Lindsay Whalen is in the Deleuzian state of becoming-animal. We rise in our stadium seats and know that we are witnessing art, but not the elegant kind. It’s the brutal art a werewolf performs when she opens her skin on a blade of moonlight. Fifteen thousand necks horripilate as Whalen trumpets her bloodlust with a rasping, skyward shriek.
Her teammates call it “Weezy mode”—a battle-trance unlike any other in basketball. It’s the 2017 WNBA championship game, a grudge match with dynasty status on the line for the Minnesota Lynx and the Los Angeles Sparks. It’s a close game, a physical game, and the point guard’s Lynx team is the oldest in the league. She’s at the cuspate year of thirty-five, an age she wears heavily after decades of bruising, fearless play. We can almost think she’s like us, in our own aging bodies, but when our Weezy arrives, it’s clear her heart is made of tougher meat.
We’ve seen this before in big games: Weezy emerges and gets the steal, the block, the score. Weezy puts up thirty-one points on a broken hand. Weezy fouls hard and stands over her kill. Her tectonic force reroutes the game’s river. Invulnerable to fire or sword, her pale skin blotches purple-red, her eyes a glowing forge. When she thunders down the court, everyone knows she’s going to the rim, including her defender, but no one can stop her—it’s a bucket or a foul every time. Our ecstatic warrior needs not the subtle finesse of shot fake, Eurostep, or crossover; she just torches a straight line to the hoop and ends every possession skidding across the floor into the baseline photographers.
We’ve also seen Weezy games where her stat line is a strip of zeroes, yet her teammates thank her for the win. Our berserker will seize victory, because her shapeshifting is in service of the collective. She beats the drum of her chest in a rhythm that incites the contagion of war. It is a hot loop of energy surging through her teammates, rousing the pack.
Her battle-trance sprouts in her a sense organ others don’t have, one that allows her to see and manipulate the emotional arc of a game, plotting it like a master dramatist. It’s a deep relational wisdom, combined with virtuosic timing. In this 2017 championship game, she knows just the right moment to draw a foul from an opponent growing too confident. Knows when a loose ball demands of her body a sacrifice to galvanize her team. And knows us—can feel when that changeable organism, the home crowd, must be fed; just when we can’t stand the third-quarter tension another moment, she gifts us the frisson of a behind-the-back pass.
The transpersonal energy she creates has propelled this championship game, and the whole team has responded: Syl sets a rebound record, Maya calmly earns a double-double, and Mone and BB are ageless and flying. Those team turnovers, though—in the game’s last minutes, we grow worried. With thirty seconds left, the Sparks pull within three. Then a trap, a scramble, just get the ball to Maya Moore just find just please find—Maya escape-dribbles, steps through—the ball is up and—
Do you know the caesura of thirty thousand full, unmoving lungs?
Of the entirety of an arena’s air being gasped into bodies, leaving a soundless vacuum?
Of a ball moving through that vacuum along the sacred geometry of gravity’s arc toward an eighteen-inch rim?
Do you know the clamor of thirty thousand lungs unloosing as it swishes through?
Twenty-six seconds left but we know, our guts and ganglia know. The Sparks heave thrice and miss, Weezy and Syl make their free throws, and the buzzer sounds above Weezy’s long yawp of victory. A boom of confetti looses from the ceiling, and through our floating colors we see Lindsay Whalen disappear into a pile of teammates—becoming-human, becoming-champion.