I guess there is a time in all our lives that we look back on with squinty curiosity: Was that really me? Was I drunk the whole time? In the name of decency, we should, perhaps, leave the murky past alone.

For me—for I can leave it alone no longer—it consists of the years when I was the cornerstone of the Boston Celtics’ dynasty of the 1960s. Now, I realize, it’s hard for anyone to remember what NBA defense was like before I revolutionized it with my uncanny shotblocking. But this is the crux of my problem: that part of my life is uncanny to me, too. Others may shake their heads in wonderment and then eject the Sports Illustrated Highlights in History tape and go about their lives. I cannot.

Although not everyone spent his or her young adulthood winning eight consecutive NBA championships, I believe it’s common to find life more complicated and difficult as one grows older. Make no mistake: maturity brings its own rewards. You find yourself with a family, people call you Dad, you get a wallet full of happy faces needing braces. Hell, where spiritual riches are concerned, I’m way ahead of Shaq.

But spiritual rewards are earned through faith and hard work, abiding love and sacrifice. Those winning seasons slid down like raw eggs. How’d we do it, when everything is so damn hard now?

In those days, I’d slip into a groove and end up with forty or fifty rebounds in one game. I’m sure I tried, but I can’t actually remember trying. Whereas today it takes two or three tries to clean my glasses. It gets on my damn nerves, I keep wiping them with their special chamois, but every time I think they’re clean, they are, uncannily, not.

Once I settle down in my chair with my newspaper and glasses and chamois, I find I’m deeply troubled by the state of our government, the intractable standoff in Congress, the profound societal division that I fear will lead to civil war. But remember the Sixties? Talk about upheaval! We almost had a nuclear holocaust. You had hell to pay for being black, and then you had to go to Vietnam. So it’s not that times are harder now.

Looking back at my Sixties, though, you have to marvel at the way we showed people that basketball is a team game. Wilt, he was formidable, but he couldn’t beat us with all his Philadelphia Warriors, because we had the transcendent teamwork of a colony of ants or bees. I was, and am still, credited for making the players around me better. I’m not trying to say the teamwork was all my doing, but isn’t it uncanny that I was such a catalyst for cooperation when today I can’t get twelve people to come to a party?

It’s not a problem of lost youth, exactly, but why is it that I have so little genuine recollection of the prime of my life? I accept certain facts as if they were memories: “If I Had a Hammer” was on the radio. Martin Luther King won the Nobel Peace Prize; then they killed him.

“The Fugitive” TV series ran for four years, but finally they caught the one-armed man and cleared the innocent Dr. Kimble, so they had to end the show.

Blocking a shot must have been like transforming myself into a missile, or rather, a kind of shield-missile.

In 1967, dozens died in race riots in Newark and Detroit.

And my kids don’t believe any of this.

But how did I manage to position myself there in the first place, how did I time my jump, how did I avoid fouling? Just how big was I?

Aw, who am I kidding?

You’ll never block a shot by checking off a list like that. You have to know all those things so that you can forget them utterly, and then it becomes so simple that you can’t remember ever needing to learn anything. Which, of course, I can’t.

These were the years when America found itself in potato chips, when per capita consumption rose from 6.3 pounds to 14.2 pounds (1958 to 1966). But it seems to me everyone was skinny. Except elder statesmen like Duke Ellington. I wish I could talk to Duke now.

I definitely felt a surge upon winning that first championship. Maybe that cocktail of adrenaline, dopamine, and crushed ice gave me brain damage. Because what did it feel like to win the fourth one? Honestly? No idea. How did it feel when we lost a game? What the hell did I do with myself in the offseason? It’s gone. What kind of car did I drive? Nothing to do but clean my glasses again and go down to the basement to look at the scrapbooks.

It’s got to be unhealthy to dwell on this. But something does not fit, some explanation is stubbornly missing. Was I just enjoying myself so much I forgot to pay attention? I hope that’s what it was. Wow! Was that my car? And who is that woman?

 

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Some memories have been augmented courtesy of the NBA, ESPN.com, and American Chronicle by Lois & Alan Gordon.

 

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