E-Mail This Article to a Friend ID CHECK Lyrical Miracle BY CAMILLE DODERO
	Past ID Checks Sneaker Pimp, Josh "Wisdumb" Spivack Iron maiden, Véronique d’Entremont Electro Porn Duo, Christopher Rand and Rori Hanson # 1 Supportah, Christina North Standup comic, Noah Garfinkel Mr. Birdhead, Michael Crigler Shy girl gone wild, Naomi Bennett Teenage Bentmen, Casey Desmond Naked animator, Bob White The Boston jerk, Wayne Marshall (a.k.a. Wayne & Wax) Experimental audio researcher, Jon Whitney Savage rock, runway style, Keys to the Streets of Fear Mash-up diva, Kate Enlow Acitvist poster boy, Nick Giannone Barista master, Willie Carpenter Allston via MTV, Iann Robinson

name: John Kulsick (a/k/a Miracle Johan)

age: 28

obsession: Boston Celtics

favorite players: Ricky Davis, Al Jefferson

Download "I Swear to God," courtesy of the Bears' Web site.

The first player to score during last Friday’s Celtics home game is Mark Blount. A seven-foot center with protruding ears, droopy fish eyes, and a permanently daft expression, Blount spent last season struggling offensively. But against reigning Eastern Conference champs the Detroit Pistons, he’s playing well: in the second quarter, the dopey-faced gum chewer makes a jump shot with less than a second left, his 12th point of the night, bringing the Celtics to a 43-38 lead. A bald kid in a Larry Bird jersey who’s double-fisting concession-stand Hurricanes screams from the balcony, "I’m Mark Blount and I swear to God I’m funky!"

"Didja hear that?" whispers 28-year-old John Kulsick, a red-bearded Acton native who’s sitting right behind him. "That makes me happy."

Kulsick, who’s better known as Miracle Johan, wrote the line his neighbor is unknowingly quoting. It’s from a hilarious one-minute-53-second track called "I Swear to God" that surfaced on the Internet last spring, along with nine other songs Kulsick scripted from the first-person perspectives of individual Celtics players. In the Blount track, Kulsick impersonates the 250-pound center, begging Antoine Walker for gum, and insisting, "I swear to God I’m good at basketball." In a Justin Reed ditty, "Don’t Wake Me Up," Johan-as-Reed sings like a stuffed-nose Geddy Lee and wonders if he’s dreaming when he actually gets off the bench. There’s also "No Layups," a synth-squiggly, deep-voiced dialogue between Al Jefferson and Kendrick Perkins that has Perkins bragging, "I’m 6’10"/I could bench press your house/I’m 280/I could eat your mortgage."

The songs emerged last February, when all-star forward Antoine Walker got traded back to the Celtics. Kulsick, a Green 17–obsessed math teacher in Hadley who played bass in a defunct band called Bears, was bored on school vacation. Lolling around on the afternoon of Walker’s return, Kulsick decided to record some music. "I was like, ‘What can I sing?’ " he recalls at the TD Banknorth Garden during halftime, while an Asian woman on court flips bowls onto her head with her feet. "I was so preoccupied with waiting for Antoine, that I was like, ‘I’m just going to sing about him.’ Who cares? It’s not a good song."

But when Kulsick played the resulting track — a guitar jam that has him yelling joyfully "Antoine Walker, welcome home!" — for his housemates, they loved it. So did the folks on Celticsblog.com, where Kulsick first posted a link. The response was so overwhelmingly positive, he started writing more tracks under his bowling/musical alter-ego Miracle Johan. He’d write them when a player inspired him with a big game, thereby "earning" their own composition. By April vacation, Kulsick had finished nine songs, mostly rap-skit-like monologues delivered over a drum machine and a home-studio sequencer, sort of like Wesley Willis scoring a G-rated MC Paul Barman sportscast. He sent CDs of the tunes to Boston sports stations and clips of the Mark Blount song showed up on WEEI’s Dennis & Callahan. But Kulsick doesn’t get Boston stations in Western Massachusetts, so he had no idea he was getting airtime until a college friend e-mailed him. Now the tracks have been played on his Pure Volume site over 22,000 times.

Kulsick had no idea how popular "I Swear to God" had become until tonight, when a complete stranger keeps yelling lyrics from the balcony of the Garden. Finally, he informs the Hurricane double-fister that he’s yelling his words. The kid doesn’t believe Kulsick and snaps, "Prove it."

"I’m getting interviewed right now," says Kulsick.

That’s enough proof. Garrant whips out his camera-phone, commanding Kulsick to smile. Garrant’s friend Joel Piggott says through a nacho-cheese mouthful, "There was one day I was listening to WEEI, they just kept playing that one clip, ‘I swear to God, I’m funky!’ It was 7:30 in the morning and I was on the way to school and I just kept laughing so I went to [Johan’s] Web site and I listened to it."

"This may sound horrible," adds Garrant. "If you look at the guy, when you see the close-ups on TV, the song just kind of goes along with his face. I’m sorry, that may be an awful thing to say, but it’s true."

Maybe so. But with eight seconds left in the game, Blount — yes, Blount — magically hits a jumper, pulling the Celtics into a 81-80 lead. But then Pistons guard Richard Hamilton lands a two-point jumper and the home team loses, 82-81.

Kulsick is deflated. But there’s one positive: "Mark Blount is definitely getting [another] song."

It’s sure to be funky.

Miracle Johan | www.purevolume.com/miraclejohan