Game Still On!
The team comes together almost by accident. A few already living in Boston, and the rest move here over the next year or so. It’s 1980, the year you graduate from college but don’t get the memo which says students are expected to leave campus once handed their diploma. Instead, you travel to Europe with your roommate only to return to Middletown to live with your girlfriend and work on photography. You aim to get started in a career as… well, you don’t really know as what, but photography beckons, as does soaring plastic.
“Exactly what are you doing?” both of your parents ask you when you tell them you’re returning to the college you’ve officially graduated from.
“Making a portfolio,” you say, trying to deflect the question with a nod to artistic purpose, your mother’s weak spot. Or so you think.
“They don’t want you hanging around,” she says, which you hear but don’t heed.
“It’s fine,” you say, sure that living with your girlfriend and using the school newspaper’s darkroom is something the college would support. You’re twenty two with your whole life sprawling out in from of you, so of course it’s fine. Frontal lobes only partially developed, you rationalize the whole thing in less time than it takes to develop a roll of negatives from your six week jaunt across Europe.
“We don’t approve,” your parents say with conviction. Mom born of proper Virginia family lineage. Dad, son of a New York banker. Neither break rules, ever. Honesty and integrity their north stars. Your mom will tell you years later she never got a ticket for a moving violation. How is this possible, you ask yourself? You the person who backed the family car into another the very first time they gave you the keys to go get milk.
Against their better judgement, the fall of 1980 finds you working for the public affairs office at Wesleyan while also washing pots at an eating club in exchange for meals. You finally move to Boston in December, for photography… but mostly to play ultimate. Yes, you and a number of your friends converge to create a team called the Rude Boys with the singular goal of being the best at sport only ten years old. It takes a couple of years, but in the fall of 1982 your new team, dressed in sleeveless black shirts with a distinctive checkerboad logo manages to pull off a National Championship. Forty two years later, which is now, most of you reconvene in Boston for a celebration and reunion of those glory years.
Almost all of the original group manage to return for what is to be a four day series of antics and events. Clam bakes, bike rides, boat trips and river swims, nerf pong and croquet, a bonfire and Celtic playoff game bring you all back to when Bird, McCale and Parish dominated the parquet floor in the early ’80’s. Now, it’s Brown and Tatum, along with their band of talented teammates up against the Mavs — Kirie Irving booed on every return to the parquet, not yet forgiven for stomping on Lucky in an attempt to rid the demons he brought mostly on himself. Go Celts! You’re all excited by the playoff run, and sad at the passing of Bill Walton, your neighbor when you lived in Cambridge. With him as inspiration, we cheer on a new group of wannabe champions. Your team knows the feeling of vying for a championship, if not the level of celebrity.
These are opportunities to relive your youth, which the team proves to be very good at. You bask in the bonds created when the team came together more than four decades ago, bonds that grow stronger as you all age. With your team acutely are aware of each other’s mortality, you all make a pact not to talk about ailments, and istead live it up. Points are deducted from anyone who forgets this proclamation, and while no one’s actually keeping score, everyone knows everything’s a game, always, and has been since you first learned the simple rules of the sport you owe so much to. Flat flip flies straight. Play catch. Invent games and have fun! You come together to forge new memories, the team still crafting the Rude Boy story, relying on each other to fill-in the next chapter, whether it’s Leif capturing a slow-mo film of kids celebrating each Boston Glory goal at the professional league game you attend, or Joey Y. fueling the bonfire well into the night.
“When’s the next tournament?” you ask as the weekend winds down.
“This fall,” Fin answers. “Rudeback West.”
There’s a move to get the team together in the foothills of the Colorado Rockies to frolic and play. The team used to take the fields with seven on the line, game after game, weekend after weekend, all in an effort to climb the ranks of a sport invented a mere decade before most of you learned how to throw a flick. Now, you and Jim attempt to complete a hundred passes in a row and find it hard. Bill Bradley could hit fifty free throws in a row when in high school, but not once he made it to the NBA. “Noise of the world creeps into your head,” Bradley professed in his book. In our case, it’s noise as well as rust, so you don’t reach the hundred pass milestone until the last day of this celebration.
On the last day, your friend Jim suggests renting BlueBikes for a ride out Beacon Street to the Chestnut Hill Reservoir. No sooner than you’re on them headed west, you offhandedly point out Summit Ave..
“That’s the steepest hill in Boston,” you say, thinking we will ride by.
“Is it on the way?” Jim asks, of course.
“Kinda,” your response, thinking these rentals aren’t designed for such an incline.
“Then let’s go,” he says as you both look up what seems like a hill too far.
“We’re gonna need the granny gear for this one,” you announce, showing him how to twist the handle to shift the gear to what just might be a manageable ratio of effort to incline.
Jim talks most of the way up, which impresses you immensely. Summit Avenue’s no joke. Straight up. Jim and his two newly bionic knees crests it with little trouble. When we lay our bikes down on the grass at the top, he reveals a disc he’s hidden under his shirt.
“We still have work to do,” he says, and you set ourselves up for one last attempt at what should be easy, and but isn’t. Your shoulder sore, your legs tired, the two of you start the count.
“Ten… twenty… fifty… eighty…” he calls out.
“I’m glad you’re counting, I’m not sure I could,” you say, only half joking.
And then, a short while later, as the two of you have inched further and further apart to ratchet up the challenge, the disc hits the ground and you’re not sure if you’ve completed the challenge. After a short pause, Jimmy shouts, “one hundred and six.”
Finally, you can put this to bed, a fitting end to an epic weekend—all of you still playing the games you played when you were six. Maybe games are the answer, the fountain of youth with Jim first in line to drink from it, while the rest of you wonder if you can keep up. Game still on!
