For as long as I can remember, I’ve fallen for other ballers: a girl who beat me in a foul shooting competition when I was ten, an AAU teammate when I was a teen, an older player who saw me as a baby sibling. The list goes on and on. When I got to college, this habit continued. First, with my teammate, F, which went just about as well as you might think. On the days F was pissed at me and let it leak onto the court, my coach would fold her arms and give me the stink eye. When we stepped on the court, we were supposed to leave our domestic dramas behind, for the good of the team.

When that relationship ended, I went bravely after what I wanted: C, the point guard on a top ten program. I’d played against her since I was a kid in AAU tournaments. She’d been one of the top recruits in our class; every school in the country would have laid out a red carpet for her. But she was also a hothead, and whenever my AAU team played hers, I made it my mission to shut her down on defense, to refuse to let her get a quality shot off. I knew what she liked to do, knew she loved to shoot the three, knew she had an impressive pull-up. She was athletic, too, had hang-time around the basket. One game, I frustrated her so much that she got a technical and stomped off the court, ripping her jersey out of her shorts. That competitiveness I felt with her, the joy I derived from getting in her head was, I realized later, erotic in its intensity, intimate in its knowledge. I wanted that hotheaded point guard to be my hotheaded girlfriend.

In one of my favorite poems, “Asking About You”, Eloise Klein Healy talks about the collision of competition and romance. She begins in an address to her beloved: “Instead of having sex all the time I like to hold you and not get into some involved discussion of what life means.” She continues, saying she wants to know about her partner playing softball and the team picture. Then she says: “What I want most is to have been a girl with you and played on the opposite team so I could have liked you and competed against you at the same time.”

That collision — I haven’t found a stronger drug yet.

C was closeted, even to her team, which frustrated me given how many of her teammates were out. But that didn’t matter to me, because I was dating my literal dream crush. Fucking gorgeous, could ball out, and was as intense as I was, about basketball, about everything. I know we didn’t invent falling asleep on Skype every night, waking up to each other every morning, and leaving Skype on all day so we could sit down and check if the other was at their desk — but it felt like we did. I watched every one of her games, as long as I wasn’t playing, too, and live-texted her throughout, reacting to each and every play in real-time: That was a nice shot, you’ll hit it next time, or, For the three, legooooooooo, or, Don’t worry about that foul, the call was bullshit. I loved the idea of her digging around in her locker after a game, win or loss, and finding 85 messages from me. My love for her was big, and I knew how to express it through basketball, our language of care.

On our Skype calls, she’d ask for my advice on how to bring the ball up the court without getting picked off. She’d been a shooting guard in high school, and some of the point guard nuances were new to her. When she’d come to visit me in college, we’d take to the court, practicing different ways to create space so she could handle full-court pressure. Then, we’d play one-on-one and nearly kill each other, diving on the floor for loose balls, neither of us willing to let go, not even when we rolled into the padded wall under the basket. That old AAU aggression came out once more. Normally, I reminded her how talented and capable she was, but when she played against me, I wanted to check her ego, wanted to be the reason she remembered why she’d started playing in the first place, why she kept coming back: for the unparalleled high of competition, the blood-churning arousal. For the sex of the game.

After C dumped me because she didn’t want anyone to know about us, I went searching for that same intense connection, where basketball meets the sensual and romantic. I dated A, whose idea of asking me on a date was saying, “Want to get some shots up at the gym?” She played at a school outside the city, so we were able to attend each other’s games in person. For me, there is something so delicious and powerful about being watched, particularly by someone who knows the game as well as I do. She was a baller, through and through. She saw me and my game, and I saw hers. This exchange of seeing is maybe what I was after.

Observing art is often one-sided: There’s the artwork and the person appreciating it. But basketball was our art, our sentient, wild, mutable art, and we were both appreciators, collectors of step-back jumpers and behind-the-back passes and crosses so nasty they cracked every bone in someone’s ankle. Really, to this day, I think she loves the game more than anybody I’ve ever met. On our off days, I wanted cuddles and movies, to nap for six hours straight. She wanted to run drills in the gym, to target our weak spots. She nearly always won the argument of how to spend our time, but only because I knew how lucky I was for the thrill of loving something with someone I loved. To, in not so many words, get to fuck basketball, my first and most transformative love.

My queerness always came second to basketball. I thought of myself as a basketball player who happened to be queer. It was only when I graduated and lost high-level basketball that the order reversed and I started considering myself a queer person who once played basketball. Graduating and retiring from the game, the yearning felt a lot like the yearning of my closeted queer youth — the wanting and wanting for something that seems it cannot ever be. I felt at odds with myself. My queerness had always been so wrapped up in my playing. Without basketball, I had no framework for that part of my life either, no understanding of how to engage with or perform desire, no context for how to date or relate to others who weren’t athletes. I’d only ever dated basketball players except for the NARP (non-athletic regular person — yes, this was unfortunately a real term we used) who called me Number 12. She was an artist, which helped me tap into the writerly part of me I typically hid, but it would be many years before I settled into that identity. I’d have to convince myself basketball wasn’t the center of my world anymore. And in order to do that, I had to admit to myself, and then accept, that my playing days were over; there would be no professional overseas career for me thanks to my body, my arthritic, ruined, four-ACL-tears-deep body. If basketball has been my most profound love, then losing it has been my most profound grief. A grief made easier only because I don’t have to face it alone.

Even all these years later, I met and married a fellow athlete in Ash, who played rugby for 18 years, and before that, high school soccer, and before that, baseball on boys’ teams. Though it was never her primary sport, it was basketball that brought us together. We met at a rec league game. From tip-off, it was as if we’d been playing together for a decade, always and forever the best type of connection. I knew she’d get out and run on the fast break, so when I received the outlet pass from our forward, I wouldn’t even take a dribble, would just turn and lob it up the court, into her hands for an easy lay-up.

What does it mean that I continue to seek athletes out, post-basketball? What is it she helps me see in myself? In a way, does being with her keep me tied to that part of me I yearn for? Our domestic life is grounded in sports, in teamwork and chemistry. When we go camping in Zion National Park, we walk to the bathroom to do our breakfast dishes together. In every direction, nothing but red-streaked cliffs. “You scrub and I’ll dry?” she says. I find our collaboration stirring. Hands moving simultaneously, dishes passed hand to hand, no words spoken, just the sweet rush of the water and a few small grunts that escape my mouth when I really dig into a scrubbing a pan. It reminds me of basketball, of hands in a huddle, hands reaching out for a low five on the court, hands exchanging a ball in the half-court offense.

At home, we crumple up bills and shoot them into trash cans like kids in school. We toss our children’s toys to each other from across the room, marveling at our one-handed catches, our feats of extreme athleticism. We can’t believe ESPN doesn’t follow us around with a camera. We hype each other up. We pretend we are Olympians. We keep each other in the game just enough to recognize how far out of it we really are.

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