Life on the Run (28 page)

With Dave out of the lineup Phil Jackson starts at forward and Willis at center. At the end of the first quarter Lucas replaces Willis. The Phoenix team, setting no screens and passing infrequently, plays as if it were an all-star team from Ellis Island. Van Arsdale drives around two men to the basket and, much to his chagrin, no foul is called. He tries it again, and still no foul is called. Van becomes incensed.

Many players feel that referees favor us. (“You can’t beat New York, the refs won’t let you.”) The Knick syndrome is not so different from the Boston syndrome of an earlier time except that there is the feeling that since we are winners from New York we are paid more, publicized more, and pampered more. Occasionally, we blow open a game which should be close because the opponent starts fighting his image of us. There are ways to capitalize on his consequent weakness, by nourishing his self-delusion.

Jerry Lucas understands the mental aspects of the game as well as anyone since Bill Russell. Lucas is a shooter in the ninety-ninth percentile and he passes better than most guards, but it is the things he and I do to opponents with our voices, eyes, and timing that makes it such a joy to play alongside him. For example, we will call a play when our opponents shoot a free throw. The play calls for me to fake a move to the other side of the court, receive a pass, and take an easy jumper behind a Lucas screen. As I begin my move to the other side, Lucas will shout angrily, “Get out of here, Bill. Get the hell to the other side. Go.” My man, hearing Lucas, will retreat two more steps in anticipation of the move across court and as I quickly step behind the screen, I am left with an uncontested shot. At other times Lucas and I will talk gibberish to each other on the court, pretending that we understand each other. “E ah se mach e kah,” I will say. “Puto res di ah,” Lucas will reply. The rookie will retreat a step, break his concentration, or try to anticipate more alternatives than are possible. What are they saying? It must mean something.

Tonight Lucas and I are working our game to perfection; five verbal decoys in a row and I start laughing. I can’t control myself. Jackson then runs a screen and roll. It works. The fans yell at the refs and deride us. They don’t understand what is really happening. Lucas slips two bounce passes to our rookie guard, streaking back door down the middle. Monroe hits a spin and Frazier swishes two jumpers. We win by 12.

After the game I drive with a friend to Pinnacle Peak about 30 miles outside Phoenix. We eat baked beans, T-bone steaks, and drink beer, as a Country and Western band plays the tunes that ring familiar for so many Phoenix immigrants. The walls of the restaurant are covered with business cards, thousands in just one of the restaurant’s rooms. Men wearing blue jeans and women with puffed-sleeve blouses sit at the next table, drinking. They begin to dance, awkwardly at first, then with less inhibition. A girl volunteers to perform with the band and sings “Blue Ridge Mountains”—not so bad. Three beers, three steaks, and two apple pies later we leave, walking through the huge, empty, main room with its giant potbellied stove. Outside the night is cold. We walk across the dirt parking lot, across the two-lane blacktop, and out into the desert, passing 15-foot cacti and piled sagebrush. Everything is still and quiet except for the wind whispering around rocks. The sky is speckled with thousands of stars, as if they were reflections of Phoenix at night, glimmering before us in the distance.

T
HE BUS LEAVES THE HOTEL AT
5:30
A.M
.
FOR THE WORST
flight of the trip—a three-stop jaunt from Phoenix to Albuquerque to Oklahoma City to Houston, where we will play the following night. Everyone staggers aboard the airplane, the exhaustion from last night’s game still on them—mouths burning, eyes itching, legs aching, bruises being discovered for the first time. Frazier pulls his tan beret over his head and immediately falls asleep. Willis and Jackson soon follow and Monroe, who sits next to me wearing a blue and white rain cap, begins to nod. The stewardess comes around with hot bouillon. Barnett removes his boat captain’s hat and says, “Six-thirty in the mornin’. Time when you want eggs and stuff to stick to your bones and some bitch gives you
boolyan
.” The man sitting next to Barnett is startled, but recovering quickly engages Barnett in the worst of all possible conversations: early morning fan-racial talk. After we’re aloft for forty-five minutes the man goes to the rest room.

“How’d I get stuck with this motherfucker,” Barnett says, leaning up to Monroe and me who are just eating breakfast.

“Learning a lot?” I kid.

“Yeah,” says Barnett, who has his hat back on. “All about business… and why do you colored fellas wear all those funny hats?”

The man returns from the rest room, stopping to talk to DeBusschere, who feels much better this morning.

“Do you think you’ll win the championship again this year?” he asks Dave.

Dave brushes the question off but it has hit a sensitive spot in me. I recall again, for about the fiftieth time this season, how it was. We had won the championship only ten months earlier. On days when I ask myself why I play, I remember those few moments after victory, in the locker room with the team, when there was a total oneness with the world and smiles grew broad enough to ache. The chance it could happen again is a sufficient lure to continue. The money is important but the chance to relive that moment outweighs dollars.

After our first championship in 1970, I got a letter which read, “I have had the great pleasure of watching sports on all levels for many of my 45 years. Rarely have I been privileged to see 12 people work so smoothly and selflessly as a team, and in the final Lakers series, under adversity [Willis had been injured].

“In these trying times, compounded by Cambodia, Vietnam, Kent State, riots, concurrent inflation and deflation, you and your teammates have made millions of fans happy and have given us a small spark of inspiration in the currently rather confused world.”

The championship was what one wanted to make of it. Vicariously experiencing the victory can’t compare to being Number One. Owners and politicians celebrate in the locker room of a champion but only the players, the coach, and perhaps the trainer can feel the special satisfaction of the achievement. They start nine months earlier in training camp. They play the games, endure the travel, and sweat through the practices. They receive the public criticism and overcome their own personal ambitions. But the high of the championship is unequaled in my experience.

Standing at midcourt in Madison Square Garden, two fists raised, and chills coursing up and down my spine, I realized in May 1970 that we had won the championship. I existed apart from the twenty thousand people who roared their approval. Since I was nine years old I had played basketball to become the best. Individual honors were nice but insufficient. The Olympic gold medal gave satisfaction, but it was not top-flight basketball. Only the NBA in the early 1970s was clearly the highest caliber in the world, and there I was a part of the best team. All those statements of team solidarity expressed since high school; all the hours of loneliness, dribbling and shooting a basketball in a gym somewhere in the world; all the near misses in the smaller championships—high school and college—of America’s sports hierarchy; all the missed opportunities in other fields; all the denied moments of personal enjoyment; all the derision by self-appointed experts and opposing fans; and all the insistent advice to shoot more instead of passing, given by friends and family who didn’t understand my commitment to the group; all the struggling against other competitors who sought the same prize; all the personal conflicts suppressed and angers swallowed—everything seemed worth it for the feeling at center court on May 7, 1970. The championship vindicated my concept of and approach to the game. I had finally proved something to myself.

When we got to the locker room after the final buzzer of that first championship, the owners, the TV cameras, and the press awaited us. And the champagne. The son of a Garden executive asked me for my jersey. Everybody did their turn on national TV, telling America in thirty seconds what the championship meant to them. The players hugged, grabbed, slapped, laughed, kissed—each other. A player would rush from one cluster of people to another, explaining how the victory was accomplished but never getting close to telling the whole story. Each of us sampled the champagne; no one drank much; its presence was symbolic more than functional. Cameramen asked players to pose for photos and slowly, very slowly, the bedlam of victory died to the normal hum of the locker room, except that it was now the place of champions. We showered, dressed, put our wet clothes in our bags, and left. It was over.

We won a second championship two years later, but it was a more mature victory, savored instead of excitedly consumed. The euphoria lasted during a quiet post-game meal with friends in Los Angeles, through a marvelous night until morning, and through the plane ride back to New York. By the following day it too was over.

I wonder if fans know that all the pressure, work, and excitement makes for only 24 hours of joy. How fast it is gone! Only a memory remains of how our group performed and how it felt to make it to the top together. If there is any broader social meaning to the championship, it is not, as my friend suggested in his letter, that it diverts you from unpleasantness or inspires you to great achievements, but rather that it gives a glimpse of a better world—a world unattainable. A team championship exposes the limits of self-reliance, selfishness, and irresponsibility. One man alone can’t make it happen; in fact, the contrary is true: a single man can prevent it from happening. The success of the group assures the success of the individual, but not the other way around. Yet the team is an inept model, for even as people marvel at the unselfishness and skill involved, they disagree on how it is achieved and who is the most instrumental. The human closeness of a basketball team cannot be reconstructed on a large scale. Groups in the real world cannot be like a championship team and ultimately the model of sport is dissatisfying for everyone but the participants.

In the locker room after our second championship, as I looked around at my teammates I thought of how I liked something about each of them. They were good people, and from our sharing these unique moments they would be forever different from other people. I saw our reflections in the lives of nomadic Indian tribes on the Plains, making the group adjustments necessary to exist in a constantly changing environment, and also in the lives of Western gunslingers moving on from challenge to challenge with the knowledge that one day somebody would be faster and surer. Our friendship was based on deeds accomplished together. It even seemed at times like that night to seal the split between the black and white races. “There warn’t no home like a raft, after all,” says Huck Finn. “You feel mighty free and easy and comfortable on a raft.” Being on a championship team is like being on that raft, floating down the Mississippi. Neither one can last forever.

Red Holzman stood in the locker room throwing right hands of jubilation at imaginary opponents. We had just defeated Boston in the seventh game of the East Division title on our way to our second championship. “It’s days like this that do it,” Red said to me with his teeth clenched. “You get hooked—this job, this profession, you live for days like this. It’s so great to get them. Everyone was great. We really responded. But, you know,” he said, taking a drink of beer while in the background players shouted and reporters pushed, “it’s not real, all this, the ecstasy, this isn’t what life’s about. But you get hooked. I always have. Seems like I’ve played 30,000 years but today was the greatest thrill. We beat Boston in
their
year. Hell of a satisfaction. Tomorrow I’ll call you dumb cocksuckers again but today, well, today even the scotch will taste better.” He put his head back and smiled.

The tires squeak as we touch down in Albuquerque. The landing wakes everyone except Willis. While we are waiting for the new passengers to board, Barnett quickly arranges a card game. Earl takes my seat and I move up to the front row, which has two seats empty. The deck of cards whir and the game is on. Lucas agrees to keep score today.

The new passengers file through first class. A few look twice at the team with a don’t-I-know-them-from-somewhere-look. After about twenty people pass by a man wearing a blue denim suit and white cowboy boots sits down next to me. I take him to be a rancher by his wind-burned, roadmap face and immediately I begin to imagine his life and adventures, but I’m puzzled by his hands. There are no callouses. Don’t all cowboys have callouses?

A few minutes later three other men similarly dressed enter the plane. They greet my seat partner and go past to the tourist section. A young black man with skin the color of caramel and a close-cropped Afro smiles as he passes. “Aren’t you Dick Barnett?” he asks Barnett, sitting two rows back. Barnett nods. “Hey, I’m Charley Pride. I saw you play in college. Mind if I sit in on a hand?”

“You got money?” Barnett asks.

“Sure, I’m ready as soon as we’re in the air.”

The plane takes off and I ask the man next to me who Charley Pride is. He looks surprised and tells me he is the hottest Country and Western entertainer in America, that he is his manager, and they are on their way to Oklahoma City for a concert. Pride, he says, has just begun to move up on the charts but he still travels most of the year. By 1979, the manager reckons, Charley should be the biggest money maker in the Country and Western field, and that means millions. He says that even Pride’s family had difficulty adjusting to his playing the white man’s music, but Charley, who is part Indian, African, and Caucasian, had enough courage just to be himself, Charley Pride, genetic man, American.

I look back at Pride. A handsome man, dressed in tan slacks and a tan sportshirt, he is alternately standing above the game and sitting on the arm of Barnett’s chair. Pride wins the hand, but shows a remarkable lack of pretension. He is “talking stuff” right along with Barnett. A rookie gives him a long glance, and smiles as if to say, “Yeah, you a brother for real.”