An unfinished life

 I met Caleb "Biggie" Swanigan one time, when his life was still a Hollywood script in embryo. It was after a basketball game at Carroll High School, and he was polite and kind of shy but neither on the basketball floor, where he'd led Homestead to a win that night.

What I remember about his game is he was a load-and-a-half on the low block, a skilled passer out of the double team and could pop it from the arc when the occasion called.

What I remember about his life is it was straight out of Dickens: Young boy drifts from one homeless shelter to another, lives under a bridge for awhile, finds a home, finally, with a Fort Wayne native and local athletic legend Roosevelt Barnes.

He's 13 years old, and he weighs 360 pounds. But Rosie sees something in him, gives him structure and love, and Swanigan becomes a state champion and an Indiana Mr. Basketball, a beloved star at Purdue, and finally an NBA draft pick.

That's the script. That's the "Miracle" film treatment, with one last lingering shot of Biggie in his Portland Trail Blazers uniform while the musical score soars triumphantly over the closing credits.

If only life were like that. If only, as so many have said, it were like the movies.

But because it's not, Biggie Swanigan is no longer in the NBA today. He's no longer anywhere, at least in this earthly realm.

He died Monday of natural causes, at the age of 25, and the shock waves rolled out from Fort Wayne and West Lafayette and Indiana and all of basketball America. NBA players don't die at 25 of natural causes, in the Hollywood scripts. Life follows the prescribed track, and it doesn't continue on after the closing credits, getting all weird and messy and horrible the way life so often does. 

 For Biggie Swanigan, it got like this: He opted out of the bubble season in 2020, and never made it back to the NBA. His genetic disposition to being heavy allegedly took over from there, and word is he gained back a great deal of the weight he'd worked so hard to shed.

I don't know if that's true or not. And I don't really care, because ultimately that's not what matters here.

What matters is a remarkable young man with a remarkable story is gone at 25, another of A.E. Housman's athletes dying young. That doesn't make his story any more tragic than any other, but it does lend it a certain pathos.  If any death at 25 means a life unfinished, it's underlined even more when that life seemed so physically vital and, well, indestructible. 

In the end, of course, it never is. In the end, life ain't fair, and that's just the hard truth of it.

Dammit.