CLEVELAND. Jerry Burke is a Massachusetts State Policeman who hasn't played basketball since he was starting point guard for the St. Columbkill's seventh-grade Gremlins in Brighton, a working-class neighborhood of Boston, yet he found himself accompanying the Boston Celtics, the holders of the best regular-season record in the NBA, as they made their way through Cleveland Hopkins International Airport this morning.
Jerry, second from left, in his prime.
"It's a real thrill for me," he says as boards the team's chartered bus, "but I have to keep my mind on my job, so I can't really savor the moment."
Jerry, on the job
Jerry's job is to protect the Celtics as they face Cleveland in game six of the Eastern Conference semifinals tonight, a task made tougher by the fact that Gloria James, mother of Cavaliers' star LeBron, has been added to Cleveland's playoff roster as a defensive "enforcer" assigned to inflict physical punishment on any opposing player who roughs up her son.
"Mom, don't embarrass me!"
"Gloria is an essential part of our game plan," says Cleveland coach Mike Brown, referring to the off-the-bench spark she added in game four, taking on Paul Pierce after a hard foul by the Celtics' small forward on her son. "You don't come into a mother's house and mess with her son, that's all I'm saying."
"Momma--you got to rotate to the weak side!"
Mother-son tag-teams were permitted in the American Basketball Association along with red, white and blue basketballs, but the NBA forced the ABA to drop the practice in much the same manner that the federal government forced Utah to abandon polygamy as a condition of statehood.
Marvin "Bad News" Barnes
The most famous maternal enforcer in the ABA was Toinette Barnes, mother of Marvin "Bad News" Barnes, who played with the Spirits of St. Louis. She is credited with teaching her son the signature "tire iron" move he used on a Providence College teammate, an incident that resulted in Barnes' suspension. As he left the locker room in his street clothes, Barnes said "News be back 'cause his fans be demandin' it," a quotation sometimes incorrectly attributed to General Douglas MacArthur upon his recall from Korea by President Harry Truman. What MacArthur actually said was "You can take the general out of Korea, but you can't make him drink."
Con Chapman is a Boston-area writer. He is the author of "The Year of the Gerbil: How the Yankees Won (and the Red Sox Lost) the Greatest Pennant Race Ever," a history of the 1978 AL East pennant race, and a number of plays, including "Number One Hockey Mom," "Please, Pope," and "What Mickey Belle Isle Told You," a trilogy about hockey (JAC Publishing). His work is available on Amazon Shorts (at 49 cents a dowload), and he writes on sports for Flak Magazine.
