Freedom in Darkness

I've been thinking a lot lately about why I watch sports. There are many reasons, of course, but one of them that I keep coming back to is the security provided by their consistency. Although the makeup of teams changes and the storylines evolve, every year, I can expect recognizable patterns to emerge once again. Come fall, I am filled with excitement about the approaching starts of the NFL and NBA seasons. This time of year, I look forward to the NBA playoffs, and I gear up for the dragging yet ultimately rewarding baseball season. And so on. These patterns, this yearly consistency, is something that has helped me deal with other changes in life, ensuring that I will always have a place to turn to when all else is changing in unexpected and sometimes terrifying ways.


In recent years, I’ve begun to find similar comfort in media entities. When I get to work in the morning, I settle in by checking out the top stories on the New York Times site, seeing what Pitchfork is reviewing that day, and streaming BBC World Service and the Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. By having familiar places for my mouse to click, I feel a sense of “home”, even when I’m unhappy with my surroundings.

For the last five years, FreeDarko has consistently centered me in this way. Andrew Abides and I started reading regularly during our junior year of college, and just about every day, one of us would yell to the other from our adjacent dorm rooms, “You read this new FreeDarko post, yet?” It became the center point for our discussions about basketball. We would reference posts while geeking out over Gil, while rubbing our eyes after witnessing Don Nelson’s Warriors turn basketball on its head, while reminiscing about the innocent days when Vince Carter looked like he might never come down. FD provided the building blocks of a new language we would use to talk about basketball, one that had existed in our heads for a long time, but that had always seemed really difficult to verbalize. It made us feel justified in attaching so much meaning to what others might have seen as minor moments, confusing subplots with characters barely worth examining. Shoals and Co. were pioneers of a new way of discussing basketball, one that gave attention to things and people that were in danger of fading to the background of the mainstream dialogue. In short, it made tangible what seemed for so long to have been intangible.

Last March, Andrew, I, and a bunch of other friends who were as passionate about this game as we were, took the leap and started this blog, knowing damn well that it would be a work in progress for a long time. There were some things that were clear from the beginning, though. We wanted it to be funny. We wanted it to be smart. We wanted it to honor the League by treating it as something worth studying, analyzing, criticizing, joking about, and thinking about in a way that was slightly less than straightforward. Basically, we wanted it to have the qualities we valued when we read about basketball, and these qualities really all first assembled in one place on FreeDarko. To this day, it is constantly our goal and dream to continue the kinds of conversations that were started on FD.

As of this morning, we’re all on our own as we continue those conversations. And when I feel like I need to be oriented, when I look for comfort in familiarity, I’ll have one less place to which I can turn. But the good news is very good, and it’s that: thanks to one little blog that my friend and I discovered (fairly late) as we killed time between classes, I now feel like I just might be able to create a little piece of home myself.