Life on the Run (15 page)

The Boston Celtics are our special rivals. We replaced them in 1970 as world champions and since then the press writes of a Knick era as they once talked of the Celtic dynasty; even though we lost the championship two of the next three years. The rivalry between us is intense and the competition is fierce. The games are rough and emotionally draining. The battles over the years, though, develop respect among the players.

I guard John Havlicek—by far the most difficult job I have in a season. Havlicek’s every movement has a purpose and his teammates look for him constantly. If I am a split second behind him, or respond to his fakes away from the ball, he receives a pass and gets a basket. He never lets down and his stamina seems endless. I’ve played him for six years. If he gets twenty-one points and I get fifteen, and we win, I think I have done a good job. Testing my ability against his superior skills gives me great satisfaction. Both of us know instinctively how far we can challenge each other without destroying our mutual respect. If he makes a cut to the basket without the ball, I might try to stop him with a stiff arm to the hip. He might respond by grabbing my arm for leverage and hurtling past me. In tonight’s game, a regular season contest, we will play hard against each other—each doing some holding and pushing, but never turning the natural aggressiveness of the game into hostility.

The interaction between the two teams is a competition that extends to the level of management. Red Holzman and Red Auerbach, the Celtic general manager, are bitter rivals. Both subscribe to the notion that no advantage is too small to take. They are polite enough to each other at public and league functions, but individual pride sometimes makes courtesy difficult. One time after a Saturday night game, both teams flew to Boston together for a Sunday afternoon game. As we waited in the passenger lounge, players from each team chatted amicably, but the two Reds remained apart. When the flight was called, they got into an argument about who would get on the plane first.

Whenever the Celtics lose in New York, Auerbach stands in the hallway yelling about how the officials won the game for the Knicks. When we play in Boston, we often dress in locker rooms that are either very hot or very cold. If we win in Boston, we never have the same locker room when we return. Whelan claims that the “musical locker rooms” are the work of Auerbach, and I believe it. When things go bad at the hotel in Boston or on the bus to the airport, Holzman occasionally blames the Celtics. Auerbach in particular prides himself on getting these psychological edges. Opposing players dislike him, but for Auerbach the smallest incident can become a test of his machismo. Once, during play-offs against Boston, Auerbach prevented Whelan, Monroe, and an injured rookie from using the Celtic training room for physical therapy. He claimed that unless the Celtic trainer was present they could not be trusted.

When Auerbach coached he would light a cigar on the bench as soon as he thought his team had won. He liked to embarrass an opponent that way. Once, when Los Angeles won the first game in the final play-off series against Boston in Boston, Auerbach announced after the loss that Russell would coach the following year. The next day, which he was flying to Los Angeles for the second game, the headlines carried news of Russell’s appointment and not the Lakers’ victory. Red claimed a psychological victory.

But no matter how arrogant Auerbach appears, I cannot dislike him. I have a personal bond underneath the layers of competitive antagonism. When I was in college and he was the coach of world champions he took an interest in my game. We would meet on summer mornings and he would explain the finer points of blocking out for rebounds or running the fast break. After each workout he never forgot to drop the confidence-building compliment and he never asked for anything in return. Auerbach loves the sport and, talking with him, one quickly realizes that he understands how to motivate players. I don’t agree with those who say Auerbach just had good player talent during his years as Celtic coach when he won eight of nine championships. He is a great teacher.

The film of our last game against the Celtics in Madison Square Garden is on the screen. Two policemen walk into the locker room and say something to Holzman.

“What is it, Red?” I ask.

“Never mind,” he says.

I look to the special locker-room assistant, who nods his head and forms his thumb and forefinger into the shape of a revolver.

“Is it a warning?” I ask Red.

“Yeah, but don’t worry, nothing can happen,” he says.

The special assistant walks over after Red is gone and says, “Somebody called up and said they were gonna get one of the Knicks tonight. The place is crawlin’ with plainclothesmen.”

Other nights in years past phone calls warned of bombs and violence. Occasionally it made the news. More often, it didn’t.

We walk out between the tan curtains, past the sawhorses that hold back the crowd, and onto the court. I see eight or nine plainclothesmen surrounding the court, concentrated behind our bench. The Celtics are going through their lay-ups. The fans are alive as usual with jeers, greetings, insults, threats, invitations, and encouragements. “Boston games are like heavyweight championship fights,” Frazier says. “People can’t wait until the buzzer rings.”

The New York press proclaims that every player in professional basketball would like to play in New York. Basketball salaries here are the highest. Ten million people focus their attention on twelve players. Fifty times a year TV carries our faces into the city’s living rooms, revealing our pains along with our triumphs. Fifty times a year 20,000 fans jam the Garden to watch us in person. Outside income from basketball flows more readily to a New York player on a winning team because he is accessible to Madison Avenue, the TV networks, and the hundreds of public appearance requests that come from a metropolitan area of fifteen million.

Basketball, according to some pundits, is really a “city” game, and New York is—more than any other—the city. People who grow up on the streets of New York feel they understand the tempo and skill of the game best. The Garden crowd applauds the subtleties of the game. They recognize the well-executed play and the pass that leads to the pass for a basket. They understand that team defense is essential for victory and that when done well it can be exciting. Yet to imply that basketball is only a city game is a fallacy—more journalistic excess than fact. Good professional players come from all over the country including rural areas in such places as Kentucky, Indiana, and North Carolina. Good coaches work in California and Missouri and many knowledgeable fans have never seen New York.

Our Knick team is not the offspring of the city’s playgrounds. None of our first seven players comes from New York. Instead, we were brought to the city by a college draft which allocated each of us to the New York team. We had no choice in the matter. If we wanted to play professional basketball, we had to play in New York. Some of us adjusted and even thrived in the excitement of the city life, but we are the city’s stepchildren. I am a New York Knick. I am never a New Yorker in the sense that an athlete from Sparta was a Spartan.

New York has been, for me, a city which operates on as many different levels as there are floors in one of its skyscrapers. In the beginning I approached it with the suspicion of a Midwesterner who has heard too many stories about the city’s corrupting influences. I avoided strangers and public places (in New York that’s difficult). But slowly I realized that New York provides anonymity as well as the spotlight, humor as well as danger, inspiration as well as sordidness. I have come to appreciate the crowds—people-watching is my number one pastime; I like the layers of humanity with diverse backgrounds all living, functioning, and prospering in such a small area. I like the New York police and the New York cabdrivers—both offering their opinions with their skills. I like the rough impersonality of New York, where human relations are oiled by jokes, complaints, and confessions—all made with the assumption of never seeing the other person again. I like New York because there are enough competing units to make it still seem a very mobile society. I like New York because it engenders high expectations simply by its pace.

“When you’re dealing with spiritual concepts,” says Phil Jackson, “you like to deal in energies because if you believe in God you believe He is probably an energy force. So, one of the things that amazes me is the amount of energy that’s in New York. You get no energy from the earth because the earth is all covered up with cement and bricks. There’s no place to walk on the earth unless you go to Central Park. The energy all comes from human beings. It’s a very high-pitched, nervous energy. It’s also very creative and very human, lustful and earthy. When I come back here every fall from the Northwest, I like the stimulation it brings me. The other thing is that no matter what you like or want, materially, you can find it here.”

The New York Knicks are a popular and fashionable part of the New York experience and have been since 1968 when the team began to have a winning record. Basketball stars have become celebrities. Details of players’ lives are hot copy. Comparisons are made—so help me—between Walt Frazier and Nureyev.

A broad cross-section of people come to the Garden to see and to be seen—to be identified with the success of the Knicks. An already sizable stable of groupies has diversified as it has grown. Point-spread gamblers sit behind the baskets urging victories by nine points instead of seven, six points instead of five. Aspiring starlets parade around the players’ benches at half-time showing off their good looks. For two years a bad dancer appeared at courtside to put his hex on opposing teams. (He later sent a bill to the Knicks.) Twenty thousand people—politicians, corporate executives, carpenters, plumbers, magnificently Afroed women dressed to perfection, and movie actors in disguise—sit with their attention riveted to a small, well-lighted strip of wood on which ten highly trained bodies run and jump.

Performed in the midst of a lengthy war, deepening economic woes, and political upheaval, the game gives people a real-life drama that has a resolution. As a form of show business it is completely honest. As a form of human endeavor it is understandable and pure. The performance demands maximum effort, as one sees clearly at courtside. Unencumbered by masks, pads, or hats, the players reveal their bodies as well as their skills. People come and see and know that what they see is real. Fakes do not win championships, or hold opponents scoreless over a quarter, or charge from behind to hit six shots in the last two minutes.

The athlete’s honest performance on the court surprisingly produces the phenomenon of a more general credibility off the court. I can’t tell you, for example, how many times people have come to me and said that they used me as a model for their children. I guess that’s all right, and often I have been flattered by such comments. But the people don’t really know me. Parents see me play and hear about a few aspects of my off-court life. From that they create a model which frequently distorts normal living and often conforms totally with their own views as they relate not just to dictates of diet and physical fitness but also to larger questions of politics, sexuality, and religion. In stripping the athlete of all individuality the parent provides a pure but sterile model for his children—more a playmate than an adult.

I think our believable professionalism on the court also leads to the phenomenon of women (not groupies or surrogate mothers or happy young wives) who regard us as show business figures with a particular brand of masculinity. An athlete can recognize the absence of interest in him as a person. He, more than most males, understands the unnaturalness of being a sex object.

The only thing which differentiates an athlete from other men is his performance on the court. When fans take that performance beyond its own legitimate boundaries, from the court to their fantasy land, they seem to create a monster that says more about their own lives than the athlete’s. It is as though people, by transferring their personal dilemmas and problems to the athlete, seek to redirect their explosiveness. If a father fails to instill values in his child, and tells the boy to be like Willis Reed or Dave DeBusschere, trying to stretch the simple example of a normal person’s professional excellence into the core of a boy’s moral training, he possibly short-cuts his own responsibility to serve as a model. In so doing, he exploits the athlete who performs well on the court, out in the open, ripe for any fan’s unarguable interpretation.

And then there is the athlete returning the favor, attempting to exploit the public’s belief in his professional integrity, seeking to transfer his general credibility to commercial products. As a spokesman for corporate entities he can generate consumption; his high salary enhancing his basic value as a marketing vehicle. With the rise in athletes’ salaries and with the publicity owners and the press gave those salaries, the athlete has taken on a credibility that goes beyond the elemental success of the court and the clean-cut victory. He has become a financial success in a materialistic society which believes money earned accurately measures accomplishment. The athlete not only achieves the obvious success of a warrior on the field of battle but then as if to reinforce his position, receives the appropriate reward from his society. The higher his salary, the more the popular mind legitimizes him. His accomplishment is clear. Envied, perhaps, and certainly well known and widely acclaimed, he becomes a celebrity perfectly cast to tickle the consumer appetites of affluent America.

Fran Tarkenton, the professional football player, always talked about his “relationships” with corporations as if they were well-remembered lovers. He carefully cultivated a stable of executives who had their firms pay him big fees for socializing with fellow executives. Almost every aspect of his life was covered by a “relationship”: Delta Airlines gave him free travel, Eastman Kodell gave him clothes, Coke gave him prestige in Atlanta, and
Newsweek
gave him access to media power.