Basketball

by Alexander Wolff

  from

  The City Game

  IN THE litany of quiet misfortunes that have claimed so many young athletes in the ghetto, it may seem almost impossible to select one man and give him special importance. Yet in the stories and traditions that are recounted in the Harlem parks, one figure does emerge above the rest. Asked about the finest athletes they have seen, scores of ballplayers in a dozen parks mention Connie Hawkins and Lew Alcindor and similar celebrities. But almost without exception, they speak first of one star who didn’t go on: Earl Manigault.

  No official scorers tabulate the results of pickup games; there are no composite box scores to prove that Manigault ranked highest among playground athletes. But in its own way, a reputation in the parks is as definable as a scoring average in the NBA. Cut off from more formal channels of media and exposure, street ballplayers develop their own elaborate word-of-mouth system. One spectacular performance or one backward, twisting stuff shot may be the seed of an athlete’s reputation. If he can repeat it a few times in a park where the competition is tough, the word goes out that he may be something special. Then there will be challenges from more established players, and a man who can withstand them may earn a “neighborhood rep.” The process continues in an expanding series of confrontations, until the best athletes have emerged. Perhaps a dozen men at a given time may enjoy “citywide reps,” guaranteeing them attention and respect in any playground they may visit. And of those, one or two will stand alone.

  A few years ago, Earl Manigault stood among the loftiest. But his reign was brief, and in order to capture some feeling of what his stature meant in the playground world, one must turn to two athletes who enjoy similar positions today. Herman “Helicopter” Knowings, now in his late twenties, is among the most remarkable playground phenomena; he was a demigod before Manigault, and he remains one after Earl’s departure. Uneducated and unable to break into pro ball, the Helicopter has managed to retain the spring in his legs and the will power to remain at the summit after many of his contemporaries have faded from the basketball scene. Joe Hammond, not yet twenty, is generally recognized as the best of the young crop. Neither finished school and vaulted into the public spotlight, but both pick up money playing in a minor league, the Eastern League—and both return home between games to continue their domination of the parks.

  The Helicopter got his name for obvious reasons: when he goes up to block a shot, he seems to hover endlessly in midair above his prey, daring him to shoot—and then blocking whatever shot his hapless foe attempts. Like most memorable playground moves, it is not only effective but magnetic. As Knowings goes up, the crowd shouts, “Fly, ’copter, fly,” and seems to share his heady trip. When he shoves a ball down the throat of a visiting NBA star—as he often does in the Rucker Tournament—the Helicopter inflates the pride of a whole neighborhood.

  Like Connie Hawkins, Knowings can send waves of electricity through a park with his mere presence. Standing by a court, watching a game in progress with intent eyes, the Helicopter doesn’t have to ask to play. People quickly spot his dark, chiseled, ageless face and six-foot-four-inch frame, and they make room for him. Joe Hammond is less imposing. A shade over six feet, he is a skinny, sleepy-eyed kid who looks slow and tired, the way backcourt star Clinton Robinson appeared during his reign. But like Robinson, Hammond has proved himself, and now he stands as the descendant of Pablo Robertson and James Barlow and the other backcourt heroes of the streets.

  The kings of playground ball are not expected to defend their titles every weekend, proving themselves again and again the way less exalted players must. But when a new athlete begins winning a large following, when the rumors spread that he is truly someone special, the call goes out: If he is a forward, get the Helicopter; if he’s a guard, let’s try him against Joe Hammond. A crowd will gather before the star arrives. It is time for a supreme test.

  Jay Vaughn has been in such confrontations several times. He saw the Helicopter defend his reign, and he watched Joe Hammond win his own way to the top. He described the rituals:

  “When I first met the Helicopter, I was only about seventeen, and I was playing with a lot of kids my age at Wagner Center. I was better than the guys I was playing with and I knew it, so I didn’t feel I had anything to prove. I was playing lazy, lackadaisical. And one of the youth workers saw how cocky I was and decided to show me just how good I really was. He sent for the Helicopter.

  “One day I was just shooting baskets, trying all kinds of wild shots, not thinking about fundamentals, and I saw this older dude come in. He had sneakers and shorts on and he was ready to play. I said, ‘Who’s this guy? He’s too old for our games. Is he supposed to be good?’

  “ ‘The coach sent for him,’ somebody told me, ‘He’s gonna play you.’

  “I said to myself, ‘Well, fine, I’ll try him,’ and I went out there one-on-one with Herman Knowings. Well, it was a disastrous thing. I tried lay-ups, jump shots, hooks. And everything I threw up, he blocked. The word had gone out that Herman was there, and a crowd was gathering, and I said to myself, ‘You got to do something. You’re getting humiliated.’ But the harder I tried, the more he shoved the ball down into my face. I went home and thought about that game for a long time. Like a lot of other young athletes, I had been put in my place.

  “I worked out like crazy after that. I was determined to get back. After about a month, I challenged him again. I found myself jumping higher, feeling stronger, and playing better than ever before. I wasn’t humiliated again. But I was beaten. Since that time, I’ve played against Herman many times. He took an interest in me and gave me a lot of good advice. And now, when I see he’s going to block a shot, I may be able to fake and go around him and score, and people will yell, ‘The pupil showed the master.’

  “Then, of course, he’ll usually come back and stuff one on me. . . .”

  “Joe Hammond was playing in the junior division games in the youth centers when I was in the senior games,” Vaughn continued. “He was three years younger than me, and sometimes after I’d played, I’d stay and watch his game. He wasn’t that exceptional. Just another young boy who was gonna play ball. In fact, at that time, I didn’t even know his last name.

  “Then I came home from school in the summer of 1969, and one name was on everyone’s lips: Joe Hammond. I thought it must have been somebody new from out of town, but people said, no, he’d been around Harlem all the time. They described him and it sounded like the young kid I’d watched around the centers, but I couldn’t believe it was the same guy. Then I saw him, and it was the same Joe, and he was killing a bunch of guys his own age. He was much improved, but I still said to myself, ‘He’s young. He won’t do much against the older brothers. They’ve been in business too long.’

  “But then I heard, ‘Joe’s up at 135th Street beating the pros. . . . Joe’s doing everything to those guys.’ I still didn’t take it too seriously. In fact, when Joe came out to Mount Morris Park for a game against a good team I was on, I said, ‘Now we’ll see how you do. You won’t do anything today.’

  “Now I believe in him. Joe Hammond left that game with seven minutes to go. He had 40 points. Like everybody had said, Joe was the one.”

  Many reputations have risen and fallen in the decade between the arrival of the Helicopter and of Joe Hammond. Most have now been forgotten, but a few “reps” outlive the men who earn them. Two years ago Connie Hawkins did not show up for a single game during the Rucker Tournament. When it was time to vote for the Rucker All-Star team, the coaches voted for Hawkins. “If you’re going to have an all-star game in Harlem,” said Bob McCullough, the tournament director, “you vote for Connie or you don’t vote.” (Having been elected, The Hawk did appear for the All-Star game—and won the Most Valuable Player award.) One other reputation has endured on a similar scale. Countless kids in Harlem repeat the statement: “You want to talk about basketball in this city, you’ve got to talk about Earl Manigault.”

  Manigault played at Benj
amin Franklin High School in 1962 and 1963, then spent a season at Laurinburg Institute. Earl never reached college, but when he returned to Harlem he continued to dominate the playgrounds. He was the king of his own generation of ballplayers, the idol for the generation that followed. He was a six-foot-two-inch forward who could outleap men eight inches taller, and his moves had a boldness and fluidity that transfixed opponents and spectators alike. Freewheeling, unbelievably high-jumping, and innovative, he was the image of the classic playground athlete.

  But he was also a very human ghetto youth, with weaknesses and doubts that left him vulnerable. Lacking education and motivation, looking toward an empty future, he found that basketball could take him only so far. Then he veered into the escape route of the streets, and became the image of the hellish side of ghetto existence. Earl is now in his mid-twenties, a dope addict, in prison.

  Earl’s is more than a personal story. On the playgrounds, he was a powerful magnetic figure who carried the dreams and ideals of every kid around him as he spun and twisted and sailed over all obstacles. When he fell, he carried those aspirations down with him. Call him a wasted talent, a pathetic victim, even a tragic hero: he had symbolized all that was sublime and terrible about this city game.

  “You think of him on the court and you think of so many incredible things that it’s hard to sort them out,” said Bob Spivey, who played briefly with Earl at Franklin. “But I particularly recall one all-star game in the gym at PS 113, in about 1964. Most of the best high school players in the city were there: Charlie Scott, who went on to North Carolina; Vaughn Harper, who went to Syracuse, and a lot more. But the people who were there will hardly remember the others. Earl was the whole show.

  “For a few minutes, Earl seemed to move slowly, feeling his way, getting himself ready. Then he got the ball on a fast break. Harper, who was six feet six, and Val Reed, who was six feet eight, got back quickly to defend. You wouldn’t have given Earl a chance to score. Then he accelerated, changing his step suddenly. And at the foul line he went into the air. Harper and Reed went up, too, and between them, the two big men completely surrounded the rim. But Earl just kept going higher, and finally he two-hand-dunked the ball over both of them. For a split second there was complete silence, and then the crowd exploded. They were cheering so loud that they stopped the game for five minutes. Five minutes. That was Earl Manigault.”

  Faces light up as Harlem veterans reminisce about Manigault. Many street players won reputations with elaborate innovations and tricks. Jackie Jackson was among the first to warm up for games by picking quarters off the top of the backboard. Willie Hall, the former St. John’s leader, apparently originated the custom of jumping to the top of the board and, instead of merely blocking a shot, slamming a hand with tremendous force against the board; the fixture would vibrate for several seconds after the blow, causing an easy lay-up to bounce crazily off the rim. Other noted leapers were famous for “pinning”—blocking a lay-up, then simply holding it momentarily against the backboard in a gesture of triumph. Some players seemed to hold it for seconds, suspended in air, multiplying the humiliation of the man who had tried the futile shot. Then they could slam the ball back down at the shooter or, for special emphasis, flip it into the crowd.

  Earl Manigault did all of those things and more, borrowing, innovating, and forming one of the most exciting styles Harlem crowds ever watched. Occasionally, he would drive past a few defenders, dunk the ball with one hand, catch it with the other—and raise it and stuff it through the hoop a second time before returning to earth.

  “I was in the eighth grade when Earl was in the eleventh,” said Charley Yelverton, now a star at Fordham. “I was just another young kid at the time. Like everybody else on the streets, I played some ball. But I just did it for something to do. I wasn’t that excited about it. Then there happened to be a game around my block, down at 112th Street, and a lot of the top players were in it—and Earl came down to play. Well, I had never believed things like that could go on. I had never known what basketball could be like. Everybody in the game was doing something, stuffing or blocking shots or making great passes. There’s only one game I’ve ever seen in my life to compare to it—the Knicks’ last game against the Lakers.

  “But among all the stars, there was no doubt who was the greatest. Passing, shooting, going up in the air, Earl just left everybody behind. No one could turn it on like he could.”

  Keith Edwards, who lived with Earl during the great days of the Young Life team, agreed. “I guess he had about the most natural ability that I’ve ever seen. Talent for talent, inch for inch, you’d have to put him on a par with Alcindor and the other superstars. To watch him was like poetry. To play with him or against him—just to be on the same court with him—was a deep experience.

  “You can’t really project him against an Alcindor, though, because you could never picture Earl going to UCLA or anyplace like that. He was never the type to really face his responsibilities and his future. He didn’t want to think ahead. There was very little discipline about the man. . . .”

  And so the decline began. “I lived with the man for about two or three years,” said Edwards, “from his predrug period into the beginning of his drug period. There were six of us there, and maybe some of us would have liked to help him out. But we were all just young guys finding themselves, and when Earl and another cat named Onion started to get into the drug thing, nobody really had a right, or was in a position, to say much about it. And even as he got into the drugs, he remained a beautiful person. He just had nowhere to go. . . .”

  “The athlete in Harlem,” said Pat Smith, “naturally becomes a big man in the neighborhood. And if he goes on to college and makes his way out of the ghetto, he can keep being a big man, a respected figure. But if he doesn’t make it, if he begins to realize that he isn’t going to get out, then he looks around, and maybe he isn’t so big anymore. The pusher and the pimp have more clothes than they can ever get around to wearing; when they walk down the street they get respect. But the ballplayer is broke, and he knows that in a certain number of years he won’t even have his reputation left. And unless he is an unusually strong person, he may be tempted to go another way. . . .”

  “You like to think of the black athlete as a leader of the community,” said Jay Vaughn, “but sometimes the idea of leadership can get twisted. A lot of the young dudes on the streets will encourage a big-time ballplayer to be big-time in other ways. They expect you to know all the big pushers, where to buy drugs, how to handle street life. And if they’re fooling with small-time drugs, maybe they’ll expect you to mess with big-time drugs. It may sound ridiculous at first, but when you’re confronted with these attitudes a lot, and you’re not strong enough, well, you find yourself hooked.”

  It didn’t happen suddenly. On the weekends, people would still find Earl Manigault at the parks, and flashes of the magnetic ability were there. Young athletes would ask his advice, and he would still be helpful; even among the ones who knew he was sinking deeper into his drug habit, he remained respected and popular. But by early 1968, he seldom came to the parks, and his old friends would find him on street corners along Eighth Avenue, nodding. “He was such a fine person,” said Jay Vaughn, “you saw him and you wished you could see some hope, some bright spot in his existence. But there was no good part of his life, of course. Because drugs do ruin you.”

  In the summer of 1968, Bob Hunter was working on a drug rehabilitation program. He looked up Earl. They became close, building a friendship that went deeper than their mutual respect on a basketball court. “Earl was an unusual type of addict,” said Hunter. “He understood that he was a hard addict, and he faced it very honestly. He wanted to help me in the drug program, and he gave me a lot of hints on how to handle younger addicts. He knew different tricks that would appeal to them and win their trust. And he also knew all the tricks they would use, to deceive me into thinking they were getting cured. Earl had used the tricks himself, and he helped m
e see through them, and maybe we managed to save a few young kids who might have got hooked much worse.

  “But it’s the most frustrating thing in the world, working with addicts. It’s hard to accept the fact that a man who has been burned will go back and touch fire. But they do it. I have countless friends on drugs, and I had many more who have died from drugs. And somehow it’s hard to just give up on them and forget that they ever existed. Maybe you would think that only the less talented types would let themselves get hooked—but then you’d see a guy like Earl and you couldn’t understand. . . .”