I know I know…He’s a bit blurry in the picture. But he’s not in my mind…

In early March, I smiled at a guy and excused myself for the tight squeeze between him and the stands and stumbled to my spot on press row at the Conference USA basketball tournament in Frisco, Texas.

It was less than a minute later that Jack Thigpen, who for reasons unknown takes time to be my friend, appeared in front of me. Jack was a stud basketball coach in these parts and, in retirement, does color for many Louisiana Tech basketball radio broadcasts.

That’s why we were both in the same building, hanging around press row, when Jack asked, “Do you know who Dave Twardzik is?”

Dave Twardzik?! I have loved Dave Twardzik for 40 years. Dave Twardzik didn’t know this, and Jack didn’t, but I did.

When Jack said Dave Twardzik, it was like someone bringing up the name of your high school girlfriend you hadn’t seen in four decades, the one who had six kids, and you’d been happily married for a long time at that point but still that emotion, because you are entirely human, shot though you like it was 1977 again and you remembered the youthful feeling of…well, a long ago love.

Like the kind I still feel for Dave Twardzik and the 1977 Portland TrailBlazers.

Of all the Twardzik’s you’d ever know, Dave was the bestest.  He’ll always be to me.

I looked from Jack to the guy sitting six feet away. It took a minute, but that’s because it’s been 40 years. The blondish free-styling hair was replaced by short and combed and well-barbered hair. The short-shorts of the pre-1990s NBA were replaced by slacks. He had on glasses and a polo.

But it was still My Guy.

During a time out during the game we were at, I stepped over and said, “I don’t want to bother you but you and your teammates brought me much, much joy in 1977, and I just want to thank you for that. Whenever I think about watching the Blazers play that year, it still makes me happy.”

Dave Twardzik lit up like a Christmas tree. Lit up like his old stogie-smoking teammate, that passing-whiz-shot-blocker-of-a-center, Bill Headband/Headcase/Bad Feet/Grateful Dead Walton.

Gosh they were fun.

Twardzik was a star guard at Old Dominion and then with the Virginia Squires in the ABA before the league merged with the NBA before the 1976-77 season. Portland, who’d drafted Twardzik after his two-time All-American career for then-Division II ODU, still held his rights; he finally became a Blazer.

Twardzik looked so Portlandish: white, dirty-blonde hair sometimes flopping and sometimes in a fro, picture of health. They called him “Pinball” because of the way he drove and bounced off people.

“He didn’t have skills that would jump out at you, until you saw him play in a game,” Jack Ramsay, the Blazers’ engaging coach at the time said. “Then, whatever you needed, he gave it to you.”

He shot a still-franchise-record 61 percent from the field that championship season as the town of Portland became gripped with BlazerMania. Ramsey helped—all 12 players played at least five minutes in the final game, a 109-107 win over Philadelphia and Twardzik’s hoops hero, Julius Erving, whose team won the first two games of the series and then got beaten four straight. BlazerMania was fueled by the inspired play and passing of Walton—he averaged 3.4 assists a game for the season but 5.2 in the Finals. More fuel was the play of Twardzik, a blueprint team-first guy who had his jersey retired by the franchise.

Check this except from a “Sports Illustrated” story in October of 1977 from Curry Kirkpatrick.

“Teamwork is preached so much,” says Portland’s Lionel Hollins, “that when one of us turns an ankle, we all limp.”

Blazermania was the force behind the Trail Blazers winning their final 18 games in the Coliseum, including 10 in the playoffs, including, of course, the world championship. Run a lap. Kiss a fir tree. Throw away an aerosol can. Chug-a-lug boysenberry-kumquat juice. And root for Bill Walton. You’ve got Blazermania.

It was a joy. And a different game than today’s. And at the risk of sounding like the old get-off-my-lawn dude, a better game. One Twardzik can’t watch. There’s very little team-ball today, he said, preaching to the choir. Hurts me, but it’s true. It’s got to cause just a little sorrow to not be able to watch the game you spent your youth playing, because that game is gone and replaced by a cheap imitation.

Not so with those Blazers. It was all moving parts, tenacious defense, selfless. Hollins and Walton and Twardzik. Maurice Lucas and Lloyd Neal and Herm Gilliam. They were a pretty team, graceful and gutsy at the same time.

Twardzik, today retired from NBA front office work and enjoying life as the broadcast color guy for ODU hoops broadcasts, was a joy then and now. I will always be grateful for him. I don’t think I am, but maybe I’m wrong about the NBA then and now. I have stronger feelings about it than I should; it goes back to 1977, when I was probably the only college freshman who wrote his term paper on the NBA-ABA merger.

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