered if he felt like I do now in the 2000s. I wondered if the same could be said for those who sit courtside, those who chop it up with the players, those who find the NBA tangible, a world they are actually a part of.

I wonder if it would have meant anything if I got to tell Dario he did a great job that night, even if he didn’t. I wonder if it would have changed anything if I got to give him the friendship bracelet, if he’d see it as an amulet – or if its life would end wedged between the seats of a charter bus or left behind on a hotel nightstand. Why did I feel like I owed something to somebody who could pay my rent without noticing a dent in his bank account? Why do I feel entitled to an experience I cannot afford, simply because I feel more deeply about it than anyone on celebrity row?

I walked home from Gallery Place in the rain that night and I felt like a loser. I watched a dozen black SUVs pull up to the Four Seasons. I went to Wawa and said “yeah” all defeated when the employee asked me if I really wanted my hoagie with just turkey and lettuce. I sat on a ledge waiting for the 33 and pulling at my too-short skirt as two disheveled-looking men threw plastic bottles at each other across the street. I thought about Tony Snell begging for a 10-day contract to be able to pay for care for his two children with autism – and I think about him not getting it. I thought about Nate Robinson desperately seeking a kidney transplant with little coverage or support from the league. I thought about the working class boys catapulted into extreme wealth. I thought about the boys in Europe pulled out of school to follow their fathers’ hoop dreams – to become athletic weapons and not much else, to face the threat of retirement only if they have that luxury – and I thought about the boys from Cameroon and Nigeria sent to American boarding schools built to forge them into professional athletes. I thought about Len Bias. I thought about Caleb Swanigan.

Four days into the Warriors’ week off for mourning, I watched a 2k24 MyEras playthrough where the streamer used a fanmade roster of every NBA player to ever enter the league. He drafted Len Bias in 1986, and the next day, Len Bias was not found dead. He went on to win multiple championships and an MVP. He teamed up with Michael Jordan and Magic Johnson and Charles Barkley on a hypothetical Celtics dream team with unlimited money. Reggie Lewis didn’t die, and Dražen Petrović didn’t die, either. Death is not a possibility in 2k – it’s a game about basketball. It would be unrealistic for the players to die. It would be violent. It would be uncomfortable.

Caleb Swanigan is not on the Wikipedia list of basketball players who have died during their careers.

Caleb, known to teammates and Purdue fans as Biggie, "found a home at Purdue, where he was cared for by Matt Painter's basketball program and loved by the fanbase. He was so good, and so big, and so gentle,” wrote a reporter for the Indianapolis Star after Caleb’s death in 2022. He was so good, so big, and so gentle.

On my walk home, I thought about the wealth he was catapulted into upon being drafted 26th overall by the Portland Trail Blazers in 2017 after a childhood spent often homeless and always without a support system. I thought about the fans who remember him in TikTok edits set to Regina Spektor – two birds on a wire / one [Damian Lillard] says come on / and the other [Caleb Swanigan] says ‘I’m tired.’ I thought about the tweets poking fun at his weight after being arrested for marijuana possession in 2021. Damian Lillard defended his teammate in an Instagram comment, but we don’t know much beyond that. We’re not supposed to.

He was so good, so big, and so gentle – and he still died. The NBA never posted more about his death than one black-and-white photo on Instagram. The Blazers didn’t have a tribute night for him. They didn’t retire his number or leave white roses on his spot on the bench. The narrative became this: Caleb Swanigan had been arrested for drug possession, he appeared at his court date disheveled and hundreds of pounds overweight, and then he died a year later.

Maybe it’s easier to ignore death if we imagine it was somehow the fault of the person who died. We revive Damar Hamlin on a football field in Buffalo, and we let him keep playing next season, because the reality of the situation – the fact that we’d just watched a man die, albeit temporarily, on live television – was too grave. We mourn Kobe by collectively imagining him possessing Khris Middleton during the 2020 All-Star Game, resurrecting his spirit to give us one final show. We reanimate Len Bias as a digital corpse – a 2k avatar which bears his draft-night smile, and, much like the most basic form of a golem, cannot speak, cannot bear its own consciousness, must be piloted by its creator. To us, this reanimation brings comfort. It brings closure. It brings justice. We can reanimate all we want. We cannot resurrect.

The night before I went to the game, a friend interviewed me for an article about Dražen Petrović, part of a series he was writing on NBA players who had died during their careers and how we treat their stories. He was mainly asking me about the similarities between Dario’s and Dražen’s careers playing basketball for KK Cibona and their shared hometown of Šibenik, a small town tucked away on the coast of Croatia, but as we got deeper and deeper into conversation, I started seeing it again. Reanimation performing the role of closure had wormed itself into a grieving seaside town in Croatia long before I’d ever known about it, long before I’d even been alive.

Dražen Petrović died in a car crash in Germany on July 7th, 1993. Dario was born nine months and one day later. Dario was raised – engineered, in a sense – to rectify the death of his father’s friend and former teammate. Dario spent sleepless nights (or so I’d imagine) working on his goofy jumpshot and quelling angry tears as a larger-than-life bronze statue of Dražen watched on sightlessly from the bench. He played game after game at Dražen Petrović Hall in Zagreb, where he could never make his father proud enough, never emulate his father’s best friend close enough, never bring the same amount of glory to his family, to his hometown, to his country.  Molded from the same clay on the rocky shores of the Adriatic Sea, but clumsy and hot-tempered, born with a cleft palate and impossibly large shoes to fill, would he ever live up to the precedent set for him one summer night in 1993? Was he already a disappointment then? Was he some prophesied resurrection of Dražen, or was he just a boy born into immeasurable grief and immense pressure?

When I was a kid, I thought my dad chopped it up with the Greek gods. He’d tell me stories about visiting the Acropolis and Mount Olympus and how our last name was passed down through the generations all the way from Achilles and Helen and Heracles down to me. He told me about the Trojan Horse like he was crouched in the wooden underbelly himself. He insisted it was all true. Even when I read the Odyssey in high school I couldn’t help imagining him as Odysseus.

I wonder if Dario felt the same when his father told him stories of Dražen, if he didn’t know where man ended and where myth began. Dražen scored 112 points in a game in 1985. He became a star after being drafted 60th overall. He wore a watch on the night of his death which now sits in a museum in Zagreb, its hands frozen eternally at 5:20 PM. I wonder if Dario had to piece Dražen, the man together through plaques by the pickup courts and anecdotes overheard when the adults were talking. I wonder if he felt like his fate was sealed.

I wonder if Dario ever saw Dražen perched on the roof outside his bedroom window, and I wonder what he felt when he took his hand.