You forget how high he could get. You shouldn’t, because he was in the 2008 Dunk Contest, catching mid-air bounces off the side of the stanchion from teammate (Grizzlies) Kyle Lowry and swinging the ball under the backboard, switching it between left and right hand, and windmilling it in on the first try. He got up there in regular games too, peppering his play with one-handed tomahawk dunks, slams with two hands out, true and benevolent to the basket like he was giving communion. He made many a reverse layup, his body understanding what to do when it got airborne; he pogoed up to meet lobs and erratic passes from teammates to redirect the ball deftly and from above into the basket, usually landing and turning coolly to walk lightly down the floor, mouthguard dangling.
Rudy Gay announced his retirement yesterday, a surprise to me. The Warriors waved him at the end of September and though there was no chatter after that to where he might go, the athletes who quietly persist you come to believe will go on quietly persisting.
Growing up in Baltimore, Gay was an early phenom. On the local competitive circuit he came up against Carmelo Anthony — three years his senior — and Lowry as early as middle school. Gay was named an All-American and so closely contested for by UConn and the University of Maryland that once he declared for UConn, the NCAA adopted a new scheduling rule in the wake of Connecticut paying $25,000 to schedule a game against a Baltimore AAU team with some of Gay’s former teammates.
The fanfare followed Gay through two years of college and he admits he came into the league cocky (to be fair, Gay was third in NBA Rookie of the Year voting, after Brandon Roy and Andrea Bargnani, both who he outlasted). It was Damon Stoudamire, then with the Grizzlies, who told him to watch and learn. The alchemy of bravado in basketball is a tricky thing because on one hand it’s wholly necessary as a component for success, in a league full of similarly if not more gifted and talented people. On the other, much like winning a championship, timing is everything.
Gay was the first of many trades meant to streamline a Memphis group into the heyday of the Grit and Grind era, and often gets left out of who is seen as a core component for that time. But without Gay — who often seemed second happiest to shooting when he was tearing down defensive boards — Memphis wouldn’t have had the bravado to get to its most definitive era. See? Timing.
Admittedly, when Gay arrived in Toronto I was skeptical. As a Raptors fan we heard he needed the ball in his hands too much. But I look back now and see a Raptors team struggling with its own timing, and how Gay was caught in the slipstream of warring franchise identities.
The injuries that hounded Gay were what ultimately slowed his career, putting him in what felt like a persistent state of catching up. Any athlete will tell you that one of the hardest aspects to injury and its subsequent recovery is watching the game move on without you, watching it change, watching the competitive landscape shift, questioning how they’ll fit in once they return. What gets lost in talk about what Gay could’ve been is what he was, all along, quietly in front of us. A small forward who had the rare ability to shift between a featherlight touch and domineering handle and played consistently, recording all the right numbers, for 17 seasons. An arbiter of grace and the harder thing: good humour.
When you read or hear the inevitable commentary around Gay’s career in retrospect, what he could have been, never forget how high he got, and how long he was able to stay there.
