I watch basketball to watch men cry. The court gives men license to make visible their pain, even to express love for one another. Men are made human to me through sport.
Basketball is the best sport for the purpose. Footballers are too padded, tears obscured by helmets, their game too violent. Soccer players are better, but rarely does the pan of the camera allow for in-depth observation of the play of emotion over a face. Players compensate with exaggerated physical reactions: airplaning around the field for a win, collapsing to the ground at a loss. But for an up-close view of tears tracing the curves and hollows of cheek and jaw, in America, in the age of HD television, there is nothing to match basketball.
I began watching basketball during my first year in schools. My students were obsessed and I’d just started dating a Blazers fan. The Celtics were my team that year and had some champion criers: Paul Pierce, Glen “Big Baby” Davis, Rajon Rondo. Even Ray Allen, with his easy smile and slim grace, had his moments. His mother was at every game and still, he could not win the championship for her.
Through the heartbreak, the men held each other, they wept openly from the bench. At times, Pierce's red-rimmed eyes looked ready to burst. Rondo was forever readjusting his sweatband, as if by doing so, he could hold back the tears. What was beautiful was that they cried not only for themselves but for one another. During Game 6, Kendrick Perkins tore a knee ligament, and his teammates watched tensely, their shoulders leaning slightly forwards, mouths beginning to purse. And at the crushing close of Game 7, when the camera panned to Davis, his face was pure anguish.
The best crier in the NBA is LeBron James. He is a giant of a man. Watching his post-game interviews, I picture him accidentally elbowing sportscasters in the face, their shoulders just reaching his waist. But in these interviews, James is in no way intimidating. Instead, he is vulnerable, overcome, sincere. He cries when he loses; he cries when he wins. And as I watch him, men become less strange to me.
I don't often get to see men cry. My father rarely did so in front of us, though he cries with my mother. I can picture how my brother cries, but increasingly it is a memory. He cried at the 1994 World Cup, which ended in penalty kicks. Sports fans, too, make good criers.
I have watched (and made) my partners cry. Isn't intimacy best established through tears? My partners have faulted me for my reluctance to cry. They are generally more disposed to weeping. I cry at movies, they cry at life. I think I need to see men cry: it is more than a desire. In relationships, I court those I know will be easy to tear up. They do so in the quiet of a bedroom, or in secluded spots of some beauty -- beaches, riverbanks, woods. If we're lucky, we'll be in a car. I suspect LA is a more livable city than New York not because of the sunshine, but because one has a car to cry in. Cleveland, too.
I admit I was skeptical of LeBron when he left Cleveland. Miami had also seduced and cannibalized my Celtics, and I felt a certain resentment. LeBron fell victim to it, too, and rather than empathizing, I could not forgive him for it.
LeBron's decision was met with an undue level of resentment: no one wanted this black man to have control of his body or his labor. They wanted him to stay in his place. Did I? There is something exploitative in my compulsion: I watch men, most of them black, perform excruciating physical labor on the court and then I wait to see if they will cry about it. I am troubled by this, but I am still fascinated by the possibility of seeing men express emotion. I get so few chances.
Were the Heat to be my team now? They were too sleek for me. I missed Doc Rivers. What other coach had such an expressive brow? I went years looking for a team, trying them on. The Knicks. The Nets. The Grizzlies. Even Golden State.
And then, watching the 2015 finals, LeBron got me. The man came back to a city and team where he could comfortably weep. I loved him for it.
In India, I would likely be reduced to watching cricket. Men do not cry in cricket. They are very good sports. Occasionally, you might see them shake their heads in dismay. If you were close enough, you might catch an intake of breath, or even a sucking of teeth. But they would never stoop to crying. Cricket is a gentleman’s game. Basketball players, unlike cricketeers, are braggarts and whiners. They act selfishly, they often show-off, but they are more wonderful to me. They are more deeply human. What good is sportsmanship absent humanity?
I need to see men cry because otherwise, they would be aliens to me. Women, I feel, even as strangers, can be understood. I have seen many women I do not know cry. I have watched them laugh. I have overheard fragments of deeply personal conversations. I see them navigate their relationships and fears — in cities, they do so in the open. On subways, in restaurants, waiting for an elevator. But men are as good as silent to me.
In airports, I sometimes see men I do not know get angry. They get a little too loud and a little too close to an airline agent, a woman with perfectly applied eyeliner and matte lipstick. The woman can meet my eyes, can share a moment of “Can you believe this guy?” — the man, however, is locked in himself. He yells himself hoarse and everyone at the gate is determined not to notice. He is not one of us.
I have a pattern in my mind of what happens to a man’s face when he is angry. I find it easy to mold new faces to that pattern. Regardless of the shape and size of the jaw, I feel I already know how it will tighten. I can see the narrowing of the eyes. I can imagine the pulse on the temple. But sadness? Joy? I cannot picture men I do not know in tears. I have too few examples.
And so, I watch basketball. The Cavaliers have become my team. They joined the NBA in 1970, along with the Blazers and Braves. They were named as the result of a competition sponsored by a local Cleveland paper. A cavalier (from the same Latin root as the French chevalier and the Spanish caballero), is a mounted knight. A gentleman. In English, the term was popularized as an insult for the Royalists during the English Civil War. In common usage, it has become synonymous with debonair, connoting that same sense of offhand dismissal of anything substantive. The Cleveland Cavaliers are not cavalier. They care rather too much. LeBron cries all the time. He can be hurt and knows he can hurt others -- he is a man struggling to do right, rather than a man already convinced of his right (to power, to women, to the NBA championship). The Cavaliers are men, not gentlemen, not sportsmen, but honest, fallible, weeping men.
Try this exercise during your morning commute: observe the faces of your fellow riders. Who can you most easily imagine in tears? Who can you see screaming at you?
