Life on the Run (22 page)

Wilt’s personality survival kit apparently included a decision to confront his public. It seemed as if his only chance to escape the resentments attached to his career was to win the fans over with his ability and conquer the non-sport public with his fame. Clearly a team championship was not sufficient for Wilt’s personal needs. He seemed determined to become one of the best-known bodies in the world. Homes, women, cars, money, only provided accompaniment to his primary quest—celebrity. Only widely publicized supremacy in all statistically measured areas of the sport or life could suffice. Then and only then might he soften the resentment that his style and size had engendered.

I have the impression that Wilt might have been more secure in losing. In defeat, after carefully covering himself with allusions to
his
accomplishments, he could be magnanimous. Sometimes waxing philosophic he would wonder publicly why the American character insisted on victory. He would relate objectively the limitations of his own team. He would imply that basketball was just a small part of his life, a life which encompassed presidents and queens, millionaires and movie stars. He would be polite with writers, talking with them as if their interest in him was somehow unconnected with the game’s outcome, or even with basketball.

Acceptance of defeat had been Wilt’s final error. If there is anything the American public hates more than its villains, it is a favorite who flaunts it and then blows the victory. Wilt’s emphasis on individual accomplishments failed to gain him public affection but made him the favorite to win the game. And, simultaneously, it assured him of losing. A team hero who loses receives sympathy, compassion, and understanding, like Jerry West or Willis Reed. An individual star who loses only gets a derisive laugh of good riddance, until he loses often enough to become a symbol for losing, the ultimate insult.

Each game has a pace of its own. One can never be sure of how a game will end by checking the score at half-time. I have been on teams that lost 30-point leads. I have come from 25 back to win. The score means little. What is important is being able to sense the mood of the opponent. What I feel is his will. A team sometimes gets behind 20 points and caves in; it just gives up. The team tries but its execution becomes sloppy; the players don’t get back on defense as fast, or play as tenaciously against their men. They take bad shots, start to bicker among themselves, and in their ultimate discouragement talk to their opponent about their own teammates’ shortcomings.

I sense tonight’s game against the Lakers is over by half-time. We have a 21-point lead. During the third quarter the Lakers make their move, cutting it to 12. We hold and then increase our lead to 18. With six minutes gone in the third quarter, I know we have it.

For the rest of the third quarter, I just watch Frazier. Occasionally he infuriates me when he doesn’t pass the ball as much as I would like, and DeBusschere sometimes, after running six times up the floor without getting a shot, will throw up his arms in anger and shout “pass the god damn ball.” But there is no denying Clyde’s ability. I am on the same court but I’m a spectator. He plays with smooth and effortless grace, as if he were a dancer revealing the beauty of a body in movement. It’s somehow right that he doesn’t sweat much. His build is perfect for basketball: tall, erect, and thin. He can move with deceptive speed. The jumper, its fake, and the drive are his repertoire—he does not have a lot of moves like Monroe. He is classic in his economy of motion, though an occasional behind-the-back dribble shows there is still a flirtation with flamboyance. Holzman says that people should get to see him practice, for that’s where he plays complete basketball. Tonight he’s doing a pretty good job of it in Los Angeles. He shoulder fakes and hits two jumpers; a third time he draws the foul, and follows with a baseline drive and a fade-away, at which several players on the Los Angeles bench shake their heads in awe. The next time downcourt he uses a change of pace dribble that makes the defensive man look ridiculous: Tonight he could make anyone look bad.

The crowd excitement at games brings out Clyde’s supreme efforts. “It’s like dancing,” he says. “When you hear a certain record you dance and you can feel it. That’s the same way I feel about the roar of crowds. They help me get psyched up. If the game is tied in the last five minutes and I make a basket, I’m telling myself, ‘You’re ready now, Clyde. Now you’re going to come up with the steal, or get the rebound, or make three more baskets.’”

Confidence and determination are big parts of Frazier’s personality. The confidence is displayed with unmistakable bravado. The determination, which the public rarely sees, rests at the core of a kid from Georgia who went to a predominantly white college and made it against the odds. “I wanted to go home that first year,” he says. “I was shy and talked different from the other kids there. In class it seemed like everybody was staring at me; it seemed like me against the world.” The results of his poor preparation and difficult adjustment showed after his freshman year when he became academically ineligible and had to sit out his sophomore year of basketball. He soon noticed how people’s attitude toward him changed. The coach gave him no academic help, forced him to work out everyday playing
only
defense, and refused to help him get transportation to Atlanta at Christmas. Frazier says that, with the help of a kind black teacher, he discovered himself, as a person, that year. He married. He learned to study and to accept responsibility and by the end of the year pulled his grades up to the B—range. “I made everything I got,” he remembers. “It’s like in sports: You don’t quit, you keep fighting back. Before the year of ineligibility I was like my father, riding with the punches and believing anything goes. Then, I became more like my grandfather. I married and took on responsibilities.”

One can see Clyde’s determination even in aspects of his financial affairs. Treading a fine line between extravagance and caution, he doesn’t
feel
he is flamboyant. The Rolls Royce, the New York co-op, the Atlanta house are investments to him; the mink and sealskin coats were free. Becoming an overnight millionaire is not his style, he says. “I would rather save my money. Like I have a lot of tax-free bonds. You don’t get a hell of a return but you don’t lose. That is my primary concern, not losing. Some people say, ‘Get in the stock market. You will double or triple.’ I don’t care about that.”

Toward the end of the game Frazier makes three steals and two difficult drives. He finishes with 44 points and wins the knitted shirts as star of the game.

“Why were you so hot?” asks one reporter.

“Is this your best effort of the year?”

“What are you wearing tonight, Clyde?”

“Are the Knicks going to catch the Celtics?”

“Let’s go,” says Whelan. “The bus leaves in ten minutes.”

We arrive at the airport fifty minutes before departure. Players wander into the coffee shop and the newsstand. I sit opposite the departure gate reading a book about Nova Scotia. A section I had read on the flight to Los Angeles discussed the Oak Island mystery, raising the possibility that the pirate Captain Kidd buried some of his treasures on this small island in Mahone Bay off the Nova Scotia coast. I see Lucas standing alone at the empty air insurance counter and, since I had mentioned the treasure to him, I walk over and say jokingly, “Want to be partners with me in a search for the Oak Island riches?”

“I’ve got my own goldmine after these past two days.”

“In what?” I ask, “puzzles?”

“No.”

“Magic?”

“No.”

“Well, what is it then?”

“Hyperberic medicine.”

“What’s that?”

“Ralph,” says Lucas, “my plastic surgeon friend out here in Hollywood—the one with the gorgeous wife—told me about it last fall because he’d been using it. I told him to get all the figures together. This trip he did and I haven’t slept in three days it’s so fuckin’ great!”

“What is it?”

“The Navy doctors have researched it for two years. Their findings are going to be made known in September at a medical conference in Canada. Once it gets out, the shit’s gonna hit the fan. Vickers, a company in England, makes a hyperberic chamber, which means a pressurized oxygen chamber. You sit in it for fifteen or twenty minutes a day, for a week and you’re a new man. One treatment lasts six months. I’ve seen pictures of burns healed overnight at the naval hospital in San Diego. It grows hair—makes you feel younger. Guys come out of there and they want to screw everything that moves—that’s what it does for your sex life. It also helps concentration. It does it all.”

“So, how do you make money?”

“I’ll get a loan for 90 percent. It takes six months to deliver right now, and we only need sixty chambers to get started. Ralph and I could finance that.”

“How?”

“Shit, Ralph makes $600,000 a year as a Hollywood plastic surgeon. He operates every morning from 9:30 to 1
P.M
. and charges $1,500 for fixing tits and $1,200 for noses. He made $400,000 last year from tits alone. If everything works out after September everybody will want to climb into these chambers, and if I work it right we’ll have a corner on the market for the machines. We’ll get locations near hospitals and country clubs and we’ll hire a pulmonary physiologist to run each one for a salary plus percentage. There is
no
way we can miss.”

“Who miss?” asks Jackson.

“Luke,” I reply.

“Oh, I thought you meant Clyde.”

“Yeah,” I say, “that was some game. The Lakers really miss Wilt.”

Chamberlain had slowed down a lot but he was still intimidating during his last year, before he signed a $600,000 contract to coach in the ABA. Players would test his quickness by challenging him and when Wilt bent to gather himself for the jump, the challenger would shoot the ball before Wilt could uncoil. That act was called “freezing him.” Other teams tried to have their center set a screen for a good shooter; Wilt never switched out and the shooter had easy seventeen-foot jump shots. At the end players were willing to test his finesse and quickness, but no one tested his strength.

“Wilt is probably laughing in the living room of his million-dollar house, the one with 20-foot ceilings that remind him of the Baptist Church of his childhood,” I say to no one in particular.

“Laughing all the way to the bank,” a rookie says.

And then Barnett adds: “People out there in the streets starvin’ and this sucker goes and builds himself a million-dollar house.”

By the time we pick up our bags in San Francisco it is 2
A.M
. We board a bus which will take us to a motel near the arena in Oakland. San Francisco is Danny Whelan’s hometown. He grew up during the 1920s in the Mission district where his father ran a grocery store. “If you had a couple of dollars then, you were a millionaire,” he says. Every time we get into town he sees his kids from a first marriage, often bringing them to the game, and he visits some of his old friends: carpenters, bartenders, brewery workers, who still live in the district. San Francisco has changed since he left. The Mission district is no longer the Irish Catholic neighborhood where, as Danny remembers, “200 people stood in front of the radio store listening to the Dempsey-Tunney fight and pulling for Tunney all the way.” The district still has the best weather in San Francisco according to Danny, and although it has become a Hispanic ghetto, it’s home for him and he relishes the thought of his return, even at 2
A.M
.

As the bus speeds along the freeway, Danny seizes the microphone and gives us a guided tour, pointing out the Cow Palace, Candlestick Park, Alcatraz, and the Golden Gate Bridge. A card game begins. Barnett, wearing a blue denim jumpsuit, plays with Earl and Phil.

“Dick, did you jump into that suit while it was standing up against the wall?” Phil asks. “You gonna change it this trip?”

“Deal ’em,” Barnett barks, “don’t let that chump distract you. But in answer to your question, I brought five jumpsuits.”

“Yeah,” needles Earl, “all the same exact kind.”

There is laughter, then silence.

“Gonna see that Nazi broad here, Phil?” asks Barnett.

“Who?”

“You know, the one who moved here from Milwaukee. The one with the boots and helmet.”

The bus crosses the bridge leaving San Francisco, heading toward Oakland. Phil shouts, “Big Time Danny Whelan, this is your town.”

T
HE NEXT MORNING I WAKE UP IN THE OAKLAND HYATT HOUSE
at 11:30. There is no bathtub in the room—only a shower—so I can’t soak my aching muscles. Even though I’ve slept seven and a half hours, I don’t feel rested. Sometimes I need sleep more than food, and I learn to take it where I can—on buses, planes, in airport lobbies—and when I can—early afternoon naps, pregame naps, at midnight, or much later. With the constant travel, I usually get to bed at the hour I did last night—around 3
A.M
. After four of these nights in five days in four different cities, I sometimes wake up to an early morning phone call not knowing what town I’m in or what day it is. My confusion is increased by the similarity in hotel decorations. All the hotels we stay in except one provide double beds for us. I sleep in so many different beds in a year that the one in my apartment seems no more familiar than any other.

DeBusschere is not in the room. He has different sleeping habits and usually gets up by 9:30 no matter what time he gets to bed. When I finish my coffee and doughnut in the restaurant and return to our room, DeBusschere is reading the morning paper. We talk briefly about the day’s news events—a murder in Marin County, an earthquake in South America, an environmental campaign in the Bay area, and a statement on the economy by the President. The phone rings. An old classmate of mine who lives in San Francisco says hello and asks if I have any complimentary tickets for the game. As soon as I hang up the phone rings again. Gerri DeBusschere, Dave’s wife, is calling from New York. I pitch the phone to Dave, who begins talking. I immediately tune out of his conversation. After eight years as roommates, the telephone calls reflect an unspoken yet comfortable distance between us. We hear but don’t pay attention to each other’s conversations. Neither of us is rude enough to ask questions about the other’s calls, and both of us tend to carry on our end of a conversation with monosyllables just in case the other’s interest perks up.