SQ14 #1 Summer Quandaries 2014

Ten years ago, on an August morning, I searched fruitlessly through the internet hoping to unearth a fix for my Boston Celtics addiction.  Pickings were slim--the Boston print media were all about the Sox and the Patriots and had forgotten the Celtics existed, the web “sportswriters” were regurgitating the July news, and even the die-hard bloggers were running out of steam to out-crazy each other with hair-brained schemes and outlandish rumors and opinions.  On a good day one might find a half dozen tidbits with maybe one original thought in the bunch, and even it didn’t do much to tickle the little grey cells.  From the quagmire of my frustration came an accusing gauntlet flung in my mental face--Hey, you want something Celtics worth pondering? Quit whining and start writing!

From such lowly depths came a, now decade long, effort to provide at least one thought-provoking entry each day until training camp started at the end of September.  So here we go again.  Every year it has been both exciting and daunting to consider the prospect of generating 65 articles that I would find worth reading, and hopefully thinking about.  If you enjoy the read, I did o.k.  If you spend as much time thinking about it as reading it, then I succeeded in my real aim.

The half-life of a sports piece is seldom more than a day, and all too often only hours.  I find this daily column so challenging that I usually try to hit this starting line with several articles already “in the can” (a phrase taken from the film industry).  Two of my early efforts to get ahead, one dealing with Bogans’ contract and the other with the clogged roster, aged even before I finished them as Evan Turner agreement came to light--foolish of me to pick the current roster as a topic to pre-load this series.  Truly ephemeral, the world of sports exemplifies the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam quatrain:

"The Moving Finger writes: and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it."

My first effort at Summer Quandaries came in a forum where I was widely criticized for making each a post in the same thread--too hard to comment and keep track of the following discussion.  I deflected criticism by saying I didn’t feel arrogant enough to start 65 different threads on a forum that averaged less than one a week.  Later that year I inquired about moving my work onto the front page of that blog which seldom had anything new at any time of the year (but did have a wonderful set of interviews [which had attracted me to that site originally]).  The request was enthusiastically received but since I didn’t have permissions to post on the front page,  many, if not most, of my articles became dated before they even got published.  That prompted me to look for another home and I bounced around a bit before discovering FLCeltsFan’s site where I was delighted to be accepted since I had long admired her work (and am still in awe of her laborious contribution in generating the Daily Links, and her sage insights in Random Comments).  Thanks again Shirley!

Yet, while sometimes overwhelming, this is indeed a labor of love, for my fascination with the Celtics goes back to the days when perhaps six (only because the Celtics were in the finals) times a year I might get to sit at my father’s feet and watch a blurry, black-and-white image on our brand new 1957 television with its seven inch screen and getting exactly one station.  Otherwise Celtics coverage was limited to a line item score in the local paper.  Even a decade later, in college, an actual box score was a luxury.  And I nearly backed out of a prospective six-month trip to Mexico due to it entailing missing the NBA finals, with the Celtics of course.  So I come by this Celtics-adoration-in-a-vacuum naturally and with long standing--God bless League Pass!

One final note on the process of writing.  On that original forum, even before the Summer Quandaries I tried to produce cogent discourse with complete thoughts and logical rationale when I posted.  One of my fellow forum members asked in a response, how long I took producing an entry.  I refrained from retorting, why do you put so little effort into what you produce?  Yet each week I shall offer up a Soapbox piece and more than one of those will focus on the difficulties of communication, even when we are doing our best.  Consider how much poorer we are at getting out points across when we dash off something filled with malapropisms, misspellings, and sentence fragments, and devoid of punctuation and organization. 

Well, thanks for joining me on this journey and I promise more pith and provocation from here on out.  It will not always be just about the Celtics as I occasionally wander into the NBA (rules, court, management, officiating, and promotion), basketball in general, and the place of sports in our society.  Next time be prepared to go into full pondering mode.  Sixty-four days to camp.
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