As someone who just celebrated a birthday — a milestone birthday — I’ll admit that aging has been on my mind. Its privileges, its gifts, its expectations and assumptions (especially for women), aging can feel overwhelming, particularly wrought, even if you’ve made relative peace through the years with it.
Much of my writing is concerned with the nuances around basketball and its athletes, particularly the elements that underscore them as people. Strange to call “humanity” a nuance, but that can be the flattening of pro sports. Athletes aging is something larger fandom is pretty bad at processing, to the point where, in the NBA, anyone over 28 is considered long in the tooth and anyone over 35, ancient. The churn of the Draft, with its college phenoms and untapped prospects, makes it so we have a continually replenishing assembly line of young athletes ready to oust the old, often in a way that we don’t actually witness. Very few NBA athletes announce their retirements or make their exits from the league public, they just sort of… vanish, and with them goes our public consciousness of them.
In his postgame presser on Wednesday night, after the Warriors had beat the Pelicans for the second time on a two day back-to-back, Draymond Green touched on aging. Well, not explicitly, but his lengthy answer when asked about his impactful defensive efforts throughout Golden State’s first five contests was telling. Namely, because he brought up two of the youngest centers in the league, Chet Holmgren and Victor Wembanyama.
“I spent all summer watching everyone talk about Chet and Wemby, and what they’re doing defensively,” Green said, a hint of his familiar Cheshire grin curling from the corner of his mouth. “Don’t forget about Dray. I want to be in that conversation as well, and I think I’ve earned the right to be in that conversation.”
In my mind Green isn’t in the same company as Holmgren and Wembanyama because their games are so decidedly different. Green is physical, a defensive bulwark able to shut offensive action down with his size and relentlessness, Holmgren and Wembanyama use, primarily, their length to stifle and rebound. But I’d be lying if I said, to some degree, I didn’t hold the three in the same echelon because of age. Especially given the first thing I noticed in Green’s presser were the patches of grey speckling his beard.
What felt most telling to me about Green putting himself alongside these two, beyond his signature move — off court and on — of inserting himself into a conversation, was his own perception of aging via our tendency to move off from athletes in award or honors after a certain age. Beyond LeBron James, who is pure exception and not rule, there’s a cut off. At 34 years old, Green has reached it in the public perception of fandom but not in his own mind. I believe him when he goes on to say that it’s a goal of his this season to get back on All-Team First Defence and into Defensive Player of the Year consideration, as much as I recognize the bravado in what he’s saying. Bravado, in aging, is necessary. Less and less will the wider world celebrate your accomplishments past a certain mental milestone — especially in sports. If this was Green throwing the gauntlet down for everyone dubbed “ancient”, I’m here for it.
