Bruce Birns \u201970 has spent the past 48 years trying to prove to Miles Hubbard that he should have seen more playing time.<\/p>\n
He recalls his senior year: \u201c1969, all hell was breaking loose with Cambodia, Kent State, Vietnam. My biggest concern? Making varsity basketball. The team was ranked second in the Tri State League but I convinced Miles to keep me anyways.\u201d Birns slid to the far end of the bench and joined the 30-30-200 Club. \u201cMiles would play us for the last 30 seconds if we were 30 points ahead or behind, and our parents had traveled for 200 miles or more to see the game.\u201d<\/p>\n
Birns\u2019 love for basketball has never waned. He plays hoops weekly in an intense Manhattan lawyers\u2019 league and holds season tickets to the Knicks. Birns had a 30-year career as an assistant district attorney in the Bronx and now works on the other side of the courtroom as a criminal defense lawyer. He also has developed a credible side gig acting in television crime dramas including Law & Order<\/em>. Birns is currently working on a TV pilot and writes courtroom scenes for a movie project with Chris Noth.<\/p>\n But his best career move? \u201cI married Rachel in 2012. She\u2019s 25 years my junior and we have two amazing sons, Josh and Matty, 5 and 3. I\u2019m in the gym five days a week so I can keep up with them. I figure I\u2019ll be 100 when they graduate from T-P.\u201d<\/p>\n Every February, Birns returns for the last game of the season. \u201cMiles sets me up with a rack of balls before the game and I shoot free throws and three pointers.\u201d In 2010, that morphed into a contest where Birns became the \u2018celebrity shooter\u2019 at halftime. For every three-pointer he made, he would donate $25 to the annual fund.<\/p>\n \u201cShooting in an empty gym is one thing. Standing at the line in front of a packed raucous house is another. Each ball felt 500 pounds!\u201d The first year, he went 0 for 6. \u201cIn an attempt to save face, I stepped up my pledge to 50 bucks a pop and incredibly, I made the next four, swishing the last three. It was the best 200 bucks I ever spent.\u201d<\/p>\n The tradition now involves 20 free throws at $25 each and 5 three-pointers at $100 apiece. In 2016, Birns went 19 for 20. Hubbard couldn\u2019t believe it. This past September, with Hubbard as witness, Birns hit 14 free throws and 4 shots from the top of the key. \u201cI turned to him expectantly and said, \u2018So what d\u2019ya think?\u2019 Miles smiled and said, \u2018I think you write a check for 750 bucks. And, I still wouldn\u2019t have played you.\u2019 \u201d<\/p>\n Birns figures he\u2019s dished out $4500 to the annual fund since 2010. \u201c50 years later, I\u2019m still driven by a desperate need to convince Miles he overlooked my prowess back in 1969. This is getting expensive but I\u2019m not giving up.\u201d<\/p>\n Keep the faith, Bruce. Josh and Matty may secure the Birns basketball legacy in a few years\u2026<\/p>\n by Maria Buteux Reade<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Bruce Birns \u201970 has spent the past 48 years trying to prove to Miles Hubbard that he should have seen more playing time. He recalls his senior year: \u201c1969, all hell was breaking loose with Cambodia, Kent State, Vietnam. My biggest concern? Making varsity basketball. The team was ranked second in the Tri State League […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":2373,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[51],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2372","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-november-2018"],"acf":[],"wps_subtitle":"SCORES BIG EACH YEAR","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/trinitypawlingthequad.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2372","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/trinitypawlingthequad.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/trinitypawlingthequad.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/trinitypawlingthequad.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/trinitypawlingthequad.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2372"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/trinitypawlingthequad.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2372\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2420,"href":"https:\/\/trinitypawlingthequad.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2372\/revisions\/2420"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/trinitypawlingthequad.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/2373"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/trinitypawlingthequad.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2372"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/trinitypawlingthequad.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2372"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/trinitypawlingthequad.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2372"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}