You’re not alone. We’re 800 strong now.
You’re never alone. Even when you’re sitting by yourself in the back of Jardin, on your final morning in Las Vegas, when an old editor stands you up and bails on breakfast.
C’mon, Joe.
There’s a power agent over there, treating a lottery pick and his family. There’s a veteran for the Chicago Bulls to their left. But you aren’t alone because you’ve been here before. At this exact table, in fact, with the same server — a smiley bald man named Wade.
He even remembers you.
Summer League has this uncanny ability to jog recall. To retrace the path your former self has traveled time and again around the same sun, as the NBA carousel spins through its cyclical calendar. If the G League Showcase is the sport’s high school cafeteria before winter break, Summer League is the last and first days of school converging. Where everyone in basketball has one foot in yesterday and the other in tomorrow.
There’s no separating reflections of this past season from looking forward to what’s ahead. This annual checkmark in the NBA marathon presents a clear indication of where you stand in your career, the league, your life. So many friends are now bringing their babies and their wives.
Coaches and executives have come to Summer League living large, fresh off championships. Only to be fired, and back walking these same lobbies of glitzy hotels, the same hallways of Thomas & Mack Center, shaking hands with that added weight of needing another job. From the head honchos to the G League staffers looking to just secure their footing in this world before it spits them out whole. One July, you’re hosting a friend in between work at your hotel suite. The next, you’ve called the front desk for extra pillows and are just happy to take that same friend’s couch.
It works that way in media, too. I have begged employers to send me to Summer League and I have slapped the corporate card down for thousand-dollar group meals. We’ve racked up quite the lobby bar tab.
So last year, I should have seen the old shop was readying to cut me loose when the new bosses gashed my entertainment budget for what had become an annual string of dinners and drinks. They almost didn’t even send me. But there I was, back hunting for free food, fortunately now preying on hors d'oeuvres at agency parties that a 20-year-old college intern who first took Las Vegas with nothing but a SLAM credential would never get into, let alone knew existed.
Then you learn about them. Then, you start getting texted invitations.
You can’t help but flip through all these memories like a picture book. Or maybe that’s just for the introspective folks. But you’re almost forced to consider it when every interaction out there includes some form of “How was your year… How’s working for or with fill-in-the-blank… Any leads…?” And if you really haven’t stopped to reflect, you’ll have more than enough opportunity to at least practice your conversational answer.
So as I first began writing this month’s installment looking at that empty chair across the Jardin table, remembering the friends, the sources, the random businessman who have all filled it, I couldn’t help feel that connection to my past selves whose experiences have given me so much.
Who brought me back to this same seat, in this same restaurant, and left me ready to leave that city to charge into whatever my future self has in store. What my next season will bring after Wade brought my omelet.
Which brings us to tattoos...
There may be no better embodiment of the concept of past, present and future selves than what we ink onto our skin.
Like writing, there are three versions of you when it comes to getting tatted. There’s the version who first dreamt the idea, the you who actually takes that needle to the arm, plus the you who must don said art for the rest of time. Just as there is a version of you whose thoughts originally brought you to the page you’re crafting, the tortured you who stabs out the keys into something somewhat legible, and then the lucky son of a bitch who gets to make your writing pretty at the end.
We have multiple selves in multiple realms. We have our happy selves and our sad selves and our serious selves and our silly selves and our confident selves and our down in the dumps selves. This notion of past, present, and future, though, really nestled in my brain when I reached my thirties, however cliche, with gratitude for the failures that punk reporter of my past suffered so this present “NBA insider” could reap those lessons. For the therapy and development that helped round a kid into an adult. For the friendships I watered so they’re still fruiting to this day.
I’ve been so focused, of late, on setting up whatever version of myself will read this in ten years. Hopefully he’s happy, and agile, still playing pickup and dancing late into the evening. Hopefully he’s excited about something. And hopefully he won’t think this is all totally obtuse.
My diet has never been cleaner. I’m in my best shape since before the pandemic. But I need to get back to meditating more and meal prepping and I gotta finish this fucking novel already…
I will. It’s coming. Because that’s writing, too. Believing some future self is going to have the energy, the proper mindset, shit, just the opportunity of a few uninterrupted hours to come back to your draft and move it even one inch along.
Right before I left for Las Vegas, I finished my fourth tattoo. It’s three koi fish wrapping around my right forearm. Those ponds with their lily pads and colorful fins, there’s always been something magnetic yet peaceful about them to me. I just saw the fish swimming around my right arm one time, and the vision stuck.
Back in June, during the Finals, Arjun sketched my past, present and future fish into a watery band maybe three inches in width. I thought we’d get the whole scene done in one long session. But it took three hours just to finally get on the same page about how I wanted the fish to swirl head to fin, and not be part of some rectangular stencil that would leave them sitting like shrimps atop fried rice.
Three weeks later, I returned to finish the job with some surface-ripple elements and those lily pads. He was absolutely transfixed that it all needed two lotus flowers. Again, the fucking day before I left for Summer League...
“If I don’t finish it now, I won’t get to finish it until October,” I kept saying.
This fifth chapter is coming to your inbox in the middle of a camping/hiking trip with Joey and Eric to round out July. August features a bachelor party in Mexico, a wedding in Texas — all things for which I wanted this koi fish vision to have finally come to life.
But there was really no reason it couldn't have been “finished” until October. It’s funny, when you look back at things you said aloud, how they become notorious quotations in your story, thoughts that proved to foreshadow your future. I keep remembering, for instance, how I used to say it would just be “so ideal” to have experienced one more relationship before I really found a person who would last.
And so, the fish couldn’t wait until October. Everything had to be “finished” before Vegas, where I was going to be hiding the plastic wrap and shaved arm hair under long sleeves in hundred-degree heat. Oh, how I did not want every one of those Summer League stop-and-chats to also feature a “Heyyy, what’s that on your forearm there, bud?”
So why then? Why the hell did that past self feel such a need to rush me, and the rest of my days, into all this black, shaded water that became the end product on my body? The finishing touches turned my little band into a sizable forearm statement now twice as thick. Arjun kept shading and shading after three more hours on the table. It was the only part that really stung during the whole process, and so I looked away to better bear the pain.
It is not what I wanted, folks. The fish, the selves, were supposed to take up about eighty percent of the whole piece, and now they’re more around half. The whole thing is way, way, way darker than I ever envisioned. I was horrified when I got off that repurposed massage bed.
Now, in this present moment, we’ve fortunately settled into looking a quite bit longer and deeper into that water, forever. It really is beautiful work. I’ve gotten enough unsolicited compliments, even the most insecure parts of me have fully embraced its artistry.
“It’s perfect,” according to Arjun.
“The tattoo looks phenomenal,” Brett texted. “It’s a good reminder there’s lots of fish in the sea. But if the fish took up the whole sea, then the sea wouldn’t be that big… so you need the sea to show that it’s a big, big ocean.”
An old friend messaged: “I think it’s cool that from far away it can seem like this intense, dark-vibed piece, and then you get close and it’s nature and meaning.”
And that, again, just makes me think of writing. How you can return to the pile of junk you assembled and smooth it into something far richer and even beyond your original intention. How you can edit each draft, your approach, and yourself one session at a time… and see how it all plays next year, at Summer League.
Where you’ll leave your last appointment at the Wynn Tower Suites, passing Draymond Green and his security team. To the point you almost miss the crafted koi ponds you remember have always adorned that entryway, and everything feels strikingly aligned.
I thought this was a great piece, taking us behind the scenes at the Vegas Summer League. It’s on my bucket list to attend. But the main reason I’m writing is to let you know I loved “Built to Lose,” and I’m wondering if there are more books in the hooper?
Can't wait to see the new Tatoo