There’s Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension

While growing up in Columbus, OH, in the 1990s, Abdurraqib (A Little Devil in America) witnessed the rise and (sometimes) fall of high school basketball players. There was Kenny Gregory, who won MVP at the 1997 McDonald’s All-American game, and Estaban Weaver, a local legend by age 12 who dropped out of school his junior year after basketball season. And then there was LeBron James, whom the author first saw as a player on an opposing high school team. Written like a basketball game with quarters instead of chapters, his book offers reflections on his own adulthood and community while following James’s career. He melodically combines topics—becoming unhoused, protesting police shootings of Black boys and men, and more—with James’s first and winning appearances in the NBA finals as a Cleveland Cavalier. Meanwhile, time outs and intermissions are dedicated to known Ohioans and movies about basketball. It’s important to note that parts of the book break format and are presented as poetry. These verses demonstrate the earnest admiration Abdurraqib has for the subject.