If only life was easy as child’s play
He was relishing the enjoyment of little kids yelping and squealing with the opening of each present, or he thought he was until someone asked, “What are you thinking about, Poppa?”
He didn’t realize his daydreaming had been that obvious.
But all those years he’d spent as a writer in the world of sports left him with echoes that constantly resound.
“Look at them,” Susie Walton, who was Bill Walton’s wife at the time, whispered as she watched her husband joyfully cavorting with Danny Ainge and Kevin McHale at a practice during the C’s title-winning 1985-86 season.
“They’re having the times of their lives,” she noted, smiling. “They don’t know how lucky they are. Most of us have to leave that silliness behind as we grow older, but they don’t. They get to be kids a lot longer than we do.”
Growing up doesn’t mean we have to forfeit all the laughs.
As the old saw puts it, “I may have to grow older, but I don’t have to grow up.”
The thought consumed him as the grandkids continued to shriek.
He remembered Bill Russell’s assessment of how his Celtic teams won 11 championships in 13 seasons: “We played like children and quarreled like men, instead of the other way around, and it helped us win.”
Easier said than done? Russell explained it this way: “In sports, as in a lot of other professions, you have to be childlike without being childish; there’s a world of difference.”
Perhaps kindness is the key because we’re living in a world where kindness is mistaken for weakness. You don’t have to be in the newspaper business very long to realize how true that is.
Sports is the great purveyor of that myth. Consider the practiced demeanor of crusty Bill Belichick, whom old-timers will tell you resembles Mister Rogers when compared to the salty Dick Williams who skippered the Sox to their Impossible Dream capturing of the 1967 pennant.
So what’s the right approach? Meanness? Happiness?
“Players don’t win because they’re happy,” Harold Kaese, the longtime Globe sports columnist, observed. “They’re happy because they win.”
Somehow this seasonal break ties it all together.
As Johnny Most, the Voice of the Celtics for 37 years, added to his annual season’s greetings: “This is the best time of all, for now the violence in the game of life takes time out while the wisdom and love on the sidelines briefly prevail.”
You can hear it in the voices of kids.
If only we could make it last. What a gift that would be.