Life on the Run (2 page)

Dave attended Detroit University, where he held to solid ecclesiastical tenets. He did “B” work in business administration, lived at home on the weekends, dated the same girl for four years, and developed into a great athlete. Baseball and basketball were his specialties. He excelled equally at both.

After college, DeBusschere signed a baseball bonus contract for $160,000 with the Chicago White Sox. They sent him and his blazing fast ball to the Sally League in North Carolina and then advanced him to the Triple A division in Indianapolis. At more or less the same time, he also signed a basketball contract with the Detroit Pistons and for four years he successfully played pro baseball in summer and pro basketball in winter. During his forty-eight straight months of sport travel, sitting alone in hotel lobbies or passing time with strangers in bars, Dave missed his close friends and family in Detroit. Although he was single and seeing most of the United States for the first time, the life got stale quickly, particularly the long, hot summers in minor league baseball. Once he made the White Sox, there were a few old-timers who befriended him, but Dave sensed that his curve wasn’t good enough and his control too erratic for the major leagues. So, when the Pistons offered him the job of playing-coach at the age of twenty-four, he left the baseball world, casting his lot with basketball for better or worse. After two seasons as a coach with disastrous records and one more year as a solid but unheralded player, Dave was traded to the New York Knicks in December 1968.

The Detroit team competed more against themselves than against their opponents. They were a group of sensitive egotists who simply failed to fulfill their potential. In New York, Dave could concentrate on his specialties—defense and rebounding—and forget the pursuit of elusive personal statistics.

“My father never pushed me in sports,” Dave says. “He’d come to the games, but he never forced me to play. From as early as I can remember, I just had the drive to excel in sport—football, baseball, basketball, you name it. I had a fear of performing poorly. I had to be good. I had to be competitive. I couldn’t stand to be embarrassed at what I was doing. I still tell myself not to take it easy in a practice, a game, or anytime. That’s the only way I know how to play.”

At 1:00
P.M
., an hour and ten minutes late, the team boards the plane, our steel cocoon where time stops and familiarity brings comfort and security. I sit next to the window, careful not to disturb the card game that has already begun on the aisle. I fasten the safety belt and slouch down so that my head rests against the back of my seat. Moments later, I hear the loud roar preparatory to take off. I feel the pressure push me back into the cushioned backrest. The landscape outside passes, slowly at first, and then faster. A creaking ascent follows a moment of fear. We’re aloft. The fog quickly denies us sight of the ground as a gray mist whips around the edges of the wings. Suddenly, moments after takeoff, we burst through the white clouds to sunshine and blue sky. The experience is physical. My eyes open. I smile. The dullness of Cleveland lies behind, and the brightness of day stimulates my imagination. For the first time since waking, I breathe faster and deeper and feel alert.

After an hour and twenty minutes we swoop out of the clouds across New York harbor and up the East River. The skyscrapers of Manhattan rise from the island on our left like the monuments of a modern religion. On the right are Brooklyn and Queens, the square blocks of houses that provide contrast to the architectural feats across the river. “There it is,” says a teammate looking out at the view, “the heart of urban America. That’s where it’s
all
happenin’.” We veer away from the skyline, over a huge cemetery and Shea Stadium, landing at LaGuardia. Moments later we emerge into the unsure world of the city.

T
HE NEXT DAY
,
TUESDAY
,
I TAXI TO MADISON SQUARE GARDEN
around 6:15 for a 7:30 game. In the old Garden at 49th Street and Eighth Avenue, a game would start at 8:30—or even 10:30, if it was the second game of a doubleheader. Those were the days when for the price of one ticket fans could see two games. The side balconies hung directly over the court. Players heard the fans’ comments easily. Sometimes spectators pelted stars of opposing teams with bottles, coins, and programs and on a bad night, the home team had to dodge the flying missiles. Occasionally, the fans would shake the backboards which were suspended from long wires anchored in the balcony concrete. Even so, players loved the baskets of the old Garden. The rims hung loose on the backboards. A shot landing on the rim was “softened” and usually rolled in. The good shooters in the league called the baskets “sewers” because almost everything went down them. The portable floor, though, was a dribbler’s hell. A few squares of the hardwood surface were completely dead to the bounce. Often, a player would be driving to the basket, only to find the ball he had controlled seconds earlier unresponsive to his dribble, as if it had turned to stone.

Backstage, behind the end seats were hockey goals, ice-show scenery, an old circus cage, and a pulpit from a Billy Graham crusade. In 1962 Marilyn Monroe sang Happy Birthday to JFK at the Eighth Avenue end of the arena. During the thirties the German-American
bund
held giant rallies there to support Hitler’s Germany. In 1924 the Democratic party nominated John W. Davies there for President on the one hundred and third ballot. The old Garden was a social history of America. And, always, the smell of popcorn and burnt cooking oil filled the air.

The new Madison Square Garden opened in February 1968, three months after I joined the team. It occupies air space over the New York terminals of the Penn Central and Long Island railroads. It was privately financed and designed to be the ultimate indoor arena. Seats were cushioned and escalators assured quick exit. The design provided a powerful ventilating system and plenty of light. The promotional message encouraged the men of Wall Street and Madison Avenue to join the die-hard basketball fans from the garment center in the new Garden. The accommodating new atmosphere and the success of the Knicks increased attendance—particularly of women. Then, in an effort to attract more families and at the same time allow businessmen to see a game before catching the commuter train home to New Jersey or Long Island, the starting time was moved up to 7:30.

As I get out of the cab and head for the employees’ entrance, Burt says hello. He is an avid fan who wishes me good luck before every game. He has a season ticket high up in the Garden’s yellow section. Sometimes I give him better seats, and occasionally we have lunch. He knows the game well and likes to gossip about players and tactics. The Knicks make his life special, he says, and give him something to look forward to after a day at work in the post office. I am his favorite player. He is similar to other fans over the years who have identified with the team and me. They suffer with us when we lose and they are ecstatic when we win. They might criticize us when we play badly but they are never disloyal. They are the bedrock of our experience as professional players.

I get out of the elevator on the Garden’s fifth floor, the arena level. Making my way through the back halls, I greet the carpenters, electricians, and guards of the building’s staff.

“Go get ’em, Bill!”

“How you gonna do? Is Dave okay?”

I walk down a long hall past the twelve dressing rooms; I say hello to a man who stands with his son. Before almost every home game for four years, he has offered to get cut-rate diamonds for me. When he first made the offer his son was a small boy. Now he stands a head taller than his father. Another man nods hello—a wealthy bachelor who gives theater tickets to his favorite players. I shift my bag to my left hand and open the door.

The Knicks’ locker room is small. The floor is covered with blue carpeting. At one end is a green blackboard and a bench where sportswriters or trainer’s assistants usually sit. A roll-up movie screen is attached to the blackboard. At the opposite end of the room is a built-in storage cabinet and a closet. Inside the cabinet are towels, hundreds of towels. The Knicks will use sixty towels in one night, for showering, for applying liniment to muscles, for wiping perspiration, for drying hands and for providing a cushioning layer against the various therapies of hot sand packs, diathermy, and ultrasound. The closet holds all the equipment needed for the team: liniments, sprays, tape, pills, and wraps. There are uniforms, basketballs, socks (wool and cotton), jocks, and shoes. Each player maintains his year’s supply of equipment in the closet. The only key belongs to Danny Whelan, who attends to the physical and mental whims of the team. Part of his job is to make sure every player is properly supplied, but not overly so. Some years ago, Whelan suspected a player of taking more than his share of equipment. He opened the player’s private locker to discover a plentiful cache. Whelan returned the supply to the closet and left it to the player to wonder who had intervened. The player got the message and thereafter his equipment requests lessened considerably.

Whelan has to know who wears Puma shoes or Adidas or Converse or Keds. He has to know which players want wool socks and which need special support in their shoes. He has to know which players use Vitamin C, which need nasal spray, which want B-12 shots and which will need and can have sleeping pills on the road. In his job, Whelan is assisted by eight ball boys who look after the players’ immediate needs: band-aids, muscle wraps, gum, coffee, tickets, and messages. They are supervised by a special helper who runs the movie before each game while the players are dressing—always a film of the team we’re playing that night—and fulfills any player’s special request. When a player leaves his allotted tickets at home, it is the special helper who sees to it that the guests get to the proper seats. The special helper also arranges for the selling of any tickets on a player’s behalf.

Locker stalls about three feet wide line opposite sides of the room. On the floor of each stall sits a big black trunk in which the player can store his personal items. At the top of the stall is a shelf, under which is a clothes hanger pole and a plastic name tag identifying the occupant. Dick Barnett has an advertisement pasted on the side of his stall—“WLIB, GROWN-UP BLACK RADIO.” Under the ad is a picture of Barnett looking particularly dapper in a tweed suit, white turtleneck, and tilted hat. Walt Frazier and Willis Reed have boxes of unopened mail and extra copies of their books,
Rockin’ Steady
and
The Comeback Year
, lying on their shelves. Dave DeBusschere has old, framed
Sports Illustrated
photos of himself stacked against the back of the locker, and a rosary dangles loosely from his shoes. On the outside of my locker, in clear view of everyone entering the room, is a poster about the horror of heroin addiction. I expropriated it from the locker of a player who was traded. On the edge of my shelf Whelan’s special helper, who knows of my liking for the Canadian north, has attached a plastic strip with the lyric, “There’s a town in North Ontario,” from a Neil Young song. Taped to the side of Phil Jackson’s stall are two letters from the same writer. They say: “You’re one of the worst players ever. I challenge you one-on-one for any amount of dollars,” and “Last year I hoped you’d get hurt and you sprained your ankle. This year I hope you die.”

Between stalls on one side of the room, a door leads to the showers and to the trainer’s room, which is shared by the New York Knicks and New York Rangers. Inside there are two rubbing tables, two refrigerators, scales, a whirlpool bath, therapy machines, a medicine cabinet, a cushioned platform for knee weight exercises, and a 5,000 pound iron safe. Players sit one at a time on the left rubbing table where Whelan tapes ankles and tells stories that keep everyone laughing. When the Ranger hockey trainer of 24 years comes in during the pregame preparations—he moonlights as a Garden usher at basketball games—Whelan usually reminds him of the hockey team’s latest loss.

After taking off my coat and hanging it up, I look around and see a ten dollar bill on the floor. I ignore it. Dick Barnett walks in and sees the bill; in one quick swoop, as if reaching to brush his shoe, he picks it up and puts it in his pocket. The room erupts in shouts, for the bill is counterfeit and was planted on the floor for amusement. The old lost-bill trick works again. Phil Jackson says he knew Barnett would go for it. Everyone laughs, including Barnett, who now argues that he was “hip” to the trick from the beginning.

Barnett, one of the greatest jump shooters in basketball history and a starter on the Knicks’ first championship team, has only recently become Red Holzman’s Assistant Coach. The Knicks’ acquisition of Earl “the Pearl” Monroe from Baltimore hastened Barnett’s retirement. He remained a regular for the rest of that year but the next season he became a reserve guard seeing little action. After a brief comeback in the fall of 1973, he retired to the sidelines.

Red Holzman realized Barnett’s value to a team and kept him on. He travels with us often and always comes to practices and home games. His voice should belong to the best drill sergeant in the world. It is as if the air from his lungs passes through uniquely built passages and comes out in sounds heard only from a tuba of the highest quality. People listen when he speaks in his deliberate manner, stretching words apart by the syllables. His sense of the locker-room situation is unsurpassed. He dominates it with a combination of candor, seriousness, and humor. What may seem a personal matter—beyond the probes of anyone but intimate friends—becomes fair game to Barnett’s needling wit and frank observation: the differences between blacks and whites, the contrast between old players and young, the idiosyncrasies of sex, the sophistications of the well-schooled man.

Dick Barnett was born in Gary, Indiana, in 1936, the youngest of three children. His father was a skilled laborer in the steel mills. When his supervisors ordered him to perform menial jobs as well, he quit rather than bow to their authority. He took a job with the Gary Parks Department. To make ends meet, he sold scrap iron and made deliveries for merchants. His greatest satisfaction according to Dick was that all his children finished high school and none went to jail—obedient to his fervent admonition, “Don’t bring the police to my door.” Mrs. Barnett was a loving, protective mother faced with economic hardship. “When I was hungry,” Dick recalls, “she always came up with a piece of bread I didn’t know was there, or she gave me twenty-five cents to go to a basketball game. When I was sick she was there to rub Vick’s salve on my chest.”