A different horse

2 days ago
2 min read

I’m sending this out from the Dominican Republic.

After five months away it was time to come back and see my family. The days leading up to traveling here felt like navigating an obstacle course of errands and emotions. My creative hours slid a bit because of it.

It didn’t help that I went to bed late twice during the week, zapping me of my early morning energy. It was another trade-off made consciously:

I stayed up to watch my childhood basketball team, the New York Knicks, play in the finals.

I grew up in Brooklyn for a few years and the Knicks were my idols. I watched this exact finals matchup; Knicks vs. Spurs in 1999. The pain of that loss sent me packing. Around that same time my parents moved us back to the Island and I traded watching the Knicks for watching MTV.

It’d be over a decade before I cared about basketball again.

By my mid twenties I was in Chicago and playing in a band where the guys were obsessed with the Chicago Bulls and Derrick Rose. The Knicks had acquired Carmelo Anthony by then, and those games between the two stars got me watching ball again. I picked back up where I’d left off.

I’ve kept up with the league ever since; watching highlights while at the gym, using basketball as inspiration, motivation, and a metaphor for living:

Ball is life.

While sitting in my parents’ balcony this weekend, I saw a horse pulling a carriage full of avocados. It’s a typical sight here; the sides of the animal’s face are covered with two pieces of cardboard so it can’t look sideways. This keeps them from getting spooked by the many distractions of Santo Domingo.

It reminded me of a video I recently saw of Knicks’ star guard Jalen Brunson. The footage shows him as a kid being trained hard by his dad. He’s doing shooting drills on courts, and running up and down hills. You hear him exhausted, asking his dad how much longer he has to go for, and his father tacking on another lap in response. To some it might seem harsh, but Jalen talks about how that level of preparation kept him focused, how to this day it helps him block out distractions.

It’s the reason that as of today he is a world champion