Recently, I was asked to retrieve from The Star’s attic contacts and negatives of Troy Bowe, the former Killer Bees’ point guard, in action. The request set my head to spinning like a leptoquark, for, as I told Carl Johnson, who had made the request, “It’s a black hole up there, a bottomless pit from which it has been said nothing escapes.”
Entire years of archived contacts and negatives have vanished utterly, 1982 coming immediately to mind, though our editor, I think, has said other years have been swallowed up too. (Confession: It was I, notoriously heedless when it comes to archival matters, who was entrusted with much of the filing in the olden days.)
Still, I felt I owed it to Troy and Carl to give it a try, to approach once again the door at the foot of the attic stairs, “the event horizon” in scientific parlance.
I should add that I had been somewhat encouraged by an article I’d read that week in The Times that shed new light on black holes, an article which, in part, said that while most matter fell into them at the event horizon, “some is pushed out, like toothpaste, by enormous pressures and magnetic fields.”
There was an outside chance, then, that I might emerge with some contacts and negatives from the Bridgehampton High School’s boys basketball season of 1986, a championship season in which Troy Bowe — an unsurpassable passer who later played at the University of Hawaii — had figured prominently.
Like a muon, the eccentric subatomic particle that also was in the news last week, I went wobbly on at last wresting from one of The Star’s imploded cardboard cabinets what I had been looking for.
Though my eyesight having long ago been given in service to this newspaper, I wasn’t able to say for sure until — after having returned illuminated from the point of no return . . . as if shot forth across galaxies, it seemed — I peered at the contacts through a magnifying glass at home.
It was a magnetic moment. My head’s still spinning.