Big Mal

I thought I had posted the reminiscence of my best friend from high school, but in trying to locate it to direct friends from my reunion to the post, I find I did not. I suspect I thought it too long, and not of enough general interest to dominate an entire page. I backdated it into last month, so that October is even more the best summary month of the whole blog.

He died around 2004 of an unusual brain cancer.  Out with friends at a restaurant, he looked up and down at the offerings and said "I can't read the left side of this menu."  That's a definite tipoff of something neurological, of the Oliver Sacks type.  He was dead within the year.  I did not learn of it until a few years later, but I heard the end was not as hard as it might have been; he had friends and family around.

I don't know who will be interested. It includes some of my own history of the era, so there may be some audience there.  Certainly, Mal was an interesting character himself, a 6'7" baby-faced boy who took up basketball reluctantly at 16 and found he was good at it.  He was an uncoached walkon from the Manchester NH YMCA league in 1972, banging heads with Kevin Joyce* of South Carolina, then one of the better programs in the country.  He made the squad and played '72-75. He stayed near Columbia after that, finding he preferred the South.  The post will also pop up whenever anyone searches for his unusual last name: Malyerck

*Yes, that Kevin Joyce, of Munich Olympics Silver Medal team fame.