Life on the Run (11 page)

On a hot night in the Garden when his muscles and skin glisten in the spotlight, there is something startlingly elemental about him. It is as if every pore opens and Willis cleanses himself nightly with his effort. I feel better for being a part of
his
effort. For spectators and teammates alike, the special awesomeness Willis conveys makes one wonder about his past, his background.

Born an only child on his grandfather’s 200-acre farm ten miles east of Bernice, Louisiana, Willis knew hard work early. He grew up a country person in the strongest positive sense. Grandparents on both sides of his family were rural Baptists who never touched liquor and preached hard work and self-reliance. After living with the eleven relatives who worked the farm, his parents moved to Bernice, where his father worked for the Linsay Sawmill Company. As a kid of nine, Willis would get up at 4
A.M
. to go fishing on the stream that crossed his grandfather’s property. Sometimes he would sneak out his grandfather’s shotgun and hunt birds. When he was twelve, Willis was picking 210 pounds of cotton a day at $3.25 per hundredweight. He picked watermelons. He hauled hay. At thirteen, he was “cutting those people’s grass” in the white section of Bernice. He saw that all the merchants and gasoline dealers were white, but he did not allow himself to hate. A strong home and good teachers gave him his preparation for life. “My parents taught me to be a good Christian,” Willis says, “to work hard and give my boss an honest day on the job and to attend church. When I was in high school, my father still demanded that I be home by 9:30, unless we had a football or basketball game. My mother and father didn’t care what I chose for a career, but they wanted me to be a good human being. If that meant haulin’ hay… well, it was no disgrace.”

As a thirteen-year-old, Willis came under the influence of a high school basketball coach who stayed after practice with him, teaching him the things about shooting, rebounding, and finesse that Willis’s teammates didn’t want to know or couldn’t do. The coach talked of proper conduct and sportsmanship, and when Willis once lost his temper in the middle of a game, he sent him to the locker room. When Willis had completed the tenth grade the coach at Grambling College promised him a basketball scholarship upon graduation. Although many other schools made the same offer when he was a senior in high school, Willis selected Grambling because he thought its representatives were “honest” and their team played with style like Boston. Willis’s hero was Bill Russell. It wasn’t until Grambling went to the national small college tournament that Willis played against a white player. Grambling won the title that year and Willis kept Grambling in the winning column for the next three years. The Knicks, though, made him only their number two draft pick and the Olympic selectors chose Lucius Jackson instead of Willis for the center position on the 1964 Olympic team. Willis was hurt. He thought he deserved to be number one and vowed he would prove that the experts had guessed wrong about his talent. People underestimated his skill and determination; and throughout the period that followed, and during his later comebacks from injury, Willis lived by the aphorisms of his high school and college coaches who said, “There’s no harm in failing. Just pick yourself up and get back into the race. You run a little harder than the next guy and nobody will ever know you fell.” “A man’s reach should exceed his grasp.” “Go for the moon. If you don’t get it, you’ll still be heading for a star.”

Willis leaves the training room and slumps on his locker-room stool. The team doctor talks to him. Willis nods his head but doesn’t look up. Tonight’s opponent is Milwaukee, with Kareem Abdul-Jabbar at center. Willis knows he’s not prepared for the best offensive center in basketball. He knows that his body will never be the same after two operations and almost three years of little active competition. Still, he sends his complimentary tickets down to the will-call window, as usual, and tells the Knick publicity man that he feels good. He sprays his knees with skin adherent and pulls on the braces which give his weakened joints support. Then he tapes his fingers to avoid jamming them. A hot pack lies over a shoulder as he rubs liniment on the tendon area above the knee. Self-respect is still as much a part of him as ever, but the pride is less apparent. He plays against his real opponent, pain, with the knowledge that someday he will lose to it. But, his will forces him on and he is ready to work, believing that his team needs him—and we do—if only for a few minutes. Basketball is his living. He holds on, and who can fault him? Still, it’s not the same, and that’s sad.

I return to my locker stall, tape my ankles and put on my uniform. I watch the first quarter of the Milwaukee film, and then turn to the stack of mail that the ball boy has just delivered from the administrative office downstairs. I usually get forty letters a week, less than in my college years, but still a sizable amount, almost none of it from people I know. Total strangers write to “Bill Bradley of the New York Knicks.” I quickly break the mail into four categories: autograph request, business proposal, personal invitation, other. For four years, I tried to answer every letter. Eventually, I realized that although each letter meant something very important to the person who sent it, I could not form forty personal relationships each week, no matter how important it was to the sender. The ones with the letterheads I recognize, or ones that are marked “Personal,” I open and read. The rest I try to forget by placing them in the black trunk, which I empty at the end of each year into big cardboard boxes. I save them all. I have nearly every fan letter written to me since 1965.

Willis answers some of his mail with the help of the Knick administrative secretaries. Barnett does the same. DeBusschere’s sister-in-law, overseen by his wife, answers most of his mail. Monroe, Jackson, and Lucas rarely answer any mail. Frazier has one of his secretaries at Walt Frazier Enterprises (a company that represents players in contract negotiations) cope with the problem. He receives more than a hundred letters each week.

The first letter I open is from a Rotary Club president in New Jersey who wants me to speak at his club’s next luncheon. Then there are a few autograph requests. A woman in Jersey City writes to ask if I could send her anything for a celebrity auction her church is having. A man from Sparta, New Jersey, asks me to assure him better season tickets. A letterhead from the Dean of Students Office from a local New York college catches my eye. It is from the Assistant Dean of Students and it begins, “I find myself increasingly interested in the effects of greatness on athletes. It is of course practically impossible to get any kind of accurate clues from such sources as television commercials, sportscasters, and popular literature; nevertheless, some consistencies do emerge sometimes. Take Dave DeBusschere. I first saw Dave doing a hair commercial in which I recall he flashed a smile that was dazzling. His radio voice, which I heard next, was moderate and pleasing. His image, coupled with his brilliance as a ballplayer, added up to an affable, easy, relaxed kind of guy. But now I think this is not so. Dave, apparently, wrote
The Open Man
, in which he inadvertently reveals quite a bit about himself….” The assistant dean, a woman, then launches into a brief psychiatric profile of DeBusschere, as revealed in his book. Predictably, it is a negative portrait because the assistant dean is angry. What is she mad at? DeBusschere did not respond to a letter she sent him, so he is now on her enemy list.

The assistant dean continues, “To me, this portrait is a great disappointment, almost a tragedy, not because it reveals a great man to be a fallible human, but because it exposes the enormous pressure under which the man lives. Were I to write to Dave instead of you, I would surely wound him, even though I am a total stranger.

“I believe athletes lead the sort of life that is highly destructive to them in many ways. Constantly on the run, subject to incredible hardships on the road, it would take a highly insensitive person, or one with fantastic insight, to maintain equilibrium. Given one who starts off less than confident, the results must be progressively difficult, not only for the star himself, but for those who live with him.”

She asks me to comment if I desire. Two days later I write to her, saying that I find Dave to be a warm, confident, and genuine friend and that I’m sure she would, too, if she got to know him better. I write that the questions she raises about athletes in general are good ones, except that I would put quotes around “greatness” in her question about the effects of greatness on the athletes. I never show DeBusschere the letter or tell him about it.

Another letter is from a man who is angry because I did not comport myself properly during the playing of the National Anthem before a recent game in Maryland. “You looked very uninterested in your country’s anthem,” he says. “Then, before the music had even stopped, you broke away from the other players and headed toward the bench. I realize that standing even at half attention is not the ‘in’ thing to do among basketball players, but for someone who it is rumored has political aspirations, it may not be a bad idea. Also for thousands of kids watching these games you would be giving a good example….”

There is a note from the “Famous Peoples Eye Glasses Museum” in Henderson, Nevada: “We would like to add a pair of your eye glasses to the growing FPEGM.” There is an invitation to a sculpture exhibit on Sutton Place in New York. Inside the invitation is a note scribbled, “I sit in my seat 16 feet from yours and watch you perform 1782 minutes each season (54 home games × 33 average minutes). Therefore I demand 60 minutes of your time knowing of your appreciation for art.”

The last letter I open is from Kentucky. It is marked “Important.” Inside is a letter from the doctor-father of a boy whom I had met four years earlier. The son was then a sophomore at the University of Kentucky. He came all the way from Kentucky to ask me to show him how to shoot a basketball. He just appeared at my apartment one day. We went up to Riverside Drive Park where there are some empty baskets. After three minutes, I knew what I had suspected. He couldn’t shoot well but he kept asking how to get off his jump shot under heavy guarding. He said that Adolph Rupp, the coach, had told him he might have a slim chance to make the team. He insisted that he intended to work day and night, for his lifelong goal was to play basketball for Kentucky. We talked and shot about an hour. He thanked me for the help and boarded a bus back home. I saw him later that year in Cincinnati. He had been cut from the Kentucky team. He was down, and convinced that his sprained ankle had something to do with it. I wrote him a letter two years later, after his sister had written that he had cancer. My letter arrived too late. The boy’s father thanks me for the letter but says that his son had died six months earlier. He goes on to relate the grief and pain of losing his only son. I put the letter down. Holzman begins his pregame conversation. I can’t concentrate. I should have written sooner. I feel numbed with anger and sorrow.

We leave the locker room with a clap of hands, pass between the tan burlap curtains under the loge seats and onto the hardwood surface of Madison Square Garden. The spotlights shining down from the spoked-wheel ceiling make the court warm, even hot. As we form two lines for warm-up lay-ins, the Garden audio department blasts a record whose high-speed percussion ratchets through the enormous loud speakers hanging suspended over center court. During the first game that was played in the new Garden, in 1968, a large metal plate fell from the ceiling to the floor, and since then I have thought about what might happen if the gigantic speaker fell. The players who never get back on defense or never go for rebounds would be the most likely victims.

I approach the basket slowly, take the pass from Frazier and lay the ball against the backboard. The pace is slow and jerky. As you get older, the warm-up becomes more important. Muscles are tight and restrict movement. They need to be slowly stretched and loosened for the running and jumping to follow. A rhythm develops which puts me in tune with the game rhythm.

Before play-off games, nervousness and determination mark the faces of players. There are shouts of encouragement to teammates and glares at opponents. Each player tries to convince his body to perform beyond its capability. But during the regular season the warm-ups are a time of hellos to opponents, smiling inquiries about families, and occasionally the making of post-game plans.

The record fades into the more familiar accompaniment of organ music. Stiff muscles yield, the tempo picks up. I see the ball drop through the hoop. I start, fake left, and then cut right; going toward the basket at an angle. The ball thuds into my hands. I feel the grain, bring the ball up to my chest, and drop it softly against the backboard. Coming down on my toes, I take five steps to slow down, then jog to the end of the rebounding line. The music plays, people watch, and a mood begins to form.

As the lay-ins draw to a close, the younger players start the playful movement of basketball, the dunk shot, literally stuffing the ball into the basket. There are many varieties. The straight one-hand and two-hand dunks are elementary. The reverse dunk, however, requires a player to approach the basket frontally and then at the last moment turn at a right angle in the air and slam the ball over the left backside of the rim with the right hand. For the hesitation dunk, a player “skies” (jumps very high). As he approaches the level of the basket, he ducks his head aside to miss the rim or net and at the last moment, after his body is past the basket but before it descends, he reaches back with one hand and stuffs the ball through. The self-assist dunk is the most violent: a player tosses the ball against the backboard and as it caroms off, he jumps, catches it above the rim and slams it through, all in one motion. With my limited jumping ability I’m not much on the dunk. The standing locker-room joke is that a daily
New York Times
can’t be slipped under my feet even on my highest jump. So, in between the “oohing” and “aahing” the crowd gives for the practice dunks, I shoot driving hooks and reverse lay-ups against the glass. After my last lay-in made running flatout down the center, I go to the right corner of the court to tighten my shoelaces. A little boy and girl shout, “Dollar, look up, look up. Please. We want your picture. You’re our favorite Knick.” I look up, but they don’t take the picture so I return to my sneakers. The two young voices call again, “Look up, look up, you jerk!” No player can blot out the comments from the crowd. He can only pretend he doesn’t hear.