Culture
The buzzer-beating Blakes siblings: Jaylen and Mikayla hit game-winners on the same weekend
Mikayla Blakes timed her jump perfectly, grabbed the rebound off the front of the rim and tipped the ball in with 0.8 seconds left on the clock. Moments later she was celebrating Vanderbilt’s first win against rival Tennessee since 2019.
Then something funny happened.
“After the handshake line, I was like, ‘Who is this bald head on the court? I swear I’ve seen this reaction before,’” she said of a passionate Vanderbilt fan who stormed the court. “I was like, ‘Who is this? I know him.’
“Then I got closer and was like, ‘Wow. My dad just made it to the court. Where did he come from?’”
Monroe Blakes, a former player and member of the Hall of Fame at Division II St. Michael’s College in Vermont, is typically more reserved by nature. The Blakes are a humble family and the idea of her dad blowing past security to storm the court had Mikayla cracking up. But Monroe couldn’t help himself Sunday when his daughter, the Commodores’ freshman phenom, hit the game-winner in the biggest moment of her college career.
Just like he couldn’t contain his emotions on Saturday, either, when Mikayla’s older brother, Stanford guard Jaylen Blakes, drove the length of the court at the Dean E. Smith Center and knocked down a game-winning stepback jumper from the left wing against North Carolina with 0.9 seconds remaining.
Two kids, two buzzer beaters in two days, one elated dad on hand to see both in person.
“The word I keep using is ‘Amazing. Blessed.’ And I’m not sure if that does it justice,” Monroe Blakes said. “I started playing basketball when I was 13, so I’ve been playing it for 40-plus years. … But the two of them have taken me to new heights and new memories that in my previous 40 years I hadn’t experienced.
“What are the odds that brother and sister would do (that) back-to-back?”
The face of a proud dad 🥹
Mikayla Blakes and brother Jaylen Blakes both hit game winning shots within 24 hours of one another.#AnchorDown https://t.co/jJZZnnXulp pic.twitter.com/mCSB9OxHe1
— Vanderbilt WBB (@VandyWBB) January 19, 2025
MIKAYLA BLAKES WITH THE PUT BACK DORES UP BY ONE#AnchorDown pic.twitter.com/uCXnEgAiXw
— Vanderbilt WBB (@VandyWBB) January 19, 2025
Jaylen, who spent three years at Duke before transferring to Stanford as a graduate for his final season of eligibility, was no stranger to playing at the Dean Dome. He went 2-1 in three games in Chapel Hill with Duke and dreamed about having his own big moment at one of the sport’s most celebrated venues.
The night before Stanford took the court, Jaylen spent some time thinking about former Blue Devils guard Austin Rivers, whose iconic game-winning shot against UNC in 2012 still lives in Duke lore. He also flashed back to Wendell Moore’s game-winning put-back at the Smith Center in 2020 that gave Duke the win over the Tar Heels in overtime.
“That’s just something that I was dreaming about,” Jaylen said. “And to be able to be in that moment was something special.”
With Stanford trailing 71-70 with seven seconds remaining, Jaylen inbounded the ball under the Cardinal’s basket. He got the ball right back and streaked down the left sideline.
“I had a very good defender on me in Seth Trimble. So I was like, ‘All right, he’s gonna cut me off,’” Jaylen said. “And as soon as he cut me off, I felt his momentum going backwards so I decided to step back and make the shot.
“It was unbelievable. It was an unbelievable moment. One thing about when you take that shot, it’s not just you that’s taking that shot. It’s everybody that has supported you along the way on that journey.”
From the stands, Monroe felt as though he was watching the play develop in slow motion. It took him a second to comprehend what he’d just seen.
“That ball went in. That went in,” he recalled thinking. “That’s the game-winner.”
In Nashville, Mikayla had just gotten out of practice and was watching the game on her cell phone before heading over to Memorial Gymnasium to see Vanderbilt’s men’s team take on Tennessee later that afternoon. She missed the shot in real time because her stream kept freezing. But when an influx of text messages and phone calls started to come in, she presumed Stanford won and rushed to the locker room for better service to rewind the feed.
“I saw that he hit the shot and I was just over the moon excited,” said Mikayla, a former five-star prospect who leads all freshmen nationally in scoring at 20.2 points per game. “I started FaceTiming my dad and then started calling my brother because by that time, he had already made it to the locker room. So I was just calling my brother’s phone and texting him, just so excited.”
Jaylen and Mikayla Blakes. (Vanderbilt Athletics)
The next day, Monroe flew into Nashville, where his wife Nikkia joined him, for Mikayla’s game. The Blakes, who live in New Jersey, made a pact that at least one of them would do everything possible to be at every one of their children’s games — no small feat, considering Jaylen and Mikayla play on opposite sides of the country.
When Vanderbilt lost a 10-point lead in the fourth quarter and it became clear the game would come down to the wire, one of the Blakes’ friends said the quiet part out loud.
“It was funny, somebody who was with us said to us, ‘What if Mikayla hits the game-winner?’” Monroe said. “I’m like, ‘No, I don’t think that can happen again twice. That can’t happen.’”
Jaylen, back on campus in California, watched the entire game from Stanford’s training room while receiving treatment. He, too, was dubious his family could be so lucky in one weekend.
“I was thinking, ‘There can’t be any way that we both hit a game-winner back-to-back days.’ And it came down to the final play,” he said. “I saw the missed layup and she trailed it and made it and when I realized she made it, I ran around the training room screaming like, ‘Oh my goodness, oh my goodness.’ It was special.”
In the moments after Monroe stormed the court to celebrate, Jaylen FaceTimed his parents to join in on the fun. Mikayla would later learn from her mom that the moment brought tears to her dad’s eyes. By the time Mikayla got back to the locker room, she had six missed calls from Jaylen.
“I picked up on the seventh call,” she said.
“I’m just lucky to have her as my sister,” Jaylen added. “Lucky to be her big brother.”
This week, Monroe has finally responded to the approximately 100 text messages he received as he continues to ride the high of what Mikayla joked might be the best moment of his life.
From all the times he rebounded for his kids in the yard or Nikkia helped pull them apart when one-on-one games got too competitive, this was a moment the Blakes family will never forget.
“One of the things that I love about my kids is they have a very competitive streak,” Monroe said. “They compete against each other but love each other, so it makes each one of them better. It was just an amazing dynamic — that love and support of each other.
“They talk all the time, they give each other tips. She called him after the game when he hit his game-winner and he gave her a call and that’s why I’m so proud. They just put a lot of work in and I’m just happy for them in that moment.”
(Top photos: Grant Halverson / Getty Images; Andrew Nelles / USA Today Network via Imagn Images)
Here we are on Day 4 of the Poetry Challenge, looking up, again, at the sky. (If you’ve just arrived, click here to catch up.)
We’ve considered “The More Loving One” as a witty, teasing love poem, and also peeked into the life of its author, W.H. Auden, to see what it might have meant to him. But maybe it’s time to take this poem at face value, as a meditation on our place in the universe.
You can read the whole poem here, but to recap: We start by admiring the stars even though they don’t feel the same way (or any way, really) about us. Then we wonder … do we care about them all that much? At last, we imagine them extinguished, leaving an emptiness that we tell ourselves would be just fine. Eventually.
Were all stars to disappear or die,
I should learn to look at an empty sky
And feel its total dark sublime,
Though this might take me a little time.
Tracy K. Smith, poet
The poem resolves with a sigh that seems to linger, as if the poem didn’t quite want to end. Unlike the concluding lines of the previous stanzas, all of which clocked in at precisely eight syllables, the last line of the last one extends to nine. That may sound trivial, but we know that Auden counted his syllables carefully.
And it isn’t hard to identify the extra particle, the one tweezed in among the others. Auden could just as well have written, “Though this might take a little time.”
That would have maintained the pattern without altering the meaning. The “me” is implied. Adding it might seem redundant. Which is exactly why Auden does it.
Though this might take me a little time.
W.H. Auden, poet
That scant word makes the poem last a little longer. It also emphasizes the human presence of the speaker, a person whose perceptions and feelings are what this is finally all about. He is asking for patience, for grace, as he adjusts his eyes and heart to a stark new situation.
But how much time is “a little”? The split second it takes to utter that extra, unstressed “me”? However much is needed to heal all proverbial wounds? Or are we thinking in astronomical measures, as those stars invite us to suppose? In that case, it might take our poor stargazer more time than he has. Millions of years. Hundreds of millions!
What does it mean to exist as a solitary being in such a vast, incomprehensible cosmos? This may have been an especially timely question when this poem was written; early versions date from 1957, the year the Soviet Union launched Sputnik, marking the beginning of the space age. But poets have been looking at the sky for a very long time.
Some find comforting news of heaven, like William Wordsworth:
The stars are mansions built by Nature’s hand,
And, haply, there the spirits of the blest
Dwell, clothed in radiance, their immortal vest’
Others, like Ada Limón, see the projection of our own curiosity:
Arching under the night sky inky
with black expansiveness, we point
to the planets we know, we
pin quick wishes on stars.
Occasionally a poet (Stephen Crane in this case) will hear an answer that makes Auden’s silent stars seem kind:
A man said to the universe:
“Sir, I exist!”
“However,” replied the universe,
“The fact has not created in me
A sense of obligation.”
Auden himself came back to the subject a dozen years after “The More Loving One,” in a poem called “Moon Landing,” which ambivalently hailed the Apollo II mission as a “phallic triumph,” “a grand gesture” of male self-regard. And while he acknowledges the spirit of adventure behind the mission, he doesn’t admire the moon enough to want to see it up close:
Worth going to see? I can well believe it.
Worth seeing? Mneh! I once rode through a desert
and was not charmed
He’d rather contemplate the moon above him — one who “still queens the Heavens” — than tread like Neil Armstrong on its dusty, lifeless surface. The feats of NASA and its astronauts belong to a world of science, politics and media spectacle; Auden prefers the realm of mythology and aesthetics.
He’s in good poetic company. In “When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer,” Walt Whitman, at a lecture, finds himself “tired and sick” of charts and diagrams and scientific discourse.
Till rising and gliding out I wander’d off by myself,
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.
He did not give a damn if they gave a damn.
For Auden, as for Whitman, demystifying the stars risks stripping them of their poetry. A sense of wonder flickers through “The More Loving One,” along with the wit and the romantic weariness. The poem concludes with an almost defiant commitment to awe, the search for sublimity in the heavens.
Were all stars to disappear or die,
I should learn to look at an empty sky
And feel its total dark sublime,
Though this might take me a little time.
Matthew McConaughey, actor and poet
Stars or no stars, what matters is the attitude of the person below: receptive, yearning, more in love than he may be willing to admit, even if — or indeed because — he doesn’t quite know what it is he’s worshiping.
As we approach the end of the poem, our own feelings might be in a bit of tangle: admiration, amusement and something else that’s harder to pin down in words or themes. A feeling that, having spent time with a poem largely about solitude, we are less alone.
Let’s nail down those tricky last lines, and come back tomorrow to talk about the whole thing.
Play a game to learn it by heart. Need more practice? Listen to Ada Limón, Matthew McConaughey, W.H. Auden and others recite our poem.
Question 1/6
Were all stars to disappear or die,
I should learn to look at an empty sky
Tap a word above to fill in the highlighted blank.
Your task today: Learn the final stanza!
Let’s start with the first couplet in this stanza. Fill in the rhyming words.
Ready for another round? Try your hand at the 2025 Poetry Challenge.
Edited by Gregory Cowles, Alicia DeSantis and Nick Donofrio. Additional editing by Emily Eakin,
Joumana Khatib, Emma Lumeij and Miguel Salazar. Design and development by Umi Syam. Additional
game design by Eden Weingart. Video editing by Meg Felling. Photo editing by Erica Ackerberg.
Illustration art direction by Tala Safie.
Illustrations by Daniel Barreto.
Text and audio recording of “The More Loving One,” by W.H. Auden, copyright © by the Estate of
W.H. Auden. Reprinted by permission of Curtis Brown, Ltd. Photograph accompanying Auden recording
from Imagno/Getty Images.
The result has been a terrible irony for a country that was founded as a refuge from intolerance: “How is it that the appeal to humanitarianism, tolerance, the rule of law and protection of minorities that characterized the beginning of Jewish self-emancipation gradually acquired all the traits of the relentless, remorseless and increasingly racist ethnonationalisms from which Zionism sought to liberate European Jewry?”
To answer this painful question, Bartov uses all the tools at his disposal, weaving together history, personal anecdotes, even some literary criticism, including a close reading of a poem — by Hayim Nahman Bialik and known to “every Israeli schoolchild” — about the perils of vengeance that has been misinterpreted and warped for political ends. Bartov writes unsparingly about Hamas’s murderous attacks, in which about 1,200 Israelis were killed and about 250 others taken hostage, which he calls an unequivocal “war crime and a crime against humanity.” It was a “slaughter of innocents” that “evoked collective memories of massacres and the Holocaust.”
Indeed, in a May 2024 poll of Israelis that he cites, more than half of the respondents said Oct. 7 could be compared to the Holocaust, and the Israeli media repeatedly depicted the massacre as a pogrom. Bartov understands why — for traumatized people, new traumas will revive old ones — but he maintains that the label is a category mistake. Israel is a state; it has an army, laws and government. A pogrom “is a mob attack, condoned or supported by the state authorities, against a minority lacking any attributes of a state.” (“To be sure,” he adds, “pogroms have occurred within the territories controlled by Israel, but when they take place, they were and are being carried out, with increasing frequency and ferocity, by settlers in the West Bank.”)
Israel doesn’t have a constitution. After its founding, its government was supposed to codify the protection of religious freedom and minority rights, but efforts to adopt a constitution were waylaid and arguably thwarted by political figures like David Ben-Gurion, the country’s first prime minister. Bartov believes that a constitution could have made Zionism “superfluous” after it succeeded in establishing a state that could be a refuge for Jews. Citizens could have turned toward the task of building a “just society” that aimed at “peace, truth and reconciliation with the Palestinians.”
This sounds nice, if fanciful; constitutions don’t magically prevent authoritarianism. Not to mention that attacks by surrounding Arab states did nothing to alleviate Israelis’ sense that they were constantly embattled.
Now that we’ve memorized the first half of our poem, let’s learn a little more about the man who wrote it. (Haven’t memorized anything yet? Click here to start at the beginning.)
For most of his life, Wystan Hugh Auden (1907-73) was a star. He was widely read, quoted, argued over and gossiped about, achieving a level of fame that few writers now — and not many then — could contemplate. His New York Times obituary did not hesitate to call him “the foremost poet of his generation.”
Celebrity of that kind is ephemeral, but Auden’s words have continued to circulate in the half century since his death. Maybe you’ve heard some of them before. In the 1994 film “Four Weddings and a Funeral,” his poem “Funeral Blues” is recited by Matthew (John Hannah) over the casket of his lover, Gareth (Simon Callow).
In the Gen-X touchstone “Before Sunrise” (1995), Jesse (Ethan Hawke) regales Celine (Julie Delpy) with an impression of Dylan Thomas reading Auden’s “As I Walked Out One Evening.”
In both these scenes, the characters use Auden’s poetry to give voice to a longing for which they otherwise might not have words. Auden’s poetry is often useful in that way. It speaks to recognizable human occasions, and it isn’t always all about him.
“The More Loving One” might not be something you’d quote at a funeral or on a date, but it is almost effortlessly quotable — the perfect expression of a thought you never knew you had:
Admirer as I think I am
Of stars that do not give a damn,
I cannot, now I see them, say
I missed one terribly all day.
Ken Burns, filmmaker
The word “I” occurs five times in this stanza, but we don’t know much about the person speaking. His personality is camouflaged and revealed by craft.
Auden, born in the northern English cathedral city of York, began practicing that craft as a schoolboy, and honed it at Oxford. Not long after graduating in 1928, he was anointed by critics and readers as the great hope of modern English poetry. A charismatic, divisive figure, he gathered acolytes, imitators and haters.
He swam in the intellectual and ideological crosscurrents of the 1930s, drawing Marxism, psychoanalysis and mystical nationalism into his writing. Assimilating a daunting array of literary influences — Old English and Ancient Greek, French chansons and Icelandic sagas — he forged a poetic personality that was bold, confiding and seductive.
His love poems of that era were candid, discreet dispatches from a calendar of feverish entanglements, wrenching breakups and one-night stands, usually with other men. He also wrote about the feverish politics of the time — class conflict; the rise of fascism; the Spanish Civil War — in ringing rhetoric he later disavowed.
In 1939 Auden moved to America, acquiring U.S. citizenship after World War II. In New York he fell in love with Chester Kallman, a young American writer who became his life partner.
It was a complicated relationship, starting as a passionate affair and enduring through decades of domestic companionship and creative collaboration. Kallman’s refusal to be sexually exclusive wounded Auden, a dynamic that poignantly shades this poem’s most memorable couplet:
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.
Yiyun Li, writer
In America, Auden distanced himself from the radical politics of his earlier career and embraced Anglican Christianity. His intellectual preoccupations shifted toward religion and existentialism — to the kinds of big questions we think about late at night, or when we look to the sky.
Making the leap from wunderkind to grand old man without seeming to stop in middle age, he became a mentor for several generations of younger poets. He was a prolific and punctual contributor of reviews and essays to various publications, including this one, for which he wrote a rave of J.R.R. Tolkien’s “The Fellowship of the Ring” in 1954.
Through it all, Auden devoted fanatical attention to the finer points of poetic technique. His notebooks are full of numbers, word lists and markings that show just how deep this commitment went. He counted every syllable, measured every stress.
He gathered rhymes and other words with a lexicographer’s zeal and a crossword puzzler’s precision.
The third stanza of “The More Loving One” is a miniature showcase of Auden’s skill. Of the four epigrams arrayed before us, it may be the most technically perfect.
Admirer as I think I am
Of stars that do not give a damn,
I cannot, now I see them, say
I missed one terribly all day.
W.H. Auden, poet
The rhythm is flawless, without an extra syllable or an accent out of place. The grammar is also fastidious. Here is a single sentence, springloaded with equivocation, beginning with one idea and sliding toward its opposite.
This quatrain is the poem’s ideal formal representation of itself, a kind of proof of concept: four lines of impeccable iambic tetrameter in an AABB rhyme scheme. The by-the-book regularity of this stanza should give you a leg up in memorizing it, and you can test yourself below!
But the rest of the poem is an argument against perfection, just as it is a celebration of uncertainty and humility — as we’ll see tomorrow.
Play a game to learn it by heart. Need more practice? Listen to Ada Limón, Matthew McConaughey, W.H. Auden and others recite our poem.
Question 1/6
Admirer as I think I am
Of stars that do not give a damn,
Tap a word above to fill in the highlighted blank.Your first task: Learn the first two lines!
Let’s start with the first couplet in this stanza. Fill in the rhyming words.
Ready for another round? Try your hand at the 2025 Poetry Challenge.
Edited by Gregory Cowles, Alicia DeSantis and Nick Donofrio. Additional editing by Emily Eakin,
Joumana Khatib, Emma Lumeij and Miguel Salazar. Design and development by Umi Syam. Additional
game design by Eden Weingart. Video editing by Meg Felling. Photo editing by Erica Ackerberg.
Illustration art direction by Tala Safie.
Illustrations by Daniel Barreto.
Text and audio recording of “The More Loving One,” by W.H. Auden, copyright © by the Estate of
W.H. Auden. Reprinted by permission of Curtis Brown, Ltd. Photograph accompanying Auden recording
from Imagno/Getty Images.
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