One Fine Evening

The past comes upon you like smoke on the air, you can smell it and find yourself gone,
To a place that you lived without worry or care, isn’t that where we all once came from?

– Mary Chapin Carpenter from The Age of Miracles (2010)

This was back in the day, way back, a half century ago, a memory that seems at once both distant and fresh. It is the kind of memory that teases, a snapshot with faded colors and creased edges, making you feel for just a moment that you can somehow really get back there before the mortgage payments, the back pain and the sleepwalking trips to the bathroom. Before all the mistakes you and everyone else you know are going to make. Before time slips away because that is all time has ever done.

Before you learn that everything will be alright anyway but only if you let it be.

This was a Tuesday evening high school basketball game in March of 1972, a day after I turned 17 years old. It was the Nassau County semi-finals, played at Hofstra in front of more than four thousand, mostly partisan teenagers like me, the largest crowd in New York State schoolboy history. This was Arnold Stone and his underdog Lawrence Golden Tornadoes taking on William “Beaver” Smith and the prior year’s champion South Side Cyclones of Rockville Centre.

I was in 11^th grade at Lawrence and had no idea what a golden tornado was or that Georgia Tech football had the nickname for a couple of decades in the early 20^th century. Tornadoes. Cyclones. Didn’t give these stormy names a second thought because climate change was just another name for spring break. I knew we were the blue and gold and that was about it. There was of course that Golden Tornado restaurant on the corner of Branch Boulevard and Peninsula Boulevard across the street from Public School No. 6. A lunch hour fried egg sub sandwich with the hash brown potatoes thrown right in. An always welcoming owner named Joe whose alleged penchant for bookmaking reportedly earned some time out from behind the counter. The best pinball machine with real three-dimensional silver metal balls and genuine tilt pronouncements. Most of all, the time to eat and play with friends willing to just stand by the side of the glass and wait their turn.

They’re all gone now, the restaurant, the public elementary school, and yes, Arnold and Beaver.

I had tried out for the team the previous summer of 1971 but needed more inches, more pounds and more talent. The coach was Fred Seger, a basketball and baseball star at Nebraska in the 1950s, ahead of his time in terms of physical conditioning. An intimidating man to anyone who had some growing and growing up to do. When I found out I could walk off as easily as I had walked on, with no one noticing either, I turned to writing about the season for the school paper. This had allowed me to witness an exhibition debacle the prior fall against Suffolk County Brentwood’s Mitch Kupchak of LA Lakers fame that made me glad I was sitting safely above court level with a pen and pad. But somehow, the boys from the Five Towns were here just a few months later playing to the hopes of their mere mortal classmates, some carrying signs that read THE ONLY WAY TO BEAT A BEAVER IS WITH A STONE.

This was years before ESPN, years before its Top Plays, years before Michael Jordan and sneaker deals offered adolescents still in algebra class. Before ticket prices climbed out of reach and before someone had the not great idea to insert radio commercials between baseball pitches. Before one of my favorite movies, Hoosiers, and two of my least favorites, Space Jam and Space Jam: A New Legacy. Long before videogame NBA 2K kept too many people inside. No smartphones, no Snapchatting, no Twitter or TikTok pics. All eyes fixed on a basketball court and a scoreboard.

You can Google South Side 70 Lawrence 68 for the next month and all you will find are real estate listings, temperature readings and restaurant prices. A black and white photo shows the center jump, Arnold wearing number 33 and Beaver 34, bodies fully extended and rising, fingertips stretched towards the heavens, the basketball balanced atop their meeting left hands. Today the commentators would describe this brilliant battle as a shame someone had to lose. The game is gone, long gone, no matter how many jump shots Stone made that day in a valiant effort to take down the champion. Tony Kornheiser for Newsday—yes, that Tony Kornheiser, a few years out of nearby Hewlett High School and a few decades ahead of Monday Night Football and Pardon the Interruption—would take up most of a full sports page to pen a piece entitled South Side Wins a Tough One – But Stone Is a Winner in Losers’ Locker Room.

Beaver Smith would have a fabulous 4-year career at St. John’s, mostly for coaching legend Lou Carnesecca, be drafted in the 5^th round by the Knicks in 1976, and play in Europe. Arnold would never quite live up to his own athletic promise in a few years of college ball at Skagit Valley College, Nassau Community College and Jacksonville University. By all accounts both would live rich lives of family and friendships, surely enjoying their past success and attention but never resting or relying on it. Beaver passed away in 2018 and Arnold just last year, both in their 60s, both long before their time.

It is now more than fifty years since that game. The favorite won, the underdog lost. That’s more often than not how it goes. I have always identified with underdogs. I rooted for the Mets, not the Yankees. My father was born into abject poverty and my mother was imprisoned in Europe as a child. I wrote a novel, The Other Side of Losing, celebrating the baseball fans of Chicago who spent a century waiting for a World Series championship, not realizing it was the friendships made along the way that made them winners long before the fickle bouncing balls finally behaved.

The history of competitive sports organization shows an early concern for not tipping the balance from participation towards partisanship too dramatically. The same can be said for society at large. We make too much of teams, of tribes, of races, religions. Of winners. We are all underdogs, all winners and all losers, all in this together, in this beautiful but all too brief game of life.

We have social media now and we see the birthdays, the graduations, the weddings, the anniversaries, the passings. I shake my head and wonder how all those days disappeared so quickly. I don’t really recognize the face in the mirror looking back at me. Every heartburn might be heart failure, tanning freckles the dawn of melanoma, headaches and bellyaches all the possible arrival of that dreaded thing our parents whispered about as the C-word. My friends and I still spend too much time worrying and wondering why the world at large seems as broken as it was when we came into it.  I’ve said goodbye to both parents and to many good friends and family members. And to Beaver and Arnold, two men to whom I owe one very fine evening, that kind of moment that helps add to a good life. After all, if time is going to remain undefeated, it still feels damn good to get your shots up, wherever you are.

_____________________________________________________________________________
About the author
Peter Brav isthe author of the novels Zappy I’m Not, The Other Side of Losing, Sneaking In, and 331 Innings. His shorter work has appeared in Black Fork Review, Kelsey Review, Monarch Review, Echo Magazine, US1 Magazine, Mortal Mag, GreenPrints Magazine, South Florida Poetry Journal, and other publications. He lives on a Central New Jersey farm.