Entry 8:

'Lex:

I always wondered about that hockey call myself. (Of course, from what we know now about Russian hockey players and the indigenous mob, I often wonder about that whole game. Of course, the Communists were running things then. Point-shaving and game-fixing are classically capitalist operations.) Then again, I grew up listening to the late Johnny Most do Celtic games, so my concept of play-by-play was stunted from childhood. You know where the spirit of Johnny Most—"AND THERE'S A FLAGRANT, DIRTY, CHEAP FOUL ON BIRD, WHOSE ARM IS BEING USED AS A COCKTAIL STIRRER IN THE THIRD ROW!"—resides today? Ari Fleischer, that's where.

The best thing about having the Celtics where they are is seeing my surname flashing baseline on the back of a Boston jersey. (I mean, who else do I have? Billy Pierce, the Dodger pitcher who was long gone before I was old enough to ignore baseball? Mary Pierce, the lady tennis player who is about three pecans short of a pie? No, thank you. Even my president—Franklin—is a lemon, redeemed in history only in that he is not James Buchanan.) The worst thing is that those Celtic Pride types are back. Young Paul already has been teed up by some local yokels—a term of derision reportedly once used by Red Auerbach to describe (oops!) Bob Cousy—as being insufficiently A Celtic. You know what I mean. He's not a "team guy," not a "blue-collar player." You don't exactly have to  have worked at Bletchley Park to crack that code. The ironic thing, of course, is that the actual Old Celtics love the guy; Cousy told me he's never seen a sweeter jumper. And, of course, poor Antoine Walker never had a chance, even though he's the most versatile big man they've had since Larry Bird. He does a little dance when he scores—nothing special, nothing that would make Don Cornelius sit up. However, it's been enough to give the vapors to some old-line Celtic fans—who seem to forget that the team was the first one to have five black starters playing for a white coach, and the first one to have five white starters playing for a black coach. In the 1980s, as you know, a lot of people—including that dilettante nuisance, Spike Lee—made the Celtics stand for racial reaction. (Some of the team's fans, unfortunately, approved of the notion.) The whole thing should've been quashed by the mere presence of Bird, who grew up in the nastiest, most bigoted part of southern Indiana—and Jim Farmer once said he preferred Mississippi—and yet was probably the most colorblind person I ever met, choosing instead to make his stand on the issues arising from wealth and class. Would that there were a single Democrat with that kind of guts.

Ever in search of John Brisker,
Pierce