Everything They Had (45 page)

And I think of the legendary runner Wilma Rudolph. Probably my first great Olympic experience came in 1960 when I watched her win three gold medals. Women's track is not as big in this country as it is in some parts of the world, where fans are infinitely more knowledgeable about the sport and its records, and where ordinary track-and-field meets regularly sell out. Here it is secondary to men's track, which itself is never quite big-time unless a rare superstar like Carl Lewis is competing. During the Cold War, Olympic track became temporarily more important than usual, I suppose, because the head-to-head competition with the Soviets and their Eastern-bloc satellites seemed to matter, as if it directly reflected the arms race. If we won fewer medals than the Soviet Union, did that mean that we were over the hill as a superpower, that we had gotten soft as a people? Had the Soviets, despite their failures in so many areas, managed to raise a tougher breed of athlete (read: would-be soldiers)? And were the East Germans, with all their medals and their ferocious sense of purpose, the society of the future? (No, it turned out. Just an overly mechanistic, rather authoritarian society, much given to doping and other practices that did no one any good in the long run.)

Wilma Rudolph burst onto the scene in 1960, and she was magnificent, not only a great runner but also a great story. Her father was a railroad porter, her mother a maid for rich, white families. A strikingly beautiful young woman, Wilma, one of 22 children, had had to overcome a series of illnesses, including polio. By chance I had met her before she became famous. I was a young reporter for the Nashville
Tennessean
then, all of 22 years old myself, and one day, just before the 1956 Melbourne Olympics, I was sent by my editors to the track-and-field complex at Tennessee State University. It was a black college, and Ed Temple, the coach there, already on his way to becoming a legend in the sport, apparently had a great relay team made up of four young, black women who were going to compete in the upcoming Olympics.

Ms. Rudolph was 15 or 16 and still in high school then. She was not yet physically imposing. Though she later became tall and powerful, at the time I think she weighed less than 90 pounds. I suspect that this was the first time she had ever encountered a reporter from a metropolitan newspaper. It was all very primitive in media terms; there were no public-relations people present that day. Ed Temple seemed to think that she was on her way to becoming a great athlete, and that she might have a shot at a medal in the 200 meters. She was also going to run a leg in the 4-by-100 relay. I knew little about women's sports then, and Temple did much of the talking. What I remember most clearly is that when I filed my story back at the office I led with something to the effect that out at Tennessee State four remarkable young coeds were zeroing in on the 400-meter relay and were going to run in Melbourne. When I handed in the piece, there was a great internal debate at the paper over the phrasing in the lead, and eventually the “coed” reference was taken out—for though we were one of the most liberal papers in the South and very aggressive in covering civil rights, a decision had been made at the top that young black women could not be called coeds. At least not yet.

I watched the Melbourne Olympics, and Ms. Rudolph did all right. She had clearly not yet grown into her body. She did not medal in the 200, but got a bronze on the relay team. I did not cover her again, did not keep track of her progress, as a wiser, more experienced reporter, aware of a great story about to happen, might have. In 1960, when she reached stardom, I was busy covering the civil rights movement in Nashville and had not followed her ascent as a dominant runner. But in Rome that year she simply exploded into the national and international consciousness. She won gold in the 100 meters, the 200 meters, and the 4-by-100 relay, for which she ran the anchor leg, took the baton in fourth place, and brought it home to win.

It was a dazzling exhibition, and I can still remember my pleasure in it. More than the three medals, there was something special about her, I thought, an elegance and grace. The Europeans seemed to sense her extraordinary qualities even before her fellow countrymen did. I have a memory of the French journalists starting sometime that week to call her “the black gazelle.” Black power and the “black is beautiful” part of the civil rights movement were then still to come, but that summer Ms. Rudolph provided a startling preview of the idea that black was beautiful, as did her fellow Olympian the young Cassius Clay. For one shining moment, in my mind, in a world which was not yet overloaded with hype, the Olympics had a truth and authenticity—the Olympic ideal lived—and I have watched ever since, hoping to see the next Wilma Rudolph.

It soon became obvious that we had hit a great river with giant fish at an almost perfect moment. Even fishermen of no distinction, like Steadman and me, caught five or six fish a day. The average size was fifteen pounds. More important, it was not just the catching; it was the ongoing pleasure of it all.

M
EN
W
ITHOUT
W
OMEN

GQ
,
September 2002

It began about a year ago as the most casual kind of palship, one formed in a New York gym. We were working out next to each other on stationary bicycles. He came over and said that he understood that I was working on a book on Michael. Michael, of course, is Michael Jordan. He knew Michael a bit, he volunteered, because he was a Carolina guy, and had played ball there a very long time ago. Perhaps he could help with the access. That did not strike me as likely. Somehow he did not look connected to the high-powered modern-day world of basketball. Instead, he looked quite ordinary, just another man in his 60's, a little shorter than me, perhaps 5 feet 9 inches or 5-10. His name, he said, was Tommy Kearns, and for a long time the name meant nothing to me; during most of the ensuing three or four months of our regular conversations I did not think of him by his name, but rather as the pleasant, helpful Carolina alumnus from the gym, a man who was, judging by the sweat on his workout clothes and the slightly chunky outline of his body, working even harder than I to keep his weight down. In the modern age when a player is usually at least 6–5, and with a body fat content of under 7 percent, he did not look like a player; that was emphasized by the fact that the New York Liberty players practice at our gym and from time to time as we talked we would look at the sleek, powerful bodies of young female professionals, all of them, it seemed, stronger and taller than we were.

But our palship progressed. We both liked to talk basketball. He was smart and likable, and he clearly knew the inside of the Carolina program extremely well, who was in and who was out. Dean Smith was Dean to him, yet he clearly was not a name dropper. After a few weeks during the early months of the legwork on my book, he began to guide me through the intricacies of the Carolina hierarchy, and at a time when I was still struggling to gain access to Smith himself, he tried to be helpful.

The Carolina basketball world, it should be noted, is tightly bonded and largely sealed off from the outside world: a cult, Chuck Daly, the former Penn and Detroit coach once told me, a good cult instead of a bad one, but a cult nonetheless. Outsiders, particularly writers, are likely to remain outsiders forever. Kearns was clearly in the club; he played golf with Smith at Pinehurst each summer with many of the best-known Carolina alumni, a kind of Dean Smith Invitational. That is very much an insider's game; Carolina coaches, Carolina alumni and a few trusted outsiders who had treated Carolina players well, like Jerry West, Rod Thorn, Kevin Loughery and Daly, were the ones asked to play.

Our friendship progressed over the year. We talked about the game, and about Michael, and Kearns tried, unsuccessfully, to get me to try spinning, a hyped-up form of stationary bike riding. Then, late in the season when I was checking out the Carolina basketball brochure, looking up some of James Worthy's statistics, I happened to stumble into some of Kearns's records. Tommy Kearns, it turned out, had been a third-team all-American in the mid-50's, but even more, he had been the playmaker—that was before they were known as point guards—on the Carolina team that in 1957 had gone undefeated and beaten Kansas and Wilt Chamberlain for the national championship.

I mentioned this to him with some measure of apology the next time we spoke at the gym: “You really
were
a player, weren't you?” And with that he started telling me a very good basketball story from a very different era. He had been in the vanguard of New York City kids whom Frank McGuire had recruited back in the mid-50's and put on his reverse underground railroad to North Carolina, as part of a plan to bring winning basketball to a school (and region) which, in basketball terms at least, was largely an underdeveloped area. Basketball was not yet a truly national sport and the game was still more often than not a city game—played best, it was believed, in New York. But it was a bad time for the college sport in New York. The point-fixing scandals of the early 50's had destroyed the sport locally. Once-powerful programs had been closed down. McGuire himself had coached at St. John's before seeking a kind of sanctuary at Chapel Hill.

After landing at Chapel Hill, McGuire had almost immediately started to import his own boys. He was the son of a New York cop and he was good at recruiting city boys; if in Carolina he had something of a strange accent, and if he seemed a little flashy, very much the outlander, then neither of these things was true when he went after kids in the boroughs. He was very good at visiting kids in their homes, usually accompanied by someone very successful from the same neighborhood who vouched for him. He liked to do most of his recruiting in the homes—where he could make a better read on the lifestyle and the ambitions of the parents and therefore tailor his pitch accordingly—rather than in fancy restaurants where the parents might be uncomfortable. He visited the home of Tommy Kearns, who was a big-time schoolboy star in New York, some four or five times. In those days the Catholic high schools held tryouts for scholarships—the players the coaches wanted got them, and Kearns had played for Lou Carnesecca at St. Ann's, a traditional powerhouse; he had been an all-city playmaking guard, quick, scrappy, and smart with the ball, with a good outside shot. Under his direction, St. Ann's in 1954, his senior year, had been national Catholic school champion.

McGuire badly wanted Kearns, and the fact that the senior Kearns was also a cop living in the Bronx did not hurt—it was an easy house in which to make a read. The recruiting sessions were, Kearns remembered, largely devoted to McGuire's attempts to overcome the doubts of Kearns's parents about sending their son to so alien a part of the country. After all, Chapel Hill was in the heart of the Bible Belt South, and Tom Kearns Sr. was wary of what would happen to a good Irish Catholic boy down there. But, Kearns remembered, McGuire was a masterly recruiter, and if you listened to him, the conversion was going to be quite different—he and his boys were going to convert the Protestants to Catholicism, and do it through the Trojan horse of basketball. And so in time Kearns became one of four New York City kids McGuire recruited for his class of 1958, fittingly enough, all of them Catholic. Already waiting for them down there, a year ahead of them in school, was a young man of consummate talent who was a great pure shooter, Lennie Rosenbluth, also a New York boy, who was Jewish. That would make their team essentially all New York, four Catholics and a Jew: Kearns; Pete Brennan from St. Augustine's in Brooklyn; Bobby (no kin to Billy, who came after him) Cunningham, from All Hallows in the Bronx; Joe Quigg from St. Francis Prep in Brooklyn; and Rosenbluth from James Monroe in the Bronx.

Their arrival marked the beginning of big-time basketball at Chapel Hill. They knew the game, they were well ahead of the national curve in basketball savvy, they knew how to shoot and set picks and make cuts and, above all, how to pass. They compensated for a lack of height by deft defensive positioning. Freshmen could not play for the varsity in those days, but the Carolina freshmen were undefeated and often beat the varsity in practice. As sophomores, they played regularly and went 19-7, and then in their junior year everything tumbled right and they went 32-0. The heart of the team, as the
Raleigh News and Observer
later noted, was Kearns. In the National Collegiate Athletic Association semifinal, they beat Michigan State in three overtimes. Then, playing in Kansas City, Mo., they had to play against a Kansas team led by the seemingly unstoppable Wilt Chamberlain. They were ranked No. 1 in the country because they were unbeaten, and Kansas, which had lost once, was ranked No. 2, but there was no doubt which team was favored; it was Kansas by about 8 points, playing virtually at home and led by the mighty Wilt.