Hanif Abdurraqib

speaker

144 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 21 Jul

Hanif Abdurraqib’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

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The Dan Le Batard Show · There's Always This Year (feat. Hanif Abdurraqib) · 21 Jul 2026 podcast

And I love basketball.

I love music.

These are the things that have defined the tentpoles of my life.

And so much of my work just echoes through those chambers.

Not a lot.

When I first pitched this book, I had nothing, you know, book proposals are funny because a book proposal is a series of lies.

You know, you're just lying to get somebody to, and then once you get the book deal, I guess I'm giving a free game to all you writers out there.

The book proposal means nothing.

You can, you're just trying to get someone in the door and once they're in the door, you can sell them anything else you want.

So when the book proposal happened,

I had this idea of like, I want to write about Ohio and the age of LeBron James, but that actually doesn't mean anything.

That's just words, you know?

And I had this like essay about he got game, which I think ended up in the book.

But what I realized as I kind of dug into it more was I was, my central concern was about time and about the loss of time.

and about age and about aging and in some real ways about becoming my father.

And it's fascinating that I worked on the bulk of this book, of course, before Bronnie was in the NBA and before Bronnie was even an NBA prospect.

And I did not realize that by the time the book was in the world, there would be a real tight thread between, you know, I think there's a large portion of this book about fatherhood and about me looking at my father through all of our joys and complications and saying, oh, wait, I'm becoming that guy.

And so even if I don't want to become that guy, I'm becoming that guy.

And therefore, I need to think about how I can better love that guy because it is going to fall on me to love myself when I become him.

And that both has nothing to do with LeBron James, but has everything to do with LeBron James in a way because he is the one athlete that I can say I saw him when he was 14 and I was 14 and now he's

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