22 years
June 17th, 2008 by mikeCeltics - NBA champions for the first time in 22 years. I guess I’m a believer in omens.
22 years ago, the last time they were champions was possibly the best year of my life …
I was 24, just finished an Honours degree in Philosophy. A good part of me wanted to carry on to, you know, academia and the PhD, but my grades weren’t quite good enough for a scholarship and …
A year earlier I’d picked up a cycling magazine. By chance, but it really was another omen. The cover story was about cycling across America. The cover photo was of a bike and rolling road stretching into infinity. It had haunted me for a year, the idea of doing that. I persuaded John, my friend, to join and we worked all summer and into autumn to save enough money. One day in early May a container ship - the Columbus Virginia - sailed into Wellington and a day later John and I were sailing to America, working our passage across the Pacific.
We arrived in Tacoma, Washington and watched the Celtics defeat the Houston Rockets in 6 games - Bird, McHale, Parish at their peaks - in various bars in Washington. Later that year I was in New England when their number one draft pick, Len Bias, died of a cocaine overdose the night he got drafted, and then when the Red Sox lost to the Yankees in the World Series finals. The end of one era and another never begun.
The states we cycled across are a roll-call in my mind - Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, Kansas, Missouri, Illinois, Kentucky, Virginia. Down the Pacific coast, through the high country of Montana to Yellowstone and the Grand Tetons, across the Rockies and the plains of the midwest. The rollercoaster hills of the Ozarks and the mining hollows of Kentucky, to the coast on Chesapeake Bay.
Late that year I travelled across to London, moved into a flat out west, in Brentford. On New Year’s eve, 1986, in a pub on Gloucester Rd, I met Debbie.
So it’s 22 years later and the Celtics are again NBA champions.
And maybe, in a sense, I’ve just set out to cycle America again. I’m not sure what mountains and headwinds lie ahead, but I know I have that same sense of excitement and anticipation and feeling that good things lie just over that next rise.
The Celtics are NBA champions again and I believe in omens.
