Everything They Had (46 page)

Before the game, McGuire, wanting to fire his players up and wanting to end any possibility of intimidation, had turned to Kearns, the smallest player on his starting team, and said, “Tommy, you're not afraid to jump center against Wilt, are you?” and Kearns had shouted out, “Hell no!” So he had jumped center, and Wilt had got the tip, but having Kearns jump center had set a tone of Tar Heel cockiness. (“My wife still says that jumping center against Wilt in the national championship game is the defining moment in my life, the one sure thing which will be in my obituary,” Kearns said the other day.) The message had been given, Carolina was not afraid of Kansas, and it eventually won, again in triple overtime. The game, little underdog Carolina against awesome Kansas, had caught the imagination of the country and the region; from that time on, noted the writer Jonathan Yardley, who was about to enter Carolina, basketball became not merely a sport, but a religion in the area—in that sense, what McGuire had promised the senior Kearns proved to be true.

Their next year was not so successful. Rosenbluth was gone, and Quigg was injured and they did not do so well. The irony of a great athlete's story—deeds once so important to so many people, thousands cheering, but deeds now largely distant memories for all but those few who actually played, men who had regained anonymity in their lives—struck me forcefully as he finished the story. He had told this story outside the locker room of our gym and as we were about to part, he said, almost casually, “I played in the N.B.A., you know.” He paused and added: “Briefly. I still hold the record for the best field-goal percentage. One for one.” And then he was gone. Not sure whether to believe him or not, I went home and took out my trusty National Basketball Association record book, and there it was, a great line: one game, one field goal attempted, one field goal made.

It was a statistical line for the Walter Mitty in all of us—and I thought based on that we ought to have lunch so I could hear the rest of the story, and so we met again. In 1958, when he had graduated from Chapel Hill, there were only eight teams in the fledgling N.B.A.—with 10 players each. The year that Tommy Kearns came out, the league was just beginning to change and there was the early surfacing of black players—Elgin Baylor went first in the draft that year. Even more important, Syracuse, which took Kearns in the fourth round, took a seemingly unknown guard from Marshall named Hal Greer in the third. Kearns, who had played in a number of all-star games, had never even heard of Greer. Basketball drafting and scouting was hardly big time, and Tommy Kearns had never, as far as he knew, been scouted. It was several weeks after the draft when a letter arrived from the Syracuse owner, Danny Biasone, setting Kearns's salary at $7,500 if he made the team. Nothing in those days was guaranteed.

The numbers, he soon realized at preseason camp, were going to be tough given the limited 10-man rosters and the need to keep the payroll down. The veteran guards on the team were Larry Costello, Al Bianchi and Paul Seymour, then 30 years old and a 12-year veteran. The question was whether Seymour would be a coach or a playing coach. If he only coached there was one more spot on the roster. But Biasone was not a wealthy man—his money came from the ownership of bowling alleys, and so all economies were critical. The competition was tough: the coach himself if he chose to play; Costello, who was very, very quick; Greer, clearly an ascending star (“a little bigger, a little quicker and a little bit better shooter than me”); and Bianchi. Some teammates thought it was going to come down to a choice between Greer and Kearns, and that was ominous to Kearns.

Kearns had a good camp, but in one of the last preseason games he came down off balance from a rebound and hurt his ankle and it cost him several weeks. When he was finally ready to play, it was in a game against Cincinnati. Syracuse, as Kearns remembers, was well ahead in the second half when Seymour sent him in: in time, the ball had come to him on the outside (“four or five feet outside the foul circle”) and he had taken his shot and it went in. “It would be a 3 in today's game,” he noted proudly. All told, he had played seven minutes. The next day Seymour made his decision. He called Kearns in and said: “Tommy—it's been great. We really like you and your game. But I've decided to stay on and play, and so we have to let you go.” That was it. There were no agents to call European teams in those days; he was gone that day. Hal Greer, who came in with him, went on to play for 15 seasons (39,788 regular-season minutes to Kearns's 7), becoming a Hall of Fame player who averaged 19.2 points a game. Kearns played for a time in the Eastern League and then went back and married a girl who had gone to Duke, and worked in Greensboro for 10 years as an investment banker before returning to New York. He was, he told me, a man with no regrets: he had got a great education from a great school, he had helped win a national championship, and in the record book it still shows that he was the best shooter ever in the N.B.A. You could look it up.

On this February morning, my friend Dick Steadman and I looked more like little Michelin Men than fly fishermen. We were fishing for giant brown trout in Tierra del Fuego, on the Río Grande near the southern tip of Patagonia, and had layered ourselves in lightweight long johns, chinchilla long johns, sweaters, Gore-Tex waders, windbreakers, river boots and mudguards. Fly-fishing should be graceful, but there was nothing elegant about our movements on this day. No decent bureau of tourism would have wanted to photograph us—the fish perhaps, but not us.

We were at the bottom of the American hemisphere, 7,500 miles from home. If you go any farther south, you get penguins. What makes the Río Grande worth the time and cost of the journey and the stay at the lodge is that it offers the rarest of fishing possibilities—to catch the giant brown trout, which, being anadromous, live in the ocean and return to freshwater at this time of year to spawn. They eat a far richer diet than their freshwater kin and can easily reach up to thirty pounds.

It was the second time that Steadman and I, along with our friend Richard Berlin, had come here: A year ago, we had fished the same river at roughly the same time of year, but it had been much harder for us. The water had been high, the wind had been very stiff, and it had been extremely difficult for even some of the more skilled fishermen to reach many of the pools; for Steadman and me, locked as we are in a kind of perpetual apprenticeship as fly fishermen, it had been exceptionally hard. A year ago, when we would return from our twice-a-day outings the first thing I would do was hit the Advil bottle. Nonetheless, I had caught about ten fish during the week, and the largest had been twenty-two pounds. A bad week here is like a superlative week anywhere else.

This year, by contrast, we had been told that all the stars were perfectly aligned. The runoff from the mountains had been marginal. The water was way down, from high on our chests in 2001 to knee level most of the time. We would be able to reach any pool we wanted. There were lots of fish in the river, we had been told, and they were big. Our week may well be the best in years, we thought. And yet, and yet … I would believe it when it happened.

But even if we fished under optimum conditions, it would not be easy. On this first morning, Steadman and I, despite all the predictions of easy success, were being skunked. The wind was well over thirty miles an hour, and I was not able to cast easily. I tried casting right-handed, but I kept hooking myself on the back. Fortunately, I am partially ambidextrous and can cast left-handed, and that helped, but only so much. It was a hard morning, and I was wondering by late morning whether I was doomed, whether there was some kind of mark on me—and on Dick Steadman as well—whether we simply had tried to go above our proper station in the universe of fishing by coming here and the fishing gods were telling us, accumulated American Airlines miles or not, that we did not deserve to fish here.

For there was a certain hard truth here, one that no fisherman likes to admit, especially in print: I am not a particularly good fly fisherman. My grade, if I am being generous, is a C+. I handle light spinning gear with considerable skill, but I remain embryonic at fly-fishing—I came to it late in life, and my schedule is not built around it. I handle a fly rod every two or three years for a few days at a time, and just about when I get into a rhythm my fishing time is over and I regress. Moreover, I am reluctant to bring the obsessive quality that drives so much of the rest of my life to my time fishing. Far more than most of my colleagues, when I am on a river I am guide driven, reluctant to be pulled into the aficionados' discussion about hatches and choices of flies. I fear trading innocence for excellence, that in the process some of the sheer pleasure of the doing will be lost, although I am aware that my attitude remains something of an affront to the purist.

Dick Steadman is a more serious student. He has been my friend for thirty-two years. We have fished together with questionable results in all sorts of lodges—Panama, Costa Rica, Venezuela—over the years. We met in 1970, when I was working on
The Best and the Brightest
and he had just finished a tour in the Pentagon as a deputy assistant secretary of defense. We became immediate friends, and for about twenty years we both had houses in Nantucket and owned a boat together and would fish two or three times a week for bluefish and striped bass. He is an uncommon man; I don't think I know anyone else who has so high a level of intelligence and yet is so grounded and so in control of his ego. He is one of those rare people who can always see the equities in any question, even when they go against their own interests.

Steadman's ability to command respect—instantly—from other men is like nothing I have ever seen. Normally, to do this a man has to have excelled at something other men admire—athletics, war—and has to be over six two. These things matter greatly to men, as do looks. I am convinced Robert Redford's appeal has always been greater to men than to women because he has the looks and the manner most of us would have liked to have had—and of course did not—when we were in high school, when these attitudes about how we should look and behave were indelibly set. Steadman, though very attractive, has no war record, did not command a battalion and was not a great athlete. He is about five eight. Little of this helps him on the normal Richter Scale of male charisma. Yet he possesses a palpable sense of command, purpose and grace, and there was no doubt in my mind that if our group was in some kind of crisis during this trip, it would be only a matter of minutes before he became, without anyone saying anything, our leader.

Steadman and I would have been good friends without fishing, but we are much closer because of it. What we were hoping to do this week was to put an end to the bane of our fishing lives, what we call the Week-Before Syndrome. This refers to our tendency to arrive at some fabled lodge the week or month after it had had the greatest week for fishing ever and the fish had all gone elsewhere. The manager of the lodge is always apologetic when he breaks the sad news of this to us—it is not his fault, and certainly not our fault, but nonetheless, he implies, if we'd had the good sense to come at almost any other time, the quality of the fishing would have been guaranteed. The truth is, it is hard for him to bring himself to say this, but they have never had a week this poor in the lodge's history. Would we, by the way, he adds, like to see the lodge's register to see how many fish were caught last week, month or year?

When I was a younger man, I thought of fishing as an end in itself; you went fishing because you wanted—needed—to catch fish. The more and bigger fish you caught, the better fisherman you presumably were and the better man you were. Now, much later in life, in a world greatly changed from that of my young manhood, with gender lines much more blurred in most professional and social situations than in my youth, with fishing still a primarily male pursuit (or at least the way my friends and I pursue it), I am intrigued by the relationship of fishing and friendship and the social dynamics of these all-male trips. I have found that the men I know talk more openly and candidly with one another about personal things on these trips than they do back home.

On most of my fishing expeditions, the people I have gone with have all been close friends. This trip would be somewhat different: There were ten of us in our larger group, and we were only loosely connected. We had been put together by my friend Richard Berlin, and most of us tended to have a link with him rather than with one another. Thus there was among us as men, as it had always been, even when we were boys, the hidden, unannounced matter of male shyness and uncertainty: Would we be good enough at this, or would we somehow fall short of our expectations and the expectations of others? As such, the social dynamics were intriguing: Would the social order be dominated by the man who catches the most or the largest fish, or would other factors emerge? Would we be more macho than normal because we were in a new and uncertain social setting, doing something that some of us were not that confident of? Would we be unusually successful on the water, and if we were, would that create an unspoken competition in terms of the number and size of fish being caught? I had seen that happen on occasion, if not in our group then in other groups at lodges we have stayed at—men becoming truly unacceptable in their behavior toward others because they have had several very good (or very bad) days on the water. Or would it, if we are unusually successful, make us more comfortable with ourselves and thus with one another? I looked forward to seeing how all of this would play out on this trip.