Kobe-being-Kobe

When I was eight, my mother took me up to the Syracuse War Memorial to see an NBA Doubleheader. You’d see half the teams in the league in one night, at one venue. What a venue. After watching the Knicks and the Warriors (Philadephia, that was) in the opener, I watched with indifference the hometown Nats take the floor. Then, through the dark smoke and backlit haze I saw something which changed my life, and directed it in a way that sealed my adult life. Trotting onto the floor in shimmering satiny green and black high Chucks were the Boston Celtics. I’d been smitten. Foggy about the particulars of the game itself, I returned to my home in the little village of Weedsport, New York, which my widowed mother shared with her parents, who had just celebrated their fiftieth wedding anniversary. They received a gift which was no less instrumental in ordering my subsequent life: a Zenith portable transistor radio which was in the shape of a portmanteau, and if you dropped the back down, you saw something resembling Stonehenge – a row of 1958 transistors so powerful, so sensitive that I could spend winter nights tucked under my covers with the radio I had sneaked into my room while the snow squalled down, pulling in stations from the Hinterlands (WLS Chicago, CKLW, the Motor City, WOWO, Fort Wayne, KDKA in Pittsburgh, the first station in America) all the way to Boston. And what I heard on WBZ still echoes in my memory, and is my own Proustian Madelaine. Although the Celtics game Johnny Most called, “from high above courtside,” often bore little resemblance to
the actual contest as it was being played out on the parquet, it was the game the Celtic fan wanted to hear. In a gravelly voice roughed up by upwards of 800,000 smokes (years later one of my more rabid C’s fan and I did the math, another bit of evidence of my total immersion in all things Green), this son of America’s most notable Anarchist Johann Most turned every possession into a Jihad, every opponent into the Anti-Christ. They pelted him with eggs in Syracuse, and one memorable night in Philadelphia, where he was particularly hated, his pants caught on fire when he dropped one of his three or four Pall Malls he had going at any given juncture of a game.

When I was in fourth grade, I was a captain of one of the teams in my gym class. I called us The Celtics. By the time I reached high school, I was inking green shamrocks on the back spines of my high white Chucks, not having the courage to go my own way and take the floor in high blacks. That would have to wait. I wore number 14, which last May my school retired in a ceremony inducting me into the school’s Sports Hall of Fame and presented me with the jersey itself, because I needed to be like Bob. The Cooz, that is. I made what was ultimately to be a disastrous college choice based on the single fact that Notre Dame’s basketball team wore high blacks and wore jerseys festooned with green shamrocks. I spent four miserable years in North Central Indiana (a geography joke I tell all my classes, all these years: Q: Why is Indiana so windy? A: Because Illinois blows and Ohio sucks) at a school with no females, no credibility and no fun, but I did, in fact, get to wear the high blacks (Johnny Dee All Stars, not Chuck Taylors, since our coach sensed there might be some money in sneaker graft, which shows just how prescient Johnny Dee was) and the shamrock on my jersey, but none of that helped me as I walked up one side of the rostrum in May of 1972 to receive my diploma from Fr. Hesburgh, and right off the other side into a deuce and a quarter on my drafted way into the Vietnam Era Army.

I got sent to the other jungle. Stationed in Panama for nineteen months, punctuated by four months temporary duty to play on the All-Army Team, coached by a guy named Hal Fischer, who was later to be Red Holtzman’s assistant with the hated Knicks, I maintain a most vivid recollection of borrowing a friend’s Volkswagen Bus, and driving it up to the top of Mars Hill (the highest point in Panama, a spot immortalized by Keats’ line in “On First Looking Into Chapman’s Homer,” where “Silent on a peak in Darien I stood,” the only place on earth where you can see the Atlantic and the Pacific at the same time) to pull in Johnny Most on Armed Forces Radio call Game Six of the 1974 Bucks-Celts game, the one in which Big Red Cowens outhustled fat Oscar Robertson for a loose ball, diving on it at half-court and with the ball clutched to his chest, full out on the floor, bouncing about fifty feet out of bounds, only to be called for travelling. Of all the moments in Celtic history when Johnny Most soared with furious indignation up into Dog Range, this was his finest moment. There was a world-wide conspiracy, I recall thinking as I heard Johnny’s shrieking reprise, to quash the Celtics for good for the way they had dominated and terrorized the league in Red’s day. By now, Tommy Heinsohn stalked the sidelines, sneering at the officials, looking as if he had swallowed a grapefruit.

After I got out of the Army, I was set to move to Boston to fulfill a lifelong dream, formed in those nascent stages by listening to Dick Summer on ‘BZ simply recite the place names of the region on his all-night show. Marblehead. Quincy. Scituate. Watertown. I vowed to make them all mine, so I enrolled at Boston University for grad school, thinking no farther down the line that to reunite with a woman I had been friends with at Notre Dame, a St. Mary’s student named Jane McCormick, with whom I had stayed in contact over my two years in the Army. She had by this time, early 1975, moved to Brookline, and taken a job teaching dance and art in the Boston Public Schools. As I prepared to visit my beloved Boston for the first time in March of ‘75, she called me on night in Weedsport. She was psyched to tell me she’d taken the liberty of fixing me up, sort of, with her cousin Celeste, who was living in Brookline too, and teaching in a nearby town called Needham. She told me I’d really like this woman, and I thought, “What a coincidence! Imagine finding a cousin in Boston.” How could I have known that Celeste had over one hundred first cousins, her mother one of thirteen, her father one of nine? Well, it was all of a piece, methinks. Boston. Shamrocks. Irish heritage, where all you have to do is roll over in bed and make skin contact and you’re pregnant with another one.

I fall madly and seriously for this woman Celeste that very first night. I had driven six hours to get to Boston, and when I arrived at Jane’s apartment, she says to me, “Celeste will be a bit late because she’s on a ski trip with her students, but she wanted me to give you this….” I open the envelope to find a note: “Hi, Tom. I can’t wait to meet you. Jane has told me so many stories about you. But I’m going to be a little late, so here’s a map to my apartment, and would you mind taking these keys and going there and walk my dog?” I find my way to the apartment in Coolidge Corner (where I am fated to spend eight glorious years), climb the three flights, unlock the door and there he is. Posing regally, Shamus the Afghan Hound, who is to become my boon companion for fourteen years. We sniff each other out and seem to pass mutual muster, so it’s off for a spin around the neighbourhood. Later that night, Celeste and I meet, fall impossibly in love, and all I can do is drive back to Upstate New York thinking about her and wondering what I should do to impress her on a first date. Turns out I don’t have to worry about it. She calls me later that week and asks, “Would you like to go see the Celtics play?” I mean, I try to play it casual, but my heart is pounding ten ways to kingdom come. I say yes I would, thank you, and the next Friday, I’m back on I-90, pedal to the metal. I don’t say a word to her about my Celtic Jones. Instead, I allow her to shepherd me to the Garden, to our seats ABOVE the rafters, and then listen quietly while she begins to point out some of the finer points of Celticia. “You see number 17 there?” I see Hondo and nod, yes, I do. She continues. “Watch what he does. At the end of every pregame warmup he does the same thing: he’ll take three layups just standing there under the basket, then flip the ball to the ballboy and go over and sit down.” I nod, grateful, it would seem, to have been given this intelligence, which I knew twelve years ago when Havlicek broke into the league, having played at Ohio State with Bobby Knight and Jerry Lucas and even Larry Siegfried! Well, the game went by in a Big Crush-Blur, Celeste yakking all the way, thrilled to have such a receptive audience, somebody so palpably grateful for all this minutiae about the C’s.

I find out about a month later, as I was gearing up to make the full-time move, first to Allston (where every grad student had to live – it was a rule), that Celeste had gone to Jane, all aglow, to relate to her every excruciatingly tiny detail of our date at the Garden. I guess she must have used the phrase “…I was able to tell him about….” Jane was absolutely flabbergasted. “You did WHAT? You “explained” the Celtics to him? Don’t you know that if he was known for anything at Notre Dame, it was that he was the world’s greatest Celtic fanatic!”

Well, brothers and sisters, I guess that cinched it. She knew that Tommy McGraw got brung up to be a gennelmun by his mother, and keeping my mouth shut for one time in my life paid off. We moved in together at Shamus’ apartment in Cool Corner, fell hard in love, lived there for seven years, decided to get married, then I sat in the Fertility Stone at Avebury, the monolithic stone circles in Wiltshire, England, when I taught there in ‘87-’88, had three children in four years, and now thirty-four years on are older, a little battered by the parental juggernaut, a bit less quick but more in love now than we were that night when she told me everything a guy could care to know about a team which shimmered in green, which defined for a young basketball player what it meant to win, and to win with assuredness bordering on arrogance, which was chronicled by a madman “high above courtside” and housed in a frowsty old barn where you had to walk through a restroom to get to some certain seats, and had to sit with your head down at your knees to get a glimpse of about half the court in others (the famous “obstructed view” tickets, cut to fit a tight budget), and which has housed its gods in its own Pantheon, its own pure mythos.

So I’m sorry to have ended up telling stories, friend, and I’ll remember to hang my head, like the Buddhist whose steps are careful to avoid killing things and say, for the last time, I’m sorry that my Celtics, the Celtics of the Syracuse War Memorial, of a fourth-grade team in a tiny village along the Erie Canal in the late 50’s, of the shamrock and the 50 thousand watt heart of Johnny Most, of the love of my life, my wife, I’m sorry that those Celtics ain’t no more.