Fade Away

Two amateur teams battled for the national basketball championship in 1962—it was not televised. We cleaned up, Grandad would say. He loomed at center, colossal and Greek. His team photo had to be wedged between two communion candles atop the microwave. The jersey numbers had succumbed to sun damage, but never their faces.

At Grandad’s, the forks were crusted with anonymous sauces. When he caught me picking at them, I got the spoon. His kingdom of avocado-green shag carpet was smoked and mottled, the red-blooded American vision of fance at war with the reality of upkeep. We begged for longer stays. 

A union lockout tanked the 1962 professional basketball season. Stadium employees—custodians, ticket boothers, the usual peripherals—were recruited by the League to maintain their ‘arena priority’ for the following season. They signed pencil contracts, donned too-long jerseys, played without an audience. Sneaker squeaks echoed around empty courts. They were ghosts on the wood. 

“What about the others?” I asked him, the words bouncing off hospital linoleum in ways carpet would never allow. 

“Christ, we were some holy bunch. Miles and Jane shacked up, had three kids before he died. Saigon, y’know. After that Jane moved to a ranch in Oregon, same one she grew up on. Clyde was already fifty-five when we won the damn thing, you believe that? And Rich… Lost touch with Rich. I heard the big man made it back to Samoa. He was homesick a lot, used to sing tribal songs before every game. Couldn’t hold a note.” 

That season was never acknowledged by the League. All records would fade away to phantom. Seventeen men and women tore major ligaments, three more broke their ankles, and the medical costs fell to them. Grandad wrote to the commissioner every week demanding penance and public acknowledgement. We littered those letters with crayon scribbles—dribbling farm animals, heifers dunking on roosters, impossible zoology. Indignation became a family tradition.

“I’ve got paper and patience—they’ll pull their thumb out someday,” he said in June before his death. At seventy-one he lost his teeth to his gums, but never his bite. 

Jake McAuliffe is a cancer researcher living in Galway, Ireland. He has other work published in perhappened mag. Follow his twitter @JakeMcAwful — or don't, that's okay too.