69

The future of mankind depends on so many things. I worry about that. Yet I cannot help but wonder if allowing an NBA player to wear the number 69 might be a good place to start fixing. No one has ever donned a 69 jersey for a game in the seventy-seven years the pro hoop league’s been around. They say they’ve got a bad sexual reputation, those two digits linked together, although most people who have tried it have hastened back to the Kama Sutra for new ideas. Frankly no one cares, or should care, not any longer, not when the West Coast is burning and the East Coast is drowning and so many people seem so unhappy. That’s right, no one should care, not about that. (Personally it’s worry enough that I’m turning 69 next year and can’t afford to give up any of these years.)

No pro hoopster seemed to want to don the forbidden digits those first fifty plus years although concern for a bad sexual reputation was probably not on player minds. The league did just fine without the numbers and the numbers did just fine without the league. There were allowances along the way of course. When the scoreboard clock showed one team leading 72 to 69 or some variation, usually in every 3rd quarter, the scoreboard didn’t go blank until the next basket out of respect or fear. When the championship Los Angeles Lakers finished the 1972 season with a then record 69 wins, the league didn’t have them forfeit that last win to the Seattle Supersonics, again out of respect or fear. 1972 Lakers

In 1999 along came Dennis Rodman in his heyday, all earrings and tattoos and Carmen Electra and long before Kim Jong Un, and he wanted 69 for his new Dallas Mavericks identity. Owner Mark Cuban supported him too and had a custom jersey made up in anticipation. Rodman Jersey The late NBA Commissioner David Stern was having none of it. Ergo the ban.

Why has 96 gotten a pass by the league? Ron Artest a/k/a Metta World Peace wore it proudly in 2008 with the Houston Rockets and no one blinked. Now Playing Ron Artest No. 96 Innocuous, unthreatening, respectable? Suggestive of middle-aged couples in a position far more familiar to them, disappointed with the kids, disdaining the meddling mother-in-law or the brutish boss, finding relief back to back with different sections of the New York Times? And while we’re at it, how have 10, or the randier 100, and component digits 1 and 0 survived the purge of possible penetrations? If we try, we might just eliminate computer coding and all that goes with it.

I worry about 1969 too. Bryan Adams wrote and performed Summer of ’69 and Don Henley did the same in The Boys of Summer about coming of age that year. Summer of '69 It was my favorite year too, really. I was fourteen years old and hopeful about my own future and that of my country notwithstanding everything going on around me. There were riots on American streets and just so many bombs dropping on villages thousands of miles away. A man died in the chaos of a Rolling Stones concert at Altamont Speedway in California. Police raided the Stonewall Inn in Manhattan, riots ensued and the battle for gay rights was forever joined. African Americans took over the Cornell student union demanding educational rights, respect and social justice. Nixon took office. A lottery of bad luck was instituted for the Vietnam War draft. Charles Manson and his crazies ran murderously loose in California. The Supreme Court again tried to figure out what was obscene and who might look and where. But against this backdrop, three things happened that I will always remember. In July, human beings walked on the moon, a reminder of what hard work, planning, commitment, and individual courage can achieve. In August, human beings gathered in upstate Bethel, New York for nothing but three days of peace and music, a reminder of how good music and good feelings can make one hopeful. And in October, the formerly hapless and lovable loser New York Mets rewarded their longtime believers for their faith and won the World Series, a reminder that good things can happen when the stars align. Even in a year with a possible bad sexual connotation.

Sure, there’s a time and a place for everything. That’s why we have ratings, for movies and music and the like. They make sense. That’s why we have restrictions, for buying cigarettes, driving a car, drinking alcohol. They make sense too. But it’s the slipperiest of slopes. Go too far and you’re letting the very few control information and lifestyle for the many. That’s never worked out well and has been the weapon of choice for every despot in human history. They say democracy dies in darkness. I suppose truth does best in daylight. Not banned, not burned, and not reshelved to a place it can’t be found. To paraphrase Jack Nicholson, one who can’t handle the truth, or the search for it, becomes quite adept at banning it, or with a wink, reshelving.

Blacks were banned from undergraduate degrees until 1947 and women banned for the most part until 1969 at Princeton University because so-called intelligent white men thought it would ruin things. African Americans at Princeton Coeducation at Princeton Blacks and women have been educated there since and the world is infinitely better off for them. Marijuana was banned for most of my lifetime because so-called principled folks of good conscience thought it would ruin things. Lately hypocrisy’s been slightly curtailed, prisons slightly uncrowded and private prison companies slightly less profitable, and those former principles have resurfaced in big profits and tax dollars.

It is actually banning, and its all too close relative burning, that have a way of doing the ruining. One day in 2021 you’re watching 22 year-old Amanda Gorman at the presidential inauguration bring a hopeful nation to tears of joy with her uplifting poem The Hill We Climb: An Inaugural Poem for the Country (“somehow, we've weathered and witnessed a nation that isn't broken, but simply unfinished”) and a scant two years later you’re watching a presidential hopeful bring a tearful nation to incredulity with his support for one woman’s banning attempts directed at Gorman’s book of the same title and others in her child’s Florida school. Gorman Reshelved

Millions of people seem to want no (or almost no) government with a sweet spot reserved in their hearts for a government that is funded only to wage war and regulate bodies, bedrooms and books. That form of government, be it large and Federal or super local in the form of the local school system, given free rein will almost always rein too far. So let’s work on fixing the world instead. Standing up or lying down. Together. Let’s start with Dennis Rodman’s jersey. Come on, NBA Commissioner Adam Silver, show some balls here, not too many of course. Bring Dennis Rodman out of retirement to set the right example. We’re more mature than you think we are and will only giggle for part of the first quarter before settling down.

Editor’s Note - June 24, 2023: Just learned from my travels that former NBA player (Philadelphia 76ers) and coach (Milwaukee Bucks) Larry Costello in 1953 played in all but twenty seconds of the then longest college basketball game ever at 69 minutes. His teammate Ed Fleming agreed to switch his uniform number to 70 so that Costello could wear 69, a number retired shortly before his 2001 death by alma mater Niagara University in upstate New York. That seems like a more valid reason for retiring the number since basketball lifer Costello is in the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame. Costello 69 Jersey Retired