Rick was my best friend -- we went through adolescence together, with everything that entails. As a teenager, I spent countless hours in the Curetons’ house, pool, and driveway, where the basketball backboard served as a crucial character-development center. Our common idol was Bill Bradley, but when it came to basketball, I was vastly inferior to Rick and Doug Nichols (the other member of our triumvirate, who died last year). As a high school freshman, though, Rick encouraged me to go out for quarterback after I’d played guard in Pop Warner football. Rick played football for a while too, but gave it up in high school to concentrate on basketball. Both of those choices turned out well.
The ways that Rick had my back, from Tinton Falls to Monmouth Regional, college, and beyond, are too numerous to recount. Whenever I felt insecure, Rick reassured and bucked me up. After he transferred to Peddie for 11th and 12th grades, we exchanged letters regularly; he saved mine, collected them in a binder, and later gave them back to me. (I still have them.) He urged me to become a writer, and at one point proposed a deal that required me to create an original cartoon every week. I can’t remember what kind of incentive he offered, though ultimately I did become a writer.
Here’s another time when Rick backed me up: The summer after our freshman year in college – where both of us had, ahem, been introduced to marijuana – I wrote a letter to a distant friend mentioning that Rick and I had gotten stoned that night. For some reason I left it out in plain sight, and my ever-vigilant mother found it and freaked out. In the wake of her panic, Rick took the bull by the horns: He volunteered the same information to his father, Jerry Sr. (my mother’s OB-GYN) so that we’d be in the same boat.
I always felt that Rick’s sense of responsibility was a blessing and a curse. He seemed to feel a duty to shoulder the load, hold down the fort, be the adult in the room. Doug and I used to call him the “may-ture” boy – “mature” pronounced like “nature.” At one point, as we entered adulthood, he told me how relieved he was to finally be approaching the age that he felt he’d been all along. Rick and I didn’t have much contact late in life, but my impression – supported by the facts in his obituary – is that this duty of care never waned.
The last time I saw Rick was a few years ago, when he came to California to visit his college friend Jim Cahill, who had terminal cancer. At some point during our day together, Rick asked me what I thought was the worst thing I ever did to him. This was a tough choice, but I singled out a time when we were at my house and he was trailing me, at some delay, up the stairs to my room. Don’t ask why – to scare him or something – but I hid in the hallway around the corner and, when I thought he was still on the steps, dropped a nine-iron golf club in front of him. Unfortunately, he was a step ahead of my estimate, and the club hit him squarely on the head. I was mortified; Rick turned around, went back down the stairs, walked out the front door and all the way home. I chased him the whole time apologizing, but all he would say was, “Aw, Dave.”
Anyway, Rick told me that was the wrong answer. His choice was the time when he asked if he could borrow my basketball for the summer and I said no. It was a “Super-K” brand ball, which we agreed had a special feel – somehow, a really superior basketball. Even though I was but a lowly vassal compared to him, it was mine, whereas Rick apparently felt that, since he was the king of basketball, I owed it to him as a kind of tithe to advance his career.
In retrospect, considering the all the things he did for me, perhaps he was right – it was the least I could have done in return. Maybe if I’d loaned him the ball, he would have played in the NBA. So Rick -- I’m sorry. (But I still think hitting you on the head with a nine iron was worse.)