It Was the Best of Times, It Was the Worst of Times
Writer: Juju Kennedy
Illustrator: Andrew Gragg
“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of light, it was the season of darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair.”
H.E.R., Ken Jeong, Peyton Manning, and Russell Wilson walk into a sold-out NBA basketball game.
Just over three years ago, this would have sounded like an intense, stress dream I had due to Covid anxiety and maybe could have been the start of a quirky screenplay, or more likely a bad dad joke.
Instead, it was a reality last night, as the Denver Nuggets tipped off against the Miami Heat for Game 1 of the NBA Finals in front of a packed audience of 19,528 fans.
But back in 2020, we lived in a different reality.
Let me bring this back and set the scene properly: it was the Year That Must Not Be Named, 2020. Civilization, as we knew it, had come to a complete halt. Toilet paper became a luxury. And “unprecedented” became a word that, unprecedentedly, shot to the top of the charts. Our TVs were constant reminders of how the world was more complicated, scary, and confusing than ever, whether they were playing the latest Covid news or binge-playing Tiger King.
Within this global disaster, sports shut down (among essentially everything else). Desperate times breed desperate decisions. Citizens turned towards anything that may fill their time, the way a LeBron James dunk or a Giannis Eurostep once did, if even in a minuscule way. Our normal escapes into the NBA Finals were replaced with marble races and soup can lifting and a woman in Canada who somehow ran a whole half marathon in her kitchen.
It was the worst of times.
The world needed basketball back, and LeBron James — self-anointed “Chosen 1” — put the world on his back, and the NBA into ESPN’s Wide World of Sports. And so, on the seventh month of 2020, Our Lord and Savior LeBron James said, ‘Let there be basketball.’ And the NBA Bubble was born.
And so while a nightmare brewed in the outside world, for a brief while we all lived in the Happiest Place on Earth — mentally, if not physically. We all lived at the NBA Bubble.
It was the best of times.
There were modern warfare marathons and scootering around campus. Rowdy pickleball games and Instagram Live dance competitions. Dining hall dinners with unseasoned chicken and shotgunning Coors Light and sneaking girls into rooms late at night. The Times were Unprecedented because NBA players were vlogging, and teams were hosting ping pong tourneys where the winning prize was a bottle of Lysol.
“The world once again had buzzer beaters and slam dunks and behind-the-back passes. ”
The world once again had buzzer beaters and slam dunks and behind-the-back passes. But while the world was glad to have basketball back, the real joy was in the off-court action. The Very Serious Time finally had breathing room to be Very Unserious — at least for a few hours a day, or through the @NBABubble Twitter account updates.
Players finished up games and walked over to the dining hall together, where trauma bonding grew over lackluster Disney campus food and ice baths in blow-up pools.
Long before pickleball hit the streets and took over your local basketball court as the hottest new sport, it was heating up the NBA Bubble scene. Party lines were blurred as fan favorite Luca Doncic hit the same courts that divisive referee Scott Foster stepped onto, the Bubble Pickleball King who won the first 150 games he played.
Wrestlemania found a new home at the Disney Coronado Springs Resort pool where players battled it out with body slams in the water, and Tyler Cook almost ended a teammate’s life coming down the slide.
Completely cut off from the outside world, their families, and their regular routines, but shielded from a global pandemic, NBA players existed in a sort of Disney-themed dystopia that somehow became a mini utopia for those of us at home. When folks in the rest of the continental US braved the outdoors (read: outside their apartments), chaos greeted them around every corner. Whether clocking in for a job in the healthcare industry or braving the local grocery store in the hopes of finding a roll or two of toilet paper, we found solace in the fact that we all could come home, sink into the couch, and scroll through Instagram to see which NBA player was the latest to catch a fish or shotgun a beer. For brief moments in time, reality was suspended, and we, too, could live in the Bubble.
“Maybe we’d get lucky and see Dame Lillard and James Harden taking turns in salon chairs for mani-pedis. ”
Maybe we’d get lucky and see Dame Lillard and James Harden taking turns in salon chairs for mani-pedis. We witnessed Jimmy Butler fully rebrand as a barista extraordinaire as he launched “Big Face Coffee”.
Who needed reality TV when Derrick Favors’ birthday cake was stolen, and the culprit remained at large? What value does Elf on a Shelf bring in comparison to Squeaky Edgar, the rubber-ducky-shaped version of Mariners player Edgar Martinez who popped up on every popular spot on campus? Who even has the energy to care about Tristan Thompson and Khloe Kardashian’s endlessly hot-and-cold romance when the bromance between Donovan Mitchell and Jaylen Brown was blossoming through longing glances over tall brick walls like a modern-day Romeo and Juliet, only instead of dying proclamations of love, they sent deltoid flexes?
Fans rioted on podcasts and Twitter when girls who snuck into the Bubble risked not just the health of the players, but the amount of fun we were having watching this Bubble season unfold.
Just when you think you’ve seen it all, a 6’9” player who looks strikingly similar to Darius Bazley adds a new pair to his closet: not of shoes, but of Mickey Mouse ears.
“We’re back now to Jumbotron celebrity sightings and trade rumor tornadoes, but for a brief period in 2020, life was simpler in the Bubble. ”
We’re back now to Jumbotron celebrity sightings and trade rumor tornadoes, but for a brief period in 2020, life was simpler in the Bubble. I learned how to fish from Montrezl Harrell, and sat front row to a DJ set from the Mavericks.
The disparity between levity and darkness never seemed so stark, but I still find myself nostalgic for those moments. One summer, when the world felt like it was falling apart, and everyone shrank to take up as little space as possible, down in Florida, six-foot and seven-foot NBA players were growing a few inches, with a pair of mouse ears atop their heads.
They made me feel a couple of inches taller too.