It’s been nearly 30 years since my father was asked the question, at a wedding he doesn’t really remember, from a guest he didn’t really know: Does your son like basketball? His tablemate that day—a fellow police officer, my father recalls—had some connections in the Celtics organization. If I—a skinny teenager with Coke-bottle glasses—wanted to work as a ball boy, he could get me the gig.
And so in 1995, the year the TD Garden (then called the Fleet Center) opened, I became a mop-pushing, rebound-collecting member of the Celtics’ staff. The pay was $25 per game. The stories were worth more.
In my second year I was rebounding before a game against Chicago on the Bulls’ end of the floor. Michael Jordan was among the shooters. I wore a Duke T-shirt that day—I dreamed of being the next Bobby Hurley—which Jordan, as he headed walked past me, noticed. “Duke sucks,” he said.
