Lightning, Electricity, Isaiah, and Adam
On Saturday afternoon, I watched Isaiah Roby take off from an impossible distance from the basketball hoop.
He was too far away, really.
It was one of those moments when a stadium of 15,000 turns whisper quiet and the oxymoronic, thundering muteness of a near-capacity crowd going full-vacuum fills up your timpanic membranes.
The Nebraska Cornhusker forward, quickly becoming one of the most exciting players to watch in all of the Big Ten Conference, turned his body into the Falcon Heavy and shrugged off any pretense about the existence of gravity on his way skyward.
He hung there, like an airliner at cruising altitude, for just long enough for the noise to come back.
The dam burst.
Roby, a six foot eight 747, may not have had jet engines but the crowd added in the sound effects for him with a crescendo dramatic enough to make Tchaikovsky pack up those cannons from his 1812 Overture and head right the hell home.
Roby finished with what the experts refer to as “authority” and what I refer to as “ALKDSFJ:JKLHRLQWKJ@#LKJHWF:FJKLEHK!:KLWJH!:KLJ” and my 5-year-old son refers to as “Dad, that’s too loud.”
You can see if on his teammate, Jordy Tshimang’s face. This was something entirely rarified and glorious.
In short, it was the best in-game dunk I’ve ever seen live. And it’s not even close.
This was lightning striking before our very eyes.
On Saturday afternoon, I watched Isaiah Roby and his teammates take on something else.
No, they weren’t merely fighting the ghost of Sir Isaac Newton and his laws on gravitation. No, they weren’t simply taking on another opponent in a high-stakes game in their drive towards winning enough games to get into the NCAA Tournament.
On this day, on this court, at this school, in this year? They were there to take on something much bigger.
While Roby floated up towards the rim, seemingly heading towards the roof above my head in section 312, the very real and leaden reality of what was happening at the University of Nebraska — and all over our country in the ongoing, stomach-churning tilt on the whirl of racism in the United States of America — was waiting for him when his sneakers hit the ground again.
You see, videos had recently surfaced of a student at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln spewing digital bile and vomiting out the kind of white supremacist stomach acid that makes your nose sting with its moral repugnance. In these videos, he had reveled in his hate; gleefully and sickeningly smearing this flaccid white man’s outrage all over himself, professing to love violence and laying claim to the dubious title of “Most active white nationalist in the state of Nebraska”.
If you know about Nebraska, then surely you’re familiar: our sports mean just a little more to us than they probably should. We care too much. And give too little of a damn about how that perception of us outside the state border. These boys who would be king that suit up for us in sports are revered above almost all else.
Our basketball team could have coasted. They could have plead the 5th in a predominantly white town in a predominantly white state, their coach could have “stuck to sports” and there would be few who would have blamed them.
But they didn’t.
They could have reacted with justifiable rage and the kind of righteous anger that I can’t ever truly know because of the color of my skin and the pigmentation of theirs.
But they didn’t.
You see, this team and these young men showed themselves to be possessed of a certain and particular kind of mettle. They gathered themselves, wrapped their jackets around themselves when the blustery north wind of hate tried to blow them off course and they kept coming.
They showed themselves to have the kind of synaptic ammunition that not all humans load into the chamber when they see wrong in the world.
They also found themselves with the kind of pulpit that not many 20-year-olds have the opportunity to speak from; a 1.8 million person bullhorn that echoes from the banks of the Missouri river to the Sandhills out in the Panhandle plains of this state
They used it.
If this seems small to you, remember: this isn’t something they needed to do. They wanted to do this. They’re unpaid, young, and have more than enough on their plates going to school and dealing with school and navigating the sometimes treacherous path of pre-adulthood. But they chose to do it anyway.
What Roby did that afternoon? That was a lightning bolt. Flashy and bold and wild and incredibly easy to see and think about. We could harness the raw athleticism of his dunk and use it to fire the home fans up.
What he and his teammates did off the court? The shirts that they wore and the message that they didn’t just espouse, but believed in?
That’s electricity.
That’s harnessing the power that’s inherent in the moment and using it. They could have committed arson, but instead they chose to create a combustion engine.
During a frigid February week, when Nebraskans had to stand face to face with themselves in the mirror and search for the truth in their eyes and their hearts and minds: these boys were men and did something I will never forget.
I have never been so proud to care a little too much about my basketball team.
On Sunday night, I watched Adam Rippon create bodily alchemy on the skating rink.
His performance had neither the raw physicality of Roby’s massive dunk, nor the thunderous monsoon reaction from a crowd of wild and rowdy locals. No, Rippon went out onto the ice and effortlessly held the awestruck crowd at the Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang, South Korea.
If Roby’s tomahawk dunk was a Neon Sign, Rippon’s performance was perfectly crafted calligraphy. The sound of the music and the skates slicing across the rink and a man in a wildly colorful and perfect outfit doing things that shouldn’t be possible when balanced on a pair of blades on frozen water.
Rippon tore through his free skate performance with style and grace and raw athleticism that I still don’t know enough about skating to fully comprehend. But I know when I see an in italics athlete who is at the top of their game and Rippon was that and more on Sunday night.
That was Rippon’s lightning. Sustained, crackling 53,450 degree bolt that somehow struck with grace and fire.
His electricity?
Rippon isn’t judged for the color of his skin.
He’s judged for what, or more accurately who, he holds in his heart. Rippon is the first openly gay Olympic athlete from the United States and he has taken the spotlight shone on himself and reflected it back at the dark parts of our society where people still believe you cannot be who you are or love who you want.
At an event where we are so concerned with the lighting of The Torch, Rippon has been vocal about holding up his own to beat back the darkness of hate and oppression and he has done so in the same manner that he attacks his routine: gracefully and with a relentless positivity that pulls everyone in with the same gravitational pull as one of his whirling, mesmerizing spins on the ice.
His journey isn’t over. Neither is Isaiah Roby’s.
Two men. Two different battles. Two heroic efforts worthy of praise.
It looks like this weekend, lightning did strike twice.
