The Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame seemed like the right place to be on the morning after Stern and Hunter and their minions deigned to think that they could win us back with a gift-wrapped Christmas-tripleheader bribe wrapped in a shiny bow; the Springfield Spheroid (it looks like a pavilion from a 1950s world’s fair in a Midwestern city) doesn’t try and drape its sport in some sort of faux-nostalgic aura of clean and tidy. This hall feels like a celebration of modern, pan-race, pan-gender hoops, visited — on this, my third trip in a month — by a lot of average people on average incomes who, if they present their Big Y supermarket discount card (“Proud to be American-Owned Since 1936!”) find it eminently affordable.
The Round Mound of Urban Rebound might be nothing but an afterthought in the national hall-of-fame pantheon, but at least it isn’t a red-brick mausoleum in Cooperstown that feels as if its permanent exhibit should be The Golden Age of Farm Implements, or the giant orange-juice juicer in Canton, the town with its recent KKK scandal, where men inducted in mustard jackets recite the Boys’ Life Sports Heroes Library edition of their careers.

True, part of my motivation for Saturday’s pilgrimage to this pocked “City of Progress” (1) on the morning after the tentative settlement was personal. With Sean Avery back, and Callahan a hero after paying his dues in the minors, the Rangers are back on my winter radar, promising to make January endurable again. So I wanted to see if a glimpse of the hilarious acid-flashback Nugget warm-ups of 1972 and Aryvdas Sabonis’ Latvian Olympic jersey could reboot my interest in a league wherein during the lockout a) Amar’e bought a fifth property, a $4 million home in Florida with a garage that fits nine cars (2) and b) Owner Jordan, who used to be cool, came out of it all looking like some 19th-century industrial robber baron itching to sic Pinkertons with semi-automatics on the unruly union mobs milling outside the factory.

But I was also curious to take the pulse of the hoop-people who’d come to visit the shrine from as far away as Dallas, D.C., Virginia, Maryland, and the All-American Valley (3) to seek refuge from the labor idiocy, drawn by memories not of dusted gilded ages, but a past you can still reach out and touch, and dozens of amazingly cool uniforms, from Moses’ high-school jersey to a shirt from the barnstorming Arkansas Lassies.

I’d expected to find some anger, and occasionally, I did. “It was disrespectful,” said Wayne Lawson, a McDonald’s manager from Toronto. “It was like taking the kids’ cookies away.” “They tarnished the brand,” said John Lester, a management consultant from Dallas. “The game took some bad PR.”

“Little folks losing out, too many egos not looking out for the people, when it’s the peoples’ game,” Larry E. Harris of Upper Marlboro, Maryland told me. Turned out that Larry E. was speaking in the present tense because he didn’t know an agreement had been reached, and when I told him, he didn’t yelp for joy. He didn’t even say, “Finally!” What he said was, “Really?”
To those with a dog in this hunt – that would be Stern, Jordan, LeBron, Hunter and all of their minions – what should be scary is that the overwhelming vibe in the game’s birthplace on Saturday was indifference. “I was fine with no season,” said Keith Huling, a George Mason grad, who, while living in northern Virginia, finds it difficult to be a Wizard fan. “Both sides were greedy. I’m paying attention to college now.”

Then, admittedly, my sample was skewed. Visitors to The N (4) don’t stroll the circular Honor Ring on a catwalk attacked to the inside of the dome (it’s like encircling the inside of a giant, empty skull) to be reminded of the way LeBron’s palmy/pathetic SuperGroup skewed the sport toward Reality Show for the Super-Rich last year; they come to enjoy the way the sociological, demographic and cultural evolution of their sport has happily mirrored for more than a half-century the evolution of the nation it’s been playing for: Walking the Naismith’s Honors Ring chronologically, starting 120 years ago, yes, you have to yawn through dozens of portraits of guys with names like Steinmetz and Borgman, and a team portrait of the Buffalo Germans (the Buffalo Germans?), but you soon gradually segue into teams like the New York Rens, and finally the appearamce of names like Russell and Chamberlain and Baylor…and Lieberman and Miller and Meyers.

Then, farther down the ring, hairstyles get wonderfully weird and names get increasingly evocative, each calling up a smile and a style: Thurmond, Frazier, Monroe, Dantley, Alcinder, Olajuwon, Gilmore, all pulling you into what seems like just a few weeks ago until, finally, you reach the surreally perfect demographic of this year’s inductees: from Goose and Satch to Teresa Edwards and Tex Winter – and Rodman and Sabonis,

Not to mention the hall’s odd, often random and delightful assortment of artifacts, like Nera White’s high-top sneaker. Nera led the Nashville Business School’s AAU team to ten championships in the Fifties and Sixties. Somehow, Nera’s stern visage made it cooler thaqn the sock. Yes, the place is missing some of the artifacts I’d really like to see – Michael’s gambling IOUs, Wilt’s motel keys, Rodman’s (your tasteless artifact here) – but in Springfield urban counts as much as rural, Artis as much as Auerbach. Inside this globe, recent history counts much more than the atrophied past. To hang in Springfield is to be reminded that the NBA is the only sport that has not only included, but embraced the fringe, whether it was little Jewish guys playing in Utica, the first black guys playing in Boston, the women barnstorming Kansas or a German named Nowitzki bringing the whole thing full circle, to one of the greatest Finals in decades.

The question for roundball mecca now is what its exhibits are going to look like in the future, after this wincingly ugly debacle — whether, after serving as the sport of the people for so long, the place has to veer off and mirror the current American 1-percent-ist landscape. And more specifically, what’s going to go into the big empty space that the “Michael Jordan Brand” section of the sphere, sponsored by Nike, is vacating next week, after two years of commercial sponsorship?

On Saturday, it was weirdly empty. Maybe Jordan the player who had become Jordan the hard-line NBA owner has truly alienated the average fan? Maybe the crowd sensed that there was something sinister about this corner of the hall, wherein the likes of Bob Lanier gets memorialized by one sneaker (true, it’s the size of a rural-delivery mailbox), but a sneaker company can buy Michael a whole corner of the building?

I’m thinking, replacement-wise: LeBron’s high school jersey? Not likely. A 3-D video loop of The Decision? Probably not. The pen and document Stern will use to sign the final agreement? I don’t think so; blood fades on paper. A doll-house version of the 15,000-square foot Stoudemire Cottage?

Mary Lester had a suggestion. “Hey, where’s the Maverick stuff?” she asked an usher, but the usher didn’t know, because there wasn’t much. Mary, from Dallas, had just watched a virtual Jason Kidd school her son in the Virtual Hoops exhibit (“Dribble! Dribble. Shoot! Shoot! Aw, he stole it again!”)

Yeah, how about a Nowitzki display case, with the bandage he wore on his broken finger when he banked in those left-handed layups, and a bottle of the medicine for the flu that Dwayne and LeBron mocked on their way to their ignominious loss, and a blow-up of that shot, LeBron and Dwyane frozen in the tunnel before the loss, like Ruby shooting Oswald; a copy of the latest contract wherein Dirk could have fled town for bigger lights, but stayed with the Mavs?
When I asked Mary, she said that it didn’t matter: Dirk had his ring, and that’s all that mattered in Dallas. When I asked her if she had any advice for the two sides, she said, “Shut up and play ball.”

1 The Armory stopped making guns during the Vietnam War; the June tornado flayed a half-dozen neighborhoods, and smack downtown, next to the iconic Mass Mutual building, a store advertises “General Merchandise,” like in a Deadwood episode, with “Gold Teeth” written on its storefront window. I didn’t know if they’re buying or selling, and I didn’t ask.

2 The house is in a town called “Southwest Ranches” in Broward County, incorporated in 2000. The town’s Western-themed web site, whose graphic features spurs, a whip, a horseshoe and an American flag, states that “all our Council Member have pledged to preserve our rural lifestyle, which includes donkeys braying, roosters crowing and no sidewalks.” The median annual household income in the rest of Broward County is $41,000.

3 The cluster of once-industrial lower Connecticut towns like Seymour and Naugatuck and Ansonia that Greenwich and Darien pretend not to know about.

4 They don’t actually call it that; I just made it up.

But if you’re looking for an analogy for Al’s legacy, there you have it, pre-packaged. What Thompson was to journalism, Al Davis was to professional football; barbarians outside the gate with not the slightest desire to be inside; asterisked BUT envied by everyone in their respective professional, rebels with a cause – in Davis’ case, to beat the Rozelles of the world at their own game, and beat the racists, beat the bullies, and stomp their heads open in the process, Albert Haynesworth-style.

Forget the Darth Vader crap; comparing Al Davis to a Saturday-matinee-serialized sci-fi movie emperor would be like comparing the real Caesar Augustus to George Reeves in a gladiator movie. One’s a cartoon. The other actually…built an empire. “The Raiders wanted to have the greatest organization in the history of sports,” Davis said in his Canton induction speech for John Madden five years ago, and that’s as good an emperor’s manifesto as you’re ever going to find, except that he could have added, in his case, “and make everyone else weep in jealousy, if not abject pain” – which, at Al’s prime, everyone more or less did.

Besides: Davis’ empire wasn’t evil. Just because everyone from Sonny Bargar and his Angels chapter to various gangs have been drawn by the Raiders’ vibe doesn’t mean the man promoted maliciousness.

Yes, the man’s empire’s been on the wane of late. For the last seven or eight years, hoping my Raiders might rebound, I couldn’t stop hearing the Keith Reid lyrics for Procol Harum: “The seaweed and the cobweb have rotted your sword; your barricades broken, your enemies lord.”  But mistaking Al Davis for Davis 2.0, the steward of the dark era that began when he yanked his team from the East Bay’s desperate, hungry maw to try and make easy money down in the City of Illusion is to mistake the Salinger who wrote Catcher to the guy who later favored young girls, ended up eating frozen peas for breakfast and spending a lot of time in an orgone box.

Which is not to imply that the late-era Al Davis was anywhere as near a weirdsmobile as J.D. — just that by the end, like J.D, in his New Hampshire bunker, Al was long out of touch with the collectivist workings of the business of the sport that had fueled his passion. He countenanced no trusted advisors. Then, by definition, emperors seldom enlist people to sit by their side and second-guess them (“Caligula? Sir? You really think we ought to draft the wide receiver from Dayton whoM no one invited to the combine?” “Combine? What combine? Somebody cover this guy in pine pitch and set him on fire.”)

And yes, Davis did score a Super Bowl appearance less than a decade ago, but if said team’s head coach (Bill Callahan) neglected to change the defensive signals so that the opposing coach, who coached the Raiders the year before (Jon Gruden), knows what plays you’re calling during the game, and subsequently humiliates you, does that qualify as a competent Super Bowl appearance?

*

But we get one shot at assessing a pioneer’s legacy in the days right after his death, so this time, let’s get it right. In the history of a sport that now dominates the cultural landscape, Al Davis is football Rushmore, and this is not in dispute. Feel free to argue about what other three old white guys who forged the game out of granite ought to be sculpted in a quarry somewhere outside of Pittsburgh, which, face it, if there were a football Rushmore, that’s where it would be; me, I’m going to lobby for the weirdly nose-forward assymetrical Brooklyn-y profile of the man who not only won three Super Bowls and built teams so scary that no one wanted to play them, but literally changed the face of the game. Because, let’s face it: somebody had to.

There are a million stories about Al Davis and his pioneering racial ways in a league whose roots lay in post-WWII steel-mill towns and whose pre-Black glory days, despite the domination of Jim Brown and Big Daddy Lipscomb, thrived on a lunchpail litany of names like Pietrosanti and Robustelli. Butkus and Modzelewski. McDonald and McIlhenny.

But this is mine: one night in 1964, in Davis’ second year as the Raiders’ coach, an unnamed white Raider called out Fred Williamson for being with a Swedish woman at a table in the Miramar Club.  Raider running back Clem Daniels wanted to pummel the guy for being a racist; Jim Otto held Clem back.

The next morning, Davis called Daniels to his office to find out what had happened. “Then he gathers the team,” Daniels told me a few years ago, “and says, `I will not have this bullshit in this organization. If you’re doing shit like this, not only are you off the Raiders, I’ll get your ass out of football.’ And after that, there was never a problem on the Oakland Raiders.”

It wasn’t just Al’s scouting black schools like Maryland State-Eastern Shore to find athletes like Art Shell (whom he would hire, 20 years after drafting him, as the first black head coach in the modern league) – and Tennessee State, to draft Eldridge Dickey in 1968: the first black first-round draft pick in league history.

It wasn’t just assembling, in the Sixties and early Seventies, a multiracial team that appealed to a multiracial second-sister city, wherein players of all colors would hang for hours in post-game parking lots with partiers of all color, and then hang together at every bar from Castro Valley to Walnut Creek to Jack London Square, from Uppy’s to the Grotto to – always — Big Al’s Cactus Room, on 19^th off Webster, named for Al Punzak, who stood 5-foot-2 and kept a loaded .45 under his pillow in his apartment above the place.

“It didn’t break down black and white,” Seventies tight end Bob Moore told me. “It wasn’t blacks in one place and white players the other. We went to the same places, from Big Al’s to the 19^th Hole, from Clancy’s to the Grotto. It’s Upshaw, Shell, Dalby, Hubbard, all drinking together after a game. That’s the way things broke down on this team. You didn’t see that around the league back then.

“Al didn’t care who your color was, what your drinking habits were, probably didn’t care about your sexuality. Didn’t care about any of that shit. He was drafting players for their ability to play football. Not for their lifestyle. Not for their race. Not for anything else.”

“I understood the blacks pretty well,” Davis told Gary Smith in Inside Sports in 1981. And if this was sort of a tone-deaf thing to say, you have to remember that Al didn’t get out a lot, even back then. Real outlaws seldom do. This is probably why, in the same interview he said, “I didn’t hate Hitler. He captivated me.”

The fact that Al qualified this egregious blurt with, “I knew he had to be stopped. Jesus Christ, he tried to take on the whole world, the cocksucker!” has been sort of lost, but face it, once you’ve evoked Adolph, all bets are off, even if you grope for some context: His dad, the successful Brooklyn manufacturer of women’s underwear, insisted his kids map European troop movements in The Big One, wherein Al, future emperor, saw some pretty impressive stuff on the Wermacht side.

That he couldn’t see, 50 years later, how incendiary his words had been is, somehow, a barometer of his true rebel nature, which is to say: True rebels, by definition, have to discard the mainstream lens for seeing things. Otherwise, you’re attacking the enemy on the enemy’s terms.

On the other side was the power of that rebellious side of his soul back in Davis 1.0:  he generally saved it for where it counted. This wasn’t a piss-ant megalo like Jerry Jones, or Andy Griffith in Kazan’s Face in the Crowd . This was a true game-changer who saved the rebellions for the big-time arenas, where they counted. He let his players do the meaningless venting, from the streakers at practice to the bar-top stripteases to the punched out plate-glass windows to the weed-smoking in the closet of the El Rancho Tropicana, a training-camp motel that only David Lynch could have loved

Like the great emperors, Davis picked his battles to win the big wars. In 1966, when Pearly Pete’s gray flannel LombardiLeague tried to swat down Al’s gnarly upstart band AFL – there wasn’t enough money to keep both alive — Davis revealed that his league has already signed a half-dozen NFL QBs to future contracts, the CBS league caved.

But Al was pissed as hell. Al wanted to grind Pete into submission. When Rozelle was named commissioner of the merged leagues, Al limped back to Oakland, where he took it out on the principal owner, a man named Wayne Valley, whom he detested, by wresting total control and ownership of the team, off an initial investment of…$18,000.

And in 1977, and in 1981, and in 1984, he tried not to smirk when Pete had to hand him the Lombardi Trophy.

He’d shown the bastards.

*

Here’s the cool thing about Al holding on until Friday night. He lived long enough to know that people had stopped laughing at his incompetency and started taking his team seriously. By the time Al’s soul ran into some ethereal authority figure, and he said, “You don’t want to admit me? F*** you! I don’t need your afterlife! I got an afterlife over here that‘s gonna kick your ass!” – his team, finally, was being referred to as a team with actual playoff possibilities.

Saving eventual face mattered a lot to Al Davis. I know this because I was granted an audience with him exactly two years ago. I’d come to talk about late Seventies Sundays on the East Coast when the NBC sun bathed my guys out there in some outlaw-loving luminescence — Biletnikoff’s eyeblack all vampiric, Tatum’s beard all Panther-y, Snake’s hair flapping like a happy freak flag.

But at one point, without my asking about the current malaise, Davis said to me,  “I know this:  That I let it slip the last several years. That will tarnish a legacy that was tough to beat. But somehow or other I’ll get it back before I’m gone.”

Weirdly, mostly I remember the doors. The black doors to the windowless black-everything-ed office seemed to be about twice as big and heavy as they had to be, with silver handles that looked like huge Cosa Costra cufflinks. After they closed behind the assistant who’d led me in, there was sort of an airlock effect: It was me and The Man. I’ve interviewed thousands of men. I’d never interviewed The Man.

He was sitting at the end of a long table, wizened and frail, with a walker by his side. He was rheumy-eyed, and he had that late-stage-Howard-Hughes-fingernail-thing going on — all of which made him all the more intimidating. I mean, Augustus probably didn’t look all that good in his fifth decade of office, but that didn’t mean he hadn’t been an emperor you had to take seriously.

Before I could even ask him a question, he started to read from a copy of that Madden induction speech, because he wanted me to know from the start that it was Madden, the man whose winning percentage beat Lombardi’s, who should get all the credit. But within a second or two, he realized this was a stupid thing to do, and he slid the speech over to me, so I could read it myself later.

Then he said, “What I was trying to say in the speech is that time never stops for the great ones. That’s what I was trying to say.”

Not to mention that when the team flew to Denver for a preseason game in August, the traveling media contingent numbered one, if one can be numbered. Or that when the city held its 10th annual Buffalo Chicken Wing Festival in its flaking downtown Triple-A baseball stadium last week, they wanted to induct Bill Murray into the Hall of Flame, but Murray declined to attend, and the organizers were reduced to showing a clip from Osmosis Jones on the JumboTron.

It didn’t have to be this way. In 2005, Ryan Fitzpatrick could have strolled from the Banks of the River Charles straight to the banks of lower Manhattan, where his economics degree from Harvard would have earned him serial Maseratis at Christmas-bonus time, instead of taking a job in an industry in which his Ivy sheepskin was no more a liability than, say, a positive test for cholera.

It’s taken Ryan Fitzpatrick seven years and three teams to finally enter a season as a starting quarterback in the National Football League, and while, yes, his size (not very big) and arm strength (average) have helped speed-bump the journey, anyone who’s spent more than 11 seconds in the robotic front offices of the NFL, an organization with all of the intellectual curiosity of a tire-salesman convention, knows that the football deck’s been stacked against Ryan Fitzpatrick from the start.

“I picked the only profession in the world where my Harvard degree worked against me,” he says one day in mid-August, lounging on a lawn chair outside the locker room at St. John Fisher College in Rochester. “Some of it was just the competition level where I played. But also, some coaches never want a guy in there that they feel like he’s too smart. How you can be too smart for a position, I don’t know.”

He’s just walked through practice with a team whose low-profile roster, if you listen to the experts, will produce upward of only four victories this year, despite new uniforms and the happy prospect of finally hosting a team they might actually beat (the Redskins) in their annual home-away game in Toronto. The border-crossing experiment, now in its fourth year (the Bills are 0-3), represents, depending on whom you ask, (a) a desire to “regionalize” the Bills, or (b) a desperate plea to a healthy, happy Ontario to bring the same magic to Buffalo’s storied franchise as the Tim Horton doughnut shops have brought to those rest stops on the western fringe of the oddly spelled New York Thruway.

“The other thing is, ‘This guy’s got more going for him. What if his heart isn’t in the game? What if his passion is for something else? What if he wants to leave for business school?’ And then you still get guys … like last year, Bart Scott said I couldn’t throw a book at him,” says Ryan. “I think it’s funny. If I’m going to get ribbed because I went to Harvard, there are worse things to be ribbed about. So I always laugh at that.

“But now, just through people meeting me and my being able to fight off those stereotypes, the whole negative stigma attached to going to Harvard is gone.”

If Fitzpatrick had really wanted to convince the powers in charge of his career that he wasn’t an Ivy geek, that he was an athlete first and an academic second, he should have explained from the start that until he got his first call from Harvard as a senior at Highland High in Gilbert, Ariz., he had no idea that Harvard had a football team. Or that the league report of his perfect score on the 50-question Wonderlic test before the 2005 draft (the Rams took him in the seventh round) was inaccurate, and that the Wall Street Journal clarified that he scored a 48 — although, yes, he finished in a record nine minutes.

Or that when Harvard’s foppish final clubs came calling in his junior year to lure the school’s quarterback into their exclusive, archaic clubhouses, Fitzpatrick in no uncertain terms declined. “It’s just not something I had any interest in,” he says. “I shunned them. I told them right away, it’s not for me. That’s just not my personality.”

Or that after five years of marriage and three kids, he now spends more time watching television than engaging in his other idle leisure-time pursuits — doing the math questions on the practice GMAT, for example. The son of a man who works for a missile-manufacturing defense contractor (”He likes to claim he’s a rocket scientist,” the son says, a little enigmatically), Fitzpatrick will confess to being a “math nerd,” but plays down the economics degree: “Harvard doesn’t have a business major. The business major is ‘Economics.’ It makes you sound smarter than you are.”

“Put it this way,” he explains. “I’m not going to go read Adam Smith again. That is not casual reading for me these days. I keep in touch with a lot of that through, like, The Economist. I also have junk magazines, too. I like to read Men’s Journal, Esquire, some that are a little bit more mindless reading, I guess.”

Fitzpatrick hasn’t even taken a tour of Wright’s Graycliff mansion, which is literally two minutes away from his home. But he has visited the Falls … although he prefers the Canadian side, but honestly, who wouldn’t? Across the border next week, north of the city, you’ll be able to catch Dana Carvey at the Fallsview Casino. On the New York side, if it’s anything like last Friday evening, you’ll be able to literally stop your car in the middle of a deserted downtown street to take smart-phone pictures of the boarded-up Hotel Niagara. Or to make an offer on the Haunted House of Wax, which is up for sale.

Things are no less depressing to the south of the city, along the waterfront, where gap-toothed warehouses and factories haunt the shore — a view that has hooked Fitzpatrick, a Sunbelt child, with its poignancy. “It’s the exact opposite of where I grew up: a farming community that started booming with every chain restaurant you can imagine. The schools are all brand-new, nice schools, there’s this great grid system; it’s like Sim City, like you’re sitting there on a computer: ‘Now there are this many people, so you need a hospital and two more elementary schools.’ The exact opposite of here. I love Arizona … but there’s something about Buffalo. It’s a community. I don’t know if it’s just how nice people here are, or the pride they take in being the City of Good Neighbors … but we love living here. We love it. It’s by far our favorite place we’ve ever been.”

That would include St. Louis and Cincinnati, two other past-their-prime cities that share a remarkable number of dismal historical similarities with Buffalo. It kind of makes you wonder if, in a graphic-novel alternate universe, Fitzpatrick has been predestined to visit failing American post-industrial towns until one of them recognizes his mission as Savior and anoints him.

But it’s been a particularly rough century-plus in Buffalo (a.k.a. “City of Light”), ever since the Pan American Exposition of 1901 tried to strut the beauty of electricity to the world by tapping into the Falls 25 miles north and draping all the lakeside pavilions in glittering bulbs, but William McKinley’s on-site assassination put a damper on the festival. Then the steel left for China, then St. Lawrence marginalized the port, and the stolid, huge, red-brick, smack-downtown Statler Tower closed its doors.

Today, reinvigorated by some wise political luring of the health industry (the Bills’ practice facility, sponsored by Blue Cross and Blue Shield, is called “The Bills Healthy Zone”), Buffalo is in the top 10 U.S. cities you want to raise a family in, according to Forbes magazine. And a local investor just bought the Statler and says he’s going to spend $100 million bringing it back to life (that would be four times what it cost to build the Bills’ stadium).

But American cities are generally judged by the success of their sports teams, and if the City of Light is going to recapture some voltage, it’s going to need the Bills to win a few games in a very tough division. Encouragingly, the Brainy-QB-as-Savior plotline has precedents. Fifty years ago, with the town still smarting after the NFL plucked the lustrous Paul Brown Cleveland Browns, the respectable San Francisco 49ers and the bottom-feeding Baltimore Colts from the All-America Football Conference, leaving the highly respectable Bills at the altar to summarily fold as a going sports concern, a future nine-term congressman, Cabinet member, and vice-presidential candidate named Jack Kemp quarterbacked the team to two consecutive AFL championships in War Memorial Stadium, more affectionately known as the Rockpile. Like Fitzpatrick, Kemp was smaller than most quarterbacks, and wasn’t known for arm strength, but the guy was smart enough to be one of the last reasonable Republicans the House ever offered up.

Then, in the early ’90s, coach Marv Levy, armed with a Masters in English history from Harvard, took them to four straight Super Bowls, even if, somehow, history has managed to mutate the four AFC championships into an emblem of failure.

On the other hand, Ivy-wise, in 2006, Beloved Very Old Owner Ralph Wilson entrusted the team to Yale grad Dick Jauron, a very smart guy with all of the charisma of a horseshoe crab. Jauron pulled off the statistically improbable but highly consistent feat of three consecutive 7-9 seasons before being jettisoned mid-2009. Last year Georgian-drawled Chan Gailey took over in time to supervise a season of true failure, along with another new, incongruously accented appointee from the Confederacy, a general manager from Alabama named Buddy Nix, who signed Fitzpatrick as a free agent to back up Trent Edwards.

The Bills burst to an 0-3 record under Edwards. Fitzpatrick took over in the fourth week, and the Bills lost five more. But they split the next eight games, and Fitzpatrick, displaying a controlled and accurate game, if not a spectacular one, went on to become the first Buffalo quarterback to pass for 3,000 yards since Drew Bledsoe eight years earlier. Hence, finally Fitzpatrick’s tardy arrival at the pinnacle: This Sunday’s opener at Arrowhead.

“I wasn’t always the guy they wanted out there,” he tells me. “First, I was fighting for a roster spot. The third guy. Then the second guy. Then the veteran backup. Now I’m the starter. It’s different for someone who was the first pick of the draft. I’ve taken the road less traveled.”

Since we’d last met, Fitzpatrick had completed 11 of 12 passes against the Jaguars for 165 yards and two touchdowns in the third preseason game, the one that sort of counts. So I figure that I’d be nuts not to ask a guy who’s read Adam Smith how he’s learned to “read defenses” — to explain that mysterious alchemy. So he patiently takes me through his presnap process, which involves three read options, and explains, complete with mathematical probabilities, the likelihood of each one succeeding depending on the defense’s postsnap behavior. But I can tell from his expression that even though he’s indulging my desire to have the smart guy sound smart, he really doesn’t want to talk about smart. The guy who has finally earned a top job in the world he loves by working his way up the grunt ladder and learning the mechanics of the workday craft and giving teammates with nothing but high school degrees their own special props — the guy who’s just spent seven years trying to convince people he isn’t too smart — decides to clarify something for me.

“Look, sometimes we overcomplicate things,” he says. “And sometimes I think it’s taught that way: where it’s too complicated for guys to actually get out there and play.

“Sometimes we try and make the game too hard, Sometimes when I’ve got my favorite receiver one-on-one with their defensive back, we just have to come up with a way to complete the pass. That’s it. Sometimes with receivers, when you make them think, they’re not at their best. But when you tell them, ‘Just beat the guy,’ they’re at their best. It takes out that other element and just allows them to play like when they were in high school.

“Essentially football comes down to our guy beating their guy one-on-one. The same as in Pop Warner and high school.”

Because it’s not, like, rocket science.

This Saturday afternoon’s game at St. John’s University-Carnesseca Arena promises to be the hoops exhibition game f the summer. The teams playing in the Malone-Mulhall Benefit Game will comprise athletes who ply their craft everywhere from the NBA, to its D League, from European leagues to Division I, all of them gathering not to show their stuff or to further their own ambitions, but to raise money for the camp and the Malone scholarship fund — and not incidentally, to honor a father named Jim Malone, a lifetime basketball man, who also happens to ply his high-school coaching trade for all the right reasons.
Babylon’s Danny Green was the Nassau County player of the year before he went on to star at UNC. He’s a San Antonio Spur now. He’ll be joined by, among others, Brooklyn’s Jamine Peterson, a Providence standout, coming in after his first year in the D League, and Queens’ Tyrone Nash, just graduated from Notre Dame, and St, John’s Paris Horne, he of the flailing dunks, and Jeff Xavier, coming off a season in Spain. Vernon Goodridge and Antoine Pereson were D-Leaguers last season, Dan Geriot and Kevin Hovne will represent Richmond’s Spiders.
The auction will offer up Yankee and Met tickets, memorabilia autographed by Brady and Brees and Rivera. For one summer afternoon, with the NBA closed down, the true city game will once again rule the sporting landscape — which, as any New Yorker knows, is the way it should always be.

It was Joe Lynch’s idea. Joe Lynch, heading into his senior year at St. John’s, was Paige’s boyfriend, and when she died, they were in love in that singularly ideal and idealistic way that only 19-year-olds can be in love. And when that kind of love is snuffed out at its apex, then it becomes the kind of thing that drives a kid to find some way to equal its strength of emotion, in the absence of the girl herself — the girl with whom you shared the first kiss, and then, it turned out, the last kiss, on the exact same street corner.
But Joe was wise enough to know that his suffering was nothing next to Jim Malone’s. For a father to lose two daughters? At once? Neither yet married? Neither yet mothers? On their way to the camp that defined both of their lives? Inconceivable. So Joe organized the game, because he figured that if he reached out to the local stars, then maybe the father would be able, for once, for one afternoon, to coach some real talent.
Joe rented the arena. Word came back that Jim Malone would not be allowed to coach one of the all-star teams. The NCAA forbids a high school coach coaching in a Division I arena.
Joe was disappointed, but not bowed. This was all the more reason to do it right. Jim deserved it.

As has long been obvious to young Joe Lynch and everyone else in Floral Park, New York — a tidy, ordered, pleasant, suburb where the half-hourly hum of the train pulling out of the station dutifully announces the commute into and out of the city, and American flags fly in the yards of neat, orderly homes, and each and every village resident knows that this good American life is not only better than it was for their ancestors but will be even better for their industrious kids, and their kids’ kids — Jamie and Paige’s dad was an unusual man, in that he was a very unusual basketball coach.
A graduate of storied Holy Cross High School, and then Stonybrook, back in the Eighties Jim was learning the coaching trade as an assistant under Bobby Valvano at Division I St. Francis – until he quickly tired of the recruiting sleaze he saw around him, and decided that the coaching he really wanted to do had to be about the game, and the kids, and nothing else.
So he took the head job at Beach Channel High, way down in Rockaway, and, closer to home, took a college-counselor and golf-coach slot at Garden City High, next door to Floral Park, even though Garden City kids had their own pros to learn from at the three local clubs. There was no golf down at Beach Channel. Beach was a dream born in 1983: a new city high school rising from a poor-to-middle class neighborhood planted on the thin slice of land flanked by Jamaica Bay to the north and the Atlantic Ocean to the south: an off-the-radar city neighborhood that owed its history to fishing, to nature.
The school would revolutionarily offer marine studies, give the kids of local fishermen a chance to better the ecosystem of their environment, and, in learning to change their distinct slice of New York, change their own destinies.
His first year, 15 kids showed up in the gym. But within four years, Jim Malone had somehow brought Beach an unlikely basketball championship. Not only were his kids just local kids, he had little support in his quixotic quest. No faculty volunteered to man the time clock, or provide security, or do anything at all; no faculty ever showed up for a single game.
No parents ever attended a game.
On the other hand, the Beach gig gave to Jim Malone the idealist, Jim the educator, a weird freedom to run a New York City High School Basketball program exactly the way he wanted to run it: pure, free of hollow promises and power-grabbing coaching stunts that exploited the kids.
It was assumed that Jim was going to take the head job at Holy Cross a dozen years ago — step up in class, get out of Rockaway, where the dream down at Beach was going South as more and more other districts dumped their underachievers onto the huge campus in Rockaway.
He didn’t take it. Not just because Holy Cross would have meant returning to the world where the parents scream at the coach, or, as happened to Ron Naclerio over at Cardoza, come out of the stands and actually punch the coach. No, the Beach Channel gig had become more than basketball. It was a calling. It was public service, without feeling he was making a sacrifice.
It was like the job his two precious daughters had embraced for the last few years: doing good, off the radar, for all the right reason. Not because it looks good on the resume. Because, at the end of the day, he loves the kids, even if their parents never show up to see a game. Because their parents never show up for a game.
And down in Rockaway, where the sea air comes at you from both sides, you can’t even get the remotest whiff of the men he calls the mutts.
The mutts?
“Yeah, mutts. There are many mutts out there,” he says, with a laugh that isn’t a laugh. We’re sitting on his porch. The anniversary of the crash is three days away. He is doing his absolute best not to lose it.
“The mutts — the glad-handing of the basketball dirtbags of the universe,” he says. “There are many mutts in the landscape of New York basketball. Oy, yoy, yoy….I’ve seen such a change in the last 20 years of the whole landscape of New York basketball: The emergence of the summer programs and the summer teams and the money they take in and the perks they can give the kids. And the sneakers and the suits and the jockeying. Flying some kid in from Wisconsin for a summer league in a dinky gym in Queens? What the hell is that about?”
He knows the answer: it’s about small men pretending to have big power. Jim doesn’t have to pretend, because he doesn’t want any power. He just wants to do what he can. If he can get a kid into Monroe Community College in upstate Rochester, whose academics he most admires, that’s a victory.
If he can lighten a kid’s day, that’s good, too. Tomorrow he’s going to visit a former Beach player upstate in the Sing Sing Correctional Facility. At his trial, the kid pled to murder. Maybe he did it. Maybe he didn’t. But here’s the thing that Jim Malone still can’t understand: it took five years for the case to come to trial. Five years for a kid to wait for his day in court…all of those years sent in prison.
What kind if system is that? Why can’t any of the damned systems work for the kids? Jim would sooner leave Beach to find fame and fortune than Paige or Jamie would have stopped going to Anchor to take a job at a fancy New England summer camp. He’s had it with the system.
“Kids in junior college in Kansas? It kills me, that old network of having to have control. `We’re going to send you to Tyler, Texas’? We’re going to send you to Hutchinson, Kansas?’”
Frankly, it makes him sick. And he’s not afraid to say so, now that he has nothing to lose.
Now that whatever happens doesn’t matter anymore.

“I didn’t realize it was going to be so difficult,” he says. How were he and his wife to know what the grief counselor later told them — that they never should have gone to any of the memorials? Who knows such a thing in advance? That memorial services just keep the wounds open and raw?
“This week…” he says. “I didn’t realize….it’s only a day, it’s only a date. What difference should it make if it’s six months? A year?”
Anchor was planning a memorial for next week. Jim won’t go. They mean well, of course; they all do. Jim Malone understands this. But this week, as everyone wants to honor by remembering, with the game a few weeks off, all it does is make it harder for him to forget. He never imagined that the empty spaces would linger, over there on the periphery, for so long.
The mailman walks up to the porch and delivers a bulging stack of mail. Jim glances at the pile, sees several handwritten envelopes. “The cards start now,” he says. He casts the whole thing aside.
There’s been one good thing, though. The police report has finally been issued. Of course, Jim has no idea why it took a year, but at least it finally absolved Justine Mulhall of all blame, a finding for which Jim is particularly grateful: “There’s no one purer than Justine.”
I try and point out, idiotically, that though his daughters’ lives were short, they were pure, too.
“I’m not ready to take on any of those kind world views yet,” he says. “There’s a lot of anger there that you just sit on….because there’s nobody to be angry at.”
I want to say something else, anything to make it easier on him, this stupid interview, but now know better; everything I say to try and make him feel better comes out wrong.
So I let him talk, if he wants to talk. Every 30 seconds or so, he does, gazing off into the verdant neighborhood, but not seeing
“They were very, very wonderful kids. Good, good girls.”
Then, not hearing the soothing hum of the train, or the birdsong all around us: “It’s…tough.”

The thing that strikes Neil Mulhall now is how he and his wife thought that they knew their only son, but in a way, they didn’t: When they met some 1200 people who knew Mike in the days following the accident, leading up to the funeral, they realized that the wake he left was broad and wide.
“It was an amazing journey to get to know our son in death, unfortunately, better than we thought we knew him in life,” says the father of the lost son, as well as the father of the daughter spared.
“At home he was this man-child who, we thought, didn’t want to grow up. But to the rest of the world he was a leader, and a friend, and a partner, and a pal, and a teacher. It was quite an amazing learning experience. Not that I wanted to find out so much under these circumstances. But I’m glad I did.
“What made Michael different from other people was that he just liked everybody. He didn’t judge people, like most of us do. And it didn’t matter where you came from or what you were good at or not good at. He was open-minded and willing to let anyone enter his world.”
Including the children at Anchor. Especially the children at Anchor. He’d been a history major at Scranton, but Neil Mulhall thinks that Michael’s vocation would have connected to Anchor, in one way or another. “It was his calling. I’d see how comfortable he was down there. With everyone. With five year old kids. It’s an amazing place. Think about it: half of the staff are volunteers. They get up every morning, ride school buses down, spend the day in the hot sun, then, at the end of the day, get back on the school buses to go home, day in, day out.
“It shows you that there’s hope for all of us.”
I ask about his daughter. The driver. He pauses for a few seconds. Then he says, “Justine’s bravery over the last 12 months is inspiring to not just those of us who get the privilege of living with her, but anyone who knows her, and I would extend that to her friend Kelly. The two of them are real role models now, for all of us. On how to live our lives and pick ourselves up after a huge setback.”
He and his wife have twin 18-year-old daughters, Grace and Carey, They work at the camp.
I ask Neil Mulhall how he and his wife are doing. “We’re okay,” he says, as if almost surprised to hear himself saying it,

I follow a group of Anchor campers– the group Paige Malone would have been working with — past the dance tent, toward their next activity: the slip ‘n slide. The campers like sliding, but they like it even better when one of the counselors sprays each of them in the face with his hose.
A young man named Kevin Richman, a group leader, wanders over. He used to spend his summers teaching school, for actual pay. But he gave it up to return to Anchor. He tells me that the most underappreciated thing about Anchor is how the family connects year-round. How when the campers meet other special kids like themselves, all from the Town of Hempstead, it gives them a year-round social network.
I ask Kevin how Justine is doing.
“Justine?” he says. “Justine’s found peace here.”

Joe Lentini wants me to see the memorial that greets all visitors to the camp, a stone from a nearby quarry with an anchor embedded in it, and the names of Paige, Jamie and Michael.
Then he nods to a large tent in the distance. Within a few years, if they can raise the six million dollars, it will be The Malone-Mulhall Recreation Center at Camp Anchor.
And now we turn to see two young women awaiting us, a few feet away, smiling tanned. They both started as volunteers in 2004, and were both given staff positions in 2007. I approach, notebook open, to ask them, what it’s like to be on staff at Anchor, to work at something that does so much good.
“It’s not work,” says Justine Mulhall. “It’s going to camp.”
“It’s not what we do,” says Kelly Murphy. “It’s what we love.”
It must be amazing, I say, as stupidly as always, to come in from your own everyday world to this one.
“This is our real world,” says Kelly Murphy, and her friend smiles in agreement.
I thank them for their time, and they turn to hurry back to their group, where they’re needed. Well, where they belong.

***
It was three weeks into the season. The starters were on the road. The remaining non-dressing dozen were practicing at home. As usual, it was an intense practice. If you impressed Bob DiGregorio, the second-team coach, in practice, your chances of moving up next year were enhanced.
Chic was moving in on goal. Skating as fast as he could, hoping to deke the goalie, pop it into the upper corner.
“The puck got too far out in front of me, and as I sped up to catch up, he reached out at the same time I made the move,” he recalls. “His stick went under my skates, and I hit the ice, sliding head-first, into the boards.”
He’s recites this without emotion.
“Five seconds later I gathered myself and tried to get up. Ten seconds later I knew something was wrong. I couldn’t feel anything, move anything. Within a minute I pretty much knew I must have broken my neck, I remember saying to the goalie, `Tell those guys to stop shooting pucks, and get the coach down here.’
“Then I remember they were wheeling me off the ice and I said to the paramedics, `Hold on a second — I just remembered: my friend from high school’s coming to visit me this weekend. He’s going to be here at 7:30 on a Greyhound, Someone has to go pick him up,’
“They thought I was delusional. But I was thinking. `Poor guy. Coming up to have a fun party weekend at college…instead he’s going to be at the hospital.’”
I ask: What was the goalie’s name? What was the name of the guy who stole your limbs?
He shakes his head.
“That’s a good question. I don’t remember. He was in the same boat I was. Probably one of the last to make the team. Put it this way: he wasn’t trying to hurt me.
“Look: It could have happened anywhere. It could have happened at Fairfield. In high school, we’d drive to fast to practice early, and shoot pucks at each other and trip each other. I could have hurt one of my friends.”
He plunged into the rehab the way he’d plunged into working out: full-bore. He enjoyed the challenge. He was off the ventilator within a week, despite contracting double pneumonia. After ten months. he came home and enrolled at St. Joseph’s University, where he earned his B.A. in economics (minor in philosophy), and then his MBA. Then he joined the Malvern Prep staff, to pass on what he knew about theology, and economics, and growing up.
“It‘s funny: if before it happened you had told me what I’d have to deal with after it happened, I would have said, `I can’t do that. There‘s no way I could physically or emotionally deal with that.’
“I remember something that happened a year before that. In church the priest was talking about a wrestler who broke his neck goofing around on the grass with a friend. I thought, `Imagine living with that. Thank God that’ll never happen to me.”
***
In 1988, the NCAA offered a program to colleges which would allow the colleges to fund insurance policies which would cover athletes who had suffered catastrophic injuries for $30,00 a year. Merrimack had such a policy in place at the time of his injury. Twenty-three years ago, that thirty grand was enough to pay for Chic’s 24-hour care.
Since then, home nursing costs have more than quadrupled. Realistically, Chic has 35 years to live, at best. The total he is requesting would be $2.4 million over the rest of his life.
Last year, the NCAA, a nonprofit organization, sold the rights to its annual basketball tournament, which provides 90 percent of its annual revenue, to CBS and Turner for $10.8 billion dollars.
Last March, a 30-second commercial during the Final Four cost sponsors $1.3 million.
Ninety-five percent of the NCAA’s revenue goes back to member schools. Those schools then use it to pay seven-figure salaries to coaches, and build new arenas.
With the money the NCAA still has, the organization pays its administrative costs, and does its best to advance the noble cause – for instance, flying 400 athletes to an expenses-paid “Student-Leadership Forum.”
The organization has no fund to help victims of catastrophic injury.
***
Four years ago, as the expenses of his nursing became prohibitive, Kelly asked Don DiJulia, the AD at St. Josephs’s, if he could reach out to the NCAA, and help see if they could bump up his annual care to the $100,000. DiJulia forwarded a letter from Chic to Keith Martin, the NCAA director of Finance and Operations. He included a DVD of Chic, explaining his situation.
Martin wrote back to DiJulia and explained that the organization could not help Chic, since their current policy, in place since 1995, was not retroactive. Martin suggested Chic contact the insurance carrier. The insurance carrier said they could do nothing.
“It’s a lot easier to say no to someone,” Chic cays now, “when they’re not there in person.”
Chic next turned to an old family friend, Jay Wick. Chic had caddied for Wick as a teenager at Gulph Mills golf course, where Wicks was the assistant. Now the pro at Old Sandwich Golf Club on Cape Cod, Wicks found an attorney to review the possibility of a case against the NCAA. The attorney advised him that the case was not strong. Chic couldn’t risk money he didn’t have on a suit he wouldn’t win.
“It’s such an unbelievable injustice,” says Wick now. “Here you have one of the great role models…the NCAA should be embracing Chic Kelly. This is someone who had this incredible misfortune and tough odds. Then he graduates,. Then he gets a masters, he teaches kids who love him – it’s nothing short of incredible for them to turn their back on Chic.”
“In the end, if the NCAA powers meet Chic Kelly, and still don’t do anything to improve his financial situation, then fine,” Wick says now. “But at least meet with Chic! If someone in the NCAA could just meet this kid…I just don’t believe that human beings in a position to help someone like this wouldn’t do it.”

***
Since then, both of Chic’s parents have lost their jobs. Money is tight all-around. So Kelly recently e-mailed Martin again, and received this response.
“The NCAA is in the same position today as we were in 2007 in that we do not have the authority or ability to retroactively change policy benefits regardless of who purchased the policy…This is true for the policies we purchased beginning in 1992 as well as the policies individual universities purchased prior to that time.”
He again told Chic to talk to the insurance carrier. The carrier again said there was nothing they could do about raising benefits
I contacted Gail Dent in the NCAA Public and Media Relations Office asking to speak to Martin about the case. A few days later, she responded by e-mail:
“I spoke with our staff and was told that we’ve been in communication with Mr. Kelly on a few occasions over the years….In 1988 the NCAA had a voluntary program and the individual schools made the decision about the coverage they needed to have in place. The NCAA started paying the premiums in 1992, however, we cannot retroactively change the benefits under a policy…I’m not sure there is any additional information the NCAA can provide for your story.”
When I asked for clarification on the NCAA’s relationship to the individual schools at the time, Dent responded: “We don’t believe that the program that Merrimack was part of was mandatory. We made the program available to schools and they had the option to purchase it or not.”
All Chic Kelly knows is that he was participating in a hockey practice insured either mandatorily or voluntarily by the NCAA – which, today, cannot apparently clarify which was the case – when his mobile life effectively ended.
And as far as Chic is concerned, all of the obfuscating semantics are beside the point: “It’s like having a pool in your backyard,” he says, “and not putting a fence around it and then claiming you’re not responsible for someone drowning in it.”
All Chic Kelly needs to know is that the policy he was issued had “NCAA” on every page.
“But look: it’s not like I’m bitter about the NCAA,” he says. “I’m like, `Okay, if you could just fix it for me going forward, my life would be tremendous.’
“If I could just get the NCAA to say, `Look, this is a special case…’ I mean, how many of us could there be? I’d bet you dollars to donuts it’s less than five people. It might be one person who has a significant disability and needs physical assistance with almost every daily living activity: me.
“I’m asking for a drop in the bucket. To just make up the difference. To just pay for the nursing. I don’t need a lump sum, like a million dollars. If they’d just put in the difference between the 30 grand they’re giving me, and the 100 grand I need and deserve, and just put the 70 in an account for a nursing service, I’d be set.
“If the NCAA would just give me what’s just and fair, I would have no problem paying for my adult independence.”

***
The last time I visited Chic’s parents’ house, the sun was high in the sky, and Chic’s spirits were, of course, even higher — even though his beloved St. Joe’s basketball team had just finished its worst season in decades with a loss to Dayton.
The cause for the smile? He was writing his final exams, and for any teacher, no matter how much he loves to teach, when you’re writing those finals, you know that summer freedom is just around the corner.
For Chic, this means a lot of mid-week Phillies’ games. “The Phillies have real good wheelchair seats,” he says. And there won’t be a lack of friends to accompany him: “They all say, `Dude, bring that handicap parking thing!’ He laughs. “You get rock-star parking.”
As I say goodbye, I realize that, on this visit, I hardly paid attention to the wheelchair, and that we had spent more time talking about the Eagles and the Giants and the NFL lockout than we’d talked about his plight – which is, at the end of the day, at the end of every day, how he wants it.
As I leave the room, he’s spinning the chair back to his computer, to watch – I can say with certainty, though I don’t know for sure – a Phillies replay, or an Eagles preview, or a Flyers’ highlight.
Because sports spawned this incredible, indomitable spirit, and tHen tried to swat it down.
But failed.
And as his mom shows me to the door, I’m thinking about how stupid it was for me to think, when I first met this guy, that he didn’t see the bars of the cage he was in.
When, this time, I see the truth: That’s it’s we — smug in our that-will-never-happen-to-me complacency — who are shackled in ignorance: looking at Chic Kelly, and seeing bars and a cage…
…that are not there.

I’m betting you can. Because you’re different. Because your generation is different, and your class is different, and some of you know you’re different…And different is good. Being different is good. Actually, it’s not only good, it’s the answer to those problems we left you.

We’ve been thinking pretty much one way around here for a couple of hundred years now, and where’s it gotten us? The country’s completely divided by ranting political talking heads who ignore substance, and champion ego. Our planet is melting. There’s no middle class. Obviously the same old solutions aren’t going to work anymore.

So if you’re thinking outside of the box, we need you. If you’re different, we need you. If you’re on the fringe, we need you. This doesn’t mean that if you lead, and you’re succeeding, and you know what you’re going to do with your life, we don’t need you. Of course we do. You already know that. That’s why you’re the leaders.

But we also need those of you who don’t fit the mold just as much. And that’s where this class comes in. This class didn’t go in for the cliques, the groups, the clichés. This one was different, in a good way. In a way where pride doesn’t mean pride in just the stars. It meant pride in everyone in the group.

How can I be sure that you’ll be the ones to change all of our mistakes? That’s easy: because you’re the first generation that finally, really, doesn’t care who’s black, who’s white, who’s Asian, who’s straight, who’s gay, who’s Christian, who’s Hindu and who worships the ancient Egyptian cat goddess Bastet. (I do, but that’s another story.)

This is how I know that gender/race/sex prejudice is on its way out (thank Bastet). I went to Red Sox spring training this year, to interview two of their pitchers for Boston Magazine. Both of them were pretty inspiring. Jon Lester’s overcome cancer. Clay Buchholz has overcome the night when he was 19 and he stole 29 laptops from an elementary school because his dad had just been laid off at the chemical plant and the family needed the money. One more mistake, and he was toast. He’s hasn’t made any since, and he’s proud of it. He also married a model from Deal or No Deal, which ain’t a bad deal.

But you know what impressed me the most? A woman named Pam Ganley. She’s the Red Sox’ head of media relations, which is a super-intense job, with a million responsibilities. It’s probably second behind the manager in importance. She’s a graduate of UMass, majored in sports management. When I started out in sportswriting, Pam Ganley would have been answering the media guy’s phone. Now she’s in charge. She didn’t get there by flirting, or being glamorous, or playing to mens’ outdated ideals of womanhood. She got there by being good at what she does.

So: all of this makes you the perfect generation to start untangling all the knots of prejudice and sexism that the last few generations wove. All of you: from the Valedictorian…to the kid whose only passions tonight are his skateboard and all The Killers songs on his iPod.

From the science star who’s going to learn how to harness wave power for cheap energy – someone has to! — to the bass player who isn’t going to college, but dreams about renting an empty storefront in Winsted to open a music store so he can teach the little kids down the street how to play the drums, and keep them out of trouble.

Mostly, I have to confess: I’m talking to the kid who’s tired of hearing, “You’re underachieving!”…because, hell, you already know you’re underachieving. What…people think you want to underachieve? As if! Right: As if you wake up each day saying, “Hey, I want the world to look at me and say, “Wow, what a loser.’” As if you aren’t waiting and hoping for the day when you can actually show your stuff.

So, to you: I’m here to tell you that there will come a day when you will achieve, for two reasons. One is that, with our society basically bottoming out, you have to get there. It’s like the draft. We need you. But secondly, I speak from experience. I was Number 1490 in a college class of 1500. I was a slacker. When I graduated I wrote to 20 newspapers in New England asking for a job as a sportwsriter. After all, I went to, like Yale. I got 20 rejections: “We don’t care where you went to school. Take your philosophy degree and shove it.”

I had no option if I needed to pay the rent on my New Haven hovel. The only thing I was passionate about was sports. The only thing I was any good at was writing. I started writing for free. Got published in The Advocate, in free papers, anywhere I could find who’d just print my words, because I thought they were worth something. They were mine, and they were all I had to offer.

And finally, six months later, the New Haven Register read my stories, and even though my hair splayed below my shoulders, and I had a fingernail painted pink (what was that about?) they took me on, and let me cover a minor-league hockey team, and I haven’t looked back since. It all worked out.

But a funny thing about back then. We all rebelled against the older generation, the way you’re supposed to, the way I hope you guys are — only we didn’t bother to fix anything they’d done wrong. We went to Woodstock, We followed our selfish bliss. We didn’t change a thing. And we didn’t leave much of a legacy. Check this out: Today there’s a restaurant in New York, with a chef my age, where two people can eat a great dinner, and it’ll run them…$1500.

That’s what my generation has produced: sushi for billionaires. Not a too proud-making legacy there, right? We talked a good game, but we still thought that success meant money and fame.

As if.

Money? Our economy’s verging on collapse because of greed. Check out this stat: half of the players who have been out of the NFL for five years have declared bankruptcy. So much for fortune.

Fame? Lebron James has fame. But doesn’t have a ring. Madonna has fame — and three marriages, and a charity in Africa whose directors turned out to have spent all the foundation’s money on cars and jewelry. The African kids didn’t see a penny. So much for fame and achievement.

Success? It’s not on the outside. It’s not Outside People Looking at You and Saying, “Wow! She’s So Successful!”. It’s knowing that you feel good about yourself, and believing in yourself, and when you feel good about yourself, well, that’s when you can really help others. And honestly: I can’t believe how much your generation seems to know, instinctively, how much of the good in life is helping others. Altruism…it’s instinct with you guys.

I can sense this. Right now I’m writing a book with a Cuban-Jamaican guy who used to want to be a model. Wanted to see himself on magazine covers. Soon after the end of apartheid, he went to South Africa to model. Even landed a magazine cover. But in Capetown he noticed something: that the homeless street kids were always smiling. Hungry, needing new clothes, but smiling, laughing.

He came home and decided that modeling was meaningless. So he formed a group of inner-city bodybuilders called the City Gym Boys to help the inner cities start getting in shape, and wipe out obesity. He’s broke, but every day he changes lives. I call him a success. I call him a hero.

And I’m starting another book, about another success that came from a different place. Phil Jackson was the NBA’s resident hippie. He was a true rebel without a cause. He loved Buddhism, and motorcycles. He retired, and started coaching in a minor league. The general manager of the Chicago Bulls started calling him for information about the kids in his league. Then the guy hired him in Chicago, because his opinions about the players was so right on. Then the Bulls fired their head coach, and gave Phil the Weirdsmobile the head job. 20 years ago.

Last month, he retired with eleven championship titles under his belt – more than any coach in the history of American sports. And if on the day Jackson retired from the NBA, with his long hair and his Fu Manchu mustache, and his coach having to say, “Phil, put out the joint before you get on the bus, okay” you‘d have asked the entire sports world who among every NBA player was going to go on to become the most successful coach in sports history, Phil Jackson would have come in 1490 out of 1500 — ahead of 10 people who’d already died.

But you know who really inspires me? A guy with sort of a backwards story about succeeding and following your bliss and doing a lot of good in a weird way. The story of a guy who was always on the fringe, and is still on the fringe, and has changed about a million lives, including mine.

He was raised the son of an orthodontist in Princeton, New Jersey, which is about the preppiest, richest town in America, His dad sent him off to Taft, which is a prep school down in Watertown that has more hockey rinks than it needs.

But Trey Anastasio kept playing his guitar. And instead of going to some prep college, he went to Godard, for art types, in Vermont, and he assembled a band, and they called it Phish, and they started out playing in clubs in Burlington, to audiences of five or six. Sometimes the audiences were so down on their weird music they performed plays. I’ve seen a video of their early days in Vermont, playing in someone’s backyard for a party. No one was even paying them any attention, just throwing Frisbees to their dogs.

Flash-forward to now. Phish sells out every venue, in every city, without advertising. Their followers number in the millions. They bring joy to a whole lot of kids who the rest of society likes to dis: Oh, she’s a Phish kid.

Well, guess what? I’m a Phish kid. Well, I’m a Phish adult. I wrote a story about them for GQ where I camped out with 60,000 kids one third my age for three days, and they hooked me.

Now, I don’t write anything — not a book, not a website article — unless I’m listening to some live Phish CD. It used to be the Foo Fighters or Beethoven or Tchaikovsky. Now it’s Phish.

There might not be any Phish freaks in this class. But I’ll bet that some of you have a band who changes your life, and that band was started by a kid like you. She was good at something, she loved it, and she did it – and this is everything, this is the one thing you should take away from what I’m, saying tonight – by working harder than the person on each side of her.

Okay: Last reference to me. I’m in the press box at Fenway Park thirty years ago for a playoff baseball game between the Sox and the Yankees. I work for the New Haven Register – the worst newspaper in history. To my left is Peter Gammons, the king of baseball writers for The Globe. A star. To my right? A guy named Roger Angell, who writes for The New Yorker. A superstar. The guy’d filled up a whole notebook page a half hour before the game starts. I haven’t written a sentence. I’m panicking.

What in the world can I do to keep up with these dudes? I don’t have Gammons network. I don’t have Angell’s talent. And it hits me: I can work harder than them. So I hung around, after the game, in both locker rooms. I come up to the press box. I write my story, and I hear this voice. “We’re closing up.” I look around, and there are no other writers. I’m the last one. I worked harder than the guy to my left, and the guy to my right.

Do the math. If you keep winning in a contest of three, you’re going to rise to the top.

Has Trey Anastasio changed the world by discovering cold fusion? Nope. Has he made a difference by working hard at what he’s good at? Yep. Did anyone think when he was playing his guitar at Taft that his band would end up making more money every year than all of his classmates who followed the prep hamster wheel? I kind of doubt it. Has he given a fourth hockey rink to Taft. Not bloody likely.

Last thing: I hope that the top ten percent of this class isn’t sitting here saying, “Hey I worked my butt off for four years, and now I’m hearing that the guy whose only achievement is his cool tattoos has as good a shot as I do at succeeding?”

‘No. To those of you who buckled down and avoided the temptations and pulled off a high-school career that made everyone in your family proud, special congratulations. Leaders do count, and we need you.

But there’s this thing about leadership. There are leaders who become politicians and then embarrass themselves and have to quit because they took that road only for themselves and their egos and power, and they messed up, as always happens when you’re only doing it for yourself.

Then, there are leaders who do it because they know they are destined to be good leaders, because they know that people they’re leading are as important as they are. Bill Gates, the head of Microsoft – who, you probably know, never graduated from college, but has changed the world more than anyone in history – likes to live by these eight words: No Life Is More Important Than Anyone Else’s.

And that’s my idea of leadership.

And so I’m going to finish with this weird and wonderful thing I just learned about penguins.
You know how when you’re wanting to watch whatever on TV, only your grandparents are watching a natural history channel show of penguins at the South pole in the winter, when it’s like 60 below, and they’re clustered, like 5,000 of them, in a big circular mass? And maybe you thought, “Aren’t the ones on the outside mad that they’re freezing, while the ones in the middle are cozy and warm? The ones in the middle, man, they must be very smart politicians?”

But guess what? It turns out that with those 5,000 penguins, the whole group \is slowly rotating, so that every penguin gets equal time on the inside, and equal time on the outside. They’re constantly moving, the whole winter. They move one foot every five seconds.

Now: I am sure that this didn’t happen randomly. I am that there were 5,000 penguins stranded on an ice floe a million years ago, and 1,000 of them on the outside were freezing to death every winter, until one of them,…or two, or three…the smart leaders at the center, said, at about, mid-January, `Hey. We’re warm right now. Let’s start pushing out, so the other guys have to come in, and they’ll get warm, and live, we won’t lose any of the flock.”

My guess is that the penguin leader knew instinctively that the most important thing is to not only keep the species alive, and thriving, but that every one of us – banker, bricklayer, mathematician, mechanic, wizard, waitress, pianist, painter, author, organist, camp counselor, marine corps sergeant, — is as important as everyone else in the clan.

I’m, not only honored to be standing before you, I’m humbled. You are going to make more of a difference in history than you’ll ever know.

It’s your time now. We need you, and I know that you’re going to come through for us. All of you.