I took the train home after the ceremony at City Hall and after I’d had lunch with Hoops and Dave Zinkoff, the legendary Spectrum public address announcer. I didn’t know that day how lucky I was to meet Zinkoff, whose rumbling voice and mannerisms—“ This is the penalty shot!”—were as much a part of Philadelphia sports history as the Palestra or cheesesteaks. Later that year, on Christmas Day, Zinkoff died. I was glad I had the chance to spend an hour with him.
I was only home briefly because George Solomon always sent me to the hockey playoffs as soon as the Final Four was over. So it wasn’t until early May that I went to talk to Sally Jenkins about my book idea. The reason I went to Sally was simple: she was my friend and she was Dan Jenkins’s daughter. Dan had worked at Sports Illustrated for years, covering college football and golf, and was as funny and talented and brilliant as anyone I had ever read. He and Frank Deford were SI’s two signature writers. There was lots of other talent, but everyone else lined up, as far as I was concerned, behind Frank and Dan.
Sally had come to the Post at the start of 1985. In fact, she’d taken over the Maryland beat from me, which freed me up to cover national colleges and do stories like the one I’d done on Knight in February. We’d quickly become good friends, and there were two things I knew for sure about her: she could write circles around me and she could drink me under any table where we happened to be sitting.
As soon as I told Sally what had happened with Knight in Lexington, she said, “You have to call Esther right away.”
“Esther?”
“My dad’s agent. She’s the best. Just tell her I told you to call.”
So I called the number Sally gave me and, after dropping Sally’s name, got put through instantly to Esther Newberg.
I introduced myself and explained that I could get access to Bob Knight for an entire basketball season and that I thought there was a good book to be done based on what I had seen while there just a couple of months earlier and—
Esther cut me off, which I now know she does most of the time when she has either sized up a situation or is bored or both.
“First of all, I represent David Israel,” she said. “And I think he’s talked to Knight about a book.”
“Oh, I didn’t know that,” I said, deflated. Knight had said nothing about Israel wanting to do a book. “I know David pretty well and this is the first I’ve heard of it.”
“Really?” Esther said. “Well, the other problem you have is no one is going to buy a book by a first-time author about a basketball coach in Indiana. You’re wasting your time. Tell Sally hello. I have another call.”
The line went dead. “Well,” I thought, “that went well.” I walked over to Sally’s desk.
“How’d it go?” she said brightly.
“The highlight is that she says hello,” I reported. Then I told her the rest. Sally rolled her eyes. “That’s just Esther being Esther,” she said.
While I was mulling over whether to try to find another agent, I figured I better call Israel. Given that he’d known Knight longer and better than I had and that he was a lot more experienced—at least he had an agent—I didn’t think there was much point in pushing forward if he was trying to do a book, a book that Knight had somehow forgotten to mention to me.
Israel had worked for the Washington Star, the Chicago Tribune, and the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner as a columnist. He’d gone on to work closely with Peter Ueberroth on the 1984 Olympics and was trying (successfully) to make a career in Hollywood as a writer and a producer.
As soon as David heard my voice on the phone he started laughing. “I just hung up with Esther,” he said. “She wanted to know who the hell you were.”
I would learn through the years that Esther is intensely loyal to her clients. Her first thought when I called that day was that I was somehow poaching on David’s territory.
“You don’t need to worry about me,” David went on. “I’ve talked to Knight a couple of times about doing a book, but I’m not spending a winter in Bloomington. You want to do it, go ahead. I certainly won’t be in your way.”
That was a relief. Of course, I still didn’t have an agent. I decided to go home and sleep on things for a night and then go see Bob Woodward in the morning. Maybe his agent, even if he didn’t represent sports books, would know someone who did. (What I didn’t know at the time was that Woodward didn’t have an agent, largely because he didn’t need one.)
Before I could finish my coffee the next morning and head to Woodward’s office, the phone rang. It was Esther.
“I’m sorry I was rude yesterday,” she said. “I talked to David and I talked to Sally. If you’d still like me to, I’d be happy to take a look at any kind of proposal you have. I’ll tell you honestly what I think one way or the other.”
A proposal? I’d never thought of that. How in the world did one write a book proposal? Too embarrassed to ask, I thanked her and said I’d be in touch. Then I went to see Woodward to ask him how to write a book proposal.
“Just tell the publisher why this is a book and why you’re the person to write it,” he said.
“But how long should it be?”
“As long as it needs to be.”
Okay, that narrowed it down.
I went home and wrote twenty-two pages. I went through Knight’s history and then added some of the details I’d witnessed during my February visit. I concluded by saying Knight would give me complete access to himself and his team for an entire season. After I’d written those words, I wondered if Knight would stick to a deal like that if the book actually were to happen.
I mailed Esther the proposal just before I flew to Paris to cover the French Open. It was my first trip overseas, and I was both excited and nervous about it. I was going to be in Europe for eight weeks: two weeks in Paris, a week of vacation, three weeks in London for the run-up to Wimbledon and then the two-week tournament, a week in Scotland playing golf, and then one week for the British Open at Royal St. George’s in the south of England.
I arrived in Paris on a Sunday morning and went straight to bed. I woke up shortly after noon and somehow got myself to Roland Garros, hoping to find a couple of players to talk to so I could write an advance on the tournament scheduled to begin the next day. When I arrived at the player and media entrance armed with the gate pass that was supposed to get me to the press pavilion where I would collect my credentials, I was told it would cost me forty-five francs to get in.
Doing my best to speak French—which wasn’t very good—I explained that I was with the media and here to work. The man was sympathetic. In English he said, “I understand. But today is a charity day. Everyone pays to come in. Even the players.”
Well if that was the deal, I could hardly argue. I pulled out my money and was handing it over when Chris Evert came strolling by on her way inside to practice.
“Bonjour, Madame Lloyd!” all the security people screamed. (She was married to John Lloyd at the time.)
No one asked her for forty-five francs. I decided against bringing that up.
I managed to find a story that day and arrived the next morning—I didn’t have to pay to get in this time—eager to get to work. I found an empty desk in the press room, set up my computer, tossed a rain jacket on top of it, and went out to watch Gabriela Sabatini, who was fifteen and about to become the next glamorous star on the women’s circuit.
After Sabatini had won her match, I returned to my computer only to find it wasn’t there. Someone was sitting in the seat where I had been writing. I looked around for a second to be sure I hadn’t gotten confused. I hadn’t. I said to the guy in the seat, “Excuse me, was there a computer and a jacket on this desk when you got here?”
He looked up at me and pointed to a spot on the floor in the corner of the room. My computer and jacket were sitting there.
“This is the room for French journalists,” he said in good, accented English. “Your room is downstairs.”
“You might have told me that b
efore you threw my stuff on the floor,” I said.
“You weren’t here, I had to work,” he said.
Several ugly American lines about surrender ran through my head, but I passed on them. I picked up my things and found my way downstairs. The room was virtually empty. There were almost no Americans covering the French Open, so I felt pretty lonely as I set up my computer. That night I wrote about Yannick Noah and his godlike status in Paris and walked onto the Bois de Boulogne at about ten o’clock to try to get a cab back to my hotel.
It was raining. There wasn’t a cab in sight. The only people around were a few of the famous transvestite hookers who populate the street at night. I began walking in the direction of the nearby square, where I knew there was a Metro stop. I was exhausted and hungry. There’s no way to grab a quick lunch in Paris; you have to sit for an hour and I hadn’t had time earlier—so when I saw a restaurant right next to the subway stop, I decided to get something to eat.
At any restaurant on the Champs-Élysées, everyone speaks English since a lot of their business comes from American tourists. Not on the outskirts of the city, which is where I was. I recognized the word entrecôte (steak) on the menu, but knowing that the portion sizes for meat were about half what they were at home, I wanted a starter.
I looked up and down the menu and finally found something I recognized: fruits de mer. Aha—fruit cup! Some nice fruit would be a good appetizer. The maitre d’ came to take my order.
Even though my French was limited, my accent was decent. I have a good ear. So, confidently, I ordered the entrecôte and then, for my starter, I said, “Fruits de mer, s’il vous plait.”
The maitre d’ looked at me strangely. “Pour une, monsieur?” he said, holding up one finger.
“Oui,” I said, wondering what the big deal was.
“D’accord,” the maitre d’ said. He shrugged and walked away. A few minutes later the fruits de mer arrived. The plate was so big it barely fit on the table. It was not any sort of fruit cup. Fruits de mer means fruits of the sea. It was a mammoth plate filled with scallops, shrimp, lobster, and anything else that came from the sea—much of which I didn’t recognize.
“Fruits de mer, monsieur,” the maitre d’ said in a tone that I knew meant “you idiot.”
I ate what I could, had the entrecôte—about five bites, as I’d suspected—and walked back into the rain. “Welcome to Paris, city of great food and romance,” I said to myself. There still wasn’t a cab in sight.
THINGS IMPROVED OVER THE next few days. Bud Collins got to town on Tuesday, a day later than usual since he had just gotten married.
I had first met Bud in 1980 at the U.S. Open when the Post sent me to the last four days of the tournament to back up Barry Lorge, the paper’s longtime tennis writer. Bud had been a hero of mine since boyhood. I still remember watching the marathon final of the 1968 U.S. Amateur Championships between Arthur Ashe and Bob Lutz with my dad. Tennis was the only sport Dad was passionate about, and since seeing it on TV was brand new, we both paid rapt attention. Bud seemed to know everything about both players, as well as everyone in the sport. How cool, I can remember thinking then, to be a newspaper guy but also be on TV. No one had ever done it before.
When tennis took off on TV in the Open era, Bud was The Man. At one point, when the networks first got involved in tennis, he was doing Wimbledon for NBC and the Open for CBS. PBS expanded its TV schedule to include most of the summer season in the States, and Bud did that package too. I still remember that when NBC decided to televise the Italian Open (which was a big deal back then), the French Open, and Wimbledon, Bud called it “the old world triple.” I dreamed of someday being at the old world triple.
That first weekend in New York in 1980, Lorge introduced me to Bud, who, before I could say anything about how long I had watched him and read him, grabbed my hand and said, “Of course I know who you are. You’re one of those talented kids George [Solomon] always seems to hire.”
George did, in fact, like to hire young. The saying in the newsroom was that George wanted his reporters young, single, hungry, and cheap. At that point I fit the prototype.
On Friday afternoon, one day after meeting Bud, I was in the press box writing a sidebar on Chris Evert-Lloyd’s comeback from a first-set loss to beat Tracy Austin in the semifinals. I got up to get something to drink and happened to walk by the Boston Globe’s phone, which was in the third row because Bud was smart enough to know that the late-afternoon sun beat right down on the front row, making life down there fairly miserable.
The phone was ringing. Neither Bud nor his Globe colleague Lesley Visser was around—they were both outside watching the men’s doubles final—so I answered. A voice said, “I’m looking for Bud Collins.”
“He’s watching a match right now,” I said. “Can I give him a message?”
“It’s really important I talk to him right now. Tell him it’s Abbie Hoffman.”
I almost said, “Yeah, right, and I’m Jerry Garcia.” Hoffman, who had been a member of the notorious Chicago Seven, had just been released from jail. I had to give the guy credit for originality.
“This is Abbie Hoffman?” I said, my voice no doubt taking on a “yeah, sure,” tone.
“Yes, it is. Can you please find him for me?”
Maybe it was because he was so matter of fact about it that I wondered, just for a second, if he might somehow be serious. I put down the phone, walked out onto the porch where people often watched matches, and found Bud.
“There’s a guy on the phone claiming he’s Abbie Hoffman,” I said.
“Oh, really?” Bud said, jumping to his feet. “He must want tickets.”
He walked inside, picked up the phone, and said, “Abbie, long time no talk, what have you been up to?”
As it turned out, it was Abbie Hoffman and he did want tickets. Bud had briefly been the tennis coach at Brandeis University, his alma mater. One of his players had been Abbie Hoffman. They had stayed in touch through the years when Hoffman wasn’t in jail.
I saw Bud on occasion the next few years, more often once Lorge left the Post to become a columnist at the San Diego Union-Tribune and I began to cover more tennis. Now, his arrival in Paris was a godsend. His new wife, Mary Lou, had gone home for a few days after they had honeymooned in Italy, so Bud had some time on his hands to take me under his wing.
On the third night of the French, when I was starting to feel settled a little bit in Paris and at Roland Garros, I went to dinner with Bud and a friend of his named Bob Basche. Basch, as everyone called him, was a very successful sports-marketing guy, but he moonlighted every summer in Paris and London working for NBC, a lot of that work being with Bud rounding up players for various interviews. We went to a very good (surprise) restaurant near the Champs-Élysées and drank a lot of excellent (surprise again) red wine.
After dinner we half walked, half stumbled down the Champs to the Hôtel de Crillon, which was where all the NBC hotshots were staying. We sat down in the elegant Crillon bar and someone—I think it was Basche—suggested we have a round of Armagnac. If you have ever had Armagnac, you know this: it is poison. You drink it, you die, especially if you keep drinking it. Which we did.
At one point Dick Enberg, who was Bud’s broadcast partner, stuck his head in the bar, having just come back from dinner with his wife. Someone had apparently told him that Bud and Basch were in the bar. They had failed to tell him the condition that Bud and Basch were in. Enberg took one look at the three of us and fled.
Too late. We had spotted him. Bud leaped from his seat (how exactly he did that I’ll never know) screaming, “Monsieur Enbairg, Monsieur Enbairg, you must join us for a drink!” at the top of his lungs. He chased Enberg down the hall still screaming his name. Enberg, knowing he was beaten, agreed to come back and have one drink if he would then be allowed to escape to his room.
I’m honestly not sure how I made it back to my hotel that night. I do remember the doorman at the Crillon looking at me agh
ast when I asked him if he could get me a cab so I could return to the Hôtel Mercure. That was the media hotel. It was not exactly the Crillon.
I somehow made it to Roland Garros the next morning even though the poison from the Armagnac was still coming out of my pores. I didn’t even feel well enough to drink coffee, but when I arrived I went to find Jennifer Proud, the PR person for the Men’s International Professional Tennis Council, which ran the men’s game at the time.
“I need Mike DePalmer whenever his match is over,” I said to Jennifer. DePalmer was a young American who had played for his father at the University of Tennessee. He was playing Joakim Nyström out on court four, which was about as far from the media center as any court on the grounds. Nyström was a Swede and was ranked number six in the world. DePalmer had won the first two sets from him, but Nyström had come back to win the next two. They had been forced to stop because of darkness in the fifth the previous evening at 2-all. I figured, win or lose, DePalmer was worth at least a sidebar.
After talking to Jennifer I stumbled downstairs to the media dining room, which was cool, dark, and empty at that hour. There was a couch in the corner of the room. The matches would resume at eleven. I looked at my watch. It was almost ten. I could lie down for an hour, then walk out to court four to watch the end of the match.
A few minutes later, someone shook me awake. It was Jennifer Proud.
“I can’t believe you were sleeping down here the entire time I was looking for you!” she said, genuinely angry.
“What are you talking about?” I said. “I’ve been here like five minutes.”
“Really?” she said. “I’ve been paging you for half an hour. I finally told poor Mike he could go.”
“Go?” I said. “What’s he doing here? He has to go play Nyström at eleven.”
She was now looking at me as if I was the single dumbest human being on earth. A light finally went off in my head. I looked at my watch. It was 12:45. I had been asleep for almost three hours.
“Oh God,” I said, truly embarrassed. “Is the match over?”
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