9. the bum who changed my life

Number 52 changed my life. Right after I called him a bum.

"Number 52, you bum!" Who was that guy anyway?

For more than 15 years, I had no idea.

He was just one of the legion of athletes I had seen doing their thing back in the days when I was a sports fan, in that word's truest, most literal sense. Remember, it stems from the word fanatic. Which is what I was in the worst, most obnoxious way. Until number 52.

For those 15 years, he had always been there, in the back of my mind. Just a guy wearing a uniform with 52 on the back of it. Who he was hadn't seemed all that important until I had a conversation with a co-worker at the Bay Area newspaper at which I was employed as a sportswriter in 1988, 15 years after Number 52 changed my life.

my co-worker was on the paper's features staff after having begun his career as a sportswriter, during which time, he said, being an NFL beat writer covering the 49ers had taken away the joy of sports, had erased the "fan" in him.

The "fan" in me, I told him, had disappeared long ago. I related to him the story of Number 52. It's funny how sometimes the simplest thing, an emotional moment, even a poignant expression, can become etched in your memory. For me, Number 52 was one of those. And I didn't even know his name or anything about him. The co-worker I was telling this to asked why I had never taken the time to learn who this miracle worker was. So I decided to do just that.

Number 52 Day had been March 2, 1973. at the time, I was a student at North Texas State University, where I had spent two years on the university's track and cross-country teams, as no doubt one of the worst distance runners in NTSU history. Number 52 was also a college student, at Creighton University in Omaha, Nebraska. His college and mine were competitors in the Missouri Valley Conference, so when they played each other at North Texas that day, the basketball arena was packed. This gym was a cramped space to start with, the spectator stands right up next to the court, so tightly nestled that if you were in the front row and there was an out-of-bounds play in front of you, you would need to move your feet out of the way. Naturally, loudmouth fan me was in the front row that day.

I recall those days with varying degrees of embarrassment over the person I was as a fan. As far as I was concerned, every player on the other team wasn't just a person playing a game, he was the bad guy. the villain. When it came to sports, there was my team and there was this collective other, an odious malevolence bloated with wife beaters, dog kickers and nose pickers, guys who tripped old ladies in crosswalks and stole money from blind beggars' cups.

Exaggeration, perhaps? Hey, whenever I observe a crowd at a pro or college game, I think it is more likely an understatement. Blind allegiance to a uniform breeds utter contempt for the guys not wearing it; the other team becomes somehow subhuman.

So there I was, a fan embodying all of those ugly traits in the front row, when Number 52 fouled a North Texas player right in front of me, not ten feet away. A dastardly deed. A criminal offense.

"Number 52, you bum!"

Hell of a thing to shout at a person you've never met and know nothing about.

Although my voice was just one amid a cacophony of 3,000, he heard me.

Number 52 looked over at me, at this lynch-mob moron who had just screamed at him and called him a bum.

He cocked a half-grin. And winked at me.

It's OK, buddy, that wink said. I understand.

And everything changed. It was as if I had been awakened from a 20-year sleep. Rip Van Sandsberry, angels singing, clouds parting, the Goodyear Blimp overhead in a bright blue sky, 21-gun salutes, free trip to Disneyland, the whole package. Number 52 had imparted to me in that unspoken exchange a new perspective, a deeper understanding of where I had gone wrong, how easily people can be deluded into creating false adversaries, a me-against-the-bad-guys mentality that can span an entire existence. On any highway it spans whole lanes of traffic. Cutting someone off, on purpose or by accident, too often becomes an offense punishable by .22 caliber justice.

Number 52 was not a bum.

He was just a guy playing a game, and having a good time doing it.

And there I was in 1988, reaching into the past, and I had to know: Who was that guy?

His name was Ralph Bobik. By 1988 he was a lawyer living in Glendale, California, an hour's drive from the Lake Arrowhead Mountains where he played his high school ball -- at a place called, appropriately enough, Rim of the World High.

Even 15 years later, finding that out was easy enough. The Creighton athletic department had that. the alumni association had his address and phone number. I even got his work number. Just like that, I could call Number 52 on the phone and say to him something I had wanted to say for 15 years.

But I wasn't ready for that yet. I wanted to know who he was. So I found out. In talked to his old Creighton team doctor, who had remained a close friend for those 15 years. I talked to several of his former teammates -- a lawyer in Wahpeton, N.D., a stockbroker in Omaha, a dentist named Bimbo. I talked to his wife, Sheri. I talked to his old coach.

It was like a paint-by-numbers portrait. The more I found out about him, the more sections that got filled in, and the more I liked Ralph Bobik.

When Ralph Bobik went to college and became Number 52, he was just a kid, really; he had skipped a grade in school and graduated from high school a month before his 17th birthday. His family had moved from inner-city Los Angeles, where he had spent two months at Fairfax High as a sophomore trying to make the "B" team, to Lake Arrowhead and Rim of the World High. By the time he graduated as a 6-foot-6 guard, he felt like a big fish in a small pond, unable to believe he could hold his own with the "city" kids who had manhandled him when he was a 5-9 sophomore. He was amazed when Creighton offered him a full scholarship and went primarily because the Omaha school would allow him to keep playing his second love, baseball, and because he thought he might disappear into the crowd at a more "big-time" university.

Not a chance. He was Crazy Ralph. He could never disappear in the crowd.

For one thing, he became a 6-foot-8 point guard (6-7 3/8, to be exact) in an era when most point guards were 6-1. He was passing the ball between his legs and making no-look passes behind his back five years before Magic Johnson ever stepped on a college court.

"Bobik was kind of ahead of his time," said his Creighton coach, Eddie Sutton, who by 1988 was head coach at powerhouse Kentucky. Sutton had been in his first university coaching job at Creighton, and it was he who dubbed Bobik "Crazy Ralph"

"He used to drive me nuts," Sutton told me. "I'd be yelling, 'Don't be passing that ball through your legs when you can make a normal pass!' and he'd just kind of grin at me and say, 'It's OK, coach. I can make that play."

Ralph sure could and did. He set single-season and career assist records that still stood 15years later. Ralph -- usually called C.R. by his teammates for, yes, Crazy Ralph -- was a passing wizard. As far as he was concerned, the game was meant to be fun. Even entertaining.

"We'd be yelling 'Shoot the damn ball!'" recalled Bimbo Pietro, a guard on those Creighton teams of the early 1970s. "But he'd rather see if he could pass through four guys than take an open 15-footer. Of course, that drove Coach Sutton absolutely nuts."

But the player named Ralph Bobik -- the young man I had reduced to Number 52, a bum in the wrong-colored uniform, was easily as likeable and memorable off the court as on.

For one thing, he was the only Mormon undergraduate at Creighton, a Jesuit university. For another thing, he occasionally wore his size-16 Chuck Taylor Converse All-Stars to bed. He was not averse to driving nonstop from Omaha back to Lake Arrowhead, sleeping in his car when necessary. He was 6-foot-8; his car was a Volkswagen Beetle. a Bug.

"It was amazing how he could sleep in that thing," said teammate-best friend Richie Smith, "but he did."

Ralph's name for Smith was Xerk (pronounced Zerk). Nobody knew why.

From his old teammates, I got enough Crazy Ralph stories to write a book. To recall just a few:

There was the time Bobik was racing downcourt on a fast break and he was undercut by a defender, flipping him into the air and landing on his upper back and neck with such an explosive SMACK! that the 10,000 screaming fans in the Creighton arena were instantly quieted, fearing he had suffered a grave injury. Team doctor Lee Bevilacqua rushed to Bobik's side and knelt down over Ralph, whose eyes were closed. "Ralph. Ralph. Do you know where you are?"

"Yeah, Doc, I'm at Rim of the World," Bobik said, hoping the joke would ease Bevilacqua's concern. It did the opposite.

One Bobik eye popped open. "Doc," he asked softly, "if I get up now, will they all cheer?"

Bevilacqua burst out laughing.

In one practice, Sutton told the team to go to the north end of the gym to begin a drill. Bobik asked which end of the gym was the north end.

An exasperated Sutton asked, "Which end do you think, Ralph?" "Well, coach," Bobik retorted drolly, "that depends on which door I came in."

One time Bobik took off with his buddy Smith to visit Smith's family in the tiny Minnesota town of Campbell. There, Bobik saw a grain elevator for the first time and just had to investigate it. He ascended the tiny ladder on the outside and crawled over the top, coming down the inside. When he emerged, he was covered head to toe with grain shavings.

"Only Crazy Ralph would do that," Smith told me with a laugh.

"He was always wanting to get the full story, " said Ted Wuebben, a guard on the 72-73 Creighton team. "People would think he was nosy -- you know, 'What, are you writing a book or something?' But that was just Ralph. He was interested in people."

In his sophomore year, the team was assembled in the gym for yearbook photos. The pictures were all basically the same: posed action, dull stuff. Bobik, typically was clowning around, spinning the ball on a finger and making a face at a teammate. The photographer noticed that and snapped his picture. Sure enough, when the yearbook came out, there were a dozen players with routine posed shots and one ... different sort.

And there, under the picture, read the caption: Crazy Ralph.

When I finally called Ralph Bobik at his office as in-house attorney for a lumber company in Tarzana, California, I felt as if I'd known him since college. In a way, I had.

We talked casually. He told me basketball had been entertaining for him, and that he had tried to make it entertaining for the spectators. He laughed at my story of "Number 52, you bum!"

"You probably caught me at a good moment," he said, but I don't think that was it. I think that was just a typical Crazy Ralph moment. Just having a good time, and sharing it ... even with a guy who called him a bum.

Almost as soon as I hung up after our conversation, In realized I hadn't said the one thing I really wanted to say to him. The thing I wanted to say to him for the rest of that 1973 game, during which I had rooted for Creighton to win so I could go talk to him afterward. But North Texas had gone on to win so I'd decided against it because I didn't want to come off as patronizing.

So for 15 years I had waited without knowing it. A little wiser, perhaps. Certainly a lot saner when it came to following sports, with a different perspective on athletics, blind allegiance, the demonizing of opposing teams and what being a fan should be.

All because of Number 52.

And the one thing I really wanted to say to Ralph Bobik? Oh, come on, you already know. This one is easy:

"Hey, Number 52!"

Thanks.