The hallway phone at a Regis College dormitory rings. Cowens answers it.
"Hello?" he says.
"You going back to California anytime soon?" the man asks. "I could use a ride."
"No, I'm not," Cowens responds.
Click. The caller was someone Cowens had picked up on the road en route to Kentucky. Cowens, who had traveled to the Bay Area to watch part of the 1975 NBA Finals between the victorious Warriors and the Washington Bullets, ended up purchasing a Comet convertible and began driving it back home. The journey had almost lurched to Las Vegas before Cowens, a frequent hitchhiker himself, obliged this man hoping for a lift to Cleveland.
A few hours after the two had met, Cowens decided to fly home instead. Without hesitation, he gave his companion a fistful of money and asked that he steer the Comet to Kentucky, from where Cowens would put him on a bus to Cleveland.
Cowens did not know the new driver had just checked out of a mental institution until, wondering a few days later why the car had not been delivered yet, he called the man's father. ("Oops," Cowens says, laughing at the memory.)
The Comet eventually showed up in one piece, the interior littered with food wrappers, and Cowens kept his end of the bargain, paying the man's way to Cleveland.
"Then a few months later he called me at Regis College when I was having my basketball camp there," Cowens says. "How the hell did he know I was there? He somehow called that one pay phone, and somehow I was there to answer it. Weird stuff."
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