After the Houston Rockets downed the Boston Celtics on a sad day in America, Kevin Garnett hugged Kevin McHale while his former coach wept into his shoulder.
To Kevin Garnett, wins are a beautiful elixir.
They are the reason for so many things he does. They are why he wakes up at 5 a.m. during the offseason to run on the beach, why he has pushed himself hard enough to remain a potent option more than 46,000 regular season minutes into his NBA career, why he bangs his head against a basket stanchion, why he yells at everyone, why he yells at no one in particular, why he sometimes pretends to bite Dwight Howard's arm. Wins mean more to Garnett than maybe anyone else in basketball today.
I don't know how much any of that matters to this story, because wins or losses didn't mean nearly as much Friday.
"Today's been a crazy day," Garnett told NBA.com after the Boston Celtics lost 101-89 to the Houston Rockets.
The senseless killings in Newtown, CT, put millions of Americans into the mood to hug their children. But Rockets coach Kevin McHale couldn't hug his daughter Sasha, who passed away from lupus at age 23 in late November. I don't even have a child and I drove home from work on my lunch break just in hopes of seeing my little brothers when they got home from school, which, for one of the few times, no longer seemed like a certainty. I can't possibly grasp how much pain McHale went through a few weeks ago losing his daughter, and I can't fully fathom how much pain came flooding back to him in the wake of Friday's atrocities.
As Rivers said, "You go to shootaround and have a long talk with Kevin McHale who lost his daughter and then go back to the room, and there's 20 other parents. It's just awful, senseless. A very black day."
"Anybody that has kids — a niece, any kind of siblings, someone that they love — it’s just been a tough day," Garnett added.
McHale was the NBA executive to take a chance on a gangly, straight-out-of-high-school Garnett in the 1995 NBA Draft. The two worked together on the Minnesota Timberwolves for the next twelve years, with McHale operating as the general manager, and, for a short period of time, the team's coach. Finally, to end their working relationship, McHale freed Garnett from the Timberwolves' stink and traded him to the Celtics. McHale and Garnett have history. They're friends. "There will always be a special place in my heart for Kevin," McHale said.
Tragedy, by its very definition, is horrendous. But it can encourage moments of human inspiration. McHale's Rockets dominated the fourth quarter to down Garnett's Celtics. Wins, you can be sure, remain Garnett's elixir. But in the wake of his latest loss, Garnett knew a friend was quite a bit more important. He walked to McHale, held him tight and whispered something into McHale's ear personal enough that the coach began to weep.
"I (saw) Kevin out there and had an emotional moment with him. It’s been an emotional roller coaster today," Garnett explained.
Added McHale, "It was a long day for me (Friday)."
But maybe Garnett made it a little better. That's what friends are for.