by Steve Rushin
I don’t know what he’s told Mom and Dad, but he tells me that the freshmen were required to dig a mock grave in the front yard of their frat house and bury an effigy of a fictitious alumnus in an annual rite of freshman passage. Tom thought there must be a more efficient way to make a six-foot hole than with a spade and a wheelbarrow, and so he and a colleague mixed oxygen and acetylene in a trash bag, which blew the yard, and themselves, to smithereens.
The explosion was heard several blocks away at the ER, to which Tom was taken posthaste. The concussive wave he touched off blew his pants into tatters. “The first thing I did was look in my boxers,” Tom confesses, as the Katy Lied cassette plays between us at 1 a.m., “to see if I’d blown my balls off.”
He hadn’t. Like the Roadrunner, Tom always emerges from these situations with his extremities intact and his Permanent Record pristine. This time is no exception, apart from his ruptured eardrums and absent eyebrows.
He returns from Iowa as if from a five-year circumnavigation of the globe. He’s into bands I’ve never heard of that open for bigger acts I’ve still never heard of. “I saw this awesome band called 10,000 Maniacs open for R.E.M.,” he tells me. “I hung out with R.E.M. at a bar after the gig, then we all went to some random house after that.
“At the Violent Femmes show in Iowa City,” Tom says, “my buddy Shithead, who never wears underwear, had a hole in the thigh of his jeans. One of us ripped his pant leg off, leaving him partially naked. He got onstage to dance and got booted out by security. But he snuck back into the balcony and sprayed the crowd with a fire extinguisher…”
The stories go on like this, all of them involving college bands and buddies named Shithead being escorted out of bars, houses, or concert halls while wearing a T-shirt as a fig leaf.
Back in January, Mike and I drove down to Ames to visit Tom, two teetotalers staying overnight in the communal guest room of a fraternity house whose subtropical heating required us to sleep with the windows open on a 20-degree night. Not that we slept. The house throbbed and thrummed with music and mayhem until 3 a.m. We had left the hothouse party downstairs and ascended to the guest room, wall-to-wall and floor-to-ceiling bunk beds, stacked three-high, so that we very nearly had to be slid into them on long-handled peels of the sort that pizza makers use to slide pies into brick ovens. That we were the only sober people being warehoused in that room—quite likely the only sober occupants in the long and checkered history of that room—only heightened our discomfort. In this context, we were the debauched ones, wantonly undrunk.
Back in Bloomington, Mike sometimes carries a half-gallon carton of milk with him, swigging from it at parties to advertise his fealty to athletic good health, and our basketball team’s wholesome determination to follow wrestling and hockey to the mountaintop of high school jock experience: “going to State,” which is to say the high school state tournament.
5.
Hold On to Sixteen as
Long as You Can
Basketball is our outlet and our altar, our vocation and avocation. We play it in driveways and suburban parks, in cutoff sweats, in red Chucks with blue laces, in striped socks, terry-cloth wristbands, Rambis glasses, Kareem goggles, and careworn T-shirts from the Mychal Thompson Basketball Camp, where Dr. J signed a piece of notebook paper that I held out to him like a trembling leaf on a sapling branch. The magnificent orb of his Afro remained bowed over the card table as he signed with long tapered fingers that made the BIC pen in his hand look the way the scorecard pencils at Putt-Putt mini golf look in mine. When those fingers slid the notebook paper back to me, the signature on it—“Julius Dr. J Erving”—had the healing power of a real doctor signing a scrip for some powerful euphoric.
Thompson and Doc and all the other NBA players at camp carried leather briefcases that turned out to be backgammon sets. So strong was our desire to be these men that Mike and I asked for and received backgammon sets for Christmas, preparing ourselves for our future lives as Rolls-Royce-driving, fur-coat-wearing, prodigiously gifted professional basketball players exempted from gravity’s law.
That was years ago, in eighth grade. There has since emerged an even higher power, a basketball god greater than Doc. Larry Bird—Larry to us, shorn of surname—is why I wear white athletic tape on my fingers and black Converse Weapons whose soles I wipe with the sweaty palm of either hand before I shoot a free throw. Larry is the reason Mike and Ope and I watch every televised Celtics game as if we have a hundred grand riding on the outcome. “You are looking liiive…” Brent Musburger intones on CBS, stirring our blood as the lacquered crazy quilt of Boston Garden’s parquet floor fills the screen.
If we see something of ourselves in slow, white, earthbound Larry, we never say so out loud. All our other favorite players are black: Doc, Iceman, Gus Williams, Bernard King, and World B. Free, whose name I’ve written in ballpoint pen on the rubber ball I dribble and spin and shoot at home. That ball is attached to me like a goiter, its pebble-grained surface worn bald and smooth over the years.
We watch the Celtics in Mike’s basement, on the TV we call Richie the C, because it looks like Richie Cunningham’s 1950s console set on Happy Days, a great walnut casket, eternal and immovable by fewer than six men. Dad returns from his biennial trips to Japan to tell us of the consumer-electronic wonders that await us in our adulthood—that mythical space-age future—including slim high-resolution TVs that will hang above fireplaces like oil paintings. These TVs are already in the works in Tokyo, whose Akihabara neighborhood Dad describes as an electronic wonderland, where he first saw the Sony Walkman that is now part of any self-respecting basketball player’s pregame wardrobe.
Gazing into Richie the C, a TV that could never be hung above a fireplace without the aid of a crane, the only future we can see is the future of basketball, as Larry whips a no-look pass to Kevin McHale, Flip Saunders’s former teammate with the Gophers and a demigod himself, Orpheus to Larry’s Apollo. We have watched McHale play in person at Williams Arena on the campus of the U. Sitting up in the bleeders, with a box of popcorn and Cokes, engulfed by noise.
Woe unto Mrs. McCollow whenever she descends to the basement with 7 Ups and cheesy popcorn while Larry’s on a cold streak or the Celtics are suddenly trailing. “I thought you boys might like some popcorn,” says the woman we call Dory (though never within earshot) while standing in front of Richie the C with a butler’s tray.
“Jesus, Mom, can you just leave it on the table? We can’t see the game, for Chrissake!”
Dory shakes her head in quiet dismay but remains unbowed. “I’ll leave it here, boys. Oh dear. I’ve forgotten napkins. I’ll just nip back upstairs and—”
“Mom! Please! Nobody cares about napkins!”
Dory smoothes her apron with both hands as Ope and I sit on the couch in silent mortification. “Michael!” she mutters, disappearing up the stairs. “I never!”
In the absence of girlfriends, wives, children, or careers, Larry is our source of pride, our object of adoration, vessel of our hopes and frustrations. His achievements are our own, as are his failures. We defend him against charges of being inferior to Magic Johnson, of dunking lamely and cultivating a dubious mustache.
Our dream as basketball players is no longer to play for the Celtics or even for the Gophers. At seventeen, those dreams—of being Rod Carew or Evel Knievel or Rocky Balboa—have burst like soap bubbles, leaving only the faintest residue as evidence that they ever existed. Our dream now is to play one game on the famous raised court at Williams Arena, televised throughout Minnesota on channel 11, covered by the Minneapolis Star and Tribune and the St. Paul Pioneer Press and the Bloomington Sun. And this dream is only marginally more achievable than playing for the Celtics.
The dream is to play in the Minnesota state basketball tournament, which is always reduced to a single word: “State,” like “Oz” or “Mecca.”
Because for all the basketball we play—on playgrounds, driveways, and the court at the Y, with Nerf hoops and Stra
t-O-Matic boards—we play above all else for John F. Kennedy High School. We play in navy-piped double-knit polyester gold shorts and jerseys that fit us like sausage casings. In class, before practice, we doodle in our notebooks, redesigning our ridiculous warm-up suits, purchased in the early ’70s and never modified, so that the bell-bottom pants feature vertical stripes in navy and gold and white. They’re the kind of pants a color-blind Uncle Sam would wear to conceal his stilts in a Fourth of July parade.
We breezed through the regular season with 18 wins and 2 losses, both of them to Jefferson, the first time at our place on a half-court shot at the buzzer, leading me to the unspoken conclusion that those bastards from Prestigious West Bloomington might be unbeatable. It is inevitable that we face them again in the regional final of the playoffs: the Jefferson Jag-offs, denizens of Jock Hall, resplendent in their classic uniforms of Columbia blue and silver, in their blue Adidas Top Ten high-tops and shooting shirts with their names emblazoned on the back. Winner goes to State.
The game is in Minneapolis, on the neutral court at Augsburg College. I’ve never been as nervous or excited about anything in my life, even though I know instinctively that Jefferson will win, because winning is what they do, and pessimism is what I do. But I also feel—after playing basketball almost daily for the last five years—a serenity in surrendering to whatever happens.
Mom and Dad won’t witness it. They’re on a Mickey Mining sales-incentive trip to the Caribbean that was booked ages ago, when they assumed I wouldn’t be playing in the regional final for the right to go to State. Amy and John are old enough to be home alone. Tom and Jim are in Iowa and Illinois, respectively. No member of my family is there to witness the Kennedy Eagles—from the opening tap—beat the ever-living snot out of the Jefferson Jaguars.
Everything is easy. I feel like a precision component in a Swiss ass-kicking machine. I’m reminded of the moment in our driveway a few years ago when I finally beat Dad at one-on-one, despite his fifty-pound weight advantage and disinclination to play by the rules. In the waning moments of the game, the Kennedy student section chants, “Wrestling, hockey, basketball!” Our wrestling and hockey teams have already gone to State—wrestling won it all—and the growing chant serves as a taunt to the Jefferson players, parents, coaches, and student section. By the time the crowd counts down the final ten seconds, my own skin is pebble grained, like the basketball’s.
At the apocalyptic horn, I run around mazily before getting swallowed by court-storming students, a photo that will run on the front of the Bloomington Sun Sports section. Borne off my feet on a human tide. Jefferson cheerleaders are in tears.
I just want to get home, put Amy and John in Mom’s Accord, and drive us to Bridgeman’s ice-cream parlor, home of the La La Palooza Sundae, where Mom and Dad have taken us to celebrate good report cards and Dad treated Tom and me after taking us to see Jaws when I was eight.
I tell John and Amy to order anything they want. “On me.” It could hardly be otherwise. This feels like the first grown-up act of my life. It’s the first check I’ve ever reached for. Three marble sundaes. I calculate the 15 percent tip in my head and leave $1.78 on the table instead of grandly stuffing it into the waiter’s breast pocket, which is what I feel like doing.
Some of my teammates are partying or out with girlfriends or even celebrating at the Castle right now. Amy, John, and I are experiencing the instant hangover of the ice-cream brain freeze. For perhaps the last time in many years to come, I’m marking a milestone not with beer or champagne or cigar or shot glass but with vanilla ice cream, chocolate syrup, and sprinkles. The cherry on top is an actual cherry on top. Hold on to sixteen as long as you can—at least until you’re seventeen or eighteen.
When Mom phones from their Caribbean hotel to ask how the game went, I know she has prepared some maternal words of consolation. “We’re going to State,” I say casually. “They’re going to State!” Mom says, for the benefit of Dad, somewhere in the hotel room. There is disbelief, and joy, and a touch of melancholy when she speaks to me: “Oh, honey, I wish we were there.” A week later, Mom and Dad are back home and we are set to play the state quarterfinals in the home of the Golden Gophers. If we win there, we’re on to the final four at the Saint Paul Civic Center.
We skipped school yesterday for a banquet at the Saint Paul Athletic Club. Mom placed a matchbook with the SPAC logo into the maroon pages of a scrapbook she bought for me, along with the sign that had been taped to our mailbox this morning by the cheerleaders: YOU CAN DO IT…WE KNOW YOU CAN. GO STEVE!! SHOW ’EM WHO’S #1. It’s the first note I have ever gotten from a girl. Mom will place that in my scrapbook too. In her mind, this is my prom.
It always snows at state tournament time, what the rest of the country calls March. One and a half inches today and 88.6 inches for the winter, the third highest total in Twin Cities history. Inside Williams Arena, as the snow falls, we change out of ski jackets and into tiny shorts and tank tops. Bare thighs on cold metal folding chairs: the bane of every Minnesota basketball benchwarmer.
Dad leaves work on a Thursday to be at our afternoon game, against North Branch, who has a six-foot-ten-inch center. The raised floor at Williams Arena is springy. For the first and last time in my life, I easily dunk in the layup line. Our band is here, and I think of all the times I’ve sat in this building, singing along to the U fight song: “Min-ne-so-ta hats off to thee, to thy colors true we shall ever be…”
I’m out of school on a Thursday, dunking in warm-ups like Dr. J in my Uncle Sam pants. On the bus, Mike played McFadden and Whitehead’s “Ain’t No Stopping Us Now” on his Sanyo box with the single honeycomb speaker. And we are unstoppable, scoring over and under and around North Branch’s giant en route to a 54–41 cakewalk. Mike is interviewed postgame by Tom Ryther on channel 11. Back in our room at the Saint Paul Radisson, we wait through the weather to see our highlights on the ten o’clock news.
The next morning, the Star and Trib headline reads: KENNEDY’S RUSHIN PUTS RUSH ON FOE.
I don’t know what that means, but it’s a thrill to see my name in the Sports section. I can see Mom at home, scissoring the article out and pasting it into the maroon scrapbook. Dad will come home from 3M, sit in his Archie Bunker chair, snap open the paper, and stare through the hole where the piece used to be in sitcom-Dad exasperation.
The story begins: “Kennedy’s ‘forgotten man’ introduced himself to the fans and North Branch Thursday.
“Steve Rushin, a 6-foot-4 senior forward, averaged around seven points and seven rebounds a game during the regular season. Yesterday he got 14 points and 12 rebounds to lead the Eagles past North Branch in the opening game of Class AA.”
There follows a quote from me so anodyne (“The ball and the opportunities seemed to come to me today…”) that it reads like a ransom note cut and pasted from all the clichés uttered by all the other athletes in the rest of the day’s Sports section.
Outside our window at the Radisson, on top of the First National Bank building, is a red glowing number 1, fifty feet tall. We take it as a portent, our neon destiny. It doesn’t occur to me that every other kid on the other three remaining teams—including our next opponent, unbeaten and top-ranked Minneapolis North—is looking at the same number 1 and feeling identically destined.
The Saint Paul Civic Center is another hallowed venue, site of the televised state high school hockey tournament, whose iconic see-through Plexiglas dasher boards make the rink resemble a Lucite lottery drum. This is where I saw my first concert—Earth, Wind & Fire in eighth grade. This is where I watched professional wrestling—Tom threw potatoes into the ring on a Friday night, then watched the taped broadcast on channel 9 after Mass on Sunday morning to see the potatoes rain onto the wrestlers. Before one of those matches, in the crowded ticket lobby, I watched a heavy man fall dead of a heart attack while the mass of spectators moved around him and into the arena to see the insuperable tag team of Jesse “The Body” Ventura and Adrian Adonis.
/> The high polish of the basketball court reflects the arena lights above. Three months from now, Bruce Springsteen will play in this building and pull a young woman in jeans and a white T-shirt out of the front row to dance with him onstage as director Brian De Palma films them for what will become the Boss’s “Dancing in the Dark” video. We don’t know that she’s not a local girl from Fridley or South Saint Paul but an actress from Alabama named Courteney Cox. The thrill will be in seeing the Saint Paul Civic Center in heavy rotation on MTV, and in looking for Tom in the crowd shots. But the biggest thrill of all will be to say that Bruce, Mick, Keith, Dylan, and Prince played on that stage and so did we.
We’re playing Minneapolis North on channel 11. TV Week says we’re on opposite Dallas, Webster, The Dukes of Hazzard, and, on subscription cable, “The Untamed / Private eye tells a writer his romantic adventures. Kay Parker, Paul Thomas. 1978. Language, nudity, mature themes.” I’ve stepped inside my TV.
Minneapolis North is in the “inner city,” the setting of my favorite songs, and their black players are whom we imagine ourselves to be when we’re listening to R&B on KBEM on our boom boxes. But we’ve been pretending long enough now to feel at ease against any opponent on any court—playground or civic center—and by the time I get a rebound and putback to give us a 40–37 lead, we’re one quarter from playing White Bear Lake in the state championship game, if we can just hold it together for eight more minutes.
But North starts pressing, we turn the ball over for layups, struggle to get past half-court. In the ensuing avalanche, I’m reminded of casually opening a closet door and having all its contents fall on me. When my head finally emerges from the mountain of fallen boots and tennis racquets and suitcases, the last item in the closet—a bowling ball—falls off the shelf, causing birds to circle my noggin. We lose 59–52. The mimeographed box scores that circulate in the locker room after all our games—I like to press their purple ink to my face and drag in deeply the heady fumes—will show I had 10 points and 6 rebounds. I don’t care. My teammates and I are in tears. I mimic the heroically vanquished Larry Bird, after losing to Magic Johnson in the 1979 NCAA championship game, and hang a towel over my head.
