Time warp

Idly scrolling through a few social media sites the other day (because "idly" is the only way I scroll), and I came across this photo on some Indiana Basketball Memories site. It was from Assembly Hall on Feb. 23, 1985, the day Bob Knight introduced the Chair Fling to college basketball.

The vantage point is the baseline, and the photo was taken right after the Fling happened. Knight's out on the floor, about to exit stage left. In the background, behind him, is what was then the media seating.

And it dawned on me: Hey. I might be in this photo.

I was there that day, see, covering IU-Purdue for the late, great Anderson Daily Bulletin. I was 29 years old at the time; I'm 70 now. And I remember where I was sitting: Third tier, above and to the right of the Indiana bench.

So I magnified the photo. Looked. And there I was, fuzzy but clear enough: Above Knight's left shoulder, wearing a white shirt, hand over my mouth.

Weird City.

Weird City, because how often do you see yourself in the crowd on a day that's been dead and gone almost 41 years? Witnessing, in real time, an incident that's been described/referenced/anthologized six ways from Sunday since?

Oh, what I could tell that kid with his hand over his mouth, all these years later.

I could tell him that in a bit more than two years he'd lose his beloved nephew, all of  five years old, to leukemia. If I could stand to, that is.

I could tell him in two years he wouldn't be in Anderson anymore, but in his hometown of Fort Wayne, where he'd work 28 years for the newspaper he grew up reading.

I could tell him if the prehistoric Teleram Portabubble he was typing his Indy 500 column on got stuck and started backspace-eating his words, it was just a glitch and not an editorial comment. And the technological caveman fix was to give it a good smack.

I could tell him that, on that very day, his future wife was sitting somewhere several rows up and off to the left of him, and that we wouldn't meet for six more years.  I could tell him about the children we would have, one of whom just turned 30. I could tell him about the time, years in his future, when I got locked in a high-school football stadium one night and had to scale an eight-foot fence to get out.

I was in my 50s by then. And what I was thinking, wobbling atop the fence, was this: I am too old for this (expletive depleted).

I could tell my 29-year-old self that, within three years, the newspaper he worked for would no longer exist. And that someday there would be this thing called the internet that would kill the newspaper industry as he knew it and transform it into an entity both more expansive and less standardized And that he would come to pine for the days when a guy could fix a stuck backspace key by physically assaulting his piece-of-shite portable computer.

I could tell my 29-year-old self do not, under any circumstances, enter the locker room of a hockey team that had just won a championship unless you wanted a beer poured on your head. I could tell him do not, under any circumstances, attempt to close his laptop with the power cord lying across the keyboard. I could tell him to keep his head on a swivel when covering a Purdue-IU basketball game, because, years after the day he watched Knight fling the chair, a Purdue player named Brian Cardinal would come flying into press row and land on his chest.

I could tell him someday he would cover a high school basketball game whose final score was 16-14. That he would see the Indianapolis Colts win a Super Bowl (no, really!). That the friends he'd made in the business would still be his friends 41 years later, and that he would make many more in the meantime.

Mostly, though, I would tell him this: Oh, you kid. You're in for a hell of a ride.