David Ebner is a member of The Globe and Mail’s editorial board.
The infatuation was unexpected. Let me tell you about him. I’ve already regaled my wife, close friends and co-workers – sometimes unsolicited and often at length.
He’s 25 years old, from Hamilton, Ont., and he’s one of the best basketball players in the world. He’s an aspiring fashion icon, and seems like a good family man, too. This summer, he has a clear shot to enter the annals of Canadian sports history at the Olympics in Paris.
I’m a former sportswriter, in middle age, surprised to publicly declare I have a favourite player: Shai Gilgeous-Alexander.
My first favourite player, circa age 7, was Mike Bossy, the great NHL goal scorer and four-time Stanley Cup champ. Our affections are drawn to winners. In high school, my passions shifted. I traded basketball’s New York Knicks for Nirvana. After university I was hired at The Globe and wrote in the business section for years. When a sports job came open, the editor-in-chief asked me: “Do you even like hockey?”
It is true that I had grown distant from sports. I brought an outsider approach to my reporting, but I still understood why people loved sports. It’s the dynamics that vest a game with meaning; it’s a hope for something amazing to happen.
The story that drew me in most was the Canadian men’s basketball team. This country was forever a nobody on the court, save for Steve Nash’s Hall of Fame career. But in the mid-2010s, a parade of prospects started to make the leap from gyms around Toronto to the NBA. I had the workings of a book, until “the rise” of Canadian hoops crashed into the reality of failing to qualify for the 2016 Summer Olympics. Canada lost the make-or-break game by a single point. I tasted the bitterness of what it’s like to stake a lot on the outcome of a game: not like a fan, but not entirely dissimilar.
Then came Shai Gilgeous-Alexander.
My run as a sportswriter ended as he made it to the NBA in the late 2010s, landing with the Oklahoma City Thunder after his first season. I had joined The Globe’s editorial board and kept tabs on his climb.
The core of my might-have-been basketball book hadn’t been the sport alone. It was an immigrant story, a story of Toronto and of Canada. Many of the two dozen-plus Canadians in the NBA are children of immigrants. Shai’s mother, a former Olympic sprinter, is from Antigua, as is his father’s family. My parents arrived in Ottawa from Austria in the early 1970s. To me, basketball is a story of a changing Canada.
An outsider’s eye works for journalism but that view is the opposite of being a fan – short, of course, for fanatic. It had always struck me as overly devotional, the passions of all those at an arena or stadium, so many of them wearing players’ jerseys. I may have once or twice haughtily scoffed at such sartorial choices. But academic research shows that fandom can be a big positive in a person’s life, starting with the benefits of community.
The moment my emotional distance started to recede had to be the shoes. Shai, whose self-styled fashion game had accelerated like his game on the court, put out a new pair with Converse in the fall of 2021, in baby blue. I arrived at a Vancouver shoe store as it opened on the morning they came out. Shai wasn’t yet famous; I was the only one there. It stoked a sense of being part of something.
As I let go of my detached appreciation, I ate up stories about Shai at fashion weeks in New York and Paris, including as a Thom Browne runway model. At last year’s Met Gala, he put together an elaborate black-and-white Browne ensemble. He’s twice been named the most stylish player in the NBA in GQ magazine. I closely followed his Instagram. This year, he married his long-time girlfriend on Valentine’s Day. A few weeks ago, they welcomed their first child.
Shai Gilgeous-Alexander at the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Costume Institute benefit gala in New York, May 1, 2023.NINA WESTERVELT/The New York Times News Service
This past winter, my wife and I visited Portland, Ore., to see his Thunder play the Trail Blazers. On the court, Shai was great as always – he was the runner-up for this season’s MVP award – but it was his comportment, his leadership, that resonated most for me. We went early to watch the players warm up, and after he was done, he took time to embrace everyone, players, coaches. He has curated a bond on a young Thunder team. Young teams are usually terrible – yet Shai led the Thunder to more wins, and further into the playoffs, than any such youthful team before, until they were knocked out of the final eight last week.
It is, however, his commitment to and performances for Canada’s national team that hooked me the hardest. He turned almost winning into actually winning. At last summer’s FIBA World Cup, Shai led Canada to its first medal, a bronze. Two games earlier, when Canada was losing with the chance to qualify for the 2024 Paris Olympics slipping away, his steady heroics won the day. “Unorthodox, offbeat, slithery, being unpredictable” – that’s how he describes himself on the court. At the World Cup, when it counted the most, he was all of that.
Rediscovered fandom has its limits. I will not buy a jersey, though the idea of a red-and-white Canada jersey with his No. 2 on the back has flitted across my mind. And this summer I’ll watch every minute of the Canadian team at the Olympics. The last – and only – time Canada’s men stood on an Olympic podium for basketball was 1936, so long ago it was the Canadian inventor of the game, James Naismith, who handed out the medals.
There’s an old sportswriters’ dictum: no cheering in the press box. Now freed from such strictures, I am a fan. From fashion to his otherworldly basketball footwork, Shai Gilgeous-Alexander has invoked in me something from boyhood – a sense of awe, and of what might be.