A moment of reflection

On the eve of the NBA Draft with the NBA Finals still fresh on everyone's minds, there's a lot of speculation and talk about who is picking who. It's about making that one pick to elevate one's team above their piss poor life as an underachiever in a big market team's league. It's about selecting the next Jordan, Duncan, or Garnett and not getting another Len Bias.

Len Bias.

Even 21 years after his untimely passing, he's still primetime in all the wrong ways. The Boston Celtics' downfall began after his cocaine overdose and now that the 17th banner has been won, it's time all that past painful history is buried behind. Including his size 48 jersey with a #30 stitched in front of it. But that's the pull of tragedy.

There's this picture of graves of the Bias brothers -- younger brother Jay would die five years after Len's passing -- with their respective jerseys laid out in front that is plenty powerful. I mean... what do you say about something like that? That's you're inspired? That you're appalled about dieing young and staying pretty?

And I thought of this old issue of Rolling Stone magazine that I once read way back in my schooling days and it featured the famous grave sites of some of rock 'n roll's late demi-gods like Jim Morrison in Pere Lachaise, Paris, Elvis Presley's in Graceland, Memphis, and Jimi Hendrix's in Renton, Washington among many others.

The images of their grave sites -- coated with graffiti and unkempt (saved for Elvis's) which was rightfully so because they were real not some new romantic fag gloss -- seared themselves forever onto my mind's eye yet it was much later before I became highly appreciative of their music. My dad once thought that my rock 'n roll obsession so different from the Twist or the Merseybeat of his day would turn me into a freakish nihilist that he once had me checked out if I was taking drugs. I can chuckle about it now but back then, my only vices were collecting 24-inch vinyl albums and trying to score a goal from free kicks. Talk about true confessions.

I once told myself that if I had quite a lot of money to burn, I'd visit those three tombs (even though Hendrix's is in disarray up to today) along with Kurt Cobain's. I'm not going to crib Don Maclean and say that those were my days "when the music died." Far from it because U2 is still around.

I thought about that while standing beside the Vietnam Memorial in Washington, Ground Zero in New York, the Memorial Cross in Bataan, and on island of Corregidor. In these places, life ended yet ironically life goes on. There's a respectable vacuum of noise save for the occasional muffled and muted sounds of grieving kin or veterans as people hurry along their way. They're grim reminders of different things that elicit different emotions and responses from people.

It's a reminder that life can only be understood backwards yet lived forwards.

Sort of like this past NBA season. And now teams are trying to make sense of who they hope to steal for after Derrick Rose or Michael Beasley, there are no shoo-ins (although Donnie Walsh hopes to land Danilo Gallinaro, the son of Mike D'Antoni's teammate in Italy). That one pick can elevate them yet if unlucky enough to pull in a Bias, drag a franchise down for an untold number of years.

Just look at how long Boston wallowed in it.