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My last Celtics game came at the behest of my friend and former roommate Candice, in town from Long Island, where she had moved the past year in search of an ethnically Italian soul mate. She has a crush on Paul Pierce, and, unrelated to her crush and for reasons I don’t understand, “loves” Italian men. She even tried to enroll in a CPR class at her local Long Island fire station, but was told that it was only for people who were training to work as EMTs. Frustrated, Candice joined the Navy and requested duty in Sicily. She was visiting Boston for perhaps the last time before she disembarked, and had warned me on several occasions that we would be going to a game together when she came to town. Our mutual friend Albert, a concert level pianist who had never been to a basketball game, went along with us.

The Celts were playing the mediocre Orlando Magic. Remembering how we’d gone near courtside in previous games that hadn’t sold out, we sauntered out through one of the lower level hallways to see if that might again be a possibility. I didn’t have high hopes, but thought it couldn’t hurt to ask.

There was, unfortunately, an usher waiting for us at the end of the entrance, who promptly asked to see our tickets. I told him we had balcony seats, but, since it wasn’t a sold out game, thought we might be able to sit closer in. “I’ll tell you what,” he started in an encouraging, upbeat tone. “If I see you guys sitting anywhere down here, I’ll have you kicked out of the stadium. This is your warning.” It was not the end of “I’ll tell you what” that I was hoping for, and I was a little miffed that he’d skipped the cordial, intermediate step where he apologized and pointed us in the right direction for our ticket stubs.

“Whoa!” I exclaimed. “You could have just told us we couldn’t sit here.” At this point, he repeated his first statement, this time leaving out the “I’ll tell you what.” Resigned, we climbed the stairs to the balcony, then the stairs in the balcony to our ZZ seats. More polite people, ones who didn’t try to sneak into the expensive sections, sprinkled the area around us. Three children wearing green T-shirts sponsored by a local bank listened to Disney songs and tried to name their corresponding movie during the timeout.

“WOOOOWEEE!!” shrieked Candice, “I love you Paul!” Ads for Lumber Liquidators, featuring yellow lightning bolts and the company name in black capital letters raced around this electronic banner screen attached to the front edge of the balcony, spurred on by the lightning. This has never clarified for me what the Lumber Liquidators do, though their company name will be forever in my memory. There were also the typical plugs for health care companies, sneakers, airlines, glass installation companies, paint products, donuts, and cues for the crowd to make “noise” or chant out “D-fence.” Somewhere near the end of the first quarter, “a lucky fan,” a bald, middle aged white man with a beer belly and a mustache, got to take a shot from beyond the three point line for $7,777, sponsored by a local casino. To keep the crowd interested, the casino offered each fan in the stadium a $10 gift certificate to any of their “fine restaurants” if the lucky fan could hit the three. At each of the twenty-five games I’d attended, the casino had run this game of chance, but I’d never seen a fan actually make the shot. This night’s fan nicked the front of the rim. “Aaoooh,” sighed the crowd sympathetically.

As my attention wandered, men dressed as Leprechauns poked up through our section entrance and started tossing out a bunch of plastic disk things to the loudest groups of fans. A rogue packet landed next to Candice, who grinned and opened it. Inside was a small straw, about coffee stirring size, and two plastic bags that, unfurled, looked like tall white socks. The fan uses the straw to inflate the socks and turn them into long, skinny balloons. Candice got white ones, labeled “Pure Passion” and “Pure Fans” in capital green letters, “Passion” and “Fans” slightly bigger than “Pure.” “Oh, these were meant for me,” she said. “ ‘Pure Passion,’ Paul Pierce. Can’t you see the connection?”
I’d seen these things on TV, especially in playoff games where the visiting team was shooting free throws and the fans behind the basket waved them around in a frenzy, hoping the shooter’s ensuing sense of vertigo might rattle his concentration. But when I claimed them from Candice, it was the first time I’d actually held a pair of spirit sticks in my own hands.

When you smack them together, they make one of two sounds, a “B-WOPEey” if you strike them flush together, or a kind of pathetic “pliiith” if you’re slightly off. Of course, at a Celtics game, any kind of device like spirit sticks immediately becomes an inescapable part of the environment, and a continual, dull stream of “BWOPEey, pliiith, pliiith, BWOPEey, BWBWOPEey” underscored our conversation for the rest of the night. It sounded sort of like the nighttime at a frog pond.

I noticed that the spirit sticks made higher sounding “piiiths” and “BWOPEeys” if you pinched them in the middle, effectively shortening their lengths. Albert the piano player has perfect pitch, so I tried to play my favorite game with him, Name That Note. “What’s this one?” I say when we play the game, just before blowing across my beer bottle or striking a pencil against a can. Albert proceeds to tell me what note it is, and though I never know if he’s right, I am always impressed. Though normally soft-spoken and quiet, he is so full of conviction when he announces the note that I don’t question his answer. I find him especially awe-inspiring when he adds “sharp” or “flat,” usually after a moment of scratching his chin.

“What’s this BWOPEey?” I asked him. “Those things don’t have a pitch,” he responded, to my disappointment. “I LUV Paul Pierce! WAHOO!” screamed Candice as he passed the ball into the post. “I love him,” she said to me more quietly, as if the ringing in my ear might have masked the content of her first proclamation. Candice had been following Paul Pierce since his college years with the Jayhawks, and had even worn a shirt that she deemed Paul would appreciate, should he have the good fortune to see it. “Not Everything is Flat in Kansas,” it reads, the “o” and “y” stretched taught and distorted over the more hilly parts.

As usual, the players kind-of coasted through the first three quarters of the game but picked up the pace in the fourth. “The Noise Meter” (a well-established ploy for getting the cheering), popped up about six minutes before the end. The Noise Meter features a thermometer like tube whose level rises as the crowd makes more noise. Next to the meter are a series of labels, each one louder-seeming than the one before. They say things like “LOUD,” “ROCKING,” “CRAZY,” “ROCK CONCERT,” and “SUPERSONIC” before the reach the top category. I remembered from past years that they had left this category as a tribute to the days of Celtic glory, calling these loudest moments of a Celtics game “Garden Level.” I always found this homage to the Boston Garden appealing, as if the place would live on in spirit even if corporations like the Delaware North Company could knock it down and rename it. This moment of a Celtics game melded the team’s great tradition with the present moment, fans and players alike momentarily united in the aura of Bill Russell, John Havlichek, Bob Cousy, Larry Bird, Robert Parish, and the sixteen championships these stars and their cadre had won. “Garden Level,” was one of the few moments outside of corporate sponsorship for which I still felt I could cheer. But in the past year, this “Garden Level” designation had mysteriously changed to “Jungle Level,” and I had stopped shouting.

A jungle, after all, is not a loud place. It is the realm of a brutal and cunning nature, and it pays to be quiet to avoid the detection of predators. But perhaps “jungle” is a more appropriate term for the current ownership of the arena formerly known as the Fleet Center. “Jungle” breaks those associations with the Celtics’ legendary home court, and in doing so, further removes the present team from its fabled history. It’s an emblematic corporate change, forging a new identity that has nothing to do with the present or future of the franchise; it testifies to the power of the owners to set these kinds of rules.

In a jungle, living creatures cannot think about the past; the need for survival overwhelms sensibilities about preservation. That which perseveres is that which dominates, the history of this or that species imbedded in its life cycle at the present moment. If “Jungle Level” was partly a signal that the new Fleet sponsored stadium was forging a new identity, it has succeeded. Like the top predator of the food chain, the Fleet Center sits impersonal and untouchable upon the debris of its more quirky and intriguing predecessor, home to a team loved less and less as the years pass.

I decided to voice my dissatisfaction with my pocket book. Until Delaware North finds a more moderate outlet for advertisers, I will not attend another Celtics Game. I still play, and I still watch an occasional stretch on TNT (thank god for Charles Barkley, Tommy Heinsehn, Carla’s hanging plants, and the mute button), but I will not spend more money on going to games. For my money and enjoyment, it is no longer a safe bet.

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