Basketball

by Alexander Wolff

  from

  The Breaks of the Game

  THERE WAS, on that day in Portsmouth, a young black kid from Kentucky State named Billy Ray Bates, and he had been dazzling, a player of awesome, almost completely undisciplined talent. The crowd had immediately adopted him as its favorite. He seemed to go up for dunks and hang in the air, and then hang some more, and then dunk over much taller players. He touched something deep in Buckwalter, who could look at him and instantly see all the natural ability and then, with his practiced eye, see all the things the young man had never been taught, all the things other kids with better luck would have learned by their second year at Indiana or UCLA or North Carolina. Bates was to Buckwalter terribly poignant, a stepchild on the court. He felt first a sadness that so much talent was being wasted, and then, secondly, a coach’s fascination; for Billy Bates was everything a coach could want in a player, at once so terribly untutored and so talented. If I were a player today, that’s who I would want to be, Buckwalter thought. The next year Buckwalter was coaching in the Continental league and he saw very soon that Billy Ray Bates was the best player in the league. When in January 1980 it became clear that Kevin Kunnert was out for the season Buckwalter had started pushing Inman and Ramsay to sign Bates, who was again starring in the Continental league. With Kunnert out, Buckwalter argued, there was a place on the roster. Bates, he said, was a great raw talent, well worth a try. If Portland signed him in the normal way and he came to a rookie camp, it was likely he would be shunted aside, quickly lose confidence and fail. But if he could sign on now, in a no-fail way, the pressure would be far less, he would have a chance to learn the plays more slowly, he could practice with the team every day, and he might be able to make it. If he made it, he might become a truly great basketball player. It was almost impossible, Buckwalter said, to exaggerate how much natural talent he had, and also impossible to exaggerate how little coaching he had been given. Inman was interested but somewhat dubious. He had seen Billy Bates, agreed that he had talent but was unsure that so undisciplined a player could fit into so disciplined a system as Jack Ramsay’s. Like most basketball people he doubted that Bates’s head was equal to his talent. Ramsay himself seemed unconvinced. He had heard about Bates and he was not very enthusiastic about what he had heard.

  Billy Ray Bates was a child of the feudal South, the son of sharecroppers, an American whose roots ran a short way back into slavery itself. He had chopped cotton, he always remembered what it did to his back and how much he disliked doing it, and he had grown up in a sharecropper’s shack owned by a distant rich man of another color. Many of his teammates had grown up hearing stories similar to his but at a generation or two removed. It would be hard to imagine an American of Bates’s own generation against whom the odds were so hopelessly stacked. Most of the young men and women of his time in Mississippi had little choice about life: they could remain in those small rural Mississippi towns until they died, subservient and obedient, embittered but somehow willing to swallow their resentment, and get by, or they could pack their belongings into the inevitable cardboard suitcases, take the bus to Memphis, and from there the next bus to Detroit or Cleveland, in frail hope of finding some industrial job. But even in the North, as agrarian uneducated black children in a highly industrialized and technological new world, they were, more often than not, doomed to end up lost on the cold winter streets. Billy Ray Bates was different. He had had a chance to get away because he was a surpassing athlete, so talented that colleges in his native state, once all-white, competed for his presence on their campuses. He was born in Goodman, Mississippi, a tiny village near Kosciusko, the town which had produced James Meredith, the young man who at great personal risk had integrated the University of Mississippi in the early sixties. Billy Bates did not know for whom Kosciusko was named; since there were so many Choctaw Indians in the area, he had always assumed that it was named for a Choctaw chief, not a Polish-American patriot. The farm on which the Bates family toiled was huge, a man could work all his life on that one piece of land and never see the end of it, he thought. The owner was a man named Pat Smithson. He was okay, Billy thought, in that unlike some of the other big white men he never did anything cruel to black people. Five or six families lived on Smithson’s farm. Ellen Bates, Billy’s mother, helped clean house for the Smithsons. His mother, he was quite sure, was part Choctaw. There was something in her face that told him. Also, she kept pet snakes, and told him that the snakes were her friends. To black people in Mississippi talking about snakes like that was a sure sign of Indian blood. There were four brothers and four sisters, and everyone worked in some way or another. Billy Bates as a boy had many jobs: he picked cotton, sometimes he broke clods of fertilizer up as he followed behind a tractor, and sometimes he hooked logs for the lumbermen. The cotton money was the best; there had been times when he worked hard and had made as much as $50 a week picking cotton. But he was not a good picker. His heart was never in it. He tended to pick a little, and sleep a little, and pick a little, and sleep a little, just like the cartoon figure of the shiftless southern black. The white people who saw him thought him shiftless. His father was Frank Bates, known as Shack. Shack was not a good worker, nor finally, Billy came to realize, a very happy man. Billy’s early memories were of him laughing and playing, but then when Billy was about five, he seemed to change. He was hot-tempered and began to work less and to get in fights more. Increasingly he would spend the day drinking, returning to his family late in the day when he was drunk. Soon Ellen Bates had to protect her children from their own father. Later Billy Bates came to understand why his father had come apart, and why he had begun to drink. For a black man in Mississippi life was nothing but farming and not even farming for yourself, but farming for the owner. Too much like slavery, he thought. His father died when he was seven. From then on everyone in the family had to contribute even more. When he was a sophomore in high school the family stopped sharecropping and started paying rent. The thing he remembered most clearly about that life was the poverty of it, the fact that they had no electricity, and no indoor plumbing, and very little food and not enough clothes. He decided when he was very young that when he grew up the first thing he would do was to buy a good house for his mother, not just so that she would have some electricity and indoor plumbing, but so that when it stormed the lightning and thunder would not seem to be right there inside the house. Of the nine children he was the next to the youngest. When he was about ten years old he told his mother what he intended. “We’ll see, we’ll see,” she had said.

  Sometime after he had reached Portland and become an instant success, reporters would wait in the locker room and ask him how it had all happened so quickly, the meteoric rise to the highest level of professional success from nowhere, and Billy Ray Bates would answer, not a bit surprised or perplexed by the question, no bravado in his voice, “I was born to play basketball.” Perhaps he was. He had one of the most powerful bodies of any guard in the NBA, a huge barrel chest, immense hands, strong legs that sprang from thick thighs. He had done some hard physical work as a boy, but he believed the body had been given to him; almost everyone else in his family, uncles, aunts, cousins, had bodies something like his. The talent had always been there. No one had ever taught him to jump, he could simply do it from the first day he tried. He could dunk the ball from his sophomore year in high school and he lived for those moments, sailing above the rim, and then slamming the ball down; in that instant, back in Mississippi, he felt all-powerful; he was up and everyone else was down. Dunking was outlawed in Mississippi high school play, deemed illegal by white men writing white rules. But sometimes when his team was up by fifteen points he would risk a technical foul and he would take off and soar in the air, every split second to be remembered and savored.

  Billy Ray Bates was in some ways much luckier than many black Mississippians of his generation. He was born in 1956, two years after the Supreme Court had ordered the nation to integrate its schools with all deliberate speed. Mi
ssissippi, the state with the highest percentage of blacks, resisted integration the most fiercely and its speed was more deliberate than anywhere else in the South. For years after the ruling, black children continued to attend the tattered rural schools which the state had deeded over to its less favored citizens. But by the time Billy Ray Bates had arrived at McAdams High School in 1970, the courts had finally pressured Mississippi into integration. He arrived at the once all-white school to find riots and signs that said NIGGERS GET OUT, NIGGERS GO HOME. Police were everywhere and no one knew which side the police were on, including themselves. Thus was he welcomed to the white world of Attala County. For a week the school shut down. When it reopened what had been a white high school had turned into a predominantly black school. Whites departed for their own new instant private schools. But they left behind for the young blacks of Mississippi something previously unattainable—first-rate facilities, gyms built by white school boards for white children, athletic budgets set by white boards for white players, and a tradition of white newspapers covering local high school sports events. That was important, it kept these same teams, now black, still a point of community focus. His coach, Wilson Jackson, then twenty-seven, was a black Mississippi native who had grown up with far less in the way of state-supplied facilities.

  Even in the seventh and eighth grades he had always been hanging around the gym trying to get on the basketball team. No matter that he was smaller than the other kids and too young to be on the team. Finally, when he was a high school freshman, Jackson allowed him to join the team. “You that little boy I always used to chase out of here?” Jackson asked. Billy nodded his assent. His shooting eye was exceptional and his body was growing and filling out quickly. He loved shooting the ball and regrettably had a good deal less interest in playing defense. But whenever McAdams was behind, Jackson sent him in. Once in a game, Billy refused to look his coach in the eye in the event of a time-out—he was afraid Jackson might pull him. Jackson would see him out there, always scrupulously looking down, checking to see whether or not his sneakers were properly tied.

  By the time he was a sophomore he was the strongest player on the team. He already had a powerful body and great jumping ability. Jackson sensed immediately that he was of college or pro caliber. The problem basic to the entire region was how to ward off the sense of hopelessness and defeat that destroyed so many young blacks early in their lives. Mississippi was Jackson’s home and he had no great desire to go anywhere else, but he also knew what it did to young people. The signs of defeat, he knew, came early. The boys would start dropping out of class, and then slipping out of school. Then they would start drinking. The drinking was the big move. It was just a way of showing off at first, he thought, of being big men. But once a boy started, he rarely stopped. Jackson was sure Billy could play college ball. The problem was going to be getting him that far in school. The moment that basketball season was over, Billy simply disappeared. School was a gym, it had no other attraction. Billy Ray Bates, like countless other young black kids in America, was going to be a professional basketball player or he was going to be nothing. (Harry Edwards, the black sociologist who disliked the singular attraction of professional athletics for black youths, once estimated that there were some 3 million blacks between thirteen and twenty-two planning to be professional athletes; the odds, Edwards figured, were worse than 20,000 to 1 against their making it.) When Billy disappeared Wilson Jackson simply went to Billy’s cousin’s house, deep in the backcountry. There would be the two of them, Billy and his cousin, playing basketball. Coach and player resumed their ongoing argument.

  “Boy, what are you going to do with yourself after school?”

  “I’m going to play pro ball, Coach. I know I can make it.”

  “Boy, before you turn pro you got to turn college first, and before you go to college you got to finish this school right here.”

  Finally, in desperation, Jackson prevailed on the school authorities to add an extra period of gym to the school schedule, right at the end of the day. The pot sweetened, Billy stayed in school. But the pull of defeat was always there. He slept through classes, he missed others, and Jackson had to force him to study. Sometimes the hopelessness around them was so great that Jackson was afraid it was going to pull all of them down. Jackson would give the students his lectures on hard work, on staying in school, on what the future might be. But then when they were gone, he often at night had his own doubts. He knew their families, he knew how many fathers were gone, and how many fathers were not able to make a living. Above all, he knew the odds against them. Mostly he knew in his heart what they could not be. What could he tell them to be—doctors, lawyers, architects? Who would listen to him? Maybe if he found a few students a year with strength and character, they might be able to become teachers and nurses. In Billy’s junior and senior years, Jackson, worried about the drinking, took his star home with him on the day of games so that he would not drink. Billy, Jackson believed, didn’t drink all that much, it was just that he wanted people to think he had been drinking, and that he was a big man. In his senior year Billy stayed away from booze and averaged forty-five points and twenty-one rebounds. In the end, in his senior year, an astonishing number of once all-white colleges, including Ole Miss, applied for his services. Ole Miss would take him as a football player or a basketball player. Billy seemed to be gravitating towards Jackson State, which was a black sports power only sixty miles away. Wilson Jackson fought the decision. He knew what would happen if Billy went to Jackson State: it was too near McAdams and Billy would play basketball, drift back in the off-season to his old haunts, start drinking and hanging around. Wilson Jackson thought his best chance was if he got out of Mississippi and he pushed him towards Kentucky State, where he finally enrolled.

  He played well at Kentucky State, a sure scorer, a powerful exciting presence on the court, but by the mid-seventies black schools like Kentucky State, once a prime producer of talent for the NBA, were no longer considered a very good source of athletic talent. The revolution had come so quickly in black athletics, so many once all-white schools had opened up to blacks, the scouts had become so much better at foraging through the high school circuit, that by the early seventies the finest black southern talent was already being spotted in high school, and the better players were now going to the best state schools in the Midwest and the South. States like Alabama and Tennessee and Kentucky, which had once allowed their indigenous blacks to play in the Big Ten, now fought to keep them in state, not at some small black school but at the main university. White fans now cheered for blacks, players they had once tried to bar from their colleges, finding in them lesser racial qualities only when they lost. The world of black colleges was now worked by the second and third tier of scouts looking for fourth-, fifth- and sixth-round draft choices. Indeed if a player was with an all-black college, there was already an unstated judgment against him: the presumption was that he would have been picked up at the high school level if he were really any good. That presumption worked against Billy Ray Bates at Kentucky State. Scouts watching him saw the powerful body and the natural instinct for the game. But they looked at his annual statistics and then they asked themselves: Why hadn’t he been picked by a better college? Was he a bad kid? Was he a head problem? As for the points, who did he get them against? Above all, was he smart enough to learn plays and be part of a disciplined system? By going to a black college he had at the age of seventeen already damaged his reputation in the professional basketball world. But then he had looked good in the Portsmouth All-Star game, and he was drafted for the NBA in the fourth round by an interested but wary Houston. Given the growing odds against him, it wasn’t bad. Yet since in America it is largely true that the rich get richer, the converse is surely true, that the poor get poorer, and at this juncture Billy Ray Bates, who desperately needed good advice, signed with an agent who gave him what Bates later concluded had been the worst kind of advice imaginable.

  The agent, who had bee
n brought to Billy by his college coach, told him to hold out for guaranteed money from Houston, and not to report without it. This made little sense. In the first place, fourth-round draft choices did not get guaranteed money, and even more important, Billy Ray Bates’s best chance was simply to go to the camp and play, letting his game be his best advertisement. The last thing wanted by any team already ensnarled in tedious negotiations with its first- and second-round draft choices, as Houston was, was problems with its fourth-round picks. So he arrived late to the camp, a camp he could have dominated, and found the place filled with guards holding no-cut contracts. He immediately showed raw skill but had trouble with the plays. Tom Nissalke, the coach, was already furious with Billy’s agent, and the anger reached over to Billy. Soon he was cut. He was hurt but not yet bitter. He was sure he was better than some of the players they kept. Deciding that somehow he would be back, he went to Bangor, Maine, to play for the Maine Lumberjacks of the Continental Basketball Association.

  Within limits Billy Ray Bates enjoyed playing in the Continental league. The Maine Lumberjacks were not the Boston Celtics but it was professional basketball, and the dream was still on, just one step away. Sometimes in those games he would go against a player who had once played in the NBA and then he turned it on; inevitably he was the stronger player, and the experience encouraged him to believe that he still had a chance. There were, of course, almost always rumors of scouts in the crowd, and when the rumors circulated, the Continental game, not very much given to structure anyway, completely degenerated. No one passed the ball. It wasn’t just Billy Ray Bates who was desperate to get to the top, it was everyone in that league. He was Rookie of the Year in the Continental, and won a slam-dunk contest in the All-Star game. In the summer he returned to Mississippi, played some ball, worked some construction. He had a car and he often drove his mother around town. Every day he would pick her up and they would go to a cousin’s house, or to a store. She bought less and less at the stores so that she would have more reason to drive back the next day, he noticed. She loved the power and the freedom that the car gave her.