WillJ
12-28-2017, 06:59 PM
Coach K and I arrived at Duke together in the Summer of 1980, me as a callow freshman and he as the new basketball coach. Neither one of us got off to a good start. Coach K’s first team was a decent one, but his next two were dreadful, losing 17 games in both years as he struggled to recruit good players. I got off to a slow start, too, struggling academically and floundering in my efforts to impress the women of Duke. But things began to turn around for both Coach K and me in the Spring of 1983, at the end of my Junior year. Coach K’s star freshman class came together to form a winning team that has set off more than 35 years of sustained excellence, and I got better grades and started dating Patty. The year 1983 was good to both of us, then, K and me.
Fans of other teams often ask whether I’ve gotten bored rooting for a team that always wins, particularly a team tied to an obnoxious, elite university like Duke. My answer is always that no, I don’t get tired of rooting for the Duke basketball team, in part because we were so bad when we first fell in love. Many of my male Duke friends are similarly obsessed, still showing, in our 50’s now, a prurient interest in the upcoming college attendance decisions of 15- and 16-year old basketball prodigies, hoping that our run of recruiting victories over North Carolina will continue. I know Duke women who care like we do, but most don’t, including our daughter Maddie, a recent Duke grad who rarely went to basketball games. This gender difference in obsession has, on occasion, been the source of some intramarital conflict, as Patty will sometimes troll me with comments like “That didn’t seem like such a bad call to me, Will.” It’s most vexing.
Why do we Duke men - smartish people with interests in ostensibly more important things like medicine, law, and economics - care so much? I think it’s partially the naked tribalism, a celebration of us-versus-them in a socially controlled environment, the sort of thing we see in other team sports, in civic rivalries and in politics. But it’s more than that, I think. There’s something special about basketball, with their uniforms of sleeveless shirts and, in our day, tight shorts that left very little to the imagination. Basketball players are unfettered by masks, helmets or hats, their faces and emotions fully visible to the crowd that is quite close to the court, far closer than in football or baseball. As a result their emotions, their aggression and drive, both their frustrations with their bad plays and their joys with their good ones, are all far more accessible to the basketball fan than they are in other sports. It makes it easier for us fans to fall in love. And all that near nakedness, all those emotions and connections leads, in my friends and me at least, to a love that occasionally wanders over into the homoerotic. Not that there’s anything wrong with it.
I was in a fraternity at Duke. I joined it in typically clueless fashion, only realizing late in the February rush season that the only way to secure good housing on campus was to join the Chi Delt’s (not its real name). I was an enthusiastic Chi Delt for a year or so but, while I still like my friends, I later came to dislike the whole system, thinking it exacerbated anxiety and division. Duke Chi Delt’s were quite homogeneous in my day, all male of course, but also mostly mirroring the homogeneity of the Duke students of the time, almost all from well-off families, mostly from the East and not quite good enough to go to Ivy League schools. But there was some variation, too, with Jews from Illinois mixing with Japanese-Americans from North Carolina, with tall and short, skinny and fat, and with brothers both outgoing and introverted. At least one brother was gay, although not out at the time. But the most unusual person in our group, the person whose life experience had most deviated from the norm, was probably Tod. He was certainly the only one of us who had almost died in high school.
Tod was about 5’6” tall and stocky in a doughy way. You wouldn’t know he was recovering from brain cancer except that he was almost completely bald, with a single patch on the front of his head, like Charlie Brown. Tod had been a varsity wrestler in high school, before his illness, and he had retained some of the build of an athlete. But he was not very coordinated when I knew him as a college student, with a slightly off-kilter gait and a basketball dribble that was too high, as if the cancer or its treatment had mutilated some small but essential part of his proprioception. His speech was slightly off, too, with words coming in syncopated gushes, as if his slightly impaired mouth was constantly trying to work off a backlog of instructions coming from the intact portions of his brain. Oliver Wendell Holmes said of his Civil War service that “it was given to us to learn at the outset that life is a profound and passionate thing.” I think, Tod must have felt some of that, too.
Tod had a great sense of humor, both charming and barbed. He had nicknames for everyone. I was called Won’t by a junior tennis coach, Wilhelmina by my supervisor when I delivered pizza for Domino’s, and Willis, Swill, and Willbur while in college, but Tod is the only person who regularly called me Wildo. I rather think it’s the nickname I’d give myself if I weren’t me. He always referred to Patty as “Voodoo,” my college nickname for her, long after everyone but me had forgotten about it. Tod had nicknames for other friends, too, such as Art (“Arturo”), Stillwell (“Stillborn”) and many others, but his two favorite nicknames were for two friends that, like Tod, came from Maryland. Bob Winterberry came to school with the nickname Spike, a reference to his resemblance to a first basemen for the Baltimore Orioles, but Tod made sure that he kept it at Duke. Tod gave Bob Stepnicky the nickname “Sputnik,” an obvious but well-chosen nickname that stuck with him through college and beyond.
We appointed Tod as the fraternity “hod,” whose job was to deliver mocking doggerel and a matzo-encrusted cross to the fraternity brother who had committed the sin of the week. Tod was a very good hod and his performances were the only thing that livened up what were otherwise soul-killing fraternity meetings. Tod gave me my only matzo cross when I, drunk and confused, tried to climb into bed with the occupant of the 3rd floor analog to my 2nd floor bunk bed. The ne plus ultra of Tod’s hodship occurred when his beloved Orioles beat Sputnik’s Chicago White Sox in the 1983 playoffs, which Tod celebrated by igniting a Sox cap doused in lighter fluid in our meeting room, setting off a genuinely scary fireball that would have likely drawn expulsion had the campus fire marshal been a witness. The fireball burned Tod’s few hairs, too, but he didn’t mind because he always got an extra measure of joy out of sticking it to Sputnik.
There was considerable variability within our fraternity in interests and behavior, though almost all of that variation was around a central tendency of alcoholism, mockery and basketball. My group of ten or so focused on mockery, with an admixture of sports enthusiasm. Another group was more studious, typically young men who had aspirations (mostly successful) of going to topnotch medical schools. And a third group settled into a life-style of underage hipsters, playing jazz music, serving cocktails and decorating their rooms in the style of Frank Sinatra’s Palm Springs villa, with clean lines, framed prints and swept floors. They made excellent martinis and stored cocktail onions and olives in their tiny refrigerators. This last group, to which Tod gravitated, became known as Palm Springs, mocked for both the pretense and the reality of their own relative maturity.
Like many other men my age, I’m sure, the recent attention on campus rape and assault has made me think about the events of my own college years. I thought first of my own experience, of course, and I’m still with the only girlfriend I ever really had in college, and so I’m guardedly confident that I never assaulted anyone. My initial reaction was that none of that happened anywhere else in my fraternity – in my memory, we, particularly the Palm Springs clique, were far too meek and insecure to ever assault anyone. And yet, in recent conversations with men and women in our group back then, it’s clear that young men in our fraternity did sometimes act in dishonorable ways. I was shocked, for example, when in response to the #MeToo phenomenon, a one-time Chi Delt “little sister” posted on Facebook an anguished recollection of her 35-year old encounter with an unnamed brother in the back seat of a car on the way to an off-campus party. And what’s further, my semi-educated guess is that the young man who acted this way was at least loosely affiliated with the Palm Springs group. We were the meekest of the meek, having our bench mockingly emblazoned one night with the words “Safe Date,” except when we weren’t.
The fact that we drank too much was surely a contributing factor to some of that misbehavior. Duke had, in our freshman year, let kids buy beer with our meal plan points. This was a very bad idea, particularly at the end of each semester when most girls used their remaining points to buy beer for their male classmates. Playing drinking games with free beer was one reason why Patty says I was always passed out by 9pm in our freshman year. I can’t remember, so who’s to argue. I sobered up considerably in later years, but Patty once egged me on to doing some extra shots one night during senior year and I avenged myself by barfing in her bed. She felt bad about goading me into that state, and so she was kind to me after my heave. Word of my performance leaked out in her dorm, however, and she herself got the equivalent of a matzo cross from her own sorority. “I’ve heard of being served breakfast in bed,” said their hod-equivalent, “but this is not at all what I had in mind.”
The severely drunk often reveal parts of their personality that they had tried hard to keep hidden in more sober moments. Brothers were expected to ask a girl out for a date to our semi-annual formals, and these events provoked anxiety in those without steady girlfriends. I realized late one night, after too many beers and too much foosball, that it was particularly demoralizing for Tod. “Who are you taking to the formal, Tod,” asked Cindy, a pretty, blond girl whose steady boyfriend Neal was a year ahead of us. The three of us were sitting on a couch in the fraternity’s poorly-lit game room, a tacky Lowenbrau light hung from the ceiling and a Budweiser light on the wall. It was a Wednesday night, very much a party night in the Duke culture of the time, but we were the only three still about for some reason. I needed to get up early and study for an exam in my 9am Roman History class. I wasn’t doing particularly well in that class and it had been unwise of me to drink five beers, but that was far fewer than Tod had ingested.
“Who would want to go out with me?” Tod responded to Cindy and me.
I wasn’t sure how to answer. If it had been any other kid I knew, I would have bucked him up, told him that you had to take your chances in asking out girls and that, with enough chances taken, there was someone out there for all of us. It was just a matter
of putting yourself out there often enough. That’s all good advice, mind you, but I couldn’t find myself to deliver those words to Tod. It seemed cruel to do so. I wasn’t sure that there really were any girls at Duke who wanted to be Tod’s girlfriend, who wanted to tether themselves to someone so obviously damaged and, one had to suspect, at risk of further damage in the near future.
“What do you mean, Tod?” asked Cindy.
“Just what I said,” said Tod. “Nobody would want to go with me to the party.”
“That’s not true,” said Cindy. “I’d go with you if I Neal weren’t in town.”
“No, you wouldn’t,” said Tod, turning his head to face her.
“You’re wrong,” said Cindy. “I would go with you. You’re like a brother to me.”
“Exactly,” said Tod with heat. “I’m like a brother to you.”
Exactly indeed, I thought. Tod didn’t want someone who would go to the party just because their regular boyfriend was out of town. Tod wanted a date who wanted to be with him. Like the rest of us, Tod wanted a girl to dance with him, to kiss him, to have sex with him.
“There’s a girl out there who’s not your sister,” I said quickly, “one that wants to go to the party with you. I’m sure of it.”
But I wasn’t sure of it at all. An older brother once told me that he had lost respect for Tod because he felt sorry for himself for having had cancer. This seemed an odd thing to say to me, both because I wouldn’t hold it against Tod if he did feel sorry for himself occasionally – I know that I would if I were him – and because, outside of this one drunken instance, I never heard a word from Tod that could be construed as self-pity. I admired him for that, and very much doubted that I could have done as well under the same circumstances.
My friends and I all loved the Duke basketball players, but nobody loved them more than Spike, a team manager for the team. An unpaid volunteer position, the team manager’s responsibilities included shagging balls for the players as they practiced their shooting, making sure that enough towels and water were on hand during practice and games, and occasionally filling in to simulate the upcoming opponent in slow-motion drills. To this day, one of the managers’ jobs is to sprint, full throttle, across the court the second the buzzer sounds for halftime, bobbing and weaving between referees and the much bigger players. They surely have good reason for doing so, perhaps to check on the locker room towels, but they look ridiculous to my eye. It’s the kind of job that would only be taken by young men at peace with their place in the athletic universe, young men willing to sublimate their own desires and aspirations to the betterment of something bigger than themselves, young men willing to take the razzing and abuse of less mature young men, like me, that had not fully accepted their own place in the athletic universe. My best friend Doug and I sporadically published a fraternity broadsheet in which we constantly satirized Spike, referring to him as the “towel-flinger” and “jock carrier.” In his own, not infrequent, drunken state, and in response to our abuse, Spike would unfavorably compare our courting tackle to that of one of the star forwards.
“You wouldn’t believe how big it is!” said Spike.
“How do you know?” we would ask.
“You can’t help but see it,” said Spike, “when you’re in the locker room handing out towels to the players after they’ve showered.”
“Well, of course it’s big,” we would say. “The rest of him is big, why wouldn’t that be big, too.”
“No,” said Spike. “You don’t understand. It’s really, really big.”
We mocked Spike mercilessly for his over-interest in the players’ bodies, but of course we all listened carefully. Most of the great players we saw play at Duke in our time there played for other teams, most notably Michael Jordan of North Carolina and Len Bias of Maryland. We loved Bias because he played well against North Carolina and the enemy of our enemy was our friend. Bias was 6’8” tall, at once slender and muscular, and possessed of both a great jump shot and an explosive jumping ability that led to arena-rattling dunks. The fact that dunks could serve as a sexual metaphor was not lost on us. Len Bias left Maryland two years after we left Duke and he died of a cocaine overdose the day after he was picked 2nd in the NBA draft. We were young and so there were more shocking deaths to come, but we were all rocked by the death of Len Bias, Spike most of all. As one of the Duke players of the time put it, we thought that Len Bias was indestructible.
Spike got married several years later. I was not invited to the wedding, but I later heard from Tod about how he had found Spike late at night in a hotel hallway, his butt on the floor and his back leaning against the wall, tears in his eyes and a half-full beer bottle in his hands.
“What’s wrong, Spike?” Tod asked.
“It’s so sad,” said Spike, his eyes on the bottle in his lap.
“What’s so sad, Spike?” asked Tod while gently shaking his shoulder. “What’s making you so sad?”
“It’s just that he was a beautiful athlete,” said Spike, still eyes still on the bottle. “A beautiful athlete.”
“Who was?” Tod asked. “Who was a beautiful athlete?”
Spike looked up at Tod, fresh tears welling from his eyes.
“Len Bias,” he said. “Len Bias was a beautiful athlete.”
Everyone agreed that Len Bias was a beautiful athlete, but Spike had overstepped the unspoken limits on expressing our longings. And so he was mocked by Palm Springs and the rest of our fraternity for years whenever we would come together and, with Tod especially, the term “beautiful athlete” became a catchword, a term trotted out whenever our fandom crossed over, too explicitly, into love.
Tod was a computer science major and subsequently went on to get a Masters degree in Systems Management from the University of Maryland, Len Bias’ old school. Tod worked as a computer consultant before becoming, briefly and like his parents, a Democratic politician. Tod was elected to the Maryland House of Delegates in 1999, when he was 37. While in the legislature he served on the committees related to environment, health and public utilities, providing cogent analyses and sarcastic remarks in equal measure. I saw him sporadically over the 1990s and early 2000s, seeing him at basketball viewing parties, at downtown DC bars or at Sputnik’s suburban house. Tod remained witty and sarcastic, always referring to Patty and me as Voodoo and Wildo, respectively. His body, like mine, grew a bit flabbier with each passing year. And then Tod stopped coming to these occasional events in the late 2000s, and I heard from Sputnik and others that his health had worsened and forced him to retire from the legislature. His cancer had not returned, but other aspects of his nervous system had deteriorated as a result of his earlier treatments and he was now prone to frequent seizures that kept him from steady work. There was no woman in the picture, and he reportedly had to be cared for by health workers paid for by the state of Maryland’s Medicaid program, whose funding he had fought to preserve when he was in the legislature.
In the Fall of 2015, Sputnik let me know that Tod had been admitted to Washington Hospital due to a deterioration in his neurological situation. A group of us went to visit Tod. We were all in our early 50’s and looked it, but Tod looked older still. He was still nearly bald, but he had gained considerable weight and, though still bald, he had the extravagant ear and eyebrow hair of an even older man. Tod was bedridden and could only feed himself with some difficulty, and he had a bowel movement while we were there that was cleaned up by the hospital staff while we waited outside of his room. Tod was inconsistently sentient on this visit, but we had moments of conversation and humor when he was alert. When I was a boy, we had a Magic Eight Ball, a black fluid-filled glass toy that we would shake up and wait for a message to float by the little window on one side. Messages like “Save me” or “Tell me something funny” would pass by the window, as if they were communications from a specter. Talking with Tod that day was a little like that. He mostly had an opaque expression on his face but there were occasional moments when we could peer into what was going on inside his head.
“Thanks for coming, Wildo,” he said to me in one such moment. “How is Voodoo?”
“Voodoo’s good, Tod,” I said. “She told me to make sure to say hello to you and to let her know if you need any psychiatric help, or at least more than you usually do.”
“Hah!” he said with some difficulty, as if it was painful to laugh. He motioned me closer to him. “Tell Voodoo not to bother with me,” he said, “until she fixes whatever’s wrong with Sputnik.”
“Double hah,” I said.
“I really appreciate you coming to see me,” he said to all of us in his most lucid moment.
“Don’t mention it, Tod,” we said. “We’ll be back to see you again, soon.”
I kept tabs on Tod’s condition through Sputnik, who went to see Tod every two weeks or so. Sputnik emailed me and some other friends in February, 2016 that Tod had been moved to the Washington Adventist Hospital in Silver Spring, which was closer to Tod’s home and better equipped to handle what was essentially a hospice situation. Our old friend Art, Arturo to Tod, came in from California to see Tod, and five of us, including Art, myself and Sputnik, went to visit Tod in the hospital. It wasn’t much of a visit, as Tod was almost entirely unconscious and blind, the messages never floating to the surface. The five of us tried to figure out some way to get through to Tod.
“I’ve got it,” said Sputnik to Art. “Ask him about Len Bias.”
And so Art walked over to the side of the head of Tod’s bed and bent down to speak into Tod’s ear, moving what little hair Tod had out of the way.
“Tod,” said Art. “What do you think about Len Bias?”
Tod had given no indication that he knew we were there for 30 minutes or so, but his eyes opened a bit and he smiled weakly. His mouth was dry and he smacked his lips a few times to wet his tongue.
“He was a beautiful athlete,” said Tod in his lilting diction, a faint sign of satisfaction on his face.
Art laughed, as did the rest of us.
“You bet he is, buddy,” said Art. “Len Bias was a beautiful athlete.”
Len Bias was a beautiful athlete, a graceful, lithe, kinetic player who we loved to watch except when he was playing Duke. His death was widely mourned in the summer of 1986, by the legendary Boston Celtics who had drafted him, by college basketball fans who remembered his excellence, and by anyone who saw how unfair it was for a young man to die simply because he snorted a little too much powder in a moment of supreme achievement and pride. It’s a cruel, capricious world that would strike a young man down at such a time.
We went to Tod’s funeral a few months later, the ceremony held at a Jewish cemetery in Silver Spring, a few exits over from where Len Bias had been buried thirty years earlier. The rabbi talked about the challenges of Tod’s life, and how he had borne them with a stubborn grace and humor. Tod’s sister seemed a bit surprised that Tod, her little brother who had suffered so long with first brain cancer and then with its neurological sequelae, whose isolating condition she had helped with for so long, had elicited such a warm and fond memory from his old friends. But that was exactly what Tod had done. He was a beautiful man.
Fans of other teams often ask whether I’ve gotten bored rooting for a team that always wins, particularly a team tied to an obnoxious, elite university like Duke. My answer is always that no, I don’t get tired of rooting for the Duke basketball team, in part because we were so bad when we first fell in love. Many of my male Duke friends are similarly obsessed, still showing, in our 50’s now, a prurient interest in the upcoming college attendance decisions of 15- and 16-year old basketball prodigies, hoping that our run of recruiting victories over North Carolina will continue. I know Duke women who care like we do, but most don’t, including our daughter Maddie, a recent Duke grad who rarely went to basketball games. This gender difference in obsession has, on occasion, been the source of some intramarital conflict, as Patty will sometimes troll me with comments like “That didn’t seem like such a bad call to me, Will.” It’s most vexing.
Why do we Duke men - smartish people with interests in ostensibly more important things like medicine, law, and economics - care so much? I think it’s partially the naked tribalism, a celebration of us-versus-them in a socially controlled environment, the sort of thing we see in other team sports, in civic rivalries and in politics. But it’s more than that, I think. There’s something special about basketball, with their uniforms of sleeveless shirts and, in our day, tight shorts that left very little to the imagination. Basketball players are unfettered by masks, helmets or hats, their faces and emotions fully visible to the crowd that is quite close to the court, far closer than in football or baseball. As a result their emotions, their aggression and drive, both their frustrations with their bad plays and their joys with their good ones, are all far more accessible to the basketball fan than they are in other sports. It makes it easier for us fans to fall in love. And all that near nakedness, all those emotions and connections leads, in my friends and me at least, to a love that occasionally wanders over into the homoerotic. Not that there’s anything wrong with it.
I was in a fraternity at Duke. I joined it in typically clueless fashion, only realizing late in the February rush season that the only way to secure good housing on campus was to join the Chi Delt’s (not its real name). I was an enthusiastic Chi Delt for a year or so but, while I still like my friends, I later came to dislike the whole system, thinking it exacerbated anxiety and division. Duke Chi Delt’s were quite homogeneous in my day, all male of course, but also mostly mirroring the homogeneity of the Duke students of the time, almost all from well-off families, mostly from the East and not quite good enough to go to Ivy League schools. But there was some variation, too, with Jews from Illinois mixing with Japanese-Americans from North Carolina, with tall and short, skinny and fat, and with brothers both outgoing and introverted. At least one brother was gay, although not out at the time. But the most unusual person in our group, the person whose life experience had most deviated from the norm, was probably Tod. He was certainly the only one of us who had almost died in high school.
Tod was about 5’6” tall and stocky in a doughy way. You wouldn’t know he was recovering from brain cancer except that he was almost completely bald, with a single patch on the front of his head, like Charlie Brown. Tod had been a varsity wrestler in high school, before his illness, and he had retained some of the build of an athlete. But he was not very coordinated when I knew him as a college student, with a slightly off-kilter gait and a basketball dribble that was too high, as if the cancer or its treatment had mutilated some small but essential part of his proprioception. His speech was slightly off, too, with words coming in syncopated gushes, as if his slightly impaired mouth was constantly trying to work off a backlog of instructions coming from the intact portions of his brain. Oliver Wendell Holmes said of his Civil War service that “it was given to us to learn at the outset that life is a profound and passionate thing.” I think, Tod must have felt some of that, too.
Tod had a great sense of humor, both charming and barbed. He had nicknames for everyone. I was called Won’t by a junior tennis coach, Wilhelmina by my supervisor when I delivered pizza for Domino’s, and Willis, Swill, and Willbur while in college, but Tod is the only person who regularly called me Wildo. I rather think it’s the nickname I’d give myself if I weren’t me. He always referred to Patty as “Voodoo,” my college nickname for her, long after everyone but me had forgotten about it. Tod had nicknames for other friends, too, such as Art (“Arturo”), Stillwell (“Stillborn”) and many others, but his two favorite nicknames were for two friends that, like Tod, came from Maryland. Bob Winterberry came to school with the nickname Spike, a reference to his resemblance to a first basemen for the Baltimore Orioles, but Tod made sure that he kept it at Duke. Tod gave Bob Stepnicky the nickname “Sputnik,” an obvious but well-chosen nickname that stuck with him through college and beyond.
We appointed Tod as the fraternity “hod,” whose job was to deliver mocking doggerel and a matzo-encrusted cross to the fraternity brother who had committed the sin of the week. Tod was a very good hod and his performances were the only thing that livened up what were otherwise soul-killing fraternity meetings. Tod gave me my only matzo cross when I, drunk and confused, tried to climb into bed with the occupant of the 3rd floor analog to my 2nd floor bunk bed. The ne plus ultra of Tod’s hodship occurred when his beloved Orioles beat Sputnik’s Chicago White Sox in the 1983 playoffs, which Tod celebrated by igniting a Sox cap doused in lighter fluid in our meeting room, setting off a genuinely scary fireball that would have likely drawn expulsion had the campus fire marshal been a witness. The fireball burned Tod’s few hairs, too, but he didn’t mind because he always got an extra measure of joy out of sticking it to Sputnik.
There was considerable variability within our fraternity in interests and behavior, though almost all of that variation was around a central tendency of alcoholism, mockery and basketball. My group of ten or so focused on mockery, with an admixture of sports enthusiasm. Another group was more studious, typically young men who had aspirations (mostly successful) of going to topnotch medical schools. And a third group settled into a life-style of underage hipsters, playing jazz music, serving cocktails and decorating their rooms in the style of Frank Sinatra’s Palm Springs villa, with clean lines, framed prints and swept floors. They made excellent martinis and stored cocktail onions and olives in their tiny refrigerators. This last group, to which Tod gravitated, became known as Palm Springs, mocked for both the pretense and the reality of their own relative maturity.
Like many other men my age, I’m sure, the recent attention on campus rape and assault has made me think about the events of my own college years. I thought first of my own experience, of course, and I’m still with the only girlfriend I ever really had in college, and so I’m guardedly confident that I never assaulted anyone. My initial reaction was that none of that happened anywhere else in my fraternity – in my memory, we, particularly the Palm Springs clique, were far too meek and insecure to ever assault anyone. And yet, in recent conversations with men and women in our group back then, it’s clear that young men in our fraternity did sometimes act in dishonorable ways. I was shocked, for example, when in response to the #MeToo phenomenon, a one-time Chi Delt “little sister” posted on Facebook an anguished recollection of her 35-year old encounter with an unnamed brother in the back seat of a car on the way to an off-campus party. And what’s further, my semi-educated guess is that the young man who acted this way was at least loosely affiliated with the Palm Springs group. We were the meekest of the meek, having our bench mockingly emblazoned one night with the words “Safe Date,” except when we weren’t.
The fact that we drank too much was surely a contributing factor to some of that misbehavior. Duke had, in our freshman year, let kids buy beer with our meal plan points. This was a very bad idea, particularly at the end of each semester when most girls used their remaining points to buy beer for their male classmates. Playing drinking games with free beer was one reason why Patty says I was always passed out by 9pm in our freshman year. I can’t remember, so who’s to argue. I sobered up considerably in later years, but Patty once egged me on to doing some extra shots one night during senior year and I avenged myself by barfing in her bed. She felt bad about goading me into that state, and so she was kind to me after my heave. Word of my performance leaked out in her dorm, however, and she herself got the equivalent of a matzo cross from her own sorority. “I’ve heard of being served breakfast in bed,” said their hod-equivalent, “but this is not at all what I had in mind.”
The severely drunk often reveal parts of their personality that they had tried hard to keep hidden in more sober moments. Brothers were expected to ask a girl out for a date to our semi-annual formals, and these events provoked anxiety in those without steady girlfriends. I realized late one night, after too many beers and too much foosball, that it was particularly demoralizing for Tod. “Who are you taking to the formal, Tod,” asked Cindy, a pretty, blond girl whose steady boyfriend Neal was a year ahead of us. The three of us were sitting on a couch in the fraternity’s poorly-lit game room, a tacky Lowenbrau light hung from the ceiling and a Budweiser light on the wall. It was a Wednesday night, very much a party night in the Duke culture of the time, but we were the only three still about for some reason. I needed to get up early and study for an exam in my 9am Roman History class. I wasn’t doing particularly well in that class and it had been unwise of me to drink five beers, but that was far fewer than Tod had ingested.
“Who would want to go out with me?” Tod responded to Cindy and me.
I wasn’t sure how to answer. If it had been any other kid I knew, I would have bucked him up, told him that you had to take your chances in asking out girls and that, with enough chances taken, there was someone out there for all of us. It was just a matter
of putting yourself out there often enough. That’s all good advice, mind you, but I couldn’t find myself to deliver those words to Tod. It seemed cruel to do so. I wasn’t sure that there really were any girls at Duke who wanted to be Tod’s girlfriend, who wanted to tether themselves to someone so obviously damaged and, one had to suspect, at risk of further damage in the near future.
“What do you mean, Tod?” asked Cindy.
“Just what I said,” said Tod. “Nobody would want to go with me to the party.”
“That’s not true,” said Cindy. “I’d go with you if I Neal weren’t in town.”
“No, you wouldn’t,” said Tod, turning his head to face her.
“You’re wrong,” said Cindy. “I would go with you. You’re like a brother to me.”
“Exactly,” said Tod with heat. “I’m like a brother to you.”
Exactly indeed, I thought. Tod didn’t want someone who would go to the party just because their regular boyfriend was out of town. Tod wanted a date who wanted to be with him. Like the rest of us, Tod wanted a girl to dance with him, to kiss him, to have sex with him.
“There’s a girl out there who’s not your sister,” I said quickly, “one that wants to go to the party with you. I’m sure of it.”
But I wasn’t sure of it at all. An older brother once told me that he had lost respect for Tod because he felt sorry for himself for having had cancer. This seemed an odd thing to say to me, both because I wouldn’t hold it against Tod if he did feel sorry for himself occasionally – I know that I would if I were him – and because, outside of this one drunken instance, I never heard a word from Tod that could be construed as self-pity. I admired him for that, and very much doubted that I could have done as well under the same circumstances.
My friends and I all loved the Duke basketball players, but nobody loved them more than Spike, a team manager for the team. An unpaid volunteer position, the team manager’s responsibilities included shagging balls for the players as they practiced their shooting, making sure that enough towels and water were on hand during practice and games, and occasionally filling in to simulate the upcoming opponent in slow-motion drills. To this day, one of the managers’ jobs is to sprint, full throttle, across the court the second the buzzer sounds for halftime, bobbing and weaving between referees and the much bigger players. They surely have good reason for doing so, perhaps to check on the locker room towels, but they look ridiculous to my eye. It’s the kind of job that would only be taken by young men at peace with their place in the athletic universe, young men willing to sublimate their own desires and aspirations to the betterment of something bigger than themselves, young men willing to take the razzing and abuse of less mature young men, like me, that had not fully accepted their own place in the athletic universe. My best friend Doug and I sporadically published a fraternity broadsheet in which we constantly satirized Spike, referring to him as the “towel-flinger” and “jock carrier.” In his own, not infrequent, drunken state, and in response to our abuse, Spike would unfavorably compare our courting tackle to that of one of the star forwards.
“You wouldn’t believe how big it is!” said Spike.
“How do you know?” we would ask.
“You can’t help but see it,” said Spike, “when you’re in the locker room handing out towels to the players after they’ve showered.”
“Well, of course it’s big,” we would say. “The rest of him is big, why wouldn’t that be big, too.”
“No,” said Spike. “You don’t understand. It’s really, really big.”
We mocked Spike mercilessly for his over-interest in the players’ bodies, but of course we all listened carefully. Most of the great players we saw play at Duke in our time there played for other teams, most notably Michael Jordan of North Carolina and Len Bias of Maryland. We loved Bias because he played well against North Carolina and the enemy of our enemy was our friend. Bias was 6’8” tall, at once slender and muscular, and possessed of both a great jump shot and an explosive jumping ability that led to arena-rattling dunks. The fact that dunks could serve as a sexual metaphor was not lost on us. Len Bias left Maryland two years after we left Duke and he died of a cocaine overdose the day after he was picked 2nd in the NBA draft. We were young and so there were more shocking deaths to come, but we were all rocked by the death of Len Bias, Spike most of all. As one of the Duke players of the time put it, we thought that Len Bias was indestructible.
Spike got married several years later. I was not invited to the wedding, but I later heard from Tod about how he had found Spike late at night in a hotel hallway, his butt on the floor and his back leaning against the wall, tears in his eyes and a half-full beer bottle in his hands.
“What’s wrong, Spike?” Tod asked.
“It’s so sad,” said Spike, his eyes on the bottle in his lap.
“What’s so sad, Spike?” asked Tod while gently shaking his shoulder. “What’s making you so sad?”
“It’s just that he was a beautiful athlete,” said Spike, still eyes still on the bottle. “A beautiful athlete.”
“Who was?” Tod asked. “Who was a beautiful athlete?”
Spike looked up at Tod, fresh tears welling from his eyes.
“Len Bias,” he said. “Len Bias was a beautiful athlete.”
Everyone agreed that Len Bias was a beautiful athlete, but Spike had overstepped the unspoken limits on expressing our longings. And so he was mocked by Palm Springs and the rest of our fraternity for years whenever we would come together and, with Tod especially, the term “beautiful athlete” became a catchword, a term trotted out whenever our fandom crossed over, too explicitly, into love.
Tod was a computer science major and subsequently went on to get a Masters degree in Systems Management from the University of Maryland, Len Bias’ old school. Tod worked as a computer consultant before becoming, briefly and like his parents, a Democratic politician. Tod was elected to the Maryland House of Delegates in 1999, when he was 37. While in the legislature he served on the committees related to environment, health and public utilities, providing cogent analyses and sarcastic remarks in equal measure. I saw him sporadically over the 1990s and early 2000s, seeing him at basketball viewing parties, at downtown DC bars or at Sputnik’s suburban house. Tod remained witty and sarcastic, always referring to Patty and me as Voodoo and Wildo, respectively. His body, like mine, grew a bit flabbier with each passing year. And then Tod stopped coming to these occasional events in the late 2000s, and I heard from Sputnik and others that his health had worsened and forced him to retire from the legislature. His cancer had not returned, but other aspects of his nervous system had deteriorated as a result of his earlier treatments and he was now prone to frequent seizures that kept him from steady work. There was no woman in the picture, and he reportedly had to be cared for by health workers paid for by the state of Maryland’s Medicaid program, whose funding he had fought to preserve when he was in the legislature.
In the Fall of 2015, Sputnik let me know that Tod had been admitted to Washington Hospital due to a deterioration in his neurological situation. A group of us went to visit Tod. We were all in our early 50’s and looked it, but Tod looked older still. He was still nearly bald, but he had gained considerable weight and, though still bald, he had the extravagant ear and eyebrow hair of an even older man. Tod was bedridden and could only feed himself with some difficulty, and he had a bowel movement while we were there that was cleaned up by the hospital staff while we waited outside of his room. Tod was inconsistently sentient on this visit, but we had moments of conversation and humor when he was alert. When I was a boy, we had a Magic Eight Ball, a black fluid-filled glass toy that we would shake up and wait for a message to float by the little window on one side. Messages like “Save me” or “Tell me something funny” would pass by the window, as if they were communications from a specter. Talking with Tod that day was a little like that. He mostly had an opaque expression on his face but there were occasional moments when we could peer into what was going on inside his head.
“Thanks for coming, Wildo,” he said to me in one such moment. “How is Voodoo?”
“Voodoo’s good, Tod,” I said. “She told me to make sure to say hello to you and to let her know if you need any psychiatric help, or at least more than you usually do.”
“Hah!” he said with some difficulty, as if it was painful to laugh. He motioned me closer to him. “Tell Voodoo not to bother with me,” he said, “until she fixes whatever’s wrong with Sputnik.”
“Double hah,” I said.
“I really appreciate you coming to see me,” he said to all of us in his most lucid moment.
“Don’t mention it, Tod,” we said. “We’ll be back to see you again, soon.”
I kept tabs on Tod’s condition through Sputnik, who went to see Tod every two weeks or so. Sputnik emailed me and some other friends in February, 2016 that Tod had been moved to the Washington Adventist Hospital in Silver Spring, which was closer to Tod’s home and better equipped to handle what was essentially a hospice situation. Our old friend Art, Arturo to Tod, came in from California to see Tod, and five of us, including Art, myself and Sputnik, went to visit Tod in the hospital. It wasn’t much of a visit, as Tod was almost entirely unconscious and blind, the messages never floating to the surface. The five of us tried to figure out some way to get through to Tod.
“I’ve got it,” said Sputnik to Art. “Ask him about Len Bias.”
And so Art walked over to the side of the head of Tod’s bed and bent down to speak into Tod’s ear, moving what little hair Tod had out of the way.
“Tod,” said Art. “What do you think about Len Bias?”
Tod had given no indication that he knew we were there for 30 minutes or so, but his eyes opened a bit and he smiled weakly. His mouth was dry and he smacked his lips a few times to wet his tongue.
“He was a beautiful athlete,” said Tod in his lilting diction, a faint sign of satisfaction on his face.
Art laughed, as did the rest of us.
“You bet he is, buddy,” said Art. “Len Bias was a beautiful athlete.”
Len Bias was a beautiful athlete, a graceful, lithe, kinetic player who we loved to watch except when he was playing Duke. His death was widely mourned in the summer of 1986, by the legendary Boston Celtics who had drafted him, by college basketball fans who remembered his excellence, and by anyone who saw how unfair it was for a young man to die simply because he snorted a little too much powder in a moment of supreme achievement and pride. It’s a cruel, capricious world that would strike a young man down at such a time.
We went to Tod’s funeral a few months later, the ceremony held at a Jewish cemetery in Silver Spring, a few exits over from where Len Bias had been buried thirty years earlier. The rabbi talked about the challenges of Tod’s life, and how he had borne them with a stubborn grace and humor. Tod’s sister seemed a bit surprised that Tod, her little brother who had suffered so long with first brain cancer and then with its neurological sequelae, whose isolating condition she had helped with for so long, had elicited such a warm and fond memory from his old friends. But that was exactly what Tod had done. He was a beautiful man.