At Holy Rosary, we had to wear a uniform to school. That was fine with me, especially since we had so little money for clothes anyway. I had nothing against having to wear blue pants and a blue or white shirt to school every day. It sure beats the chaos we see in some schools today, where some kids are so fashion-conscious that they steal and even kill each other for jackets and shoes.
The Catholic Church was the answer to my mother’s prayers. It was a place where her children could receive extra discipline, a place where there were strong male role models—critical for kids being raised without a father. When I was about twelve, Father Mannion pulled me aside, putting what felt like an iron fist around my puny bicep. I thought he was going to squeeze all the blood right out of my arm. Usually, Father Mannion greeted me with a smile that made me feel like I was one of the most special people in the world. Not this time. He had a stern look, his eyes hard, prying. He said only that he wanted to talk to me in private, in his office. He sat behind his desk in that black robe, that white collar, that air of holy authority about him, and I feared the wrath of God was about to fall down on me.
“I don’t like some of the kids you’re hanging out with,” he said.
I said nothing.
He mentioned a few names. He told me that those kids were headed for trouble, and I’d be doing the same if I stayed with them.
I was shocked. I couldn’t figure out how he knew so much about me and my friends. Later, I learned that my mother had told him, and basically, this was an inside job designed to set me straight—which it did.
As I think back, I don’t remember Father Mannion telling me, “Don’t be friends with those kids any more.”
He didn’t have to. I knew what was on his mind. The meeting could not have lasted more than a minute, but I knew what had to be done.
I changed my friends.
It’s funny how these same themes are there for young people today. Bad company does corrupt good character, and as a coach, I’ve had this same discussion with players about their friends more than a few times, how they had to be careful whom they allow to get close to them. The last was with J. R. Rider in my final year as the coach of the Atlanta Hawks. Of course, that was only one of several problems we had with Rider. But some young NBA players worry more about looking like phonies or sellouts in front of their friends, and they don’t realize how easily they can end up in the wrong place at the wrong time doing the wrong thing—just as Father Manion warned me. That’s happened to a lot of athletes over the years. Just look at the football player Ray Lewis, who ended up involved in a murder trial because of the alleged actions of some of his friends. When I coached in Cleveland, we traded Ron Harper because ownership was worried about his friends. I talked to Harper about it several times, and he slowly was coming around, but teams sometimes fear that a player will be dragged down by his friends.
Among young people, you hear the phrase “Keep it real.” Of course you don’t just cut off everyone whom you grew up with, but you also don’t allow them to dictate your life. Is it phony to want to better yourself, not just financially, but in terms of your own character? Some people think it is. But to me, that’s the essence of life: making new friends, learning new things. It’s not disloyal to cut off someone who is constantly in trouble and doesn’t care if he gets you in trouble, too. That’s just common sense. When Father Mannion first had that discussion with me, I wasn’t happy about it. No one likes to be told what to do. But I also respected Father Mannion. I believed that he wasn’t just exercising his authority for the sake of it, he really cared about what happened to me. I listened to him because I was sure he had my best interest at heart
The word “respect” is tossed around a lot, but it’s not really understood. Some young people demand respect, even though they have no idea how to give it to anyone else—nor have they done anything to deserve it. They just believe that, somehow, they’re entitled to it. And when they run into any sort of authority, they rebel—be it against a teacher, a coach, or a policeman. A big reason for this is that so many young men have no older males in their lives who are worthy of respect. And they don’t have a Father Mannion, because churches have lost their importance in many families. Too often, the drug dealer or the gang leader seems like the only male who has any success or sense of himself, and these criminal types are romanticized in the music and movies that are so popular with young people. They’ve made going to prison or being gunned down in the street look like a noble cause, instead of a waste of a human life. This isn’t going to change until more adults get involved with kids, until children are active in churches and community centers where they can see the right kind of adult males who care about them. Would I have gotten in real trouble if there was no Father Mannion in my life? It’s hard to say. But I do know that I owe a lot of my success and my knowledge of what it takes to be a man to him.
In the Holy Rosary gym, we played a lot of basketball games. There was a CYO league, the Catholic Youth Organization, and the PAL, the Police Athletic League, and of course there were pickup games. On Sunday night there were two games, followed by a dance for teenagers. Father Mannion ran it and he loomed over it. A lot of kids came to those dances who didn’t belong to our parish, kids who would be considered gang members today. They liked to fight, liked to drink, and maybe tried drugs. But when they were at Holy Rosary, there was none of that: Father Mannion made sure of it. He demanded it. And he had such respect in the neighborhood, even from the kids who didn’t belong to the church, that they were afraid to test him—at least after they saw him grab a couple of kids by their jacket collars and drag them right out the gym door. Word spread: You didn’t mess with the young priest at Holy Rosary.
Those dances brought together kids from the parish, kids who were considered hoods, and kids we called “400s.” I don’t know why they were called 400s, but they’d be considered preppies today. They had nicer clothes than we did. Some of them drove cars. A lot of them were pretty smug, as if they thought they were better than us. Today, I fully appreciate what a presence Father Mannion was in that gym to create an atmosphere where kids from so many different backgrounds could gather.
When it came time to go to high school, I attended Boys High, which was a public school in Brooklyn. But Holy Rosary remained a big part of my life. In addition to Mass on Sunday, I attended the classes they had for religious instruction, classes designed for kids who attended public schools. After those classes, we’d go roller skating.
The church was a sanctuary. The streets were a different story.
When I was about twelve, I saw a policeman shoot a man. The guy was drunk and was playfully chasing us. The policeman stopped him, and the guy shoved the officer. The next thing I knew, the officer shot the man right in the chest. Blood splattered everywhere. The man lay on the street, twitching. He was dead before the ambulance arrived. I was surprised by what happened, but I wasn’t shocked. It wasn’t like people were killed every day in the streets of my neighborhood, but it did happen, and we all were aware of it.
On another occasion, I was playing a pickup basketball game at PS-35, Public School 35. Suddenly, the basketball court was surrounded by a bunch of guys, I mean guys with bicycle chains, sticks, and knives. They started shaking all of us down, taking our money. There was nothing we could do: There were more of them, and they had weapons. When they came to me, a guy shoved his hand in my pocket and pulled out a couple of Catholic rosaries, which I carried around with me. That stopped them for a moment, as they stared at the rosaries. Then one of the guys recognized me as “Myer’s cousin.”
It turned out that I had a cousin who was in that gang, and another cousin who was in a gang that was considered friendly. These guys began asking me about relatives and friends we had in common—then they gave me the money back, so I could return it to the kids who were playing with me.
While all this was going on, a girl spotted the gang moving in on us. She ran and told my mother, who called the police. Rumo
rs flew that I had been stabbed. When I came home, my mother and aunt kept asking if I was OK. I told them that I was fine. They didn’t believe me, and they made me take off my shirt so they could check for knife wounds.
I was lucky because I had cousins in the gangs, and they made sure I was left alone. Or as Father Mannion said, “Lenny was smart enough to know how to stay just friendly enough with the gangs so he wouldn’t get his head knocked off.”
Some people say that I’ve spent much of my life walking between two worlds, between black and white, between the streets and the church. But I knew who and what I was—an African-American Roman Catholic. I knew I wanted something more than the streets, and I knew that hard work was the only way to get it.
That also was true of basketball.
My older cousins used to play pickup basketball at the Holy Rosary gym. They usually wouldn’t let me in their games—and when they did, I shot the ball every time. They started calling me “The Heaver.” I wasn’t a good player. No one would pick me to play on their team. So I had to call “Next,” and sometimes wait a couple of hours for a chance to play with four other guys who thought I stunk and didn’t want to play with me. When I did get on the court, they didn’t want to pass me the ball, because they figured I’d just mess up.
When I somehow did end up with the ball, the last thing I intended to do was to pass it to them! So I shot it, no matter how ridiculous the situation. I didn’t care where I was on the court, I was going to get off a shot. Naturally, my team lost. I would get angry because nothing was working out, and I really hated it when they started yelling “Heaver” at me, because I knew it made all the kids laugh at me.
Father Mannion didn’t have to be Red Auerbach to notice I wasn’t exactly on my way to an NBA career. In fact, he saw that I had no clue when it came to the fundamentals of basketball. I didn’t even own a basketball. I had only one pair of basketball shoes for each year: I’d wear a hole in them, then cut out a piece of linoleum to cover it. Father Mannion gave me a basketball, then he took me into the gym when he knew it would be empty. We brought ten chairs onto the court and he lined them up.
“What you need to do is dribble around the chairs,” he said.
I stared at him.
“You dribble around the chairs, switching hands,” he said. “You’re small. You’re going to have to be a guard, so you need to be able to handle the ball, to dribble the ball with both hands.”
I spent hours dribbling around those chairs. Left hand, right hand. Back and forth, from one end of the gym to the other. It was boring, but I kept at it, day after day. I liked the routine, the practicing alone in the gym. Left hand, right hand. Back and forth, over and over. Then came shooting: ten layups from the right side of the rim, ten from the left. I practiced jump shot after jump shot after jump shot. I shot until I developed a knack for getting the ball on my fingertips, then releasing it with a flip of the wrist, the ball rotating nicely in the air until it gently dropped through the rim. I loved to watch the ball swish through the net. In the same way that I was attracted to the ritual of serving Mass, I came to enjoy these solitary workouts. The drills, the chairs, the sweat, the echo of the ball bouncing in an empty gym—that became part of my life.
I suppose I also was so dedicated because Father Mannion was the one who taught me the drills. Here was an older man, an important man, paying attention to me. I was a kid without a father, a kid looking for a male influence. If he wanted me to dribble around chairs, I’d dribble around chairs. If he wanted me to shoot one hundred jumpers, I shot one hundred jumpers. I wanted to please him because I knew that he cared about me. I knew it not just because he took the time to talk with me, but because he did things like buy ice cream for a bunch of us. He didn’t have much money, but he knew that we usually didn’t have any. I wanted to be a good altar boy for him, and later, a good basketball player for him.
I was lefthanded, which was pretty unusual back then. I remember my third-grade teacher making me print with my right hand because she thought being lefthanded was strange, and no one should write with his left hand. The nun who taught my fourth-grade class was lefthanded, so I was saved—and not surprisingly, my penmanship really improved. This was a time when adults—especially teachers—represented authority. If a teacher said, “Print with your right hand,” you printed with your right hand. It didn’t matter if you were lefthanded—and your parents were going to back the teacher, not make a case that their son’s creativity was being stifled by writing with the wrong hand, and this would psychologically scar him for life. Parents would say, “You do what the teacher says, and you better not let me hear another word about it.”
While NBA guys who played against me said I “always went left,” that wasn’t true. I went left a lot, but I could drive right—and they knew that, which set up my lefthanded moves. I could dribble equally well with either hand, and I have Father Mannion and those chairs to thank for that. I smile as I think about those chairs, and I think about all the formal ballhandling drills the kids are doing today. They work fine, but no better than those chairs set up by Father Mannion. When I coached the Cavs and Steve Kerr wanted to improve his ballhandling skills over the summer, that’s what we did—we set up chairs for him to dribble around. Michael Jordan said he did the same thing after his rookie year: He knew he needed work on his dribbling, so he set up chairs in a gym—and went through the drills, alone.
I played on the eighth-grade team at Holy Rosary. Our coach had never coached basketball before. We wore black cloth Converse shoes, which was a real upgrade from the Keds we used to buy at a neighborhood store known as Cheap Charlie’s. The name fit the place, and the prices were the only ones that could squeeze into my mother’s tight budget.
Holy Rosary’s gym would look tiny to me today. At one end of the court was a basket with a balcony above it. At the other end was another basket—with a stage directly behind it. I remember taking the basketball, running off that stage, and jumping and dunking the ball. That was my first dunk, off that stage. The backboards were big wooden squares. There were only a few rows of wooden bleachers, and they crowded the floor.
Basketball was hardly an obsession for me. I played a lot of sports, especially baseball, stickball, and softball with Tommy Davis, a good friend who later went on to be a fine hitter with the Los Angeles Dodgers and other teams. If you were a good athlete, it was expected that you’d play several sports. Wilt Chamberlain was a track star in high school, as was Bill Russell. Gene Conley, Ron Reed, and Dave DeBusschere played both big league baseball and NBA basketball. Willis Reed played flanker as a high-school football player, and also threw the shotput in track. John Havlicek played football, baseball, and basketball in high school. Pat Riley was a star high-school quarterback in addition to playing basketball. Not only was Phil Jackson a center on his high-school basketball team, he also played center in football! Coaches didn’t push you to specialize at an early age, to quit playing everything but the one sport where you supposedly showed the most ability. That’s very common today, especially when so many parents are obsessed with turning their children into pro athletes. They all want to stand on stage when junior is taken in the NBA draft—on national TV, naturally. There are a lot of problems with that approach. It leads to kids burning out on their sport, because they not only play and practice it during the season, they attend off-season camps, off-season conditioning, everything you can imagine, all aimed at excelling in that one sport. They almost turn these kids into twelve-year-old pros. I’m not saying every coach does it, but too many fall into that trap. And these kids are twelve, fourteen, and sixteen years old. They’re still kids. And a young man or woman might show a lot of talent in one sport at thirteen, then suddenly grow and be better at another sport at sixteen. Or he or she might stop growing at thirteen, and maybe would be better off playing a different sport. That’s why I encourage young people to play as many sports as they want, as long as they keep their grades up.
I’m a Ha
ll of Fame point guard, but I never played high-school basketball until my senior year.
After eight years at Holy Rosary, I moved on to Boys High in Brooklyn. A mob of kids went out for the freshman team. I was nothing but skin and bones: all elbows and knees. The coach was Mickey Fisher, and he cut the team down to fifteen. I was on the list—the last name on the list, and that was no accident. Coach Fisher made it clear that he planned to play only eight kids per game. I could tell from the practices that I was the fifteenth kid out of the fifteen players. I was so far down at the end of the bench, the coach probably couldn’t find me even if he wanted to put me in the game.
My mother was still struggling to pay the bills, so I couldn’t justify sitting on the bench of the freshman team instead of working to help support the family. In the back of my mind, I never forgot that I was the “man of the family.” I may have only been fourteen, a freshman in high school, but I had to act as much like a man as I could, and I knew a man didn’t waste time sitting on the bench. That not only wasn’t any fun, it didn’t help my mother. So I quit the team and took that job at the grocery store instead, giving most of the money to my mother. The pay was a dollar an hour, which was very good for the time, and the discount was a big help.
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