Unguarded

by Lenny Wilkens

  I played a lot of pickup basketball in my spare time. I still remember winter days when the Holy Rosary gym was locked, and I’d shovel snow by the outdoor hoop just so I could play—often practicing by myself. I played in some amateur leagues. The more I played basketball, the more I liked it, especially as I sensed I was really learning how to play the game.

  In my sophomore year at Boys High, I had a geometry teacher whom I really didn’t like. I started to cut the class, then I was tossed out of the class for missing it too many times. I was really discouraged with everything, and at sixteen, I figured I was a man.

  “I’m going to join the Marines,” I told Father Mannion.

  This led to a long talk with Father Mannion about life and school and my future.

  “Just go back to the geometry teacher, apologize, and then stay in there and lick the class,” he said. “No reason you can’t do it.”

  When Father Mannion told me to go back to geometry class, keep my mouth shut, and study hard, I did. I think I got a B in the course. Father Mannion also put me in charge of working with the girls basketball team at Holy Rosary. This was my first coaching job, and I took it as a test: Father Mannion wanted to see if I was grown up enough to coach some girls, most of whom had a limited idea of how to play. I didn’t know much about coaching, but I had them shoot layups, I called timeouts, made substitutions, and acted as much like a coach as I could at that age. I took it seriously because I didn’t want to let Father Mannion down. He gave me a job, and I did it. I think he also knew that I’d respond to the challenge, that I welcomed responsibility.

  I’ve always been like that.

  I still played a lot of pickup basketball, especially at lunchtime against the kids who were on the varsity team. At this point, I was able to play as well as most of them. Tommy Davis was on the basketball team, and he kept saying I should go out for the varsity. Tommy Davis later became a good major league baseball player.

  During the summer, I sometimes had Saturday off at the grocery store. I used to play pickup games at the park with some of the local high-school players. One day, a college kid named Vinny Cohen showed up: He was a star at Syracuse, about six-foot-two and built like a rock, a very muscular guy—or at least he was compared to me, because I was only five-foot-ten and 140 pounds.

  I was matched up with Cohen, and guarding him very close. I stole his dribble, made it hard for him to catch passes and get off his shot. I was much quicker, and I used my speed to frustrate him, to keep the ball out of his hands. Some people were watching the game, and they started to get on him: “Hey, All-American…you ain’t showing me much.” That kind of thing. Making it worse, he was being shut down by a kid who wasn’t even on his high-school team. Finally, he just blasted me with a forearm to the chest and began to shove me around. I played him a little softer, because I didn’t want to get into a fight.

  But after that game, several guys told me that I had really improved, and maybe I should try out for the high-school team. Understand that the New York playground games of my era were much different from the playground games of today. The accent was on teamwork, on passing, on setting picks and working for a good shot. The idea was to win the game, especially since the winners stayed on the court. Older guys taught younger players the value of moving without the ball, of always keeping your eyes open for a pass. The pick-and-roll play, which remains one of the keys to scoring in the NBA, was considered an art form on the New York playgrounds of my youth. Now, you’re more likely to see a dinosaur wander across midcourt than to see kids use the pick-and-roll. So much of the playground game has disintegrated into one-on-one, guys trying to dunk in a guy’s face, or blocking his shot. The individual now rules where the team once did. TV has a lot to do with it, as many kids seem to be constantly auditioning for ESPN’s Sports-center, and they act like one in-your-face, rim-rattling dunk is worth ten layups off a finely executed pick-and-roll play. Today, playground ball can ruin good players; in my era, it made me a great player because it translated perfectly into organized basketball, although I wasn’t aware of that until much later.

  Tommy Davis kept after me about playing for Boys High. I still wasn’t sure. The job at the grocery store was important to my family. Basketball was fun, but it wasn’t as if I saw it taking me anywhere after high school. I found out later that Tommy talked to Father Mannion, so the priest came to me one day and said, “Why don’t you go out for the high-school team?”

  That was the last shove I needed to take the plunge. If Father Mannion thought I should do it, why not?

  Father Mannion also talked to me about going to college, which sounded about as realistic as going to the moon. We didn’t have the money. No one in my family had gone to college. What I needed to do was get my high-school diploma, then get a full-time job.

  “You never know,” Father Mannion said. “Sometimes, things work out. Just get good grades, so you’ll be qualified if you get a chance.”

  I thought, OK, maybe he means I can work in the daytime and go to night school. That’s a possibility.

  I played very well for Boys High, but I graduated in January. I had done so well in school that I skipped a semester and graduated early. I couldn’t play with the team after January, and I thought that was it for my basketball career. I’d started and had some excellent games; I scored 35 points against Jefferson High and a kid named Tony Jackson, who went on to play at St. John’s. I averaged about 20 points, and I sort of surprised myself with how well I played. But I still didn’t think about playing college basketball. I had a full-time job at Montgomery Ward. They did a lot of mail-order business, and I filled the orders from the warehouse, packing clothes into boxes. My dream was to save enough money from January to September so that I could go to City College of New York in the fall, and keep working part-time.

  To me, high-school basketball was what it should be to 99 percent of the kids playing today: It was fun. It was a way to learn about teamwork, to burn off energy, to make some good friends. It was about hard work, character, and all those other values that are almost dismissed today. It was not about a college scholarship, the NBA lottery, or thinking that the world owes me a living and a college education because I could throw a basketball through a hoop. In a sense, I was blessed to grow up in an era when pro sports didn’t rule the consciousness of most high-school athletes. Even college sports seemed out of reach to most of us. The temptation to not study in high school because you thought basketball was all you needed for a meal ticket… well, that mentality just didn’t exist. I wish it were possible to instill our way of thinking in kids today who sell their souls and their futures for a shot at the NBA. They have a better chance to be struck by lightning or win a state lottery than to be picked in the first round of the NBA draft.

  CHAPTER THREE

  IN 1956, IT REALLY DID SEEM EASIER to jump to the moon than to go to college, especially for kids from my economic and social back-ground—and especially when you’re talking about a private school such as Providence College. Today, a chance at college is a given for many kids. It’s expected because their parents often went to college, their friends attended college, and college is a part of life for many Americans as we head into the next century.

  I didn’t receive a single recruiting letter from a college. Not even a form letter. Not one telephone call from a coach.

  Nothing.

  After I graduated from Boys High, Father Mannion wrote to Father Bagley, the athletic director at Providence College, recommending me for a basketball scholarship. The letter was passed on to coach Joe Mullaney, and the amazing thing is that he actually read it and eventually checked it out. Father Mannion was not a former player at Providence, not a basketball star anywhere: He was just a priest writing a letter to a Catholic college about a kid he liked. I did have some good games before I graduated, but when I graduated in January it was like I disappeared, dropped off the radar of the college coaches. In 1956, recruiting was not the full-time obsession that it is
today at every major basketball program. There were no summer showcase camps, no recruiting magazines touting the top high-school players to college coaches; for the most part, it was done by checking the newspaper stories and word of mouth. Most colleges were lucky to have one full-time assistant coach, not the army with three-piece suits and clipboards that you see today.

  I didn’t even play basketball in my first three years of high school, then I played only half a season as a senior, so why would any college coach know about me?

  Coach Mullaney came to New York to see the Public School Athletic League high-school championship game at Madison Square Garden. Boys High was in the game, so I went to the game to support my ex-teammates. I was introduced to Coach Mullaney, who was very polite: He told me about Providence, and he gave me a school catalogue and an application form. He then invited me to an informal tryout at Chaminade High, which was way out on Long Island. Today, that would never happen: The NCAA prohibits college coaches from having open tryouts with high-school players. I arrived at the gym and saw about two hundred kids. I was shocked, angry, and intimidated—partly because I didn’t know a soul. When I finally did get into a game, I was out there with a bunch of guys who should have been named “Heaver.” It really was every man for himself. Whoever got the ball, shot it. It wasn’t a great situation for a point guard to show what he could do, and I know I didn’t play very well.

  I did fill out the application to Providence and mailed it in, but I never heard a word. I had given up hope of getting a basketball scholarship.

  Meanwhile, I still liked to play. In the spring there were some postseason tournaments for high-school players, and I was eligible. The best was the Flushing YMCA Tournament, and two teams loaded themselves with the best high-school players from New York. Tommy Davis convinced the coach of a team called the Gems that I’d help them, but they decided they had too many guards and cut me.

  No one else wanted me. That infuriated me, because I knew I could play with the guys on those teams. I had played against most of them in the summers. But they had played high-school basketball longer than I had, and they had bigger reputations.

  One of my old Boys High teammates, Eddie Simmons, also was cut by the Gems, so we decided to form our own team and enter the tournament. We convinced some of our friends from Brooklyn to join us. We won the tournament, beating Dan Palmer’s All-Stars, who had defeated the Gems earlier. I scored 32 points and was voted the tournament MVP. We had the worst uniforms in the tournament, some ratty green shirts with holes in them. Joe Mullaney’s father was watching that final game, and he sent the small newspaper write-up to his son, along with a note saying that he liked how I played and adding, “This can’t be the same kid that Father Mannion wrote about.”

  Joe Mullaney remembered me from Father Mannion’s letter, and also from meeting me at Madison Square Garden. After months of not hearing a word from Providence College, I was accepted in a matter of days and given a full basketball scholarship.

  The way it happened still amazes me.

  I received a scholarship because Father Mannion cared enough about me to write Joe Mullaney… because Joe Mullaney bothered to read the letter… because I got mad when the Gems cut me and started my own team… because Joe Mullaney’s father happened to be in the stands on the day of the championship game, when I happened to play one of the best games of my life.

  All of that had to happen for me to end up at Providence College.

  And the welfare department had to help, too.

  During my senior year in high school, my mother was receiving Aid to Dependent Children. The welfare department had a rule that after a boy passed his seventeenth birthday and graduated from high school, he had to go to work to help support his family or the welfare benefits would be cut off. I didn’t find this out until after I received the scholarship from Providence, and suddenly I saw everything crumbling. I couldn’t go to college: I was the man of the house, and the law was that the man had to support his family, even if the “man” was only seventeen.

  Father Mannion stepped in again. He pleaded for me with the caseworker, telling him that I was a good student, that I had earned a college scholarship, and what that meant to my family. To me, the caseworkers were the people who stopped by our house and made us feel like criminals: They were always checking to make sure we weren’t hiding money, or that we didn’t have a luxury such as a telephone.

  I admit, I was angry with the whole situation. We didn’t want to be on welfare. My dad had died. My mother worked. I worked. But we just couldn’t earn enough money, and it wasn’t like my mother was having kids out of wedlock. But they made us feel as if we were cheating the government.

  Father Mannion talked to a caseworker who understood the opportunity presented to me. I just remember him being called “Mr. Walker,” and he came to our house to meet with my mother and me. “Lenny,” he said, “I’m going to stick my neck out for you. The only sensible thing is for you to attend college so that you can do something positive for your future and your family. You go to college and we’ll see to it that your family continues to receive its benefits.”

  In my first day at Providence College, they brought all the freshmen together in a big hall. One of the speakers told us to look to our right, then look to our left. “Odds are you won’t see at least one of those people on campus at the end of the year,” he said. “So you better keep your grade averages up.”

  The message was scary, and it was supposed to be. At Providence, they wanted you to know they were serious about academics. It wasn’t like some schools where athletes were assigned cupcake classes designed to keep them eligible; all freshmen took the same basic core courses. That really didn’t bother me. I expected to do well in school. I expected to study, and yes, I expected it to be hard. I didn’t come to college just to play basketball, and I didn’t entertain thoughts of an NBA career for even a second. Freshmen weren’t even allowed to play varsity basketball, and that was fine with me: School came first, and basketball was just a way for me to pay for it. I’d make it work. I went to college with that attitude: I would not fail.

  I told myself that when I looked around that assembly hall and began counting the black faces. I didn’t need many fingers to do it: just seven.

  Seven black kids in the entire school. I had attended a grade school that was about 33 percent black. Boys High was about 50 percent black. And now, I was one of seven blacks in four grades of college? A thought struck me: “I’ve never seen so many white people in my life!”

  In my church and neighborhood, there were a lot of white people, but it wasn’t like this. I mean, this was a sea of white people. This was nothing but white people. And they were from all over the East Coast. For me, a big trip was to go from Brooklyn to Manhattan. I’d left the New York area only once, and that was to go with some friends to Philadelphia for the Penn Relays during my senior year. Oh, I did go to Providence for a visit before I received my scholarship, but that was it.

  So I wasn’t exactly a young man of the world. But I was comfortable with the Catholic Church and the priests. Because of Father Mannion, I believed the priests cared about everyone, not just the white students. And because Father Mannion and my mother continually told me that I could make it as a college student, I believed it.

  Never underestimate the impact of teachers and other role models. As a senior in high school, I had a history teacher by the name of Mr. Schuler. He was one of those guys who, when he talked to the class, you swore was talking to you and no one else. He made you feel important, because he seemed to be interested not just in his own subject, but in making sure you were fascinated by it, too. He smoked a pipe and wore a sports jacket with patches on the elbows. We thought he was very cool. He often said, “Are you going to settle for what everyone says you can be, or will you go for something more? Will you strive for what you want?”

  That meant a lot to me, because again I sensed that Mr. Schuler was speaking right to me and no one else
. I know that wasn’t the case, but it was how he made me feel. Besides, I knew he liked me, and when a student senses the teacher likes him, the student really responds. It’s a natural thing.

  If I have any advice for a teacher or coach, it’s this: Make your students or players feel special, not by coddling them, but by taking an interest in them, by pushing them the right way, by being demanding without being demeaning.

  That was Mr. Schuler, and that was every good teacher and coach I ever had.

  So I went to Providence with a lot of confidence.

  But I also had a choice.

  When you’re a minority, you can either spend your time with your guard up, ready to be insulted and prepared to use that as an excuse to fail, or you can be determined to show people you’re as good as anyone else. It’s really that simple: You prepare yourself for failure or for success.

  I was not about to fail.

  What I remember most from my first day of school was logic class. The teacher was Father Heath, a gruff-looking Dominican priest who immediately wanted us to know he was in charge of the class, and he was not about to tolerate anyone who felt like playing the part of a fool.

  He passed out cards and had us fill out our names and some other information. He collected the cards and said he’d use them to learn our names.

  He stood in front of the class, shuffling through the cards. It was so quiet, you could hear his fingers going through the cards.

  “Mr. Wilkens!” he roared.