Katie Heindl has a good feeling about this
The author and creator of BASKETBALL FEELINGS talks the Raptors' return to Toronto, being a "bev head" and finding her bliss at the community pool.
VANCOUVER – As any good water sign will tell you, it can be tough to navigate the emotional tributaries of everyday life. One minute you’re floating down the lazy river of love and friendship. The next, you're careening headfirst over the falls of jealousy and rejection, on a collision course with the rocks of remorse and regret below. At the best of times, it can feel hard to stay afloat. But throw in a group of eccentric, competitive millionaires, a 24 hour news cycle, and some Amiri jeans, and suddenly you’re facing a bomb cyclone of sensitivity. Or as Katie Heindl might call it, a biblical flood of BASKETBALL FEELINGS.
A writer, journalist, and podcaster of the highest order, Katie, 37, has spent the last few years carving her niche in the NBA extended universe. With prose (yes, prose!) that bridges the gap between the physical and the spiritual, her idiomatic approach to sports writing stands apart from other basketball stories, be it the tomb Ben Simmons helped build in Philadelphia, PJ Tucker’s appetite for fashion, or how a member of the Raptors ownership tried to oust president Masai Ujuri. I enjoy her perspective so much, I decided to go full reply-guy and request an interview, to which she graciously agreed.
Our conversation, which took place early last Friday morning, has been edited and condensed for clarity. It touched on the Raptor’s first game back at Toronto’s Scotiabank Arena following last season’s bubble, her early days of NBA fan fiction, and the benefits of embracing even the most overwhelming emotions. As expected, Katie was a generous and thoughtful interview, often leading the conversation into canals and streams I was all too happy to explore. To quote a certain Raptors announcer… this shit is BUCKETS!!!!
ES: You were out at the Raptors season opener last night. How did that feel?
KH: It was great. I was at their first preseason game about two weeks ago, but last night definitely felt more formal. Kind of this feeling like, “Oh right, it’s happening” whereas the first preseason game was a time to get the awkwardness out. There was so much anticipation in the building… I cried a lot. They did three welcome back montages right at the intro... My mask was wet, it was gross.
ES: Oh my god.
KH: Yeah, the last time I set foot in that building was in February 2020. So it felt kind of full circle even coming back to that, even with the different restrictions for media and access… I didn’t necessarily know when I would be back there. I didn’t know if it would be this season. And there was also this sense of not even knowing what the team would look like, you know, there’s so many new faces… younger guys like Dalano Banton and Scottie Barnes. I would probably think [the overall feeling] was more relief... It was kind of like, “Alright we’re back, this is starting again.”
ES: I should ask, how did you kind of find yourself in the sports writing space? Was that something you always wanted to do, or was it just happenstance that led you here?
KH: I’ve always written since I was a kid. I started writing a big fantasy novel… And then, when I actually got to a point where I was publishing and pitching, I was writing social commentary, political commentary, arts and culture. And I liked that but I would kind of drift from subject to subject depending on what was interesting to me… I’ve always watched basketball… but it took a little bit longer than it should have for me to reconcile the two. Like, “Oh, this is something I could write about.”
I also want to acknowledge the fact that sports writing is obviously such a male dominated space. Like there’s gatekeeping everywhere, but there’s definitely gatekeeping in a sense of the social pressures around who should be in [the sports writing] space and who has kind of the authority to talk about sports or about basketball… I used to write for a site called The Classical, which doesn’t exist anymore. But David Roth founded that, and I wrote NBA fan fiction because it was extremely creative but also zero pressure. It was almost like a soft way of entering the space. I think what’s made me stick with it this long is recognizing the fact that there aren’t a lot of voices like mine in the space… whether you want to call that a literary or a writerly approach. I think sports writing has this tendency to flatten everything and I never really liked that. I think readers can handle a little bit of nuance, a little bit of emotion.
ES: Tell me more about this fan fiction involving NBA players???
KH: I would kind of just write them as I felt like it. I came in right at the tail end of The Classical, so David had a full time job somewhere else, and he was publishing stuff here and there. But then as it went on, he stopped publishing all together. The only thing he would publish on the site was a fan fiction for me that I started writing on Halloween every year. He would revive the site like a Frankenstein.
Actually, I did write a story once about Phil Jackson putting together a Frankenstein player out of the parts of other NBA players. There was another one about the Minnesota Timberwolves being Teen Wolves, and Jimmy Butler was like the mature werewolf who came in and he didn’t really like the work ethic of the other teen wolves because all they did want to do is play video games… There was one about Chuck Hayes getting lost outside of Houston in this expanse. It just became a desert. But he was driving a chuck wagon, which was his nickname in his playing career. And then he was looking for this restaurant in Houston that sold shrimp scampi, because once I had read that Chuck Hayes really liked shrimp scampi. So he was trying to get there and got lost. And then he runs into Matt Barnes, who is like leading a gang of ne’er do wells in the desert... He might have been rescued by Vince Carter.
ES: I don’t know why, but a lot of this is reminding me of if Scooby-Doo was investigating sports mysteries.
KH: Yeah kind of!
ES: I don’t love getting into the sauce of where people draw inspiration from BUT who were some of the people you read growing up that influenced that distinctive Heindl style?
KH: It’s a good question, and it’s kind of tough to answer. When I was a kid, I read a lot of Jack London and Hemingway. And then as a teenager, I went through a real unfortunate Beat Generation-era… Kerouac, Bukowski, Burroughs, Ferlinghetti, Ginsberg, all those guys. Now it’s a bit cringe-y to read… but I think at the time, it was also expansive for me, which is funny because now I almost exclusively read women. It’s not even a conscious choice. I really think Vivian Gornick is amazing. Her essay writing and just the way that she can kind of see the world and infuse it with a lot of richness and emotion. I really love Miriam Toews because she writes in this way – I don’t know how she does it – but you’re reading and you’re like laughing out loud and then literally crying within the same sentence.
The way that I tend to write and use languages is very free-flowing… I’ve had colleagues in the industry say “You’re a very writerly writer.” That’s not usually what sports writing is. It’s usually just five words, period. I don’t really write like that because I don’t feel like I can encapsulate the mood. I’m not just trying to write about the thing that happened, but to paint a picture of the environment: what did it feel like? What was going on in a player’s voice or across their face? I love weaving in-game stuff into the more atmospheric stuff.
ES: You mentioned that you went to school in Halifax and Montreal. Are you from the East Coast originally or how did that come about?
KH: I grew up in Scarborough, Ont. I went to high school in Toronto. When I was done high school at 17… I took a year off that ended up being two years off… At that time I was just not invested in school, it seemed very boring. But when I made the conscious decision to go back, I did it in a very romanticized way. I was like, “Where do I want to go to school?” “I want to go to school beside the ocean.”
So I picked Dalhousie and I moved to Halifax by myself. I didn’t know anybody there… But Halifax was great. I really loved it… I loved how small it felt. It was the perfect city to move to when you’re young and trying to figure out, like a lot of stuff about yourself. It was a sort of city where you had to make your own fun, but you could also do anything.
Eventually, I transferred to Concordia [in Montreal] for the creative writing program. I lived with my best friend there, but it was a much different experience. It was kind of like my lost years, which I think happens to people in Montreal. It’s weird. I was very excited to go to school for creative writing, but I imagined it being a very different experience than what it was. I really didn’t enjoy it at all.
ES: I’ve heard other people say that formalizing your creative writing education kind of saps some of the magic out of it. Is that sort of how you felt?
KH: I think so. I guess I thought it was going to be a bit more “serious,” though I don’t know that I had defined what “serious” was to me. It was all workshop based... So much of [the experience] is contingent on the people in your class and their sensibilities and where they’re coming from. And at that point, I think having taken two years off before I went to university, and being technically in my third year when I went there, I was in school with a lot of first year students. Some of them were really young and our lifestyles, and where we were at in our lives, didn’t necessarily align. Not to be like “They didn’t take it seriously”… but at the time I didn’t know what I stood to gain from it at all.
I didn’t write it for a long time after… I moved back to Toronto... I got an internship and then I got a job. I didn’t start writing again for probably another two years or something because of it.
ES: I’m interested to learn more about your lost years… What was life for Katie looking like in that two year span?
KH: I mean, they were fun years, don’t get me wrong, but for a person who doesn’t really do well in the winter, and it’s gotten worse and worse as I’ve gotten older, Montreal winters are brutal. Like especially brutal. It’s funny because like Halifax was so small and felt so insular, but Montreal felt so much smaller at times. I didn’t really hang out with anyone from school. I hung out with my friends that I already had there, who were either like going to punk and hardcore shows or in the indie rock scene or were in the club and party scene. There were a lot of very late nights, a lot of partying, drinking.
When I was in Halifax, I was still going out and having fun and meeting people. But school felt like why I was there, whereas in Montreal, I think I kind of lost that. I know it got dark at times toward the end, because when I left I was ready to leave the city and I could not go back to visit. Nothing bad explicitly happened, but it was just this feeling of like, I don’t know that I’m ready to even like, go back and visit, you know?
ES: Have you been back since?
KH: I’ve had to go back for work, but I haven’t been back for pleasure… which seems kind of weird to me. But I just feel like, what would I do?
This past fall I did a road trip out to the East Coast and ended up in Halifax for about a week and a half. I walked around downtown and I walked around Dalhousie… I felt so affected in a really good way. So I don’t know, maybe I should give Montreal a chance.
ES: You seem very present in your emotions. Is there anything you do to foster that sense of vulnerability?
KH: Not consciously. I’m very over-analytical as a person, sometimes to a fault. I imagine that probably has something to do with it. There are some times when being so openly emotional can get in the way. I’d like to maybe process something without choking up, you know? Watch a montage at a basketball game without having my mascara all down my face. But that’s just sort of how I am. When I was younger, I would try to steel that part of myself a little bit more, or would kind of show that more in private or with friends who knew me closely, but I think as I’ve gotten older, it’s just kind of like “Why?”
I think it’s a richer experience to go through your life and let yourself be affected by things, and to kind of embrace the inconvenience of those emotions at times. I haven’t had a lot of awful things happen to me in my life, I think I’ve been pretty lucky. But I have had some pretty bad things happen, and I think you go through that stuff and you can let it numb you or harden, or I think you can go the other way. I suppose I’ve just chosen to go the other way and embrace every kind of feeling as it comes.
ES: You mentioned that you were hanging out with the hardcore and punk kids in Montreal. Is that part of your background? Or were those just the homies you were rolling with at the time?
KH: Growing up in high school, I would go to raves and then I would go to shows because my best friend was a punk. I would tag along with her at first, but eventually it was like “Oh, I like this music.” And in Montreal, that was kind of the scene at the time. There was a lot of punk houses still, and shows were just at really small venues…All the hardcore bands from New York would come to Montreal... It was more of a destination than Toronto was at the time.
I’m not like a hardcore aficionado, I think I mostly just liked the energy of those spaces. I’ve always had a wide range of musical tastes in terms of what I listen to. But in terms of where I went, it probably just started because I was tagging along with somebody.
ES: What were you listening to your road trip out to the East Coast this summer?
KH: My husband makes a joke about me that my favourite musical genre now is “Spin Class.” I’ve never been to a spin class, but this was underscored to me at the Raptors game because I was sitting with a friend, and I was Shazam-ing some of the songs that were getting played, and he would be like, “It’s this song.”
But on that road trip, I was mostly the DJ in the car. I take a lot of pride in knowing how to read a car, or read the room where I’m DJ-ing… knowing when you needed to keep the energy up or when you could just have a chill time, knowing when to put on a podcast, knowing when you didn’t want to hear people talk anymore and you had to go back to music. We started that road trip by going up to Lake Superior Provincial Park and camping. So the literal opposite direction of going east. And the reason I wanted to go there was because one of my favourite songs is “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” by Gordon Lightfoot, which is a sick song!
We also listened to “Jail” a lot of times – the only song in the new Kanye West album that I really like, but I think it’s because it sounds like a Phil Collins song. Listened to Young Thug, Rae Sremmurd, Lucy Daucus, Cat Power, Tan Lines, Stevie Knicks, T. Rex, Future Islands. It was a bit all over the map.
ES: I notice you’re drinking sparkling water right now. Based on some recent Instagram stories, it seems you have a lot of hard opinions on the matter. What should I be drinking that isn’t Topo Chico?
KH: I love Topo, but I was only rebelling against Topo because I think I only know one place you can get it in Toronto. I know it’s everywhere in the states. I wanted to first try it at Summer League, and I made this plea on Twitter asking any friends who saw it to bring me some, and then no one did. So I was chasing the TOPO dragon all the way home. And I had one. It’s pretty good but the bubbles are very hard, which I feel you have to be in the correct mood for. I think LaCroix, which is what I’m drinking now, is kind of middle of the road. It’s easy drinking. There’s this new one I found called City Seltzer. I think they’re out of Ottawa, but they sell them in Toronto. They had a very exceptional flavour, which was cool melon. It was like cucumber and honeydew... It was tasty.
What else… I love a straight San Pellegrino. You can’t go wrong with the San Pel glass bottle. Something about it makes you feel really boujee. The fridge right now is stocked with sparkling water, there’s a huge kombucha in there. I’m a huge iced tea fan. I’ll buy all these things, and then just forget about them, so there’ll just always be random drinks in the fridge. I just love a bev.
ES: Gifts from past Katie to future Katie. The last thing I wanted to ask you about was swimming. I know why I love it, especially as as adult, but I’m curious to hear your thoughts.
KH: The first memory I have, honestly, is of almost drowning as a child, but I still love swimming... It’s very solitary. I really thrive in social settings, and I kind of need that, but I need equal time alone by myself to just completely kind of decompress and turn my brain off... I got into lane swim this summer at a public outdoor pool just down the street from me, and what I loved about it was it was first thing in the morning. The park would kind of be coming alive around the pool, so on one side is a dog park, there’d be kids at day camp, there’s a group of seniors doing tai-chi. It could be chaos, but in the pool, it becomes very organized. You can hear people breathing, you can hear people swimming, sometimes you can hear the hungover teen lifeguards yelling to each other. And then you start to just focus on your own breathing… Time just kind of slips away.
I used to run [for exercise] and I tried to get back into it, but I had such a hard time… I need to listen to music or listen to a podcast because hearing myself breathing extremely heavy… you’re just so aware of your body. But with swimming you’re not. I would always take a break at the end. There was... this kind of kidney shaped offshoot where the diving board was in the deep end, and I would go there before the next lane swim came in to just float. Catch my breath. Stare at the sky.
ES: I think that peacefulness, the meditative-ness is a big thing for me, too. I was going to ask you if you’ve ever been to Vancouver, because we have this great outdoor pool here right at Kits Beach.
KH: I’ve been to Vancouver, but I didn’t know there was a pool like that… In Ontario we have lakes, and I love swimming in lakes because it’s the closest you have to wild swimming. I like swimming in the ocean, but it’s a different kind of awareness, so the idea of swimming in a pool, but being able to look and be so proximal to the ocean or some big wild body of water, is very appealing to me because it’s kind of the best of both worlds at once.
ES: It’s one of my favourite things to do in the city, and it’s so easily accessible.
KH: Are the people that swim there really intense? Or is it like a good mix?
ES: It’s a good mix. It’s kind of chaotic because if you see the shape of the pool… it’s very curvaceous. So you basically have two lanes, but they’re really, really big. Your slow lane and your fast lane. And by default I go in the slow lane, but the range is so wide that… you kind of feel too fast for the slow kids and too slow for the fast kids.
KH: They need a medium lane. That’s what I swim in.
ES: Medium would be perfect. But yeah, it’s not intense at all… A lot of retirees, a lot of fit old timers from the West Side of Vancouver, who have been coming here for like 10 years and this is what they do every summer.
KH: I love watching those people swim because they’re beautiful swimmers. That’s the thing that I started to understand this summer. Like I want to get to the point, not where I’m so good that I’m crazy fast, but to where I have any sense of style.
Katie Heindl is the creator of BASKETBALL FEELINGS, a Substack newsletter and podcast that reconciles real life with basketball and expounds on the less quantifiable stuff — like loving a sport with problems and treating chasedown blocks as an analogy for living your life. She has also written for Uproxx, Rolling Stone and Complex.
Thank you, Ethan! Gonna crack a seltz for you right now.