Basketball

by Alexander Wolff

  Some people hoped that Earl would be cured that summer. He did so much to help Hunter work with others that people felt he could help himself. Hunter was not as optimistic. “The truth is that nobody is ever going to cure Earl,” he said. “The only way he’ll be cured is by himself. A lot of people come off drugs only after they’ve been faced with an extreme crisis. For example, if they come very close to dying and somehow escape, then they might be able to stay away from the fire. But it takes something like that, most of the time.”

  Earl was not cured, and as the months went on the habit grew more expensive. And then he had to steal. “Earl is such a warm person,” said Vaughn, “you know that he’d never go around and mug people or anything. But let’s face it: most addicts, sooner or later, have to rob in order to survive.” Earl broke into a store. He is now in prison. “Maybe that will be the crisis he needs,” said Hunter. “Maybe, just possibly . . . But when you’re talking about addicts, it’s very hard to get your hopes too high.”

  Harold “Funny” Kitt went to Franklin three years behind Earl Manigault. When Funny finished in 1967, he was rated the best high school player in the city—largely because he had modeled himself so closely after Earl. “We all idolized Earl in those days,” Kitt said. “And when you idolize somebody, you think of the good things, not the bad. As we watched Earl play ball, we had visions of him going on to different places, visiting the whole world, becoming a great star and then maybe coming back here to see us and talk to us about it all.

  “But he didn’t do any of those things. He just went into his own strange world, a world I hope I’ll never see. I guess there were reasons. I guess there were frustrations that only Earl knew about, and I feel sorry for what happened. But when Earl went into that world, it had an effect on all of us, all the young ballplayers. I idolized the man. And he hurt me.”

  Beyond the hurt, though, Earl left something more. If his career was a small dramatization of the world of Harlem basketball, then he was a fitting protagonist, in his magnitude and his frailty, a hero for his time. “Earl was quiet, he was honest,” said Jay Vaughn, “and he handled the pressures of being the star very well. When you’re on top, everybody is out to challenge you, to make their own reps by doing something against you. One guy after another wants to take a shot, and some stars react to all that by bragging, or by being aloof from the crowd.

  “Earl was different. The game I’ll never forget was in the G-Dub [George Washington High] tournament one summer, when the team that Earl’s group was scheduled to play didn’t show. The game was forfeited, and some guys were just looking for some kind of pickup game, when one fellow on the team that forfeited came in and said, ‘Where’s Manigault? I want to play Manigault.’

  “Well, this guy was an unknown and he really had no right to talk like that. If he really wanted to challenge a guy like Earl, he should have been out in the parks, building up a rep of his own. But he kept yelling and bragging, and Earl quietly agreed to play him one-on-one. The word went out within minutes, and immediately there was a big crowd gathered for the drama.

  “Then they started playing. Earl went over the guy and dunked. Then he blocked the guy’s first shot. It was obvious that the man had nothing to offer against Earl. But he was really determined to win himself a rep. So he started pushing and shoving and fouling. Earl didn’t say a word. He just kept making his moves and beating the guy, and the guy kept grabbing and jostling him to try to stop him. It got to the point where it wasn’t really basketball. And suddenly Earl put down the ball and said, ‘I don’t need this. You’re the best.’ Then he just walked away.

  “Well, if Earl had gone on and whipped the guy 30 to 0, he couldn’t have proved any more than he did. The other cat just stood there, not knowing what to say. The crowd surrounded Earl, and some of us said things about the fouling and the shoving. But he didn’t say anything about it. He didn’t feel any need to argue or complain. He had everyone’s respect and he knew it. The role he played that day never left anyone who saw it. This was a beautiful man.”

  George Kiseda

  George Kiseda (1927–2007) was a young reporter for the Pittsburgh Sun-Telegraph in 1957 when the Army football team was set to meet Tulane in the Sugar Bowl in New Orleans. How, he asked in print, could a branch of the U.S. military justify participating in a game where the fans would be segregated by race? Kiseda won that round after a congressman took up the cause and forced the game to be moved to West Point. But that one crusading column cost him, as the Hearst-owned Sun-Telegraph banned political comment from its sports pages and Kiseda went on to clash regularly with his superiors. The episode helps account for his vagabonding path—from the Sun-Telegraph to the Philadelphia Daily News to the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin and, after he abandoned writing at age forty-four, to the copy desks of The New York Times and Los Angeles Times. A well-meaning friend once asked Kiseda, a devout Catholic, “What’s the Church’s position on career suicide?” But commitment to principle made him a hero to his peers, especially “the Chipmunks,” the generation of antiestablishment sportswriters to emerge at mid-century. Beginning with the 1960–61 season, Kiseda swung on to pro basketball, covering the Philadelphia Warriors, and eventually the 76ers, of Wilt Chamberlain. Over the next dozen years he established himself, in the judgment of the Boston Globe’s Bob Ryan, as “the greatest NBA writer of all time.” A beat reporter in training camp can get away with filing little more than scrimmage summaries and news of the latest cuts, but to Kiseda that was stenography. So when a rookie from Vanderbilt named Perry Wallace came through the Sixers’ camp in 1970, Kiseda filed this thundering column for the Bulletin. “George was the guy who made you feel like journalism was a calling,” said Mark Heisler, who competed with him on the Sixers’ beat for the Philadelphia Inquirer, yet like many professional rivals became a Kiseda acolyte and felt his hero’s suffering. “If he was more cult figure than icon, he set it up that way. With George, the greatness had to be its own reward.”

  A Reflection of Society

  SEPTEMBER 18, 1970

  PERRY WALLACE didn’t go to Vanderbilt to be Jackie Robinson. The first black athlete to survive four years in the Southeastern Conference went to Vanderbilt because (a) Nashville is his home town, (b) Vanderbilt is a good school and (c) it was a chance to play basketball in a major conference.

  “I just wanted to go to college and get a good education and play basketball and realize my academic and athletic potential,” Wallace said. “It was as simple as that, nothing much more and nothing much less.

  “It was made a racial issue by the people who jeered. I found I had to accept it as a challenge and accept that those people who were jeering me were making me represent a lot of people. At first I tried to ignore it as a racial issue.

  “I began to be successful when I began to accept it as a racial issue. It’s odd that the people who deny it was a racial issue helped to make it a racial issue.

  “The press almost never said anything about it. Cheerleaders were leading cheers against me, racial things, and the press never said much about it.

  “I felt like the only justice I could have gotten was for them to mention it. A thing like that tends to produce a sort of madness, a sort of insanity. When you see a purple man and nobody else sees him, you begin to wonder . . . I was going through these things and other people were acting as if it didn’t happen.”

  Sometimes the press has myopia. There are sports writers who pretend it is a Jack Armstrong world, all fun and games, but it isn’t, it never was and a sports writer who says he has never met an abused athlete simply has not been doing his job. I could introduce him to Satchel Paige or Earl Lloyd or Carlos Alvarez.

  Or Perry Wallace.

  Until yesterday Wallace was a 76er rookie, a 6-5 forward who is a definite futurebook prospect. He went home to keep a commitment with the National Guard, but he promised he would be back next year.

  Perry Wallace has an appointment with his potential that he has been w
aiting four years to keep.

  An All-American at Pearl High School in Nashville, he played on a team that went 31–0 and won the state championship the first year the tournament was integrated. He was class valedictorian (and would later double-major in math and electrical engineering) and naturally there were college offers, 120 of them. When he picked Vanderbilt, there was rejoicing in Nashville.

  “Everybody smiled,” he was saying yesterday, “everybody spoke to me when I visited the university. Everything was fine on the home front.”

  Everything appeared to be fine four years later. Wallace was captain of the varsity, all-conference, the most popular student on campus according to a student poll, and at his farewell game 15,000 fans in the Vanderbilt gym gave him a five-minute standing ovation. Nashville congratulated itself for integrating the SEC smoothly.

  A couple weeks later, Wallace dropped a bomb on Nashville, letting them know how it really was. The reactions were predictable. How could he do it to them?

  His coach, Roy Skinner, seemed to be one of the few who understood. “I feel like he was trying to help us,” Skinner said. “And I feel like we will all be better off because he has spoken his mind.”

  Exactly.

  “Some of the other coaches didn’t like it,” Wallace said. “They thought I was ungrateful, but why would I mess up a good future in Nashville unless (1) I was crazy or (2) I wanted to make constructive criticism? . . . I was afraid everybody would think everything was beautiful.

  “. . . If I had allowed people to sit back and be fat and happy, maybe more athletes would have to go through the same hell.”

  Hell began in church. Wallace was attending services at a campus church until a group of good ol’ Southern Christians told him his presence might hurt the collection plate.

  They emphasized it had nothing to do with prejudice.

  After that came the first game at Mississippi, a subdivision of hell. It was the middle of Wallace’s sophomore year, and he was trying to shake a slump. The reception he got was just the thing to help him.

  “As I walked into the stadium to warm up,” he said, “I heard jeers, cursing, threats. They were coming from a lot of people, thousands of people.

  “I started the game on the bench and when I went in, they just raised holy hell. Every time I made a mistake, everybody clapped, everybody laughed. They called me Leroy, which was a polite name for nigger.”

  Something—an elbow or a fist—found its way into Wallace’s eye, and at halftime he was still in the dressing room getting treatment while his teammates were out on the floor warming up.

  Wallace took one of the most frightening walks of his life—alone.

  “I looked out the door and I saw our team warming up and I could hear the catcalls,” he said. “You could hear the catcalls over the radio, people told me. They were hollering, ‘Where’s the nigger?’ ‘Where’s the nigger?’ ‘Is he scared?’ ‘Did he quit?’

  “I stood there and I looked out and I said, ‘Who is on MY side?’ ”

  He found it hard to understand that none of the people who recruited him could understand that at that moment he might need some moral support—even if it was only somebody walking out to the court with him.

  There was more around the SEC. Mississippi and Alabama were only the worst (Kentucky and Florida, he said, were the best places to play).

  “They would call you nigger, black boy, burrhead, or Leroy—that was always a favorite—or Willie or they’d say, ‘We’re gonna get you.’”

  There was no physical violence, but there was mental anguish. Wallace’s mother was dying of cancer. He would go back to his room at night wondering how he could survive the torment. He went three years with the knowledge his mother had terminal cancer.

  “It was hard to face that and also be a pioneer in the Southeastern Conference,” he said. “. . . I almost had a nervous breakdown.”

  Wallace can appreciate what is going on at Syracuse and other schools where blacks have demanded black coaches. “I didn’t get the moral support and understanding from the people who recruited me,” he said. “I didn’t get the sort of follow through, the sort of inquisitiveness I expected.”

  He would not want to do it again, but he still helps Vanderbilt to recruit black athletes. He does not see it as a contradiction.

  “It’s not the same place it was four years ago,” he said.

  Perry Wallace is one of the reasons.

  Jimmy Breslin

  To hear Jimmy Breslin (1928–2017) tell it, a stint as a sportswriter, for the New York Journal-American during the early 1960s, launched his career as a chronicler of twentieth-century America, particularly its urban working class. A lesson learned from post-game protocol—“Go to the losers’ dressing room,” he liked to say—sent Breslin in search of stories further from the expense-account hotel room, and closer to his tabloid readers’ experiences, than those filed by his broadsheet counterparts. Throughout his career he dipped in and out of sports, writing Can’t Anybody Here Play This Game? in 1962 about the debut season of Casey Stengel’s Amazin’ Mets, and a 2011 biography of Branch Rickey, the executive who signed Jackie Robinson for the Brooklyn Dodgers. But Breslin found his voice and made his name with the kinds of cityside columns for which he won a Pulitzer Prize in 1986. Sent to cover the aftermath of John F. Kennedy’s assassination in 1963, he famously filed on Clifton Pollard, the man who dug the president’s grave, noting that for his service Pollard collected precisely $3.01 an hour. A decade later he wrote this profile of fellow Queens native and Irish Catholic Al McGuire, then coaching for the Jesuit fathers at Marquette. Breslin makes no apologies for championing a guy from around the way, whose roots in the Rockaways lay only a half-dozen stops on the A train from Breslin’s in Ozone Park. In this piece, which Sport billed with a titular homage to the author’s best-selling comic mob novel The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight, you’ll find the characteristic Breslinian virtues. There’s an ear for dialogue; a palpable compassion for working people; a willingness to disclose even an old friend’s cons and excesses; and, wouldn’t you know it, an hourly wage, right there in the lede.

  The Coach Who Couldn’t Shoot Straight

  THE FATHER, J. W. Chones, after 22 years of working as a moulder in a steel plant in Racine, Wisconsin, was in bed in the house, the life going out of him in the hollow dry cough of lung cancer. The mother made salads in a restaurant for $1.75 an hour. The six kids, confused, depressed, went through the form of attending school. The oldest and largest, James B. Chones, 18, six feet, 11 inches, played on the basketball team at St. Catherine’s High School. It was hard for him, the months in the snow in 1969, with his father home dying and the men coming into the high school to talk to him.

  Chones can recount almost everything that was said to him by these men from American colleges and universities. The first man from a college to talk to him said, “Your father’s sick, that’s too bad. We’ll get him a nice house. Get you a car. How would you like that, a nice new car for yourself?”

  Another one thought for awhile when Jim Chones said his father was sick. “What we could do, we could get your mother a job. Real good job. Don’t worry about what she’ll get paid. Course, it’ll really be your money, you know. You let us worry about how we give it to your mother.”

  “The father’s sick,” another one of them said, “Well, he can fly to all games. Doesn’t take too much effort to get onto a plane, first class seat, and come and see your son play in the fieldhouse.”

  To the best of Jim Chones’ recollection he heard from every college in the country that was interested in basketball. Except one. He had not received anything, a phone call, a letter even, from Marquette University in Milwaukee in his own state. The coach of Marquette was Alfred J. McGuire.

  In April, when it was over, when J.W. Chones was gone, somebody from the high school asked Jim to stop into the athletic office.

  “This is Al McGuire,” the man said to Chones.

  “I w
anted to talk to you for a long time,” Al McGuire said. “But we heard your father was sick and we didn’t want to bother you.”

  He invited Chones to come down to the basketball banquet at Marquette. When Chones came to the banquet, Al McGuire spoke to him again. Spoke to him with those eyes locked on Chones. Big brown eyes that talk, question, laugh, challenge, get mad. Eyes that never leave you during a conversation.

  “There is no money here,” Al McGuire said. Chones mentioned some of the things he had been offered. “That’s fine. You’ll be just another hired hand for them. A field hand.” Chones knew what that meant. Field nigger. “You listen to me, you can do it differently. You’re big, you’ve got reactions, good speed. I think if you listen and work hard you have a chance to make big money as a pro. Big money for yourself. You can do whatever the hell you want with your life once you make it for yourself. You can be anybody you want, do anything you want. But make it on your own. You’ll never get anything if you’re just a hired hand for somebody. Listen to me and you’ll make big money by yourself.”

  He also told Chones he had an important house rule at Marquette. A basketball player had to get a degree.

  If you know Al McGuire for a long time, you smile when you hear about his rule. I sat with him when we were young and watching a college game at the old Madison Square Garden and during the warmup a ball bounced up to the seats and Al grabbed it and threw a shot, a two-handed set shot from his chest. It went into the flock of basketballs bouncing around the rim. “That’s the first shot I ever took at the Garden,” he said proudly. The shot had missed by a half-foot or so. Al would go home and tell everybody he put it right in. In college, he majored in defense. When he got out of school—rather, finished his time there—he announced that he was going for a master’s degree. When he played with the New York Knickerbockers, he announced he could guard Bob Cousy so well that he owned him. Cousy used to score hundreds of points against the Knicks. The newspapers kept saying that Al McGuire owned Cousy. Al himself still was throwing up shots that were a half-foot wide. When he became coach at Belmont Abbey, a small school in North Carolina, he also had to teach history. The notion is his wife prepared the courses and Al did the talking in class. He remained approximately six pages ahead of the class. If a student asked him a question during class, Al said he would take that up with the boy immediately after class. At which point Al would flee out the front door of the classroom and hope the kid forgot what was on his mind.