Tyson Chandler fell to his knees in the middle of the Arizona desert, overwhelmed with grief. He picked up two handfuls of sand and let the fine granules slip through his fingers. The sand was just like Tyson’s own athleticism: fleeting, no matter how tight of a grip one tried to keep on it. Soon it would all be over, he thought to himself, and he wasn’t sure if he was referencing his athletic skill or something larger than that.
The sun was so hot, and the sand nearly scalded Tyson’s hands when he touched it, but his despair had carried him beyond the point of physical pain. Over and over, he would pick up the sand and watch it disappear from his hand, but this ritual act did not sooth him; it simply deepened his misery.
“Tyson! Tyson! What you doing out here, man?”
Tyson looked up from his hunched-over position to see Suns teammate Devin Booker jogging towards him. “Leave me be, Devin. Is a man no longer allowed the luxury of a private torment?”
Devin took note of the discarded iPad lying in the sand a few feet away. “Were you looking at that ‘Tyson Chandler skips leg day’ picture again? You told me it was photoshopped,” Devin commented.
Tyson grimaced as if an old wound had been reopened. “I have mostly come to terms with my scrawny chicken legs. While I still have regrets regarding my lower-body musculature, that is not why I am currently so possessed by anguish.”
Walking over to the tablet, Devin picked it up and looked at what was on the screen. It was a YouTube video claiming to show every dunk from Tyson’s last season with the Mavericks. “Why is this so sad?” Devin asked. “I would love to be able to dunk it 179 times in one season.”
“You do not understand!” Tyson wailed. “That number by itself is fine. But when compared to this year’s number, it becomes a stark reminder of my own interminable decline. I have truly fallen off the metaphorical cliff, but in the darkest corners of my troubled mind, I wish the cliff had not been a metaphor.”
Devin squatted down next to where Tyson was beating the sand with his fists. “You don’t think maybe it’s because your point guards were chuckers extraordinaire?” he asked, referring to the Brandon Knight/Eric Bledsoe tandem.
“For the briefest of moments, I considered placing the blame upon my teammates for not setting me up for more dunks,” Tyson said, pausing his attack on the desert to stare introspectively towards nothing at all. “But it would be unwise to blame others when the effects of age are so obviously eroding my body.” He slumped face-first onto the sand, and his next works were muffled. “I feel it, Devin. I feel it in my bones. The decay.”
“But if you think about it,” Devin went on, “I probably had the most lobs to you out of anyone on the team, and I wasn’t even the primary ball handler. That has to mean something.”
“It means I’m old and useless. It means I’m no longer a man. I am lower than man,” Tyson answered. “If I dunk fifty times next year, it will be a miracle. And it will be fifty more times than my decrepit self deserves.”
Devin lifted Tyson’s heavy, ragdoll-like body and flipped it over so he could address his teammate easier. Tyson squinted at bright sun shining in his face, but otherwise didn’t move. “Well, maybe your role on the team isn’t to provide anything on the court other than fifteen minutes per night. Maybe your role is to mentor all of us young players. You don’t need athleticism to be able to do that.”
Tyson laughed bitterly. “That’s why they paid me the big free-agency bucks in my last contract. To mentor Alex Len, wave towels, and get the opening tip.” He again lifted some sand off the desert floor; this time, he let it fall onto his face, as if he was starting the process of burying himself. “The front office and the fans expected me to be a viable player well into my mid-30’s. I don’t think I’ll even be a viable human for that long.”
Devin had no more words of consolation left in him. In lieu of these words, he simply shrugged. “Whatever. We should be getting back before you get heatstroke or something.”
“Heatstroke would be a welcome respite from my sorrow,” Tyson answered. Nonetheless, he struggled to his feet. “How did you find me out here, anyway? This is supposed to be my secret place of meditation.”
“Well, you’re only a few hundred feet away from the practice facility, and you’re on this little hill, so it was actually pretty hard to not see you,” Devin replied, pointing at the building where he and his teammates had been getting in some practice. “Not to give you any ideas, but if you really wanted privacy, you would drive fifty miles into the desert, park your car, and start walking until you collapsed.”
Tyson looked at the rookie fondly as they trekked back towards the Suns’ facility. “Not quite yet. I’ll give it another year. Just make sure to throw me lots of lobs.”