Exits: Making a run for it
The Celtics won when they cut, ran, and embraced the unknowns. What if they did it again?
One of the worst breakups I’ve been through, I remember going out on the night it became, or seemed decisively, final. I don’t remember why. Only that it felt like booting a ghost and finally having the house (myself) to myself.
We went to an LGBTQ bar on Queen West that I’d been banned from maybe 5 years prior for going behind the counter to self-pour pitchers for my friends, many times, before I was caught. The ban, like a lot in our lives and the city then, wore off. The bar, too, is gone now.
Greg came, I can’t remember if Julian, who was working in kitchens or as a bike messenger then, two jobs he cycled between when one wore too heavy on his body or brain, showed up. Richard met us there and just kept buying and handing me cans of Coors Light, something even we barely ever drank. Ice cold certified, he kept shouting solemnly into my ear every time came back from the counter and handed me one, knowing I’d always laugh.
Ace showed up, which surprised me then but now I know it shouldn’t have. He’d seen me come apart too many times by then. This wasn’t everybody but everybody else was at home. It was definitely a Wednesday or Tuesday.
We danced, badly, bobbing around and waving our arms in the dark. It was the first night in those never-ending feeling months — the nights, a couple in deep winter, where I’d wait til he fell asleep to walk back to my apartment, feet going numb in the cold; the gas lighting in the safe shroud of public or pervading my own place; the prolonging departure with manipulation — that it felt like I’d busted out, flung myself clear of something. The lightness, even in the shit mix of preemptive loneliness and what I knew would be a very slow, very long recalibrating with myself, was acute. It was the feeling of pushing your body in anything physical (mental too) past the wall of first quit and tapping instead into the buzzing, protective circle of self that you know will sustain you until you need it to.
It was making a run for it.
When the Celtics put the Warriors on their heels, they had it.
In the last 10 minutes of Game 1 of the Finals, Al Horford found his gear, Jaylen Brown leaned into downhill action, Derrick White began to cut in from the corners and kick the ball out mid-air, and because of all this combined momentum Golden State had close to a five minute scoring drought. A Sahara, almost, for a group like that.
Pace, in life and in basketball, is tricky to sustain. In basketball, there’s a reason why the teams that rank highest with it tend to be younger or errant or both. In life, we tend to go in bursts.
Boston didn’t get to where they did — competing for a chip — because of their speed. The team ranked 24th overall throughout the regular season. But in the playoffs it was all about momentum swings, especially against Miami. It was the games where the Celtics managed to capitalize and convert on fast breaks and limit their turnovers, essentially hobble the Heat’s own opportunities for the same, where Boston looked not just fast, but comfortable, like they ran at this clip all the time. Jayson Tatum’s occasional trepidation, Horford’s (not exactly fair) reputation for stodginess, Robert Williams’ size to relative quickness, all of it mitigated by just the right loosening of a grip on formalized control and angling into freewheeling. Boston’s version of freewheeling, so, a bit white-knuckled and resistant to letting go, but loose and a little defiant all the same.
Tatum uncharacteristically and calmly crashing into Steph Curry to strip the ball — a rebound for Curry from Tatum’s seconds earlier missed wide open 3 — and flip it to Brown on a hard bounce pass for the bucket in Game 1. Later, a flying full court transition between Brown and Payton Pritchard that looked one errantly placed dime away from derailing the Celtics accelerating train of momentum. Later still, swinging passes that skimmed the whole lineup’s hands. Brown’s running block on Klay Thompson late in Game 3, Horford’s tidy cross-paint lob to Williams as he wound up from the corner of the key to meet it and dunk in the same game.
The Celtics only took two games in the series but where they managed to turn each was when they decided to make a run for it. That is, commit full body to disruptions and wholeheartedly to plays that could backfire in their timing or execution, commit, as best as a team like Boston can, to the elements and the headiness of a moment unfurling.
Hiding out under the bridge as the rain went from light to sheets, sky turning a bruising shade of green, watching apples that fell from the wild trees on the soft grassy banks that slope from the Greenwood subway yard go rushing down the road to choke the sewer grate in the deluge.
At first it felt like we had to wait, obey that human inclination to stay out of weather, but the rain wasn’t slowing, only speeding up and growing denser, wind kicking it under the bridge. We only had about five more blocks until home so we put everything worth protecting into a plastic bag from the pet store and I wound it around my hand and we went out into it. Soaked in seconds, laughing in less.
Boston, the city, has a history of running with it.
Symbolically, there’s the marathon. Long before that, the Massachusetts Bay Colony going ahead and pressing John Hull, a British silversmith turned Puritan colonist, to start mass-producing a “pine tree shilling”. The coin, a thin, wobbly approximation of a circle, would replace the predominantly barter-based commerce system in Britain’s 13 U.S.-based colonies, and be deemed as high treason by King Charles II, their circulation and use coming with the threat of being drawn and quartered.
The American Revolution had its beginning in Boston, inhabitants of the port town bucking one after another of Britain’s parliamentary acts until the war’s first engagements bloomed to life in blood and artillery smoke in fields along the Mystic River. Post-war and part of a brand new country, citizens of Bostons voted to rename it from the Town of Boston to the City of Boston, which now makes that movie title make sense to me.
There was the Great Molasses Flood of 1919, where a storage tank filled with 2.3 million gallons of molasses burst and went bubbling through the streets of the city at 35 mph, killing 21 people and injuring 150 more. Prior to this, the faulty tank had been painted and re-painted brown to hide its constant leaking, which is speculated to have started the first time it was ever filled, and which people who lived around the factory would use to slowly fill their own containers from. While the case brought against the company would spur some of the first corporate oversight in America, the flaw in the tank allowed, at first, an ease of access and convenience to the people most affected by the accident. A contradiction of modern times as much an example of how running with it can go very wrong.
Walking back from Marion’s, lightning flashing wide in the distance and flying ants swarming, apocalyptic if it wasn’t so beautiful this time of year. All the memories of living in this part of the city rushing me in the dark to weave, trippingly, around my ankles just as a slim black cat comes out from a hydrangea bush to do the same. I’ll have one more night in this pocket, but it’ll be spent inside and packing, falling asleep surrounded by stacks of cardboard boxes. Leaving something with no assurances it will immediately be better, only different.
Tonight, trailing slow along the sidewalks, watching a raccoon teeter on the fence in Marion’s backyard and then a skunk a few feet away on a boulevard, bumbling around like me. Reminders of malleability as much as quelling ferocity for the sake of what you want to keep close to.
I feel a very precise kind of soft that usually comes, for me, whenever I’m wrung out in an emotional and physical combo and that only ever makes me want to push farther into affection. The catch is it can backfire. The strength, I’ve found, is it also tends to lay things bare — with other people or with myself.
I always know when it’s the real dog days of summer because my heart goes fully feral.
I like the unruffleability of Tatum. His tendency to seem detached only because he is not a reactionary athlete, or because he’d rather spend the time he has to himself on other people, namely his family. I think a lot of the criticism he gets is patterned with the same historic threads of this team, that they are supposed to be loud and brash and hard-headed, and he is not.
The Celtics, and Tatum, don’t really have to change anything huge or fundamental to be back in this place next season, mostly because they spent the bulk of this past season adjusting, slowly, game over game. It was real-time evolution, rare as it is necessary of teams not employing the greatest shooter of all time in order to win it all. Still, the underlying methodology of that evolution can chip away at spontaneity, at the human need to sometimes make big, untidy, bold moves for the sake of self-preservation and survival. The Celtics don’t need to embody, entirely, the city’s own history of upending itself and running with the results, whether fortuitous or disastrous, but this team could stand to not seem so nervous to come undone or appear outwardly foolish. To make a run for it, again, means to embrace what could topple them — experimentation and coping to the requirements of timing, and luck.
The means don’t always justify the ends in the grand span of human history. But on an individual, or a collection of individuals level, the means, messy as they can be, will propel you to keep running, keep fighting, when other forces want to see you fold.
Yes to all of this. Except my bar was Rudy’s or dive bar. And my Tatum was Manu in 2013 missing that free throw in game six. That devastation led a team that came up short to not change a lot the next year where Manu threw it down on bosh. Oh, btw, the assistant coach on that team? Jim boy....jk ime and Sean M. And boylen....
Was deeply stoked for, and dreaded reading, the obit of my local Celtics. Beautiful per usual, even if it tugs are wounds still weeping. This series is so good.