I don’t have a sports fan following.

Mostly, my sports fandom feels tolerated. I try to act non-plussed and act like I don’t see numbers and track reactions (I do my damnedest to not pay attention), but the small patch of land I could inhabit safely as a sports writer in the enlightened late period Deadspin/Defector/The Classical/Free Darko mode is vanishing and instead the terrain has become gnarled brambles, Pat McAfee like a Frank Miller Superman, Stephen A. Smith as the main character of the entire channel. Barstool Sports needs no introduction. It may not be that whatever readers I have aren’t really into sports, but that sports is leaving the intellectual world behind to return to the atavistic chest-beating of homophobic high school jocks. Witness the aforementioned McAfee effectively spreading gossip about a college age woman fucking her boyfriend’s dad. 

I wasn’t really a sports fan until my stepdad’s Sports Illustrated subscription sent over a small NBA preview booklet for sports betting. This was the closest I had to a Basketball Prospectus. I looked over the teams and saw the Detroit Pistons. I had remembered that I had played them in NBA 2K7 as a counter to my stepbrother playing the Miami Heat. Some names rang a bell and I decided I would adopt them. The other close teams I could have followed were the Wizards and the Hornets. It took awhile for this bet to pay off, but it did, as of 4/21/2025, when the Detroit Pistons snapped their 16 year playoff victory drought.  

I was 16 when they last won a play-off game. I am now 33. It was half my life. 

Basketball was not just basketball, though. Basketball was how I began to make inroads into the world, how I was introduced to a world beyond Appalachian provincialism. Free Darko, probably the greatest sportswriting collective in history, did not see basketball in a way where basketball was just basketball, but rather, as a cultural object in conversation, witting or unwitting, with other objects in that field. It could not avoid this. You could do this with other sports, certainly, but basketball compacts into its history streams and currents I wasn’t aware existed. Jewish vacationers in Upstate New York, America’s abortive attempts at a social democracy of parks and recreation, asphalt courts paved in the inner city, Indiana farm-boys shooting in dirt, fates changed in the Virgin Islands because of a hurricane, youth careers stopping and starting in the bombing of Yugoslavia, all continuous with the sport. Yet in every game I was experiencing the current culmination of one hundred years of logic, the court a manmade confluence where these streams all met and continued their course. 

In America, all of this loaded cultural context comes with the albatross of basketball being connected to thugs, something made all the more present in the 2000s after David Stern ended the wearing of street clothes on the bench because of his frustrations with Allen Iverson, of a Virginia much different than mine. I thought the accusations of thug behavior were silly; why anyone who is playing basketball would have enough time to be a career criminal is something I didn’t understand and have not had to. I wasn’t aware, just yet, of what thugs were supposed to represent, that a thug wasn’t a credible accusation of criminal involvement but a smear of its likelihood. These are lessons that wound up imparted on me, as I tried to understand how a game full of the world’s top athletes were thieves and could only wind up at the obvious answer when I looked at the demographics of the league I loved, and its connection with music I was growing to love, a love compounding with my increasing devotion to the sport. Not jazz. There are connections to basketball and jazz, but they’re comparative, rhyming phenomena. Basketball has always sounded like whatever music they play on boomboxes on paved courts, and that music has been rap since the mid-80s. Iverson made that connection apparent, and it has remained apparent, but in that apparence, it was less that the inner city was humanized for me. The inner city never needed to be humanized. I was the one humanized because I let myself be curious. 

It was that curiosity, and the imagination I learned from my searching for basketball knowledge, that began to change things. There are no Detroit fans in Wise, Virginia. Most of my basketball friends were Lakers fans, and upon learning I was a Detroit fan, they would complain about Detroit and Rasheed Wallace’s ignominity at any referee who ever believed he was wrong. Yes, I posted on forums, meaning somewhere, my wrongness has been fossilized. At seventeen or so, I signed up to post on an SB Nation blog for my team called Detroit Bad Boys, named after the Pistons infamous mid-80s team of roughnecks (who I hold a sneaking suspicion were easily cast in that role being from an industrial city with no glitzy media markets). I named myself Biz Markie Moon. Deserving special mention here is the first adult man I had met who seemed to be mostly looking out for me as a youngin. I rarely name people fully in my writing from my real life, but Skylar Woodman did more for me than he probably realizes. For a shy and largely traumatized 17 year old, an adult who is cool and takes interest in you is a lifesaver, and Skylar became a possible model for adulthood independent of past prejudices and fears. He talked to me, told me when I was being a knucklehead, and he sent me rap albums I illegally downloaded later. All of this started in our leaner years, when the Iverson trade depleted the Pistons team of sheen and I began to fill in games watching the Chauncey Billups led Nuggets. 

The Iverson trade itself marks the slow descent of the franchise. It also marks my maturing. Not long after the Decision began the team’s super league era, the Pistons, originally a franchise noted for winning by putting together the perfect team instead of two or three stars, would begin being terrible. The NBA began feeling like a rote performance, and it was easy to let it slide to the background. I had other things in mind. 

You will realize I have not talked about why Detroit. After all these years. Would it have not been easier to look for other teams when you’ve never even been further west than Knoxville and further north than Philadelphia? Being a fan of the sport, omnivorous?

When I was away from home, a region seething at its status at becoming a service and prison economy after years of gains from a profitable extractive model, there was a team falling apart at the other end of the Hillbilly Highway on US-23, from where Glenn Roberts hit some of the first recorded jumpshots to where Stanley Johnson couldn’t buy them, in a city noted for blight, criminality, decrepitude, qualities I could see in my backyard and understand wasn’t anybody’s choice. I could imagine it there, aided now by music like Danny Brown’s wonderful three song trilogy “EWNESW/Fields/Scrap or Die”, imagining the fields of empty houses. I could have thought of blight in Richmond, which it certainly has, but Richmond was anointed as possibly becoming the next Austin, Texas, a hipster playground. I thought of the Pistons and I thought of home, and when I thought of home, I thought of the Pistons, of one day we would be in the playoffs, of when the Appalachian mountains would be somewhere I could go with opportunity. Every minute I spent waiting for our draft chances to change or someone to come through was a moment where I could hope to enjoy the kind of life I wanted at home that I did in the city. 

Only one of these things has come to pass. 

 

Speaking of Detroit: I don’t know what else there is to add about the team this season, but check this out.  In “How the Detroit Pistons went from 14-68 to a playoff threat”, ESPN recorded the following regarding the Piston’s pregame tunnel dance: “I’m not part of the unc crew,” Beasley clarified. “I’m still that cool cousin that’s a little bit older.” Cousin theory vindicated and yet again, history will absolve me.

I am well aware I said the Pistons will win in six, but Fidel thought he could take Moncada a lot easier than he did. He had to grind for it, and so will the Pistons. 

I’ve been working on a longer essay that hopefully explains some of the things I actually enjoy. It was supposed to be in honor of my 33rd birthday. However! Writing 33 capsule reviews of fiction I love has taken longer than expected, mostly because I’ve tinkered with the list multiple times. One iteration included plays, but that meant I had to push out the novels and short stories that are frankly more important to me now both as a medium and to my artistic endeavors. You can peel my hands off my Sarah Ruhls and Sam Becketts when I’m dead, but I don’t write or read drama enough to speak on them intelligently. The next iteration included a few short stories as gap fillers, but I realized, more and more, I was going to have to remove some short stories to make sure I got necessary novels in. As of now: there are two short stories in the list. Because the list is roughly produced in biographical order, I’ve sequestered the two important shorts to the early part of my life, when I was reading things in anthology or school books. 

The good news: at some point there will be a list of 33 short stories. Will there be 33 movies? Probably. 33 songs or albums? Very likely at some point. But this one has taken so much time I don’t think I’m going to tell you when, just that it’s present in the background. 

See you in two. I promise, next issue won’t be about sports. 

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