Life on the Run (21 page)

Helping one to focus on the game in Los Angeles is important, for it is an easy place to lose concentration. The change in weather encourages one to get away from the hotel and onto the beaches or tennis courts. Every player has his own set of personal distractions—family, friends, business, and unusual kicks—that are more plentiful in the nation’s second largest city. More than one game has been lost in L.A. because the team was not ready to play by game-time.

“Hey, Clyde, don’t sit under that chandelier,” Holzman says to Frazier in the hotel ballroom where the movie is set up, “it might fall.”

“It wouldn’t hit Clyde,” I say. “He’s too fast.”

“No,” Jackson interrupts, “Red would catch it before it got to Clyde.”

Jack Kent Cooke, who owns the Los Angeles Lakers, emigrated to the United States in the 1930s from Canada. He made his first million before he was twenty-nine. He prides himself on his million-dollar art collection, his eighteen-thousand-acre ranch, and his impeccable vocabulary. He bought the Lakers from Robert Short for $4 million in 1966. Cooke, a smart but ruthless businessman, rarely sacrifices profit to personal considerations. Dick Barnett, talking of his brief terms as a Cooke Laker gets right to the point, “Man was down on the bench wipin’ sweat off me with a towel and two days later I was traded to New York.”

Shortly after he purchased the team, Cooke embroiled himself in a major dispute with the City of Los Angeles over his rental of the municipally owned L.A. Sports Arena. When the city officials would not budge from their position, Cooke decided to build his own arena. He bought a tract of land next to Hollywood Park Race Track in nearby Inglewood and constructed The Fabulous Forum. (It had to be a forum; Los Angeles already had a Coliseum.) Never mind that no athletic events were ever held in the forum of Rome, after which Cooke named his monument. But, when it comes to things like the usherettes, they wear
mini
togas to keep up with current fashion
and
the historical motif. Such compromises create the usual southern California jumble—seen elsewhere in monumental restaurants with terrible food—where one can never be sure of the interconnection of money, style, and function.

For all its pretentiousness the Forum is my favorite building away from Madison Square Garden. It makes me appreciate Cooke’s drive, success, and imagination. There is real evidence of planning for the players’ needs, beginning with the simple convenience that players can park their cars very near the employees entrance. The locker rooms are spacious with mirrors, showers, wash basins, toilets, and benches built for people over 6′5″. A man under 5′6″ can’t see his face in the bathroom mirror. The hallways and playing area are kept spotless. There are private press rooms for interviews and a luxurious club for post-game drinks and dinner. The air in the arena is cool. The baskets are suitably loose. The portable court (laid over hockey ice) gives slightly with a player’s weight since it is separated from the ice by a four-inch layer of air. It is easy on the legs. The lighting promotes a feeling of distance from the crowd. The press are not permitted at courtside.

I carry my suitcase to the game along with my basketball bag. We will leave from the Forum for a 12:30
A.M
. flight to San Francisco. I am the last one to arrive in the locker room. The evening’s conversation has already begun.

“Aw, come on Danny, how big?” says DeBusschere.

“I swear to God, as big as this,” Danny says, grabbing each elbow with the opposite hand and making his arms into a circle. “Their balls swelled up as big as this.”

“How did they walk, then?” asks Frazier.

“They used to have to carry their balls in a wheelbarrow. That’s how tough it was for some guys in the South Pacific during the war.”

Barnett walks up to DeBusschere, who is on the taping table, and asks, “How’s the stock market?”

“Shitty,” says DeBusschere.

“You know, some guy wanted to sell me stock at the beginning of last summer,” continues Barnett, “and two weeks ago I pulled into a gas station and there he was readin’ the meter and pumping gas.”

“We’re all lucky to have a job,” adds Whelan.

There is a moment of silence, then Willis and Barnett get into a discussion of the movie
Superfly
, which is about a black who sells drugs in the ghetto. Barnett maintains that the guy should be shot; force is the only way to clean up the drug problem in the ghetto. Willis says that the guy is just “a brother gettin’ over,” that the real enemy is “the man,” and that any way a black man can get ahead is okay with him. Barnett grimaces, shakes his head and says, “No, man, not no sellin’ horse to brothers, that’s not gettin’ over, that’s murder.”

On the other side of the room two rookies talk about a newspaper account of a fight between two players on Philadelphia and Portland. Both teams apparently joined in and several players were seriously injured. That discussion leads to accounts of other fights and boils down to comments on the greatest fight ever seen. Barnett tells the story of one player who held a grudge against another for winning an MVP award in college. During a game in his second year in the league, the recipient of the MVP award drove for a lay-up against his old rival—but never made it. He landed in the third row of the audience, with what turned out to be a career-ending back injury. When the first player was asked why he had deliberately injured his opponent, he said only, “I deserved to be MVP.”

DeBusschere tells the story of Reggie Harding, the 7-foot center with a high school education whom he coached in Detroit and who later died of gunshot wounds sustained in pursuit of a heroin fix. During one of his several suspensions from the team, Harding came to a game in which Detroit played Wilt Chamberlain’s team. Harding, who usually gave Wilt a good game (though not as good as he himself believed) stood on the sidelines half drunk, baiting Wilt: “Hey, big fella, I’m gonna stick your dick in the sand. You’re lucky I ain’t playing tonight.” Wilt ignored the taunts, and no fight developed—which may have been a good thing for him because Harding often carried a gun.

A whole series of one-sentence stories follows featuring well-known players in one-punch fights: “Out, he knocked him out,” or “He killed him, oh my God it was pitiful,” or “He just can’t fight. He will, but he loses,” or “He sucker-punched him, before he knew it,” or “Pow! it was over,” or “He’s a bad motherfucker, make no mistake.” The younger players do most of the talking about fighting. After you’ve heard the stories ten times they sound like a search for manhood, a litany of youth. When the discussion turns to the most memorable moments of basketball violence, it inevitably touches on Al Attles’s fighting knowledge, Wilt Chamberlain’s unchallenged strength, and the night Willis Reed knocked out the whole Los Angeles Lakers team.

“Part way into the first quarter it looked like someone jumped on Willis’ back,” Phil Jackson says about the film of Willis’ Los Angeles massacre. “Suddenly Willis totally lost control of himself. Anything that moved he hit. After five minutes he had knocked out two Lakers, broken the nose of a third, and downed a fourth. Finally a Knick teammate about his size snuck up behind him and said, ‘Take it easy, Willis, it’s me!’” The story of that night made the rounds of the locker rooms. No one ever challenged Willis again.

Thirty minutes before game time Red asks the reporters to leave. There is a surprising amount of tension in the air. We have been on a losing streak, and a win tonight will keep us in the running for first place in the East. Waiting for Holzman to begin his pre-game talk each player has his own nervous habits. I bite my nails. Willis tapes his fingers and adjusts the hydroculator pad on his knee. Lucas keeps counting with his thumb touching each one of his fingers in rapid order as if he were filing their tips. DeBusschere and Earl stare straight ahead. Some of the rookies concentrate on chewing gum. Jackson scratches and scratches his leg.

The Lakers field a less interesting team than in the recent past. From Cooke’s triumvirate of Jerry West, Elgin Baylor, and Wilt Chamberlain, only West remains. The regal threesome never won a championship together. Only when Elgin Baylor was forced into retirement and Chamberlain had one of his most peaceful, satisfying, and successful years did Los Angeles finally win it all. That year the Lakers beat the Knicks four games to one in an anti-climactic title series. I was very happy for West, a man of quiet dignity and prodigious talents. I felt the championship was more his than Wilt’s, whose talents and personality even in victory stood apart from the team.

The highlight of those play-offs was the Los Angeles-Milwaukee semifinal pitting Wilt against Jabbar. Wilt, in that series, at last became a popular big-man. He defeated the proud, independent Muslim, who for a brief moment due to his size, outspokenness, and misunderstood religion became the designated villain that Chamberlain’s arrogance and size had always made him in the public mind. Wilt had finally become an American hero.

For fifteen years Wilt Chamberlain was the dominant single
individual
in professional basketball, a
team
sport. His massive height and weight (7′2′, 260 pounds) sometimes made him seem a colossus. It brought almost incomprehensible achievements. During one year he averaged 50 points per game and in one game he scored 100. He averaged 30.1 rebounds per game for his career. Against Boston once he got 55. He led the league in rebounding eight times and once in assists. In practically every department of the game for which individual statistics are kept, Wilt’s name is etched in the record book.

Wilt played the game as if he had to prove his worth to someone who had never seen basketball. He pointed to his statistical achievements as specific measurements of his ability, and they were; but to someone who knows basketball they are, if not irrelevant, certainly nonessential. The point of the game is not how well the individual does but whether the team wins. That is the beautiful heart of the game, the blending of personalities, the mutual sacrifices for group success. No one man can dominate every aspect of a game—serving as a daddy and assuring victory through his effort alone. The essence of the game is selectivity, knowing one’s limitations and abiding by them. Some players are capable of exercising several skills but often their team situation requires that they concentrate on only one. If an individual claims superiority in everything, then it is impossible to avoid the ultimate responsibility for victory or defeat. A team wins or loses; an individual who audaciously claims pre-eminence
must
win. Wilt could not eat his cake and have it too. If he had been a part of the team he alone never would have been blamed for defeat. But, since he sought statistics to justify his superiority in
every
aspect of the game, he could not avoid responsibility for the game’s outcome. So the more often Wilt lost (perhaps because he did have mediocre teammates) and tried to absolve himself by referring to his individual achievements the more he became, in the eyes of fans, a giant who should never lose. What seemed like a paradox was really a misunderstanding of the game. It was as if Wilt were a big tank fighting in a jungle, possessed of all the latest equipment but unable to win a guerrilla war. The more Wilt accomplished individually, the more he came to symbolize failure.

Accompanying Wilt’s statistical self-justification was a veneer of sportsmanship. It seemed as if Wilt almost choked on the familiar aphorism about sports taught to all American children: “It’s not whether you win or lose but how you play the game.” Wilt apparently applied this prescription selectively to professional basketball, where its reverse is true and where aggressiveness is essential for success. Some people even say that the reason he didn’t win every year was because he played too passively. He never developed the killer instinct necessary for team victory. In his rookie year he was constantly battered, kneed, elbowed, tripped, and gouged. He did not hit back. Instead, he threatened retirement. In his duels with Bill Russell he patted him on the behind when Russell made a good play, showing what Wilt thought was magnanimity. It was as if he were paralyzed within his enormous body, unwilling to strike out for fear of injuring an opponent or demeaning himself. Above all, Wilt, sensitive to being called a bully, made sure he never took unfair advantage. If someone said Wilt could only score by dunking, he retaliated by taking fall-away jumpers. If critics questioned his passing ability, he stopped shooting and rolled up the assists. He seemed driven to be the best, and on everyone else’s terms.

Another familiar aphorism heard in America is that a man is free to fly as high as his ability will take him. But, a person born to vast inherited wealth has a better chance to succeed than a poor man. Likewise, a man with unparalleled physical equipment is more likely to succeed at sports than a man with an average body, no matter how hard the latter works. Although we continue to teach the democratic ideal of equality, inequality surely exists in abilities and power. Those few people who are more fortunate—Rockefellers or Chamberlains—receive the average man’s resentment together with his admiration. If their work exposes them to public curiosity, they must be prepared to handle that resentment in all its intensity.

Wilt has dealt with the public for over twenty years. When people started showering favors and money on him as a 6′11″ fourteen-year-old, he learned to manipulate them to his own advantage. Though he rarely failed to get things his way, he must have felt the fans’ resentment. They asked for his autograph and then told him that anyone seven feet tall should be able to score thousands of points.

To those who weren’t fans and didn’t recognize that his size meant superior physical ability, he was regarded as a freak, a giant, labeled different and weird. His height alone subjected Wilt to stares, pointing fingers, and inane questions. A man whose head rises eighteen inches above the crowd can never have a normal existence. Add the fact that Wilt is black in a racist society and it is easy to see how he had to retreat inside himself, if only for protection.