The Game in the Background

It’s a Saturday night, and like many nights during the winter I am on my couch watching the Knicks play. On this particular night, they are playing the Philadelphia 76ers. It’s a good game, that has gone back and forth with six ties and ten lead changes. And yet, despite it being a very watchable game featuring my favorite team, I can’t seem to stay focused on the action.

Instead, I am drawn to my phone to browse social media. In the background I hear the sound of my partner scrolling through her TikTok feed to stay informed on the latest news. We were doing this because that same day, ICE agents terrorized the streets of Minneapolis, resulting in the shooting and murder of Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old ICU nurse.

Normally, basketball would be the one thing that would help me escape from that reality. I have been watching the sport since the mid 1990s and have been a loyal observer of it ever since. And yet, the action became secondary and I instead was glued to my phone trying to make sense of what this country had become. It forces us to wonder, when times seem so dire, are our escapes limited in the reprieve that they can provide us?

The Power of Escape

Using basketball as a means of escape might seem foolish to many. After all, it’s just a game where the teams are owned by billionaires who employ coaches and players that are millionaires. The result of a Knicks game in January really has no significant impact on the world at large. But it does to me.

I was exposed to basketball and the NBA from my father. He was very invested in the Bad Boy Pistons and 90s Bulls. He would tell me stories about Isiah Thomas overcoming an ankle injury to win a game in the NBA Finals. He would tell me of the grace and tenacity of Jordan on the court. I would meet some of his business partners who would explain to me why Shaq was so dominant. It hooked me and made me fall in love with the sport.

Basketball has always been there with me, as a sort of companion on my life’s journey. And at times, it has been the thing that has helped me keep things together. The thing that I had to look forward to when there wasn’t much positive happening in my life.

This was never truer for me than in 2021, when the Knicks had a renaissance led by Julius Randle and coach Tom Thibodeau. The Knicks up until that point had been a laughingstock for a decade. The fantastic play of Randle and the defensive philosophy of Thibodeau led to a lot of games won in the regular season and a reason for basketball fans to pay attention to the Knicks again.

But for me, the connection to that team went deeper. The COVID pandemic and subsequent lockdowns were hard on a lot of people—but hardship is not singular and it comes in many forms. For me, hardship presented itself in the way of two job furloughs and being in a romantic relationship filled with psychological manipulation.

During that time, I was doing DoorDash to make some extra money and even took a job at a casino trying to sign up patrons for a sports gambling app as a way to make ends meet. When I got home, I was greeted by a girlfriend that was mentally unstable who often let out her frustrations at me in the way of verbal abuse. To put it bluntly, I was miserable and felt the existential dread of a life being wasted.

At that time, the only thing that kept me sane was watching the Knicks. They were a brief escape a few times a week that helped me to forget just how everything had gone wrong in my life. I was able to take my laptop, go into another room and just drift away imagining myself at Madison Square Garden cheering on my favorite team.

Basketball has always been more than a game for me, and it has always been there to help me through my toughest times. But today, it feels a little different than it did in 2021. The reason being that back then it allowed me to escape personal problems that had an eventual solution. But today, we face issues that seem to have no reasonable solution—and the result, is a general sense of powerlessness.

Feelings of Hopelessness

As an Arab American, I find that I have a different lens on the American government than my white counterparts. Where they see Donald Trump and his cronies as a once in a lifetime fascist tyranny machine, I see them a little differently. Since 2001, I have been accustomed to the American government viewing any and all Arabs as scum. I have viewed them as a sort of surveillance state that plays towards the interest of those with financial means and power.

So, for me, Trump and the MAGA movement at large is simply the latest mutation of a virus that I am all too familiar with. But as the days go by, it seems that I have underestimated just how deadly that virus truly is. I have long lived with the accepted reality that many Americans view the idea of me as a sort of threat. That they would expel us from this country if they could.

In the last quarter of a century, I have been racially profiled at airports multiple times, put on a watchlist for visiting my father overseas, and denied job opportunities because of establishment racism. I have had people tell me to “go back where I came from” and that I am a terrorist. It is the same playbook that ICE uses in the streets of American cities. Only this time, the power is unchecked and consequences no longer exist.

With Trump and his deployment of ICE agents to American cities like Minneapolis, that fear now has a blueprint. We have seen three people murdered by ICE in recent weeks—Alex Pretti, Renee Nicole Good, and Keith Porter Jr. They were not these domestic terrorists that the Department of Homeland Security would make them out to be, but rather positive contributing members to their community.

Seeing the videos of the deaths of Pretti and Good in particular is a gruesome sight. It shows a level of depravity that is normally reserved for war zones. With the power of social media and smartphones, we have been able to see multiple angles of the atrocities, leaving no room for spin.

The issue is, as Nilay Patel of The Verge has said multiple times, that the Department of Homeland Security likes to fashion themselves as content creators and have begun to spin the narrative of domestic terrorism. With the never-ending feed of outrage and anger on social platforms, it is impossible not to be consumed by the hopelessness of it all.

At this point, there is a general sense of hopelessness when we see people being gunned down in the street. Politicians condemn the actions but at the same time don’t do much of anything to bring about reform. This leads us to a state of anger and overall exhaustion that is at times overwhelming. My friend David Rushing posted on Threads about the need to find an escape by saying:

I know people mostly care what I have to say on here because of basketball, and I promise I’ll get back to that at some point.

I just don’t have it in me to talk hoops right now with everything going on.

Please try to make some time for the things that bring you joy. Joy isn’t ignoring reality, it’s just how we get through it sometimes.

I echo David’s sentiments completely. Joy is essential to help us navigate the terrain of this messed up world that we live in. Brief moments of escape are crucial to not driving ourselves insane with the mostly unchangeable realities of our time. The issue becomes that the volume of activity designed to cripple us as a society continues to come fast and furious.

It’s fair to wonder if we can ever truly have an escape when there is a clear formula in place designed to bring about outrage. The Knicks ultimately held out to beat the 76ers 112-109 that night, and for a brief second, I felt that happiness try to return. I am holding out hope that the Knicks and basketball at large will be able to provide that escape again, despite how bleak everything seems right now. Quite frankly, I need it to.

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