A Eulogy for the Cool NBA Headbands
These days, often the first thing you see when logging onto Twitter is news of someone’s death — and if not their actual death, then their career’s death. It’s almost as if we have become completely desensitized to death. We log on. We see someone has died. We feel a pathetic excuse for “grief” for a few, fleeting seconds. Then we continue scrolling to laugh at some meme we will forget about seconds after laughing at it. It’s a cycle that we’re all in. And it pains me to say it, but I recently broke the cycle.
Yesterday, I got a notification from Adrian Wojnarowski’s Twitter account informing me that the NBA had officially banned “ninja-style headwear” from being worn in game. For the first time in a long time, I didn’t feel a fleeting sense of a pseudo-grief. No, this time I felt real, 100% genuine grief.
It hurts beyond belief when something you cared about so radiantly disappears just as your passion reaches its apex. I hesitate to use the word “love” unless I am undoubtedly sure that I love something. With that said, I absolutely loved the cool, ninja-style headbands that some players wore last year. While I didn’t know them (the headbands) personally, this loss still feels undeniably personal.
We only knew each other for roughly eight months, but during that time, I loved them (the headbands) with a ferocity I have never felt before in my life. I’m unsure if the feeling was reciprocated because the headbands are incapable of feeling emotion because they are headbands. And even if our love was one-sided, it was a love nonetheless.
I will never forget first seeing Jrue Holiday donning the cool, ninja-style headband and thinking to myself, “Oh wow, that looks pretty cool.” Looking back, the initial naivete behind pretty cool was adorable; I didn’t know what I was looking at, and I didn’t know what it stood to mean. After that, I kept seeing more and more players wearing them as the season went on. With each player I saw wearing a cool, ninja-style headband, my admiration soared. My thoughts of pretty cool quickly evolved into thoughts of very cool. I even thought about putting one on myself, but I immediately retracted that idea because it was a bad idea.
It’s easy for monotony to take over during an 82-plus-game season. It’s easy for players and fans to fall into the same habits they had in October, all the way at the end of March. But every once in a while, something comes along to completely shift things during the season, as was the case with the cool, ninja-style headbands. I’m not sure if we really deserved the cool, ninja-style headbands, but I know for a fact that we don’t deserve to have the cool, ninja-style headbands taken away from us as soon as we got them.
They say the good die young, but what about the great? At the end of the day, the same fate awaits us all. We all go the way of the cool, ninja-style headband. Eventually, Adam Silver deems us unworthy of life and our time expires. Though, we must not forget what we have done on this Earth. Instead, we should hope that our legacies will be carried on and remembered by those that came after us. Perhaps there will be another cool fashion trend in the NBA like players wearing eyepatches or wearing Heelys. No matter what comes next, I promise to remember the 2018–2019 NBA season: the season of the cool, ninja-style headwear.
Of course, I will keep those more-deeply affected by it in my thoughts. I wish nothing but the best for Jrue Holiday, Jimmy Butler, Aaron Holiday, Mike Scott, Montrezl Harrell, De’Aaron Fox, among others who knew the headbands personally.