CALL ME SNAKE

It was a good night: I had the kids in bed by 9 and after two stories (one in which Santa got stuck in the chimney), I ducked out in time to catch the last quarter of the Celtics game with my friend “B.G.,” who’s more knowledgeable about basketball than I am, since he’s actually played the sport. (I haven’t been on a basketball team since the age of 11, when I played with the Chicago-based “Spoilers,” who true to their name lost every single game.) B.G. showed me a column about squash–the sport rather than the whatever you call it (gourd?)–written by Steve Almond that appeared in this week’s Boston Phoenix. B.G. was a key figure in this story, though the author, who claims to have played squash with him for four years, called him Reverend Bubkis and sometimes just Rev. That’s news to me, since I’ve played volleyball with the same “strapping, six-foot-five beast of a man,” as Almond put it, for nearly 25 years, and in all the time I’ve known him, I’ve never once known him to be called “Reverend,” “Rev,” or “Bubkis,” though I have heard the monikers Big Al and Big Guy, in addition to the aforementioned B.G. It just goes to show ya: You think you know somebody, and then something like this has to happen–a shattering revelation that makes you question everything you know and reexamine everything that has happened, or that you think has happened, since an innocent era known as the 1980s.

I enjoyed the Almond column and agree with most things he said–especially the part about the squash ball being “very hard”–though I take issue with his characterization of squash as “the most macho game ever invented.” That’s because I know something Almond doesn’t know: Seven years ago, the man he calls “the good Rev” played two games of handball against a well-known blogger. After two games, his hands were a purplish, puffy mess and he vowed never to set foot on a handball court again–a promise he shows no signs of breaking. I think that pretty well squashes the squash theory and puts handball back on the macho deathsport pedestal where it belongs, one notch below badminton.