Ex-Celtic Dave Cowens, NBRPA work to shield retired players from virus

Former Boston Celtic big man Dave Cowens and other members of the National Basketball Retired Players Association are working to protect its members from the pandemic.

In the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, many retired NBA players are turning to one another for help.

Older people are generally more at risk to the virus, and unlike in may industries, when NBA players retire from the game, many still maintain a close relationship with what was, for many years, their workplace.

Now, in the midst of the pandemic, the National Basketball Retired Players Association (NBRPA) has been working with members to ensure the safety of many who, on average are 55 or older, are among the highest-risk age groups of having severe adverse outcomes if they contract the virus, reports SB Nation’s Michael Pina.

Former Boston Celtic big man Dave Cowens (who helped found the organization in 1992 with Dave Bing, Archie Clark, Dave DeBusschere and Oscar Robertson) recently spoke with Pina about how the NBRPA has been helping its own during the pandemic — and how life has been for him as well.

Cowens has been in Fort Lauderdale, Florida since early January in a building he shares with many other older people — though many have been scarce in recent weeks for understandable reasons.

Thinking back to early-season exhibition games against the New York Knicks Boston played in upstate New York, the Hall of Fame center related he would have liked to see a game with no fans in the stands, the sounds of sneakers on parquet squeaking audibly as it did in those days.

With the state of the league and the world being what it is, he’s quite likely to get his wish if the 2019-20 season is resumed this summer.

But recognizing there’s much more to worry about than to serve as a platform for nostalgia, Cowens is deeply worried for his friends and former teammates and peers.

He recently contacted former Celtic Don Chaney, who, with a heart condition is probably at even greater risk than the Kentucky native is at age 71.

“There’s so much uncertainty. If you’re feeling fine, but all of a sudden you start feeling sick, you then say ‘Am I gonna die from this?’ And so you don’t know,” posited Cowens.

“Young people don’t care because they’re already immune to everything in the world anyway. They’re gonna live forever. But they’re young, that’s how they think, and for the most part they’re in pretty good shape for dealing with this … So I don’t hang out at the clubs anymore.”

“That’s not part of the schedule,” he laughed.

While the NBA is hopeful to resume play this summer, many experts believe the pandemic could linger well beyond that timeframe, whether the league can find a way to safely resume play or not.

“The thing that bothers me so bad is they don’t know when it’s gonna end,” observed Cowens. “Or is it?”

The scale of the disruption the world is currently seeing is unlike anything in living memory, wresting from our collective consciousness handfuls of air as we struggle to find a template to draw on to get through this global disaster.

Thinking back to roughly a century prior, Cowens considered how his grandfather and others survived not only the 1918 H1N1 pandemic (often wrongly called the “Spanish Flu”) that killed around 50-100 million globally, but World War I before it, perhaps responsible for as many deaths.

“People are going to survive,” Cowens offered. “That’s true. But the coronavirus will still crash into so many different lives, and so far the mortality rate for those it infects is substantially higher in seniors with underlying health issues.”

For that reason, Cowens and the NBRPA have worked hard to spread good information on physical distancing and self-quarantine to help protect members.

In this brave new world, scientifically-accurate information can literally be the difference between life and death, and it’s one of the few things the NBRPA is prepared to do about this novel coronavirus.

While the NBRPA was never designed to be a medium for pandemic preparedness, in truth, little in our society today is ready for such an event. In even the best-prepared nations on earth, the virus is everything their health care systems can handle.

And as the U.S. has struggled to prepare for the severity of the impact on its own healthcare infrastructure, the driving force protecting society’s most vulnerable in the NBRPA and society more generally has been that very society working together to take of itself.

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