Life on the Run (5 page)

Some day, I say to myself, I won’t be spending 100 days a year on the road. Travel disrupts the continuities of life. Seasons of the year become merely months of basketball games. Some day I’ll wake up in the same place every morning and that will lend wholeness to my life. Flying away to play and returning one week later destroys that possibility, not because of what happened to the place, but by what has happened to me while away. When I travel constantly the experience I have seems to consist largely of observations and moments of enjoyment—the 80 degree weather in San Diego, the desert nights in Phoenix, the days in the mountain ranges of the Northwest—but never are they lived through and absorbed. I miss that sense of sharing that comes from people living together in one place, over time. I miss permanence.

In my hotel room the day passes slowly. In the late afternoon, Country-Western singer Bill Anderson comes on the radio and sings his super-patriotic hit, “Where Have All the Heroes Gone?” He speaks for the common man. He touches the hearts of descendants from the strong Scots-Irish stock that settled the Revolutionary South and lived with the economic pressure that a slave economy generated. They rarely held slaves but they still managed to eke out a subsistence in the backwoods of the Piedmont. Their descendants proudly sent sons to Vietnam and, as Anderson sings, they can’t understand why others did not want to.

Plantation art covers three walls of my hotel room. One scene shows four ladies dressed in highcut flowing dresses carrying bonnets and parasols; they are having tea on a columned porch with a gazebo in the background. Another picture is of a man in a waistcoat, white pants, and black boots. He is walking with a woman who picks flowers under a moss-filled oak. A third picture is of the grand hall: A Confederate officer chats with a woman who wears a long red gown, while a second Confederate officer awaits his lady as she descends a sweeping staircase. These scenes, with all their assumptions about power and position in the Old South, are the past of Atlanta’s new look, progressivism.

Inside the chambers of Marriott modernity Bill Anderson’s words clash with these scenes from the aristocratic past. Atlanta styles itself as leader of the “New South.” Hank Aaron’s marriage to a civil rights activist makes the society columns of the newspapers. The Marriott, opening its doors to anyone who has money, the great American leveler, fills its ballrooms with black cotillions and its banquet rooms with black businessmen’s luncheons. Never mind that white lawyers and real estate tycoons still control much of Atlanta’s future. The opinion leaders of the city see Atlanta as cosmopolitan, prosperous, black and beautiful, aristocratic, powerful, and most of all, in the vanguard of progressivism. Atlanta, the capital of the Confederacy, is the home of Martin Luther King, Julian Bond, Lester Maddox, and Rhett Butler. Atlanta sells its municipal bonds easily while mayoral candidates make crime the number one issue of a campaign. Atlanta is a deceptive study in contrasts.

Around 5
P.M
., I take a 45-minute nap and then board the game bus two minutes late.

“That’ll be a five dollar fine,” Holzman says.

An elaborate structure of fines punishes tardiness: a five dollar fine for arriving from ten seconds to five minutes late, a ten dollar fine for being up to ten minutes late, and five dollars for each additional minute over ten. Holzman established the fine system with approval from the team. The money collected goes into a pot that is used for a team party at the end of the year. Therefore, it is to everyone’s advantage for Holzman to fine.

“Boo-ay-ay,” shout the fellows in the back of the bus.

“On behalf of the team I want to thank you for the contribution, Bill,” says Phil Jackson.

We wind through the residential streets of Atlanta to the Omni (as in omnipotent or omniscient), the new home of the Atlanta Hawks. The Hawks, formerly in St. Louis, were the team of my childhood fantasies. Bob Pettit, Cliff Hagen, Clyde Lovellette—they made my interest in the game burn. They provided examples of individual moves to develop. During high school summers in my home town of Crystal City, Missouri, I would drive sixty miles a day to play in pick-up games against the best players in the St. Louis area. One night I hit a hook shot against Cliff Hagen, and another night a Hawk rookie, Zelmo Beaty, split my face with an elbow under the eye, which the Hawk doctor had to stitch up. Every other Saturday night during my grade school years my friends and I would go to a pro game in St. Louis, and the Boston Celtics became our bitterest rival. Those were my days as a fan. Sunday afternoons we watched the Hawks on TV and later tried to imitate them in backyard games. The high point of those years came when Pettit scored 52 points and the Hawks won the world championship. The low point came a year later when the Celtics regained the title.

In many ways I will never be as much from anywhere as from Crystal City—that small cluster of houses tucked between two limestone bluffs on the banks of the Mississippi River. When I was growing up, it was a town dominated by the Pittsburgh Plate Glass Co. and populated by workers of many ethnic backgrounds, melding together in the heartland of America.

The mythic hero of my youth was Ozark Ike, the funny-paper athlete with one enormous blond curl and the Daisy Mae girlfriend, and a tantalizing penchant for making last-second shots, scoring touchdowns, and hitting home runs. Then there were the real-life heroes with less fantasy and more flesh—like Basil, Perry, Cook, Hicks, LaRose, Carter, King, and the Jennings brothers, all of them high school basketball players in a factory town.

I was an only child born to an energetic mother who spent a lot of time at church, and a banker father who suffered from severe arthritis. We lived in comfortable circumstances. As early as I can remember I was programmed to become a successful gentleman. My father insisted on manners and my mother on success. I took lessons in practically everything: dancing, trumpet, french horn, piano, boxing, tennis, golf, swimming, canoeing, typing, French, and horseback riding. Our home served as a meeting place for my friends, and my mother arranged excursions to museums, baseball games, swimming holes. By the time I was fourteen I had become self-motivated. Whatever raced inside me was more demanding than any pressure applied by parents or teachers.

At about that time I began in earnest to play basketball, spending four hours a day, alone, in the high school gymnasium, choreographing the smallest detail of particular moves I had learned at Easy Ed Macauley’s basketball camp. Gone were the leisurely hikes with my grandfather along the banks of the Mississippi listening to stories of his youth in Germany. The river road became only a track along which I ran for miles, training for my sophomore season. Basketball was my preoccupation about which I never talked with my parents and about which they manifested little interest. At fifteen, when a girl called me up one night in a playful mood, I told her I was already dating someone—a basketball.

The high school coach, the only man who would ever be “the coach” to me, was like a monk, withdrawn personally and unsociable in town circles; unreachable by the power of the company, the church, the bank, or the mayor; rigid with discipline and sparse with compliments; inspiring to boys like me, cruel to those unprepared or unwilling. Never did he confuse his roles. He was not the college counselor, family advisor, tutor, athletic businessman, or budding politician. He aspired only to be the coach. It was a calling. If in the years as a New York Knick there would be thousands of words written about passing and teamwork and hitting the open man, it would all be true but it would not be new. It would be “the coach’s” game, which by age seventeen was second-nature to me.

An education at Princeton placed a layer between adolescence and manhood and pressed me toward a traditionally acceptable career. But it was my two years of study at Oxford that proved the more rewarding experience. I was determined when I left the United States in 1965 that I was finished with basketball, or more appropriately I was finished with the public acclaim that surrounded the game. My last year in college I had received fifty letters a day and had become something of a symbol as the Christian scholar-athlete. Although it was true that I studied, practiced, and went to church, the media exaggerated each facet of my life until expectations were generated in the public that I could never fulfill. When I told reporters I was interested in politics they wrote that I wanted to be President or Secretary of State. When I told ministers that I could not speak at their church they accused me of being un-Christian. When I told coaches that I could not play in post-season all-star games they said I was ungrateful to the sport which had given me so much. The greater the acclaim became, the more certain it was that the public appetite could never be satisfied. The only way out, I thought, was to reject basketball and become a lawyer or a businessman.

At Oxford I had time to experiment with every aspect of my life. For the first time since I was fourteen I took chances with my body—hiking, racing cars, and playing contact sports—without fear of injury. Eating five meals a day I even gained 30 pounds. I questioned my religious faith and sought workable moral values instead of simply rules. I became more playful and rebellious, responding to events in a way that discipline and obligation had outlawed before. I began to enjoy people more, at first only if they were interesting foreigners and then even a few of the less serious-minded Americans. I traveled widely in Russia, the Middle East, and western Europe. Specific studies were neglected without guilt. I stopped taking myself so seriously, recognizing that life is as much a good laugh as a stirring sermon. I began to see how far I had to grow and change if I was to become a person that even I would like to know.

Toward the end of my second year, after not touching a basketball for nine months, I went to the Oxford gym simply for some long overdue exercise. There I shot alone—just the ball, the basket, and my imagination. As I heard the swish and felt my body loosen into familiar movements—the jumper, the hook, the reverse pivot—I could hear the crowd though I was alone on the floor. A feeling came over me that stirred something deep inside. I realized that I missed the game and that the law could not replace it. I knew that never to play again, never to play against the best, the pros, would be to deny an aspect of my personality perhaps more fundamental than any other. Uneasiness about the public would not, I vowed, prevent me from doing what I loved. Three weeks later I signed a contract with the New York Knicks.

The Atlanta locker room is quiet. Walt Frazier has not arrived. Atlanta is his home, and because he visits relatives when we’re here he usually arrives at the Omni late. Some of the players go out early to practice. That leaves Whelan, Barnett, DeBusschere, and me in the taping room. The talk as always is of crime, death, money, sex—visions of the real world through the locker-room lens.

“When I was a trainer for Rochester in the International League,” says Danny, “we used to play in Cuba. A guy in a white suit used to visit in the locker room after the game. See, he was a Battista man. He would offer a ring to players for $800 and he’d say it was worth $2,000. Of course, the players didn’t believe him, so the guy in the white suit would say, ‘Take it to New York, have it appraised at Tiffany’s. That’ll cost you $25 and if it’s not worth what I say, keep it and don’t pay me nothing.’ Well, a couple of guys started doing this, and the rings were worth what he said, ya see, ’cause he got ’em real cheap from Switzerland.

“One day I asked Jesus, one of the Cubans on our team, if he was for Castro or Battista. He stared at me, pulled me over into the corner, whispered, ‘I for Castro, but don’t tell any of the other Cubans or I die.’

“When Castro finally did take over, the guy in the white suit,” Danny says, pausing and aiming an imaginary gun at an imaginary line of traitors, “shit, he fell into the ditch with a lot of other people I used to know around baseball when we traveled there in the International League.”

Barnett picks up the general thread of discussion. “Yeah, but in the United States rich people never go to jail. When did you ever hear of a rich man going to jail? They pay off the judges and everyone else. Shit, where there’s millions to be made, no court is going to stop the big men with the money.”

“Yeah,” Danny says, “you can always find a crooked lawyer. I’ve seen enough of them to know.”

“Motherfucker steals a loaf of bread and gets ten years, and there are big fuckin’ corporation presidents rippin’ us all off and gettin’ suspended sentences,” says Barnett. “That’s justice?”

The other players return and listen to Red go over the Atlanta team, its strengths, its weaknesses, what might work and what we have to do to win. We leave the locker room and begin taking warm-up lay-ins. In the ceiling a latticework of lights and speakers comes alive with sound and brightness. The steep pastel seats become darker as they lead at one end to a big American flag. At the opposite end are signs which say, “Kristel Kritters” and “Junior Hawk Corner.” Only a few people are in the Omni. A band assembles at one end of the court and begins playing. It is the Reedsville, Georgia, State Penitentiary Band. In the middle of lay-ins, the public relations director for Atlanta pulls Walt Frazier aside. A member of the band who is doing time for armed robbery stands with both of them. He is an old high school classmate of Frazier’s.

The scene is about a common heritage which is never completely a thing of the past. Four years earlier in Atlanta, before the Omni was built, the Hawks played in the Georgia Tech fieldhouse, a place Frazier remembers from his childhood as a “real white groove.” That night there was an all-white band playing during warm-ups. They played several popular songs and then played “Dixie.” Every black player on both teams reacted. Their heads turned, they looked at each other and at their opposite number on the other team; one or two glared at me. After a few uncomfortable minutes Bill Bridges, the black Hawk captain, told the band to stop playing “Dixie.” They did.