You couldn’t pay me to watch the NBA playoffs. Maybe it’s because LA doesn’t have a team anymore (whatever happened to the Lakers?) or maybe it’s because the NBA today is dunk-travel-dunk-travel and me-me-me when it used to be pass-rebound-shoot-pass-rebound-shoot and team-team-team.
Sister Mary Joanna was four feet nine. She was a Sister of Notre Dame. It would be many years before I understood that she had nothing to do with the Fighting Irish football team, the Four Horsemen or “Touchdown Jesus.” For that matter, it would take a long time for me to figure out why they called her “sister,” because I had four sisters at home and they weren’t even close to the same thing. She spoke broken English (it might have been broken Italian). She had a pretty impressive black mustache, only a day or two from the combing and trimming stage (for this we labeled her Mister Joanna, even though we knew that mocking God’s sister might trigger a natural disaster).
By the time I first heard about The Hawk a lot of people were saying he was past his prime. But I didn’t know that. All I knew was that the voice coming out of the radio was talking about this player with high-pitched amazement, and The Hawk was about to bump my Lakers from the playoffs.