Russell vs. Chamberlain in 1969 NBA finals
Sports Saturday
As we move towards the NBA finals, here’s a poignant poem where a speaker recalls being in a bar with his father and watching the legendary 1969 NBA championship series in which Bill Russell outdueled Wilt Chamberlain. Basketball is not the subject of the poem, however, but the occasion. The speaker, who has moved a long way from home, recalls a moment in that bar that brought home to him the silences in the relationship. Although father and son love each other, the love can’t be spoken. Perhaps the father, having lived a hard life of double shifts after high school stardom, feels too vulnerable to open himself to his son. The unfortunate result is a defensive awkwardness that ruins everything.
That awkwardness has driven the son a long way from home. He notes that, wherever he goes, he posts on the wall a photo of Russell and Chamberlain, perhaps (he suddenly realizes) because they remind him of his own struggles. By “nothing has changed,” I assume he means that the relationship with his father continues on as usual. Like the basketball titans, father and son are “elbowing & snatching at a basketball/as if it were a moment one of them might stay inside forever.”
And yet, somehow, “all is different”—perhaps because the speaker has just been blessed with new insight. Although, like Russell and Chamberlain, he and his father may always be joined in battle, he now understands why.
Fall River
By David Rivard
When I wake now it’s below ocherous, saw-ridged
pine beams. Haze streaks all three windows. I look up
at the dog-eared, glossy magazine photo
I’ve taken with me for years. It gets tacked
like a claim to some new wall in the next place—
Bill Russell & Wilt Chamberlain, one on one
the final game of the 1969 NBA championship,
two hard men snapped elbowing & snatching at a basketball
as if it were a moment one of them might stay inside
forever. I was with
my father the night that game played
on a fuzzy color television, in a jammed Fall River bar.
Seagram & beer chasers for hoarse ex-jocks,
smoke rifting the air. A drunk called him “Tiger”
and asked about the year he’d made all-state guard—
point man, ball-hawk, pacer. Something he rarely spoke
of, & almost always with a gruff mix of impatience
and shyness. Each year,
days painting suburban tract houses & fighting
with contractors followed by
night shifts at the fire station
followed by his kids swarming at breakfast
and my mother trying to stay out of his way,
each of the many stone-hard moments between 1941 & 1969—
they made up a city of granite mills
by a slate & blue river. That town was my father’s
life, & still is. If he felt cheated by it,
by its fate for him,
to bear that disappointment, he kept it secret.
That
night, when he stared deep into a drunk’s memory,
he frowned. He said nothing. He twisted on the stool,
and ordered this guy a beer.
Whatever my father & I have in common
is mostly silence. And anger that keeps twisting
back on itself, though not before it ruins,
often, even something simple
as a walk in the dunes at a warm beach.
But what we share too is a love so awkward
that it explains, with unreasoning perfection,
why we still can’t speak
easily to each other, about the past or anything else,
and why I wake this far from the place where I grew up,
while the wall above me claims now
nothing has changed & all is different.
From Torque, University ofPittsburgh Press, 1988.
