Chapter 40: Life in Boston
It's been almost four months since he became a scout, and Leon has traveled all over the major cities of the United States, and although the NBA is an offseason, basketball events have never stopped in the country.
Leon has watched the NBA's top stars compete in summer training camps, and he has also gone to the streets to watch those unpopular guys play against the stream.
Basketball began to become a concrete, soulful sport from a bunch of vague data and images, and its image became clearer and clearer in Leon's heart, and he was sure that he loved the sport more and more.
Now he has his own home in Boston, living in an apartment on Hancock Avenue on the North Side, half of the rent he pays himself and half of the rent is covered by the Celtics, which is one of the perks of his career as an official scout for the Celtics.
That's right, he became an official scout for Celtic, and Pitino did not hesitate to sign him with a new official contract after his temporary contract ended. Although Pitino knew he was Auerbach's man and had caused some trouble for Leon at work, he did admit that Leon was a good scout, a basketball worker who was good at learning and improving.
Leon doesn't have to rush to work every morning, and as long as the team doesn't notify him of a business trip, his offseason time in Boston is free and free. That's when he chooses to read at the Massachusetts State Library, which is less than a kilometer from his apartment.
The State Library and the State Council are housed in the same large building, which houses a large collection of books, especially in law, medicine, and mathematics. It's just that Leon really focused on sports and statistics, and there was a fairly advanced information retrieval system at the time, and he could search for a lot of papers on kinesiology and statistics on his computer.
After lunch, he would go to the Celtics' headquarters, where he had access to a lot of NBA insiders, and although he didn't have his own office, the fifth-floor library was open to him, and he often sat there for three or four hours at a time.
When it's time for dinner, Leon will choose to watch a ball game, whether it be a boring regular season game from the '70s in the video analysis room, a high school basketball league at Umass Arena, or a practice tour of the Boston University basketball team at Boston University. In short, a full game every day is a must.
In the evening, he would choose to go to Holmenes' house for dinner, Holmenez's cooking skills are not bad, after all, he lives by himself all the year round, but compared to Leon, it is much worse. Ayatollah Khomeenes repeatedly asked Leon to come and teach her how to cook, and gradually Leon got used to going to Holmenez's house to eat when he was in Boston.
With the exception of a few old-fashioned families who still retain the traditional way of life of the immigrants, most urban Americans are not used to cooking their own meals at home, preferring to run to a restaurant and nibble on two burgers for fear of getting the stove hot at home.
The same was true of Khomemenes in the past, who would never eat a meal at home. But since Leon often came to dinner, she fell in love with the feeling of eating at home, after all, the warmth of a complete family was too little, and eating with her family had always been a luxury in her life in the past, although Pagliuca's new wife was not bad for her, she still couldn't accept the reorganized family, and stubbornly lived alone early.
At the end of September, Leon will be spending more and more time in Boston as the Boston Celtics' team training camp is about to begin, and he will follow Auerbach's instructions throughout the training camp once the camp is fully underway. Scouts are not only responsible for discovering talent outside the team, but also for their own players.
Michael Reed, who arrived in Boston in mid-September, reported to the Celtics and began to settle in, visited Leon and was surprised that he was alone in an apartment, which he thought was a family living in a detached house with a son or daughter of two or three years old. After all, Leon was deeply impressed by Reed, his keen observation and excellent persuasion skills, as well as his meticulous attire, all made Reed think that this was a guy with a successful career.
Unexpectedly, like himself, his professional basketball career has just begun, which makes Reed and Leon even deeper in friendship.
On the evening of September 24, with four days left before the start of training camp, Leon went to the library as usual today, and then went to the Celtics headquarters in the afternoon to submit two collated scouting reports to Pitino, which were some forward-looking analyses of overseas players, and he assessed the possibility of opening up the overseas free agent market.
He went to the video studio to watch a regular season game between the Boston Celtics and the Chicago Bulls in 1997, the opening game in Boston, where they upset the defending champion Bulls.
In the evening he went to Holmeneth's house for dinner, and tonight Holmenis came over with a short breath and said that he bought crayfish, in his previous life, Leon always thought that Chinese loved this, but did not expect that many people in the United States loved this delicious and juicy food very much.
Of course, Leon also knew that the reason why Khomeenes sent him a short message early was that he wanted him to cook a meal of crayfish for her to eat, after all, after eating Leon's thirteen-spiced crayfish cooked in Chinese techniques, she would never be able to eat other flavors of crayfish.
A lobster feast lasted until 9 p.m., along with Khomeines' roommate, Morena, a hot girl from Brazil. She was not ashamed to flatter Leon after meeting him for the first time, and every time Leon came to dinner, she would change into low-cut silk pajamas and walk around the house, but after several unsuccessful seductions, the impatient guy quickly gave up trying.
Recently, she broke up with her boyfriend and stayed at home for a lot longer, and Leon also found that when she wasn't coquettish, she was still a very caring girl, and she never talked about it, which made Leon look at her differently.
The three of them played poker together until eleven o'clock, and with Leon releasing the water, he still won twenty-five kisses from Holmenes and a striptease show from Morena, but he chose to save for the time being.
Just as Leon decides to leave and go home, Morena proposes to go to the bar until tomorrow, and Leon shakes his head and says that he has important work to do tomorrow.
But Morena said, "Do you know Leon, tomorrow is Khomeenes' birthday, and she really wants you to be with her from the first second of her birthday."
Khomemenes obviously didn't expect Morena to say this, and it was too late for her to react, her face was a little red, and she couldn't help but squint at Leon, for fear that he would shake his head and say, "Tomorrow's business will be talked about tomorrow", this is Leon's mantra, but now she doesn't want this sentence to appear.
Finally, Leon nodded and agreed, and Holmenez almost jumped up from the couch, at this time she really wanted to kiss Morena, if she herself did not dare to make such a slightly willful request anyway, maybe she should be more willful to Leon in the future.
Khamenez hadn't been to a nightclub for a long time since she met Leon, and the hustle and bustle and psychedelia there didn't appeal to her anymore. But it was different with Leon, her sisters would always bring a man or go with a man in the nightclub, and she would go alone anyway, even if many handsome boys discharged at her, they could not break the thick shell inside her.
Now she can also bring the man she likes to the land of wind and moon, which is undoubtedly a stimulating feeling.
Eventually, Holmenes and Morena discussed it for a while and decided to go to the Buzz-Club on 51 Stuart Avenue on the South Side, which is where Holmenes used to go, and it was a large night club, with three floors, two of which were dance floors, and one floor was a bar and café, where many young Bostons loved to release their excess hormones.
Hearing that he was going to the South Side, Leon hesitated slightly, since he was released by the MCI and returned to Boston, Leon would avoid going to the South Side, he felt that he was likely to be stared at by Frank's people, especially after he started working at the Celtics, there were more and more opportunities to appear in the media, and it was difficult not to be discovered by Frank.
He's fairly safe as long as he's in the North End, but it's not so reassuring to go to a bar in the South End in the early hours of the morning.
In the end, Leon decided to make a trip, he didn't want to disappoint Khamenez, and he wasn't afraid of the thugs, even if they had guns.