A Lucky Break

A Biograph Natural shooting over a hapless dupe

Note: The CBA was the Central Basketball Alliance. It lasted three seasons -- 1980-81, 1981-82 and 1982-83 -- which was probably long enough.

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During the month of March, each year, the season for the men's basketball conference tournaments and the NCAA men’s basketball tournament is a blessing. The surprises and suspenseful moments of the games help get basketball junkies, like me, through those last tedious days of winter.

Of course, to be a junkie in full bloom one must still play the game. Since I quit playing basketball in 1994, I suppose I’ve been a junkie in recovery. Yes, I’ll always miss the way a perfectly-released jump shot felt as it left my fingertips. Nothing in my life has replaced the pure satisfaction that came from stealing the ball from an opponent, just as he stumbles over his hubris. 

Every March, as my favorite teams are eliminated and my brackets crumble, I cling to the notion that by the time of the Final Four games, the warm spring weather will have arrived ... and baseball season will already be underway. Although I enjoyed playing basketball more than baseball and softball, in my sorely missed playing days, baseball was my truly first love in sports.

The years spent covering college basketball, as a writer, helped to soothe my basketball jones. Since the improvisational aspect of basketball has always appealed to me, from a seat on press row it's fun to watch particular players who have a special knack for seizing the moment. If it's a player you've seen plenty of, sometimes, from the expression on his face, sometimes you can sense what he's about to do, sort of like it was when I played and knew my teammates' moves.  

While basketball is in some ways a finesse game, more than a power game like football -- injury-wise -- if you play enough of basketball there are some brutal truths it will inevitably serve up. And, although I’ve heard people claim that we can’t remember pain, I have not forgotten what it felt like to dislocate my right ankle on the afternoon of April 20, 1985; I was undercut finishing an out-of-control, one-on-five fast break. While I'd love to say the ball went in the basket, I don't remember that part. 

What I do remember is flopping around on the hardwood floor, like a fish out of water; literally, out of control. Take it from me, dear reader, popping your foot off the end of your leg hurts way too much to forget -- think James Caan in “Misery” (1990).

However, this story is about another injury. On March 4, 1982, my then-34-year-old nose was broken during the course of a basketball game. In that time, the Biograph Theatre, which I managed, had a men's team in a league called the Central Basketball Alliance. Other teams were sponsored by the Track, Soble’s, Hababa’s, the Jade Elephant, etc. Personnel-wise, the CBA was an off-shoot of the Fan District Softball League, with some of the same characters onboard. 

The morning after my nose was bashed in by an opponent’s upwardly thrust elbow, while I was coming down from an attempt at snatching a rebound, I went to Stuart Circle Hospital to have the damage checked.

My nose wasn’t just broken, it had been split open at the bridge in four directions. The emergency room doc used Super Glue and a butterfly clamp to put it all back together. This was before such glue had been approved for use in this country, so he asked me not to tell anyone what he had done. I expect the statute of limitations has run out.

After getting an X-ray, I was waiting around in the hospital lobby to sign some papers and my grandmother -- Emily “Villa” Collins Owen -- was wheeled by. She was stretched out on a hospital bed. As I grew up in her home and was still very close to her, it had the same panic impact as seeing one’s parent in such an abrupt context.

We spoke briefly. She said she was feeling a little weak from a cold and had decided to spend the night in the hospital. She lived just a few blocks away. Pretending to ignore my gripping sense of panic, I calmly assured Nana (pronounced Ny-nuh) I’d be back during visiting hours, to see how she was doing.

That evening I took my then-12-year-old daughter, Katey, with me to see Nana. The doctor came in her room and told us she’d be fine with a good night’s rest. Katey and I spent a half-hour making our 83-year-old Nana laugh as best she could ... feeling a little weak.

Six decades before this episode she had trained to be a nurse at that same hospital, which has now been converted into condos. Nana died later that night; it was in the wee hours of the morning. When the phone call from her doctor came, the news sent a shock-wave through my being unlike anything else, before or since. It was a kind of pain new to me. 

As that news sunk in, I came to realize that had luck not interposed a fate-changing elbow to my beak, Katey and I may not have had that last precious visit with Nana. Knowing my grandmother, I'm not at all sure she would have let anybody know she was in the hospital. At least, not right away.

Which means I have to say the palooka who elbowed me in that basketball game did me a favor. Perhaps in more ways than one.

You see, in order to keep playing in the Biograph’s games in that season, I needed to protect my nose while it healed. So, I got one of those protective aluminum nose-guards I’d seen players wear. It was a primitive version of the much improved plastic masks that came later. 

Moreover, as a kid, I saw future-NBA great Jerry West wearing such a broken-nose-protector when he was playing his college ball at West Virginia. It impressed the 12-year-old version of me to no end; I marveled at how tough and focused West was.

So, wearing what was to me a Jerry West mask, I played the rest of that CBA season -- maybe five more games. Now I have to believe that period was about the best basketball I ever played. Maybe not wanting another whack to the nose made me a little more careful. Maybe more purposeful, too, which is probably a good trait for a point guard to have.

Anyway, it was apparently just what my game had been needing. Our team didn’t lose another game that year; the Biograph Naturals won the league’s championship.

The Biograph Naturals, 1981-82 CBA champions.

 

In looking back on those weeks after my grandmother's death, I can easily see that in testing my nerve, in a fashion modeled after the way West had tested his, I was living out a boyhood dream. No doubt, some of the game's lucky breaks can only be seen and fully appreciated with a rear-view mirror perspective. 

 

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