{"id":161877,"date":"2020-06-01T12:00:13","date_gmt":"2020-06-01T11:00:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=161877"},"modified":"2020-05-29T06:45:12","modified_gmt":"2020-05-29T05:45:12","slug":"passing-behind-our-backs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2020\/06\/passing-behind-our-backs\/","title":{"rendered":"Passing Behind Our Backs"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n
\"\"<\/a>

Bob Cousy<\/p><\/div>\n

I never met the great basketball player, Bob Cousy, the man known as \u201cthe Houdini of the Hardwood,\u201d yet he somehow influenced my life in ways I never knew, or to be more accurate, in ways I didn\u2019t reflect upon except in superficial ways.\u00a0 He was the guy who brought professional basketball into the modern era with his bag of fancy tricks that included no-look and behind-the-back passes, uncanny dribbling, and a magical court sense that made the fast break into an exquisite art form.\u00a0 The captain and point-guard of the Boston Celtics from 1950-1963, Cousy led the Celtics to six NBA titles, made thirteen all-star teams, and changed professional basketball from a stodgy, boring, and slow game into a fast-paced spectacle, entertainment as much as sport.\u00a0 He was a wizard with a basketball and set the stage for Guy Rodgers, \u201cPistol Pete\u201d Maravich, Bob Dylan, Magic Johnson, and Steve Nash, among other tricksters, modern Hermes.<\/p>\n

Over the years I have written a great deal on a very wide-range of topics, but it wasn\u2019t until a friend from high school recently sent me Gary Pomeranz\u2019s fascinating book, The Last Pass: Cousy, Russell, the Celtics, and What Matters in the End, <\/em>that something clicked for me.\u00a0 A few weeks previously, as the weather had turned spring-like, I had started to shoot hoops at our basket in the driveway. The warm air, the feel of a loose flowing freedom as I dribbled and shot, brought me back to the days when I spent so many hours playing in the Bronx schoolyards of my youth, perfecting my skills in what I can only call a fanatical way. Rushing to the schoolyard after school and on Saturday mornings to be the first there, to command the court, to compete with the older guys and beat their asses. Traveling around the city\u2019s best basketball neighborhoods to play and make my mark. The endless hours in gyms. The search for perfection.\u00a0 The adrenaline rush, the thrill, the joy of the perfect pass, the sweet swish of the net from a shot you had practiced a thousand times. From the age of eleven until twenty-three, basketball was central to my life and identity.\u00a0 It was my passion.<\/p>\n

It was during these recent days shooting around that I started to have almost nightly dreams of my younger years, playing basketball in high school and then in college on a Division I scholarship.\u00a0 They were very vivid dreams, and at the time, I didn\u2019t understand why I was having them.\u00a0 And they were starting to annoy me, as persistent and weird dreams can do.\u00a0 Begone, dread spirits!\u00a0 Yet I knew they were telling me to heed their tales told when no one was looking, only this dreamer in the night.<\/p>\n

While this was happening, I wrote an article about Bob Dylan and his recent release of \u201cMurder Most Foul,\u201d his powerful song about the assassination of President Kennedy, wherein he brilliantly accuses elements within the U.S. government and intelligence forces of killing the president in cold blood, while framing Lee Harvey Oswald for the deed. I had written about Dylan before, loved his music, and found him an intriguing if enigmatic character, a Houdini of song. \u201cMurder Most Foul\u201d seemed to burst out of Dylan after decades of avoiding straight-forward political themes. It struck me that with this song he had ripped off the masks he had been wearing for decades, as if he were Odysseus at the end of The Odyssey<\/em>, shrugging off his beggar\u2019s rags and announcing to the suitors of his wife Penelope that the gig was up and they were going down. It seemed to me that Dylan was coming full-circle, as if he were coming home to take revenge on the killers who had scarred his youth, as they did mine and so many others\u2019.\u00a0 \u201cLike a musician, like a harper, when\/ with quiet hand upon his instrument,\u201d Odysseus lets the arrow sing, Dylan reaches back to sing:<\/p>\n

The day they blew out the brains of the king
\nThousands were watching, no one saw a thing
\nIt happened so quickly, so quick, by surprise
\nRight there in front of everyone\u2019s eyes
\nGreatest magic trick ever under the sun
\nPerfectly executed, skillfully done<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Slowly it dawned on me that everyone\u2019s life has a shape, as if it were a drawing or story or song. And that if we pay close attention and see through all the snares and temptations meant to divert us from our true paths, we will find our beginnings in our ends and without directions we will find our way home.<\/p>\n

It is very hard to explain to someone who didn\u2019t know you once upon a time long before you met, how important certain activities were to you, what they meant and still mean in the deepest recesses of your psyche.\u00a0 How they shaped you, or better still, how you used them to bend your life when you strung your bow so effortlessly to hit the target that you aimed for. Or thought you were aiming for. \u00a0My life in basketball shaped the man that I became, but my wife only knows the aftermath since she met me when I had taken a long twenty-five-year vacation from basketball. \u00a0Like Cousy, sitting and talking with Pomeranz, or Dylan sharpening his arrows and letting them fly in his new song False Prophet<\/em>, I could say:<\/p>\n

You don\u2019t know me darlin\u2019 \u2013 you never would guess
\nI\u2019m nothing like my ghostly appearance would suggest
\nI ain\u2019t no False Prophet \u2013 I just said what I said
\nI\u2019m here to bring vengeance on somebody\u2019s head<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

While I am half-way through reading the Cousy book, I get its drift, where it\u2019s heading. In conversations with Pomeranz, he is hoping to be inspired to understand the journey that has left him, an old man, frightened, alone, and approaching death in a large house in Worcester, Massachusetts, trying to understand, not only his fraught relationship with his black Celtic teammate, Bill Russell, but what his life has been all about, the court wizardry and cheers, the years on the road, the applause and awards, the championships and the price they exacted. He went to the basketball wars and won, came home, but now wonders what home really means. Unlike Odysseus, he only has ghosts to slay.\u00a0 His wife is dead, and no suitors occupy the great house of shades.\u00a0 There is no one to kill except his regrets.<\/p>\n

My friend, Wayne, who sent me the book, spent three years in high school with me studying Greek, and over the course of those years, we translated Homer\u2019s The Odyssey<\/em> line by line. We were also basketball teammates. Odysseus, of course, was the ultimate trickster, the man of many wiles and disguises, what the nymph Calypso, who held Odysseus captive for seven years on her island Ogygia, called \u201ca rascal.\u201d\u00a0 Like Houdini, Odysseus was able to escape this phantom island with the help of the messenger and trickster Hermes. Like Cousy, Odysseus was the Houdini of the ancient world, the hero who could escape any trap and thread an arrow through the smallest space to defeat the enemy.\u00a0 Cousy\u2019s fierceness on the court is legendary; his poker face hid the killer instinct, like Odysseus with his wily habit of standing with downcast eyes to disguise his intent. \u00a0Cousy could thread a pass between an opponent\u2019s eyes without them blinking.\u00a0 They often never knew what hit them.<\/p>\n

I was reminded of this as I was rereading bits of Bob Dylan\u2019s fascinating and poetic memoir, Chronicles: Volume I<\/em>, and came upon his memory of hearing the news of the death of \u201cPistol\u201d Pete Maravich, the greatest scorer in college basketball history and a magician without par on the court. Maravich was Cousy\u2019s heir, and the blood line connects to Dylan also, a Houdini with words. \u00a0It was January 5, 1988:<\/p>\n

My aunt was in the kitchen and I sat down with her to talk and drink coffee.\u00a0 The radio was playing and morning news was on.\u00a0 I was startled to hear that Pete Maravich,the basketball player, had collapsed on a basketball court in Pasadena, just fell over and never got up.\u00a0 I\u2019d seen Maravich play in New Orleans once, when the Utah Jazz were the New Orleans Jazz.\u00a0 He was something to see \u2013 mop of brown hair, floppy socks \u2013 the holy terror of the basketball world \u2013 high flyin\u2019 \u2013 magician of the court.\u00a0 The night I saw him he dribbled the ball with his head, scored a behind the back, no look basket \u2013 dribbled the length of the court, threw the ball up off the glass and caught his own pass.\u00a0 He was fantastic.\u00a0 Scored something like thirty-eight points.\u00a0 He could have played blind.\u00a0 Pistol Pete hadn\u2019t played professionally for a while, and he was thought of as forgotten.\u00a0 I hadn\u2019t forgotten about him, though.\u00a0 Some people seem to fade away but then when they are truly gone, it\u2019s like they didn\u2019t fade away at all.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

He goes on to write that after hearing the news of Pistol Pete\u2019s sad death playing pickup basketball, he started and completed the song \u201cDignity\u201d the same day, and in the days that followed song after song flowed from his pen.\u00a0 The news of one creative spirit\u2019s death gave birth to another creative spirit\u2019s gift to life.\u00a0 (I am reminded of Shakespeare writing Hamlet after his father\u2019s death.) \u201cIt\u2019s like I saw the song up in front of me and overtook it, like I saw all the characters in this song and elected to cast my fortunes with them \u2026. The wind could never blow it out of my head.\u00a0 This song was a good thing to have.\u00a0 On a song like this, there\u2019s no end to things.\u201d<\/p>\n

No one wants to end, to fade away. To not be recognized. To die and be forgotten. To fail to make their mark. Not Dylan, Cousy, Maravich, me, nor you. \u00a0We all wish to become who we feel we were meant to be. To fulfill the creative dreams we had when young and not to waste our lives in trivial pursuits. Years pass and people often ask with Dylan in \u201cShooting Star\u201d:<\/p>\n

Seen a shooting star tonight
\nAnd I thought of me
\nIf I was still the same
\nIf I ever became what you wanted me to be
\nDid I miss the mark or overstep the line
\nThat only you could see?
\nSeen a shooting star tonight
\nAnd I thought of me<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I keep thinking: who is you for you?\u00a0 For me?<\/p>\n

When I was a young boy, I wanted to stand out, to be exceptional, to be one-of-a-kind, an individual.\u00a0 Basketball became my obsession and Bob Cousy my idol.\u00a0 I wanted to be a shooting star, a dribbling star, a passing star. I watched him on television, studying him. His every move inspired me to imitate it.\u00a0 I would spend hours every day practicing behind the back passes, first right-handed, then left, against the wall where I had marked an x in chalk.\u00a0 I worked on my peripheral vision, so I could see the whole court and control the show.\u00a0 In the hidden recesses of my basement, I used tape to mark spots on the floor where I spent hour after hour dribbling behind my back, first this way and then that, past imaginary opponents.\u00a0 I made dribbling glasses with black tape out of my mother\u2019s old sun glasses.\u00a0 Worked on circling the ball behind my back either way. Hour after hour, day after day, year after year, I devoted myself to perfecting my basketball skills as a point guard. Being like Bob Cousy. Being the one whose magic feats were the talk of the town the following day.<\/p>\n

One day, I met and talked with Paul Newman on the street after high school basketball practice. When I was leaving, he called me Fast Eddie, which to my mind added to the mystique I felt as a trickster on the hardwood.\u00a0 I felt fast and loose like Paul\u2019s character Eddie Felson in The Hustler<\/em> when he was on a roll with his cue stick, \u201cYou don\u2019t have to look, you just Know.\u00a0 You make shots that nobody has ever made before.\u00a0 I can play that game the way\u2026. Nobody\u2019s ever played it before.\u201d That was my goal and the impetus behind my fanatical devotion to practice. I loved it, there was joy in it, but there was also a driven quality to my quest.<\/p>\n

For whom?\u00a0 Only you?<\/p>\n

I was easily bored by conventional life and conventional basketball.\u00a0 But the conventional world surrounded me. It was in school, church, the way people talked and walked; it seemed like people were straight-jacketed, which they were.\u00a0 Blake\u2019s mind-forged manacles. I sensed people were dissemblers, and that lies were the essence of social life.<\/p>\n

Nowhere was this truer than on the basketball court in high school and college where the coaches had their systems and their rules and discouraged innovation, as if it would reveal them to be artists in disguise, weird, less-than-manly men who couldn\u2019t run a tight ship.\u00a0 They always rewarded those who obeyed them and kept within the strict rules of the system. Creativity frightened them.\u00a0 The old ways sufficed. \u00a0It was just like society, and though Cousy had broken through and been idolized for doing so, he had retired from the Celtics in the spring of 1963, while the high school and college programs were stuck in the past.<\/p>\n

I felt imprisoned. I wanted to bust out and play free.\u00a0 Be free.\u00a0 It was like the classics that I studied in school: the lesson was always that the exploits you read about were things of the past, and now we were civilized gentlemen who must learn the rules of the game and play by them.\u00a0 Tradition. But the rules were suffocating me.<\/p>\n

The rules of the game had almost brought the world to an end during the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962. The rules of the game had created a system of war and racism that was badly broken, resulting in the savage killing not only of a President who had undergone a radical spiritual conversion toward peace-making, but four little black girls in the 16th<\/sup> Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama on Sunday September 15, 1963, a year to the day after I started college with my trivial young man\u2019s dreams of being the Cousy of college hoops.\u00a0 The rules of the game would soon be violated by Dylan at the 1964 Newport Folk Festival, when he would shock Pete Seeger and others with his song, \u201cMr. Tambourine Man,\u201d a radical break with strictly political songs in favor of pure dazzling poetry in song.\u00a0 That was a Cousy moment, poetry in motion, Houdini out of the locked box, dancing \u201cbeneath the diamond sky with one hand waving free.\u201d<\/p>\n

Bob Dylan, whose life and career follows Odysseus\u2019 trajectory, ended his 2017 Nobel Award Lecture with the first line of the Odyssey: \u201cSing in me, oh Muse, and through me tell the story.\u201d\u00a0 My friend Wayne and I, together with all our high school classmates, had memorized those lines in Greek.\u00a0 They were ingrained in us for life, as they have been for Dylan.<\/p>\n

But tell what story?\u00a0 For whom?\u00a0 Only you?<\/p>\n

Dylan has told so many.\u00a0 Here\u2019s one I have for you, one you never heard. Here are the opening lines; let\u2019s call it Book I, not that a Goddess intervened, but it was, in Odysseus\u2019 words, the beginning of the end of my \u201cclean-cut game.\u201d<\/p>\n

A month after the Cuban missile crisis, I played my first college basketball game.\u00a0 In those days, all freshman were required by the rules of the game to play one year of freshman basketball before playing varsity.\u00a0 This was the day I had been waiting for since the sixth grade when my dedication to basketball began.\u00a0 My blood was flowing fast, I had no fear, and was ready to use all the skills I had spent years honing.\u00a0 The stands were packed.\u00a0 My proud family sat a few rows up behind our bench, my parents and four of my sisters, two of whom were quite young at eight and eleven-years-old.<\/p>\n

The game was close, back and forth it went.\u00a0 With about a minute and a half left, we were leading by two points.\u00a0 The other coach called a time out with the ball in their possession. In the huddle, our coach assigned me to guard the opponent\u2019s best player, a six-foot-four inch jumping jack who was highly acclaimed and a very good player by the name of Albie Grant.\u00a0 I was five-foot-eleven, and beside my offensive skills, was a tough and tenacious very well-conditioned defender who took pride in sticking to an opponent like glue.\u00a0 They threw the ball in and screened for Grant. \u00a0He got the ball and I got in his face.\u00a0 He went up for a jump shot from about 20 feet out, and since I was not going to block his shot, I did what all good defenders do, I got my hand in front of his eyes.\u00a0 But he made the shot anyway, and the referee called a shooting foul on me.\u00a0 But I never touched him.\u00a0 It was a terrible call, but I could do nothing about it.<\/p>\n

Behind my back, I could hear my coach cursing me out with every name in the book \u2013 you fucking bastard, you shit, etc.\u00a0 He could be heard throughout the gym.\u00a0 The crowd went silent.\u00a0 He kept cursing me out and my already sweaty, red face must have turned purple.\u00a0 I felt on fire.\u00a0 He took me out of the game, a game I had played throughout.\u00a0 He kept cursing at me.\u00a0 I sat away from him on the bench and he came down and stood over me, calling me every name in his limited vocabulary, you fucking this, you fucking that.\u00a0 I looked at him in rage.\u00a0 The game continued.\u00a0 Grant made the free throw and we lost by one point.\u00a0 As we walked off the court to the locker room door at the end, he kept screaming invective at me.\u00a0 I could feel my rage swelling. My family was descending from the stands and could hear it all.\u00a0 I noticed others staring in disbelief. To say it was humiliating barely captures what it felt like, but just as I played the game fiercely, I was not one to take such abuse.\u00a0 But I kept telling myself to control myself.\u00a0 It was the coach who was making a fool of himself.\u00a0 Then, when we entered the locker room, he let loose at me again, you fucking idiot, you fucking bastard\u2026when I snapped and grabbed him by his shirt and tie, my hands around his neck, I threw him up against the wall and let him have it, screaming that I\u2019d had enough of his shit and I would kill him if he ever did it again.\u00a0 All hell broke loose as people were pulling me off him, and my father, who was outside the locker room, came rushing in to intervene.<\/p>\n

Years of passionate dedication to becoming the best basketball player I could, came to this.\u00a0 I had reacted in fury to being humiliated \u201cin my own house\u201d in front of my family.\u00a0 I think now of Odysseus when he stood on the broad door sill and killed Ant\u00cdno\u00f6s, the worst of the suitors of his wife, Penelope.\u00a0 \u201cOdysseus\u2019 arrow hit him under the chin\/ and punched up to the feathers through his throat.\u201d\u00a0 How dare he take revenge and defend his honor, came the shouts from the easily offended but secretly guilty. The other suitors screamed at him: \u201cFoul!\u00a0 To shoot at a man!\u00a0 That was your last shot.\u201d<\/p>\n

It wasn\u2019t mine, but that is the rest of the story.\u00a0 My craft changed in the following years.\u00a0 I no longer tried to imitate other tricksters like Bob Cousy or Bob Dylan.\u00a0 They have their own tales to tell and dwell upon. Their words are not mine.<\/p>\n

Now I play with words in my own way.<\/p>\n

But like Bob Dylan, \u201cI return once again to Homer who says, \u2018Sing in me, oh Muse, and through me tell the story.\u2019”<\/p>\n

Our stories often happen behind our backs where we can\u2019t see them. Telling them is the trick.\u00a0 You need to turn around and see what\u2019s behind you to pass them around.<\/p>\n

__________________________________________<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

Edward Curtin is a writer whose work has appeared widely. He is a member of the TRANSCEND Network for Peace Development Environment<\/a>. Website: <\/em>Behind the Curtain<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 edwardcurtin.com<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Like Bob Dylan, \u201cI return once again to Homer who says, \u2018Sing in me, oh Muse, and through me tell the story.\u2019\u201d Our stories often happen behind our backs where we can\u2019t see them. Telling them is the trick. You need to turn around and see what\u2019s behind you to pass them around. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":161878,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[40],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-161877","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-transcend-members"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/161877","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=161877"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/161877\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/161878"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=161877"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=161877"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=161877"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}