Sports, Limitlessness, and Humanity
On what we all can and can't do
No one I know associates me with basketball. I don’t keep up with it, I don’t talk about it, and the closest relationship I’ve had with it in recent years was through my former students, who know a lot more about it on every level than I ever will. When Kobe Byrant died, I thought, “This is a moment that’s going to be cataclysmic for a lot of people,” and sure enough, I had a student named Byran whose mother had named him for Kobe. Empathetically, I was affected, but directly, this was not my life. It didn’t feel like my life, until I overheard the most passionate basketball players in my English class lament that no matter how lucky they were to live in the age of LaBron, they would never know what it was like to be real-time witnesses to the legend of Michael Jordan.
We’ve all got our own “if only I had been there in history” moments where our personal heroes are concerned, but for that one? I was there. Rarely do I brag about having half my family roots in the Midwest — okay, that’s an understatement, we’re literally not speaking — but in the deep-before of the early 90’s, I looked forward to summers at my grandparents’ house in Illinois, where the earth itself would pause on its axis and forget to take a cosmic breath, because all was still with reverence in the presence of the immortal Number 23.
I never saw a Bulls game live, but we didn’t need to. What Jordan did on that court defied physics, and we felt it in our living rooms as the fabric of existence tearing for several moments, opening up worlds of possibility from other realms. My dad, consummate New Orleans musician, was no follower of sports, but when he watched Jordan, I remember his awe: “The dude can fly.” Years later, my German Film professor passed on an unforgettable quote from a French sports announcer, making sure to capture the emotion palpable in his voice as he said what translates to, “That. was sublime.”
Sublime: an image or experience so profoundly beautiful that it shakes you to your core, pushes you to the edge of sheer terror. Were we afraid of what might happen if we truly embraced the understanding that a human body can do that? Who would we be if we knew we could fly? And what, if we tried, and failed, would that tell us about our limitations and what they mean?
When Jordan retired from basketball, he took up baseball, and something died in America’s faith when it turned out that he couldn’t play the game. He was supposed to be without limits. His body was essentially supposed to control the sport, not the other way around. If Michael Jordan was human, what did that make the rest of us? Whatever it was, we couldn’t face it.
Ableism ultimately comes from a primal refusal to accept the irrefutable fact that all bodies have limits. No other bigotry comes from the suppressed understanding that I could end up like you, because circumstances out of your control will never change race or gender. But anyone can suffer an injury. Anyone can be forced to remake their own lives in a body that contradicts their prior existence and future plans. It ain’t my fault that it could happen to you, but people like to treat me like it is. “How dare you bring that up,” their frightened gazes say, when, uncharacteristically, I didn’t say anything.
This is why I never really experienced ableism until I lived in places where those of a certain class prioritized athletic perfection. There’s nothing undesirable about my body in the notoriously non-workout regions of the Midwest and the American South. People looked at me and saw the characteristics that made me hot; crutches were an afterthought, if they were ever mentioned at all.
Then came Seattle, the city of runners, where thankfully fellow hikers acknowledged me with a smile but glaringly-upper-middle-class people on the street treated me with such polite vitriol that I successfully pitched a Feature about it in The Stranger. My 2014 writer-self knew comparatively little about good words, and the photo remains one of the worst pictures of me ever taken, which is more than a little embarrassing to this day, but one of the most fascinating components of the experience were the ensuing Internet comments. If you dare to take a gander, you’ll see that the defensiveness my experience and subsequent sentiments brought out show you a truly evil side of humanity, and remember, when I reference the grief of my father’s death, that the same city wherein some annoymous presumed-dude asked me if “your daddy was one of those corrupt cops in N.O.,” is a very, very white place that prides itself on being “progressive.” It’s also a city filled with card-carrying introverts, which no doubt explains why my plea to ask me questions rather than stand there and stare at me leads a woman to say, “Sarah, you have a lot of expectations of us.”
In all fairness, I also made friends as a result of that article. My picture was right there, after all, and several parents of children with disabilities approached me on the street to thank me for pointing out what they had always noticed but weren’t sure how to say. One especially vindicating morning that I approached my neighborhood coffeehouse (well, one of them, because that’s one thing I do miss about Seattle!), I noticed a visibly queer woman smiling at me with a warmth that belied our lack of acquaintance.
“It’s you!” she said. “You wrote that awesome article in The Stranger!”
People weren’t weird about disability in Boston; they were weird about everything else. People weren’t weird about disability in Sacramento, because, provincial as the state capital can be, it’s also extraordinarily diverse, and people are genuinely excepting. They were weird about it in Berkeley for the same upper-middle-class-athletics reasons I’m now all too familiar with, and they were weird about it in the mountain towns of Ukiah and Placerville for an entirely different all-American reason: I don’t look like I embody individualism and independence, because I fuckin’ don’t, and in those isolated anti-collectivist places, you better do everything for yourself, or you’re basically the equivalent of what I would’ve been if my preemie self were born in Ancient Rome.
I’ll end this by talking about the one thing I got out of my aborted teaching credentialing program which is this: P.E. teachers kick ass now! When I was in school, I skipped P.E. and took extra classes because everybody’s favorite class wasn’t set up to accommodate a body like mine, but today, it’s understood that everybody’s got a body, and everybody needs to move theirs. I’ve met several P.E. teachers who rejoice in the invigorating challenge of adapting every sport for every student, and are refreshingly shocked to learn that their subject was ever closed off to me.
Micheal Jordan couldn’t play baseball. Maybe that, itself, can be reframed as inspiring
