Pass the Rock on the Left Hand Side

From Blender magazine via TrueHoop comes this item from an interview with John Chevy Mellancamp, which I defy anyone to characterize as anything other than awesome.

I've known Larry Bird since we were kids. When he was on the Celtics and I was playing in Boston, he and Kevin McHale would come to my dressing room after the show and smoke me under the table.

Stop and ponder that for a second.

Now try your best to push the image of John Mellancamp in next to Bird and McHale out of your head. Resist the urge to spin out elaborate theories as to what McHale must have looked like when he was baked. Those are but mere tributaries feeding into the majestic stream of consciousness one embarks upon considering what the back of the 1986 Celtics team bus must have been like.

For instance, while Bird and McHale may have been smoking rock stars under the table, it's extraordinarily hard to believe that they were putting away more than convicted weed possesor and dime store Indian Robert Parish. Yeah, no doubt, Parish had to have been the big-time stoner in the '86 C's front court, so that makes three weed fiends in the back of the bus.

Except wait just a minute, because that '86 front court also included Bill Walton (shown here in his salad days as a TrailBlazer). Bill Walton, people. The man who currently broadcasts NBA games while ripping bingers from the t-shirt cannon during commercial breaks. The man who has the biggest smoker in every room he's walked into since he moved into the athletic dorms at UCLA back in the day.

.

Those of you keeping score at home will have noted that we've now identified roughly 28 feet worth of stoners on that '86 team, and we haven't even gotten past the active big men yet. What about the guards? We can probably rule out Mormon Danny Ainge, but you gotta figure Dennis Johnson dipped his toe into the water every so often. Hell, at this point even Jerry Sichting is guilty until proven innocent.

The real shame here is that nobody on that team thought to call Len Bias after draft day to tell him that the secret to NBA success wasn't going out and buying questionable coke, but rather hitting the KB with enormous, goofy white men in hotel rooms in places like Milwaukee and Indianapolis. If he had only known.