Life on the Run (24 page)

I
WAKE UP THE NEXT MORNING AROUND
11:00
IN THE WASHINGTON
Plaza, a 40-story circular building in downtown Seattle, my favorite hotel in America. From our thirty-second-floor room I look past the Moore Theater and the Calhoun Hotel, both over 40 years old, past the Public Service Insurance Co. and a new 20-story condominium, out to Puget Sound where under brilliant sunshine a ferry crosses to West Seattle, and hundreds of sailboats move briskly over the whitecaps. In the distance Mount Rainier and other peaks in the Cascade range stand like guardians at the gates of this fresh, green city on the water. It is the kind of day that exhilarates by the sheer force of its beauty. I go downstairs to breakfast and then sit in the lobby reading the Seattle newspaper.

Local news fills our travel like patches in a quilt—the writing of a new state constitution in Texas, a public-housing scandal in Cleveland, a freeway siting in Atlanta, a skyrocketing crime rate in Detroit, an earthquake in Los Angeles. Today I read that the city of Seattle proposes to close the Pike Street Market and build new office buildings in its place. The historical society and environmentalists are opposing the move, but the state’s lawyers say they are fighting a lost cause. The story saddens me, because I really like the market. Every time I’m in Seattle I take an afternoon walk through it. Now, I put my paper down and wonder if today’s visit will be my last.

The market is an old wooden structure at First Avenue and Pike Street. First Avenue looks like a scene from an Edward Hopper painting except the frame facades are filled with unlikely tenants: Sansoni’s Wig Boutique, DiLaurenti’s International Food Mart, and the Green Parrot Theater. The market proper is an open area covered by a roof and divided into shops, stores, and stalls on several levels, all overlooking Puget Sound. Young craftsmen off the main market aisle sell their own products: candles, leather work, turquoise beadware, necklaces made from the feathers of pheasants and peacocks. One of them used to make chokers of beads and yarn in the woods of southern Oregon. He moved to Seattle when the paper mills closed and economic conditions soured. Further into the market sits a young female artist named Susan, who paints portraits while you wait. She arrived at Pike Place via Minnesota, Europe, school in the East, marriage in San Francisco, and a separation in Seattle.

I have discovered that I like people much more than I used to when I self-consciously fled from the public. Being the subject of public curiosity has paradoxically made me more curious. I go toward people with less inhibitions. Traveling around the country as we do, I enjoy approaching a stranger with questions. I learn from the life stories of ordinary people who want to talk about themselves if asked. I ask.

The March air is cold but the Japanese-American vendors still offer their products. “I got crab $1.39 a pound—Romaine lettuce usually 39 cents, but for you 20 cents to make your buy an even buck.” A crowd buzzes around the stalls. Collard greens, cabbage sprouts, spinach, watercress, new potatoes, sugar peas, hubbard squash, red chard, mustard greens, and chives are for sale. On platforms covered with ice the Pike Place Fish Co. displays Columbia River smelts, ink squid, Dungeness crab, white perch, and jumbo shrimp—arranged as if with the assistance of an art director. “Send the salmon back East, an ideal gift, a souvenir from Puget Sound, 8 to 10 pounds, guaranteed to arrive in good condition.” The scene reminds me of open markets in England. The temperature makes my nose red and numbs my sense of smell, but I feel more invigorated than if I were walking through a suburban supermarket.

Two men—one Indian and one white—approach me and the white says, “Hey, partner, how about a dime or two.” Three Indian buddies lean precariously against a nearby wall passing around a bottle of Bokay apple wine.

“I grew up full of discrepancies about the Indian,” Phil Jackson has told me. “They were supposed to be dirty and weren’t to be trusted and they had no concept of civilization. My grandfather had that boarding house near the reservation at Wolfpoint, Montana, and he used to always say Indians were drunks just standing outside bars or in the middle of streets, ready to steal anything if you left your car unlocked. Two Indians were in my sixth grade class at Williston, North Dakota. They lived on the flats down along the Missouri River.”

I ask the white man about his life. He says that he is a hook tender on a logging crew, waiting two more weeks before Archie McDougall of the Alaskan Logging Employment Agency sends him up to Prince of Wales Island near Ketchikan at Thorn Bay to work the summer for Georgia Pacific. The Indians leaning against the wall are Aleuts and they are waiting for work, too. He says that a lot of Indians work in Alaska, logging, and mostly they are Klamath, Aleuts, and other Alaskan and Canadian Indians.

“As I learned more about the Indians,” said Phil, “their self-sufficiency appealed to me, particularly since they lived without the inventions of the white man. Many Indians were nomads living on the prairies. Everything they got was wild—fruit, vegetables, meat, herbs—and yet they lived quite at ease in very harsh country. Boys were taught the ways of animals. Storytellers passed on the tradition and history. Body movement was as important as words. The whole concept of life was how to stay in tune with your environment.”

The logger says that he spends winters in Drain, Oregon, collecting unemployment, but every summer since 1956 when he was discharged from the army he heads north to pull the big logs out of virgin forest. He tells me they get up there by plane; sometimes as many as 5,000 men a summer are living in barracks, two in a room. “Archie furnishes you a ticket and you pay him ten percent,” the logger claims. “Say he puts out $100, you pay him back $110 out of your first check. It’s worth it. Hell, loggin’ is what this country is built on.”

I walk on past a tall, thin boy dressed in jeans, plaid shirt and derby hat, holding a guitar. He stands next to a pole and plays Bob Dylan’s song “Just Like A Woman” too rapidly. As I pass the Philippine Cafe, a white girl, her face painted red, white, and blue like a clown, stops a black woman shopper and asks her to contribute to a fund that will fight drug addiction among young people. Inside the Athenian Cafe I take a booth at a window overlooking Puget Sound and order beef stew; this is the only place in the league where I don’t have my usual pre-game meal. Big menus over the counter list beers from fourteen countries, and on the side of my wooden booth is carved the word “Peace,” above which is penciled “54–40 or Fight.” The meal is as good as the day. The cafe is full even though it’s 2
P.M
. I divide my attention between the brightness of Puget Sound and the bustle of the cafe, watching the people, and with the help of my imagination constructing their life stories. As I drink my coffee I know that today is one of the delicious by-products of playing professional basketball. Moving through America sampling its diversity and vitality and yet seeing it as a whole is as much a part of the life as loneliness.

I often ask myself why I continue to play. I was convinced that in 1967, when I first signed, I would play no more than four years, the length of my initial contract. After eight years I’m still playing. One reason is the money. There is no question that it gives me a sense of security, and a greater feeling of freedom, mobility, and accomplishment. Yet it also forces me to consider how much money is enough and what is the true value of my basketball services.

As a small boy I used to watch baseball in St. Louis. The Cardinals were my team and Stan Musial was my favorite player. One day at old Sportsman’s Park he struck out in the bottom of the ninth with two runners on base and the Cardinals one run back. A fan behind me shouted, “You get $80,000 a year—for that? What a waste.” During my first year in the NBA when I heard similar comments directed at me, I often thought of the Musial incident and then considered the question of what a player should be paid and for what.

There are some things in our society that are crazy. Among them are show business salaries, our dependency on lawyers, and the pomp of the evening TV news. Imagine a boy like me from the Midwest who plays basketball constantly for every conceivable reason except money. Suddenly he is told he can make over $100,000 a year playing. It’s lying on the ground like a seashell at the edge of the ocean. Am I going to pick it up? Sure. It wasn’t my idea for basketball to become tax-shelter show biz.

It is unlikely that a basketball player contributes as much to the social good as a teacher, a doctor or a member of the clergy. He works just as hard and has a brief career that frequently leaves him crippled, but if you believe that people should be paid according to the amount of social good they contribute (if that could ever be objectively measured), then probably a basketball player is overpaid. But the only way to rectify such an injustice is to admit that the marketplace erred, which is to say that the way economic activity has been organized in this country is wrong. But who, under another system, would determine the salary level of basketball players or doctors or teachers? Would it be the doctors or teachers? Would it be chaos or caprice? Would it be a government salary commission instead of the judgment of individual businessmen? Would any of those alternatives be better?

I heard a player say, “Money alone makes you more of what you were before you had money.” Ultimately it is your work and the struggle that surrounds its daily practice that is important, much more so than money, because it is work, as Joseph Conrad has said, that provides the “sustaining illusion of an independent existence.” Although I play basketball for money, and the amount of money is important, it is not the sole reason I play. The answer is not so easy to uncover. It lies much deeper in the workings of the game and in me.

A couple of minutes after I get back from Pike Street Market, I take a nap, sleeping through the departure of the bus. DeBusschere and I take a cab to the arena and when we arrive in the locker room Danny is taping ankles and talking: “We used to go to Alcatraz as kids to play ball,” he says. “Every time some guy from the neighborhood would be there and he’d always have the same story. ‘Gee, I don’t know what happened. I was just standing on the corner and some cop comes up and says I was robbing a bank and plants a gun on me. You know I wouldn’t do that.’”

Barnett is next on the table for a quick tape job. He is reading a book,
Building Black Business
, while Danny works. Phil walks in, distracted, two minutes before the deadline. Red tells him how lucky he is; how close he came to being fined. Phil closes his book on Zen love, hangs up his plaid lumberjack shirt and Wrangler jeans, scratches his beard, and replaces his wire rim glasses with contact lenses. He puts on his jock, walks over to the taping table, and notices what Barnett is reading.

“You believe in capitalism, Rich?” he asks.

“Why, Phil?” interjects Lucas defensively. “Don’t you?”

Phil smiles.

“Do I what?” Barnett asks, irritated because he has been interrupted.

“Do you believe in capitalism?” repeats Phil.

“No, Phil,” Barnett says in exasperation, “I believe in love.”

Barnett then tells a story about his Tennessee State team playing Philander Smith College in Arkansas. Tennessee State was nationally ranked and had beaten Smith by 70 points in Nashville. The gym in Arkansas was small and the rims had no nets. When Tennessee State scored, the officials occasionally ignored it. If a long shot went through without touching the rim, the officials frequently called the shot short; Tennessee State lost seven baskets that way during the game. At the buzzer Tennessee State was up by one and the team dressed hurriedly and left. “On our way back to Tennessee State the next day,” Barnett says, “we read in the paper that Philander Smith had won by one point on two free throws, given because of a double technical the official had called on our coach at the buzzer. We kept it as a victory in our yearbook and they kept it a victory in theirs.”

Bill Russell coaches the Seattle Supersonics with an authoritarian hand. His young players do not play well, and the frequent defeats put him, after years as a champion, in the unfamiliar position of being associated with a losing team. Even so, he seems unaffected, still walking with a pronounced stoop and laughing often in his unique cackle. He remains the competitor of the century. There is no way his team can continue to lose for long.

As a player, Russell was a remarkable innovator using his perfect timing to block shots and his exceptional quickness to dominate an opponent defensively. Until Russell’s entry into professional basketball, team defense counted for little. There were individual defensive stars, but rarely were there five men who worked as a unit defensively as well as they did offensively. Russell changed that. He played the middle on defense and encouraged his teammates to overplay their men. He always stood behind them, poised to stop an opponent who broke free. The Celtic defense became more aggressive as it revolved around the “eagle with a beard,” as an opponent once called Russell. And defense in general became a more important part of the game.

Red Auerbach, Russell’s coach during those years, states unequivocally that Russell was the greatest player ever to play the game. He recalls that some nights Russell could “play a whole team” defensively. He could hold any one player scoreless, but he was more interested in stopping five. He could get anything within fifteen feet of the basket, blocking as many as four separate shots on one play. The rest of the game he might just imply an intention with a fake, a step, or a raised arm—the grace notes of basketball—causing an offensive man to throw up a wild shot in fear that this time Russell was going for the block. No other big man ever had his lateral quickness, and few players, big or small, had a personality like his.

He saw early that the key to basketball was not individual statistics, but winning the game. Armed with that knowledge, he applied his enormous competitive energies to orchestrating victory. The advertisement he once did for Equitable Life Assurance, pointing out that becoming number one is easier than remaining number one, touches on a theme that seemed to fascinate him. During eleven of Russell’s thirteen years, the Celtics won the world championship. He developed a great pride from his dominant role in the Celtic dynasty—a fact which constantly brought him into conflict with the more publicized Bob Cousy. When reporters asked Russell why Red Auerbach was a great coach, Russell would reply that he, Bill Russell, was the main reason.