A minute and a half later, all 6-foot-6 and 220 pounds of him skips off the court, light as air, with a typically weighty line: 11 points, 7 rebounds, 6 assists and 7 steals.
"The thing of it is," he said, and we all waited as he allowed a weighty pause to fill the air — "you've just got to keep your mouth shut".
Yet for its first act "Tribes" — which was nominated for both the Olivier and Evening Standard Awards for best play — keeps all these weighty thematic balls twirling in the air.
The works, fittingly for this white-walled space, are all about the play of illusion, how weighty materials can look light as air against these walls, and can be yoked together to create strange conjunctions.
From the announcements on public loudspeakers of the "splendid Olympic games" to the severe but sham formalities of the courtrooms, Ying depicts a society in which secret official force turns the air as thick and weighty as water.
The new SCOTUS justice will help decide the safety of the air we breathe, among other weighty cases affecting generations to come.
Carol Loeb Shloss's strenuous, emotional attempt to fish Lucia up from the depths of incarceration and obliteration has to do battle with very weighty pressures, giving her book a strained, excitable, defiant air.
Pawle writes: "For the vast Yorkshire cricketing public Old Ebor wrote at inordinate length, unhampered by any consideration of literary style he was one of the severely factual school and it amazed me how any pigeon ever struggled into the air when shackled to one of his weighty effusions".
Even with the optional air suspension, the ride is firm, the steering weighty and serious.
