Cul-de-sacs

“Two roads diverged in a yellow wood/And sorry I could not travel both.”–Robert Frost

Living in California assures one serene, winding, snake-coiled drives along bristled coastline, and humped, turtle-back emerald hillsides, to scale upon. It gives you the feeling of security, as you sit, piercing a steak in a manicured backyard somewhere, under a tangerine sun, listening to Jazz. But along even this journey, one will often find forgotten roads. Places forged by a ranch hand, say fifty plus years ago, that have been covered in faded cafe colored brush, and the wile of poison ivy. A road that led somewhere,  that took grit and hard work, and is still littered with the remains of its master traveler: a person long gone to other adventures, or in the grips of death.

Death is like a mirage, a road of beauty that abruptly leads one to a curbed cul-de-sac. At the edge of that cul-de-sac, there are wild ferns, gardens of tea roses, apple orchards, oranges, melons, oak trees squat along the ground, and a wind that blows its velvet hands through your hair. But it’s covered in fences of barbed-wire. You’re stuck; going nowhere. The longing becomes great, because you had no idea this is where things would end. And when it ends, you are one of two people: the one succumbed in its strangle, or the one on the outside, powerless, saying an unwilling goodbye to a special soul–like a “hey, I’ll see you later?”

I did that yesterday. Her name was Pat. She was seventy-one, but filled with the gusto of a twenty-five year old. Her love was tangible; it still is tangible. She was a world traveler, a lover of food and dogs, and believed in everyone.  I said goodbye…unwillingly.

In the world of sports we are left with similar feelings.  People we religiously watched, pass away. Though we never personally met them, it’s as if we knew them, because at one time on the school yard playground we had similar dreams. They also gave us hope for tomorrow. Something, or somebody to look forward to, for kids of poverty like myself, who never knew anything more than what it meant to survive. All that is left of them, is their memories, the what-ifs, and the highlights to help us judge what could have been. And yet we grasp to the moments like a child does sand, watching them trickle through the cracks of our fingers. When they do, all is lost. At least for a moment, that is.

On June 7th, 1993, the New Jersey Nets were altered forever. Their twenty-eight year old, emotional, fiery, three-point shooting guard, Drazen Petrovic perished in a car accident on a Germany freeway. Petrovic was in the prime of his career.  Coming off a season in which he shot 45% from the three point line, he averaged 22.6 points, leading the Nets to the first round of the playoffs, where they lost a tough five game series to the Cavaliers.  Petrovic earned all-NBA third team status and was named team M.V.P. He, Derrick Coleman, and Kenny Anderson were arguably the best trio in all of hoops.

Who could possibly forget his famous game in 1992 against M.J., when the cocky guard waved the great over to play him tighter? Once M.J. decided to do so, Petrovic nailed a three pointer, four feet from behind the three point line, further adding to his game high forty.  A winner on every stage, Petrovic’s accolades include: several European league championships, two silvers, and a bronze in the Olympics, and the Yugoslavian league single game scoring record, 112 points. Noted as one of the greatest players in European history, he paved the way for future greats such as Dirk Nowitski, and Pau Gasol.

His sudden death shattered not only the promise of a rising organization, but altered three superstars forever.  Coleman became laden with injuries, overweight, and turned to one of the biggest busts in league history.  Anderson lost his drive and was soon dealt to Charlotte, where he never lived up to the hype.  Hall of Fame coach Chuck Daly was fired, and has not coached since. The Nets made the playoffs just twice in the next seven years, and defaced themselves in the mid-90’s as a team of super selfish athletes with bloated contracts and no production.

No more than a month later, the NBA said  goodbye to another rising talent. Boston swing-man, Reggie Lewis, coming off a career best 20.8 points per game, died of heart malformations.  That season he had taken the reigns from Larry Bird as the teams  franchise player, and was beginning his rise into NBA stardom.  A 6’7 athletic swing-man, with a deadly mid-range game, Lewis had defied logic numerous times by overcoming incredible odds. Born in the tough neighborhoods of Baltimore, Maryland, he lived in the shadows of  local greats like Mugsy Bogues, David Wingate, and Reggie Williams. He played ball at Dunbar High School, coming off the bench, for a program that was 59-0 during his Junior and Senior seasons; ranked #1 nationally.

Due to the team’s tremendous depth, Lewis never propelled into a high school stat filler.  This caused his recruiting value to drop, which is the reason Northeastern University in Boston, was one of few schools to offer him a scholarship. Yet it was there that Lewis became the best player to ever adorn a Husky jersey. He averaged a career 22.2 points per game, and left as the school’s all-time leading scorer. His 2,708 career points, currently ranks him 9th all time in the NCAA’s.

It was Lewis’ tremendous athleticism, that drew comparisons to the other tragic Celtic Len Bias, that caused Boston to admire him enough, when they selected him with the 22nd pick in the 1987 draft. Entering the most storied franchise in NBA history, with a lineup boasting Larry Bird, Kevin Mchale, and Robert Parish, Lewis had to work for every minute on the hardwood. He played just 450 minutes his rookie season, and yet within the depth of the Celtics roster would soon earn himself a major, starting role.

Entering training camp with a vigor for his sophomore season, the young Lewis earned that role over aging vet Dennis Johnson. With Bird struggling with back issues, a new void offensively catapulted Lewis into one of the teams go-to-guys. He averaged 18.5 points per game, and a second best, 20.3 per night in the postseason.  

From 89-91, Lewis continued as the teams budding star, in the new era of the franchise.  In the 1991 postseason, Lewis asserted himself,  averaging a team best 22.3 points per game, where they lost to the bad boy Pistons in six in the Conference semi-finals. Lewis improved upon that the following season. With bird in the twilight of his famed career, the young star became the #1 option offensively, and led the team in scoring, including a streak of forty-seven straight games scoring in double digits. The team finished 51-31 ,winning the Atlantic division, before losing a grueling seven game series to the high flying Cavs in the Conference semi-finals.

Yet Lewis saved the best for last. The 92-93′ season, the first in thirteen years without Larry Bird, the young star notched his greatest scoring season of his career (20.8), and by mid-season,  played in his first all-star game, scoring seven points in fifteen minutes off the bench for the East. Lewis’ highlight of his career came early in the season when he blocked four M.J. shots in a win over the elite Bulls. That season the Celtics finished 48-34, on the back of the young star, before suprisingly bowing out in four, to the Hornets in the first round. 

The defeat was not that suprising, considering Lewis fainted in game one, upon the parquet floor of the Boston Garden, in front of more than 30,000 rioting fans. A collapse that held more weight than anybody could have expected, because that would be Reggie Lewis last game

 Two months after the disappointment of a first round series defeat, Lewis was cleared to play by a group of the best cardiac doctors in the country. Unfortunately it would not be more than a week after his release, that Lewis would faint in a team practice and perish. The guy who had overcome the rough streets of Baltimore, living under the shadows at Dunbar high, playing for a small university, then making a name for himself on a team in Boston with a collective of future hall of famers, had finally lost a battle.

That battle was one between life and death.

After his death, the big three officially broke up.  McHale retired in the summer of 1993, and Robert Parish signed with the Bulls.  The great Celtics dynasty, a team who won three titles, with five finals appearance in the 80’s, disbanded and went into their longest playoff drought in team history. 

In the greatest conundrum we face in this life, I would be remiss to ignore its power to evolve us into better human beings.  Our evolution is not one that forgets, or pretends that the entities of those gone before us do not haunt us daily. Rather, our evolution is one that admits to their power to create within us.  Robert Frost in The Road Not Taken said, “I shall be telling this with a sigh/Somewhere ages and ages hence.” Frost compares life’s biggest paradigms to a sigh, an act of exhalation, and is it not the breath that gives us life?  That breath is love, a power that shapes and molds us into more productive citizens. Our souls, interlocked with memories of those we loved most, embrace their stories, not only as figures of accomplishments, but as embraces in the central parts of our beings.

Nothing can submit us to death’s strangle in the depths of who we become, because the memories of those before us shape and re-shape as our life’s progress.  Like Petrovic, Lewis, and my friend Pat, their sink unto death is nothing more than a re-defining of who they are yesterday, today, and forever.

Therefore, I will forever ride upon the roads they forged before me, because there, I can still faintly see them. They’ve become people without form, people of mystery. People who without question are from everlasting to everlasting, with stories worthy of remembering.

–Luke Johnson