THE SEASONS ARE A-CHANGIN'
Writer: Katie Heindl
Illustrator: Andrew Gragg
The myth of goodbyes is that they get easier. The truth, as with many things, is that as you get older you just get more of them. Whether their impact is softened by virtue of volume, or that goodbyes bumping up against each other in a parade of endings, chosen or unexpected, can act as a distraction from the processing of each ending itself, they might go smoother but they don’t get easier.
The impasse of endings and goodbyes is that at some point you, as the endings architect, or someone else, as the person who has drafted you into their blueprints, has to make the decision. Has to speak the words that have been forming in their heads or take the first steps in what will be their last in a place, physical or emotional, but has to choose the moment.
And these kinds of goodbyes, we also come to understand, are a luxury. As hard as the decision is to make, it’s still in our hands. Endings outside these, or mortal boundaries, well, there’s lots to read about them out there but I’m not trying to kick things off here with a heaviness deficit.
Sue Bird deciding that this past WNBA season, her 19th, would be her last, was an ending she admitted she’d been circling for some time when she made the announcement in June. After a straightforward post on her social accounts, Bird took the podium prior to the Storm’s game in Connecticut on June 16. She spoke candidly, occasionally taking breaks where her voice broke or she choked up, as she went through the dual realization of the ending itself, for herself, plus shouldering the public burden of the same thing. It’s something that most regular people in their day-to-day lives never have to do.
WE DRIFT IN AND OUT OF THAT SPARK AT THE CENTRE, TREATING IT LIKE A LIVE-WIRE WE FEEL COMPELLED TO TOUCH, HIDING THE BUZZ OF IT AS BEST WE CAN.
For Bird, the dawning of the decision came in increments but scratched at what she acknowledged was a “deep-down” thing she’d “known for a while”. Most big decisions that end with a goodbye start like this. We know, or know we feel, something percolating in the very quiet and private parts of ourselves. We drift in and out of that spark at the centre, treating it like a live-wire we feel compelled to touch, hiding the buzz of it as best we can. Bird mentioned that in her retirement presser too. She called it the “grey area” of a decision, and that being in that place for too long “can make things uncomfortable”.
Bird has made a career out of being direct. You don’t become a 4x champion and 13x All-Star point guard without understanding intuitively how to get yourself and the people around you out of lapses and lulls, in-game grey areas. But her noting the murk we make for ourselves when endings we’re putting off or plotting out can spill into the real life we’re trying to keep them out of, or that we all tend to finally take the step when the live-wire frequency of prolonging a decision becomes so all-consuming and impossible to tune out of, it took the myth-making out of her goodbye. She even made a joke about it. Looking around the room and asking, in a tone of light commiseration, “Now that it’s final maybe we can all move on, not talk about it that much — deal?”
She had grappled with it, she said so, and so for a few minutes of a press conference, everybody in the world could finally walk in Bird’s shoes.
The fall is for endings. More than any other season, autumn brings with it the lurching, simultaneous sense of slowing down and speeding up. Summer tapers, days shorten, the natural world hits us over the head with the symbolism of something ending and any decision we were putting off in better weather tends to clarify in the briskness and waning light. There’s the academic turn of a new school year, of course, but beyond that fall has always felt to me like a necessary lull to prepare myself for another year getting underway. Even when I think there’s nothing I’ve been avoiding, the buckling down, first real cold-snap of the fall is like some seasonal task-master snapping their fingers. Suddenly I find myself at attention, operating at a much faster clip.
Even as I, pretty pathetically, mourn summer by doing things like treating swapping my Flagrant shorts and breezy dresses, plus all the other clothes I’ve just spent months sweating through, for sweaters and full pants as ceremony, I understand there are beginnings in endings. Impending hellos in goodbyes.
The WNBA season, specifically the electricity and guts of the WNBA playoffs and finals, segues the stage to the NBA preseason. The stark opposite in caliber of play and timbre of action never so stark as those first few preseason and regular season NBA games. WNBA athletes have just put us through a Bacchanalian feast for the senses for anyone who loves to watch explosive, immaculate basketball at a pace that contorts the body of the viewer sitting there at home on the couch, and then we go immediately to rusty, sometimes messy, first steps of the NBA just getting its legs under it.
There is a glaring absence still lingering in one emphatic goodbye, where the WNBA said hello to Becky Hammon and the NBA, plus the San Antonio Spurs, have not yet fully grasped what it is they’ve lost. Hammon finally taking a head coaching job, something that was either outright denied her or she was forced to play nice stalling at for so long, and going on to immediately win a title only underscores the bigger problem the NBA currently has in the mass exodus of women leaving the league for better opportunities. Natalie Nakase, Niele Ivey, Kara Lawson, they each turned over that decision to say goodbye to something they loved that was not prepared to return the scope of their value, and ending that couldn’t have been easy but has brought them beginnings on their own terms.
Even with the W ending, and the NBA season starting up, there’s a lingering flicker to just how high-voltage this past season was. So many people, it felt like, were opening their eyes to the hard work and high reward of watching the WNBA season play out. Bittersweet in the big goodbyes alongside Bird’s, like Sylvia Fowles, legend in her own right and totally unique track, was the thrumming excitement of Arike Ogunbowale, Sabrina Ionescu, Rhyne Howard showing flashes of the their decisive skills and future, likely huge, roles for their teams and the sport.
The talent and importance of the WNBA is evident to anyone who watches, but the bridge between it and the wider world has still been made wider by women-run powerhouses like Flagrant, which, it must be noted since you are reading this here, both killed digital and resurrected it with this blog. Ends and beginnings, see what I’m getting at?
To me, the most memorable thing that Bird said in a presser this past season, wasn’t from her retirement announcement in early-June. It came toward the end of the postgame she shared with Breanna Stewart after the Storm had lost Game 2 against the Aces in Las Vegas. Toward the end of the availability, Bird is asked whether she would want it any other way than the way it’s just happened. That is, to lose, but to lose on the road in front of a crowd that is clamouring for that loss. The implication is that this kind of excitement and no “easy going games” in her last season, with her final goodbye no longer drifting closer but leaning up against the locker room door, is what a competitor like Bird would want. Would actively hope for.
She furrows her brow, deeply, and tilts her head. Her mouth scrunches into a scowl before the question is even done. She mouths, “What?”, which Stewart, stone-faced beside her up to then, huffs a small chuckle at. There’s no pause before her answer.
“No. I want 20-point games, every game, until we win the Championship. What are you talking about? I don’t want to lose.” She laughs, uncomprehending, “No disrespect, but, what?”
THE PARALLEL OF THIS PRESSER, OF ANY CLOUDINESS IN A DECISION LEFT TO BE MADE BURNED WAY OFF FROM WHEN SHE TEARED UP IN JUNE, CALLED WHAT SHE WAS FEELING THEN MOURNING, IS AS STARK AS IT IS A BLAST OF CLEAN, CRISP, POINTEDLY FRESH AIR.
The parallel of this presser, of any cloudiness in a decision left to be made burned way off from when she teared up in June, called what she was feeling then mourning, is as stark as it is a blast of clean, crisp, pointedly fresh air. The end to her career, and Bird waving goodbye, her last steps off a court turned silent for how carpeted the floor was in green and yellow confetti, would come two games later. The decisiveness of this moment, answering a question, and that moment, walking away, are the same. Only the setting changed. There was never a time, in Bird’s entire career, that she did not see the ending for what it really was: the next, best thing.