I was peripherally aware of them. There was the guy who got into dental school at Case Western, the guy who was a stud running back in high school, the guy who might have slept with a local celebrity, the guy who was going to be heavyweight terror Mike Tyson's next bum-of-the-week. I didn't meet any of these neighborhood guys, but I heard plenty about them on the basketball court. Mostly, I heard their modest claims-to-fame mocked by their friends.
"Interest in this fight is so intense," they said of the impending Tyson beat-down, "They had to move it from Trinidad to Japan."
I wasn't even sure when the fight was. Judging by the increasing intensity of the sneering, I figured it was soon.
One morning, I groggily opened the front door and looked down for my newspaper. There between my feet, in 4-inch type generally reserved for headlines like "CONGRESS DECLARES WAR," was instead this headline:
BUSTER'S THE CHAMP!"No. Way."
And wow, did Buster ever have a lot of friends in the neighborhood. Stories about the man they'd not-long-ago called "Meat" suddenly abounded. He's one of us. Couldn't have happened to a nicer guy. We were best friends in grade school. He dated my sister. Say, how much you think he'll get paid for his title defense?
I only met him once, a month or so after Buster shocked the world but still a few months before he would vanish into obscurity. It turns out we had the same favorite nearby restaurant, Cooker's, and the same favorite dish, the meatloaf with drop-biscuits. We nodded to one another—I'm not one who bothers celebrities when they're eating—and for the rest of the evening I stole glances at a man eating his way out of the championship of the world.