Life on the Run (12 page)

After the lay-ins, the team starts individual warm-up shots, using six balls. A jumper, a free throw, a hook, a running one-hander—each player will run through his repertoire until he has reaffirmed it against the imaginary opponents of the warm-up.

DeBusschere practices his long jumper from the corners and his full-speed drives across the middle to the basket. He jump-shoots three from the low post and tips in a few rebounds off the glass. Lucas stands twenty-five feet from the basket. He shoots with a piston-like motion—one bounce, fix the ball into shooting position, jump, fade, kick one leg forward, release the ball near the right ear. Monroe works on his rhythm, faking his shot, driving to the basket, pulling up for the jumper from the hip. Frazier dribbles from baseline to halfcourt five times. I shoot fouls and take jumpers at points on the court where our plays are designed to spring me for the open shot.

Muscles loosen even more and confidence grows. Sometimes you can sink every shot in the warm-ups, but the shots in the game fail to drop. Other times just the reverse. Each player has his own superstitions: taking the last shot, swishing the last shot, walking to the bench last or first, shooting with one ball only, saying hello to a friend in the stands.

Frazier and DeBusschere rarely use the full ten minutes for shooting; they prefer to sit on the bench for two or three minutes, thinking about their opponent.

Several years ago, I took to surveying the crowd for lovely women, and now in Madison Square Garden three women are part of my pregame fantasy ritual. They sit in different places and they attend games often. At some point during the warm-ups, I will stare at each of the three. I don’t want to meet them and I’m sure they aren’t aware of their strange role in my preparation. After two years, one of them made it known through friends that she was available, but somehow it didn’t seem right. From what I saw, she was extremely attractive and alluring; meeting her might dispel that image. I knew she was bound to be different. Anyway, I did not want to find out, because the very act of meeting her would destroy the role she played in my warm-ups. So, I continued just to look. She caught my glances with recognition for several more months, but finally ignored me altogether. I still notice her dress, her hair, and the remarkably impassive manner with which she regards the scene. Three times I have seen her from a cab walking down a New York street. She looked the same, but her allure was less, insufficient without the Garden and the game.

The buzzer sounds, indicating that players should return to their benches for the start of the game. Players take last-second shots not unlike students cramming, minutes before an exam.

“Welcome to the magical world of Madison Square Garden,” says John Condon, the Garden’s public address announcer, “where tonight it’s the New York Knicks against the Milwaukee Bucks. And now for the Milwaukee starting lineup…”

“Booooo.” The Garden vibrates like a bass violin string. Few opposing teams escape the New York boo.

“Now the World Champion New York Knicks…”

Sound of waterfalls, a continuous roar.

“Playing forward, No. 22, Dave DeBusschere.”

Waterfalls.

“Playing forward No. 24, Bill Bradley.”

Waterfalls.

“Playing center, No. 32, Jerry Lucas.”

More waterfalls.

DeBusschere and I stand stonefaced as the remaining introductions are made. DeBusschere says, “I found her. I’m playing for her tonight.”

“Where, which one?” I ask.

“The blonde in the blue sweater up to the right of Gate 13.”

I glance up the wall of faces, past Wall Street types in their three-piece suits, past blue-jeaned bearded kids, until I focus on an unknown woman in a gray skirt and a blue turtleneck sweater. She gazes down at us as the National Anthem is announced. “Okay, we’ll do it for her tonight,” I say.

During the National Anthem, while a fan in the front row does toe raises, I stare at the balcony where the signs of Knick sponsors hang—Coca Cola, Manufacturers Hanover Trust, Schaefer Beer, Eastern Airlines. I fix on the red and black Coke sign. The colors jump and then fuse. “O’er the land of the free and the…” I can’t wait. I spring to the sidelines, ready to play, excited. I catch a towel from the ballboy as the singer finishes, “… home of the brave.” I take off my warm-ups and towel my legs dry. Holzman gives last-minute instructions. Barnett calls our first play and we head out for the center jump. Game number 66 begins.

Milwaukee gets the tip. Oscar Robertson passes to Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, who hits a drifting hook shot from the middle of the lane. Oscar hits a jumper and passes for three more. Milwaukee takes a 10-to-2 lead. They are running well.

Oscar and Kareem, the old and the young, make Milwaukee a devastating team. Kareem’s calmness engulfs opponents. With a beard covering his face and his alert eyes darting back and forth across the court, he looks like a member of some royal family. He does things on a basketball court that are truly astounding. At 7′3″, he is as graceful as any player in basketball. In one game, I saw him grab a rebound two feet over the basket, dribble the full length of the floor ending with one dribble behind the back, leap from about the foul line, and dunk it. He does not have the massive bulk of Wilt Chamberlain or the coiled reflexes of Bill Russell; but he seems to be flying effortlessly, giving and taking at his whim.

Oscar’s play has been my model since I was in high school, when I saw him play against St. Louis University. He never wastes a movement; the form is always perfect. His arm fits under the ball as if its sole function is shooting baskets. The same motion releases the ball in the same manner every time. The Robertson body fake frees him time after time for the short jump shot. He dribbles at you slowly, then fakes right with his head, shoulders, and arms. His man jumps right, and he brings his body back left for a clear shot or drive to the basket. His passes are crisp and pinpointed. He is unselfish with the ball but demands that the game be played properly—his way.

Who is the best, Jerry West or Oscar Robertson?

“Jerry’s a great shooter,” Barnett says, “but Oscar is the best all-around basketball player ever. He makes it look so easy. He’s not fancy, just fundamental. He is going to take the shot he wants, not the one you want him to take, and the motherfucker isn’t going to shoot further out than fifteen feet. When he was younger he could have scored 100 points in a game if he went for the shot every time instead of averaging ten assists a game. No mistaking it either, Oscar is boss. One night we were playing Cincinnati and Wayne Embry [a 6′8″, 250-pound center] sets a pick for Oscar. As he attempts to roll I try to hold him. Embry looks at me and says, ‘Don’t hold me, man, Oscar will yell at me if I don’t roll.’”

Oscar dissects situations on the court. Basketball for him has never been a matter of emotion. The only obstacle between him and a perfect game has been the ability of his teammates, which, until he joined Kareem, could not compare with his own. Perhaps he doesn’t give lesser players a large enough margin for error, but when they listen to him he makes All-Stars of meager talents. He controls events on the court with the aplomb and authoritarian hand of a symphony conductor. The NBA finals in 1971 showed Oscar’s mood as he sensed the possibility of his first championship. He drove his young teammates, placing blame on those who made mistakes, urging them never to let up, telling them when and where to move, and insisting on perfect execution.

Oscar perceives the game from the pinnacle of his own self-confidence. When pretenders to his throne of preeminence arose (Jo Jo White, Dave Bing, Pete Maravich), they were challenges only of a moment, coming up from a lower class. Once in a crucial All-Star game between the NBA and ABA, his team trailed by eight points with three minutes to go. Dribbling the ball downcourt, he caught sight of a few glum faces on his NBA bench. “Don’t worry,” he said impatiently as he passed the bench, “we’re not gonna lose.” He knew that three minutes was enough time for a lead of eight points to vanish twice over. He knew that steals, bad calls, panic, experience, and luck still could brew quite a different result. He felt in control—and was. The NBA won by five.

Except for Oscar’s berating of officials (he believes that their incompetence has hurt the game) and instructing of teammates, he plays impersonally, and sometimes even seems to react mechanically. Other players also school themselves in detachment. Walt Frazier, the Knick’s exponent of cool, wrote a book about it, in which he said, “Cool is my style. I almost never show any emotion on the court. A guy might harass me, and it might be working, but if you look at my face, I always look cool. So they never know what I’m thinking.” Oscar never talks about his cool—he plays in Milwaukee.

When I was in college, I, too, played with detachment. I was careful to control my emotions and to let out only those feelings that made me more productive. I even described my play as if I were a machine. But as a pro I was no longer leading crusades for Princeton to show the world that a team of student athletes could prevail in the best competition. After surviving my NBA initiation and winning a starting position on the team, I had stopped struggling. I was in a safe, if competitive, status as a regular professional, and my play became more personalized. No longer did the severe discipline of the court prevent me from accepting the gentler half of my personality.

Now, I allow myself expression on the court. If I am angry or nervous, I show it. If I am in a great mood, I show it. As I give expression to my feelings during play, I have a greater satisfaction and calmness afterwards. Playing creates a release for my emotional energy. I have become dependent on the action, the physical contact, and the verbal bantering of the game. I know that when I finish with basketball for good and can no longer experience the catharsis of game and locker room, I will have to find something to take its place. Basketball has fulfilled more emotional functions for me than I can imagine.

Phil Jackson says you can tell more about a person when he loses. Some players don’t care about winning and make excuses because they’re interested only in themselves, not team victory. Other players, like me, learn only reluctantly to accept defeat as part of the life. My second game in the NBA, I scored 25 points but threw the ball away with nine seconds left. The other team then scored and won in overtime. I took the defeat hard and afterwards didn’t speak to anyone, I was so depressed. Later that night in the hotel, Dick Barnett ended up as my roommate. We had exchanged about ten words since I joined the team. I had replayed the game about fifteen times when he walked into the room, looked at me, soaked in a hot tub for ten minutes, then got into bed. Before he turned over to sleep he picked up a statistics sheet of the game and read my line of points, assists, rebounds, free throws, field goals, and minutes played. Looking first at the sheet and then at me, he finally uttered his only comment of the night, putting the game in perspective. “Forty-six minutes—that’s a whole lotta’ minutes.”

When the game is over, the most important thing is the next game. A player must be able to recuperate from a loss within twenty-four hours. Such resiliency is not a bad character trait to take away from the sport. But like so many of “sport’s lessons” it becomes oversimplified and even leads to insensitivity when applied to life. Once, for example, I heard an old basketball man say that a coach had a bad year, as if to say a bad season. The coach’s wife had died and he had lost a large lawsuit. There are some things for which there will not be another season.

Yet winning and losing is all around us. From the high school level on, athletes are prepared to win and they in turn convey to a larger public what it is to be a winner. Locker-room champagne, humility in victory, and irrefutable knowledge of a favorable, clear-cut resolution are what championships resemble from the outside. The winning team like the conquering army claims everything in its path and seems to say that only winning is important. Yet like getting into a college of your choice or winning an election or marrying a beautiful mate victory is fraught with as much danger as glory. Victory has very narrow meanings and, if exaggerated or misused, can become a destructive force. The taste of defeat has a richness of experience all its own.

Toward the end of the third quarter we begin to make our move against Milwaukee. DeBusschere hits from the corner. I hit on a jumper from the key and Earl Monroe scores on a drive. The next three times down the floor Earl makes a move for a basket. Once, he jumps, changes the position of the ball three times, and floats the ball just over the outstretched hand of Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. The next two times he drives directly at his man, then spins to the left, takes two more dribbles and shoots from the baseline. Earl Monroe plays like a man whose body was assembled through a mail order catalog. Each part seems to move independently yet is controlled from a single command center. He has an uncanny skill for gauging the distance between himself and anyone who can block his shot. When his timing is off, as it is when he is returning from an injury, his shots are often blocked. When he is healthy, he can loft the ball over anyone’s outstretched hand. Sometimes the defensive man misses a block by a foot, sometimes by an inch, but when Earl is right no one can stop him. He is one of the few players who openly challenges Kareem with a drive. Seventy percent of the time, Earl finds a way to get a shot off: He shoots it hard against the backboard; he goes straight for the rim; he steps back, jumps, tucks the ball in and then shoots it between Kareem’s arm and his head.

More than any other Knick, Earl Monroe grew up in an atmosphere shaped by the rhythms of urban change during the post-World War II decades. He was born November 21, 1944, at the University of Pennsylvania Hospital in central Philadelphia. His mother, Rose, came north from New Bern, North Carolina, with her family when she was fourteen. Of her twelve brothers and sisters only two survived until Earl’s birth. One brother died in prison. Another died swallowing a baked potato. Disease and violence took the other eight, with the last death occurring on November 23, 1944.