A Universal Time in Our Lives

It seems like a century ago, but it was only three years. January 26, 2020, started out as a normal Sunday morning in Santa Barbara. The grandkids came over for their Sunday morning brunch with French pastries. Our oldest soccer playing grandson went over to SBCC to referee an adult league soccer match, one of his special talents as a 16-year-old. The other two grandsons decided to play a couple of sets of tennis. My wife and I drove over to watch them play at the polo club. Some friends also watched for a while and others played on nearby courts. No quarantines yet, just simply a normal Sunday morning in Santa Barbara. We took for granted our freedom of movement. How could it be any different?

I was thinking about how we moved here from the East Coast 20 years ago, and although I was an experienced lawyer, I nevertheless had to take the California Bar Exam. In addition, not only my legal status but also our alliances were shifting from N.Y. Yankees to the L.A. Dodgers, from N.Y. Islanders to the L.A. Kings, from N.Y. Cosmos to the L.A. Galaxy, from the N.Y. Knicks to the L.A. Clippers and L.A. Lakers, especially the L.A. Lakers when Kobe was in action. I remember that shortly after we moved here, my wife and I were having breakfast with our son and daughter-in-law in Venice or Santa Monica. A TV set in a store window was broadcasting the N.Y. Knicks vs. the L.A. Lakers. As the Knicks scored, I let out a little cheer and my daughter-in-law looked at me and reminded me that “we were in Laker Country now.” And slowly, like Neil Diamond, we became Californians (“I am, I said”). Fortunately, I started to represent clients in Santa Barbara, which often allowed me to work at home and travel to my Los Angeles office or fly to my New York office when needed. Since the quarantine, I have worked entirely at home, mainly because of Civil Orders of Authority that effectively required that I work at home, and I continued that practice because it made no negative impact on my practice… and my clients were all at home as well.

I grew up in the ‘50s in Brooklyn, a hotbed of scholastic basketball. While we were still living on the East Coast, our then teen-age son, flew with me to the West Coast where I was scheduled to speak at a legal seminar in Marina del Rey. As we deplaned, he asked me if we would see anyone famous. Almost immediately, we recognized Magic Johnson in his Laker uniform, leaning on top of a phone booth and placing a call. We were very impressed with his big 6’9” frame. Years later, after we had both become Californians, my son and I saw the L.A. Dodgers win a World Series game; we saw the L.A. Kings prevail in the Stanley Cup; and sadly we were there when the L.A. Lakers blew a 24-point half-time lead to the Boston Celtics, but then exact revenge the following year. We also watched, in the middle of the night, as the U.S.A. Olympic Basketball Team, thought by many to be able to roll over the Spanish team in the Olympic Final, was in trouble. I knew that the Spanish team was a serious competitor because it featured Pau and Marc Gasol, Ricky Rubio, José Calderón, and Rudy Fernández, and it took a world-class effort by Kobe and Dwyane Wade to put that game away.

As COVID-19 took over our lives, it is most remarkable to me that most of us complied with the stay at home and social distancing orders without governmental enforcement. 

Sports has always been part of my life, even as an attorney. In fact, some of my more challenging sports cases involved disability policies that protected the teams against serious injuries to their star players. I represented the Orioles and the Red Sox, who had taken out insurance policies on two of their injured stars. I noticed that the policies had insured these players as “baseball players,” which concerned me because, if an athlete got hurt, the insurance company could argue that he could still have played as a designated hitter or pinch runner and that the player be insured for his actual position on the field. If he were a pitcher and could not pitch, the insurance would kick in. Similarly, with respect to a Notre Dame quarterback, the proposed insurance covered him as a football player. I negotiated a modification to cover him as a Quarterback. That would prevent the insurance company from arguing that the policy would not apply if he could play another position other than Quarterback.

At about 10:30 am on January 26, 2020, a Sunday, my wife showed me a text that she had just received – Kobe Bryant and his basketball playing daughter Gianna, and seven others, had been killed in a helicopter crash on their way to Gianna’s basketball practice – I said, “Come on, don’t kid around.” I thought about the times when UCSB provided the facility for a Kobe Bryant basketball camp. We were there when Kobe came in to sign autographs and shoot around for a while; or the many times when he scored the winning buzzer beater at a Lakers game. When Kobe often was asked about not having a son to follow in his footsteps, Gianna would say, “I’ve got this!” I slowly began to feel as I did on the night that RFK was shot. We were living on the East Coast and Sandy woke me up in the middle of the night to tell me that Kennedy had been shot. I said, “I know.” She said, “No, not JFK, RFK.” This was just after his victory in the Presidential primary in 1968 in California. A few years before, I unexpectedly saw RFK at a presentation at the Lincoln Memorial. I snapped a few photos attached here, but sadly lost the one where he posed for a photo one on one. I saw RFK again where he delivered a stirring speech at Columbia Law School in support of his successful campaign to become a Senator from New York. Just like with Kobe, I have always felt a personal and emotional connection to him. Losing both challenged our beliefs that the good guys usually prevail. 

The text about Kobe and Gianna and their travelling companions was true. We wondered if our East Coast friends could begin to understand the sense of our loss, the emptiness, the despair. Kobe was part of our digital lives. We traveled in the periphery of the same circles as Kobe, intersecting on occasion, whether he knew it or not. Not only were Kobe and his friends and family not safe, but our entire country now shares even greater universal risks, seemingly unguarded and unprotected and not knowing when a new virus will strike or a new massacre by an irrational shooter. Fortunately, there are many people in our country that dealt with the pandemic and respected our social distances and successfully created vaccine options. We certainly cannot tolerate any further encroachments on our civil liberties by electing politicians who quite frankly don’t give a damn and could conceivably support an insurrection. For me, one escape has always been music.

After all these years, I think that Billy Joel expressed how I felt when I heard about the helicopter crash: “Only the Good Die Young.” 

It was a normal Sunday morning in Santa Barbara… or was it?