Basketball

by Alexander Wolff

  While he was doing this, a young man named Don Leventhal, a Philadelphia basketball junkie who had worked as a publicity man for the Continental Association, was in his spare time trying to put together a team for Philly’s summer circuit, the Baker League. Leventhal in his own way was as anxious to get into the NBA as any Continental player. He wanted to get into player personnel, and become, he hoped, the next Stu Inman. The Baker was comparable to the other outdoor summer leagues, an almost perfect showplace of black playground play. Pros, college stars, high school stars and of course playground wizards were all blended together. No one really knew on a given night which famous player might show up. It was the kind of wild, exciting game which made a purist like Jack Ramsay nervous. Individual artistry triumphed over teamwork. Nor was there a lot of defense. Almost all of the players were from the Philadelphia area. Leventhal, putting together his team, sent out letters to a number of players he knew. Then, almost as a joke, because he had handled Billy Bates’s statistics so often in his Continental league job, though of course he had never seen him play, Leventhal sent a letter to Billy Ray Bates in Goodman, Mississippi, asking if he would like to play in the Baker League. The letter included a form which asked a prospective player to check off which month he preferred to play—June, July or August. In a week Billy Bates returned the form, checking off all three months. Soon they were talking on the phone. Billy said he needed money for the bus ride to get up there, and Leventhal somewhat nervously lent him $85 for a ticket. At the same time Billy went to Wilson Jackson and borrowed bus money from him as well. Thus well-armed he set off for Philly. The Philadelphia bus station at 3 a.m. is not the most hospitable place in the world, but Leventhal was there to meet him. Out came the bus riders of America, a few elderly people, a few young people, a few servicemen and then a tall powerfully built young black man. His cream-colored pants were adorned with his own handwritten graffiti. BILLY RAY “DUNK” BATES they read. Oh my god, thought Leventhal, what kind of a cowboy have I got? Leventhal and a young lawyer named Steve Kauffman took him in, and tried to explain the complexities of a city to him, how to use a bank, how to lease an apartment. The thing that staggered Billy, Leventhal thought, was how many young women Philadelphia had. “You know,” he kept saying, “Kosciusko is a small town, and it’s only got one or two girls, but this town, there’s thousands, man, thousands.”

  The night after he arrived, Billy Bates scored twenty-nine points in a game. Some of his opponents were professional players. Leventhal and Kauffman worked to get him a professional tryout. Soon Jack McMahon, a veteran white basketball man and former player-coach, now a Philly scout, showed up. “Billy, this is Mister Jack McMahon of the Sixers,” Leventhal had said. “Mister McMahon, it’s very nice to meet you and I’ll try not to disappoint you, sir,” Billy had answered. Then he had hit his first nine shots and scored thirty-eight points. McMahon, who had signed Darryl Dawkins out of high school, loved him. “I’ve scouted all year and that’s the best game by a guard I’ve seen yet,” he told Leventhal. Philly held a secret predraft camp where they let some of the players they were thinking of drafting work out. Billy Bates went, was the best player there and, without drafting him, Philly gave him a $10,000 bonus and a $60,000 guaranteed contract for one year. Billy Bates was sure he made it. So was Leventhal. A week later the draft was held and in the first round Philadelphia drafted Jim Spanarkel, a tall white guard from Duke. Leventhal became immediately suspicious. Billy Bates did well in the early drills and there were favorable articles about him in the Philly papers. He wrote back to Mississippi to tell Coach Jackson that he was going to make it. Could they now retire his jersey? he asked. Then he began to struggle. No one doubted his talent. Jack McMahon was for him but Chuck Daly, an assistant who had coached at Penn, was dubious. Philadelphia, an assemblage of great raw talent, was still smarting from the defeat by Portland two years earlier, and trying to change the freewheeling nature of its team. The last thing it needed was another one-on-one superstar; it had, after all, just gotten rid of Lloyd Free and no one in the league had been particularly anxious to pick Free up. In the camp Billy Bates looked at Jim Spanarkel, who was white and slow, and he thought that there was never a day that the sun had come out that he could not take Spanarkel anywhere he wanted on the court and do with him what he wanted. But Spanarkel was a first-round draft choice, he knew, and professional teams were reluctant to admit that they had made mistakes with their firsts. In the end Billy was cut. The last day he had looked long and carefully at Spanarkel, a quiet reserved young man, and he had thought, I know I’m better than you. I know there are lots of things that you can do better than me, all kinds of things. But this is one thing I know I can do better than you.

  Cut, but still signed to a Philly contract, he went back to Bangor. He was very bitter now, he had failed twice. He had been given a chance without being given a chance. He was also shrewd enough to know that in the NBA being cut a second time was more serious, that by then it became part of your reputation, there was always a they in life and the they in professional basketball would believe now that he had had his chance. He felt terribly cheated; he knew it was not because he lacked talent. It was, he believed, because he was a poor black from Mississippi. It was as if people were telling him he was a nigger without actually using the word. The others, the ones who made it, were blacks, but he was still somehow because of Mississippi a nigger. When he had been a boy he had always thought that sports was his way out, and now he felt beaten because sports seemed to be just another dead end like everything else. His coach in Bangor was Mike Uporsky, who had spent the previous season scouting for Seattle, had tried to sell the Sonics on Calvin Natt and had been let loose by the Sonics. He was himself unhappy about being back in the minor leagues.

  “Billy, can you play here?” Uporsky asked him.

  “I don’t know yet,” Bates had answered, “my head’s so far down it hasn’t caught up with my body yet. I don’t know if I can spend the rest of my life in the Continental league.”

  Uporsky had expected Billy Bates to be a smart-ass, a difficult kid who thought he knew more than the coach, an attitude which frequently accompanied such raw skills, but the reverse turned out to be true. He was a child of Mississippi poverty, untouched and uncorrupted still, a great favorite in Bangor where he spent the entire winter wrapped in a huge sheepskin coat out of which only his eyes seemed to appear. He could, Uporsky thought, have run for mayor of Bangor, he was so good and kind with people, so much loved. At one point, wary of tampering with this natural force, Uporsky asked Billy to shoot less and go for six assists a game. “When you’re on the court I want you to think only of sacrificing. We know you can score. Can you do it?” “I don’t know if I can handle it,” he had answered. “There’s something in me that’s just got to go. I don’t know if I can control it.” But he tried, and became a good passer.

  The Continental league, Uporsky thought, with its dinky gyms and tiny $12-a-night motels and cold franchise-food hamburgers was like prison for Billy. The team traveled back and forth to games in a huge Winnebago motor home. Midway during the year there was a call from Gene Shue at San Diego. The Clippers were looking for a small forward. Billy Ray Bates went down to Philadelphia for a tryout with them. Uporsky warned him not to get his hopes up. He did not even play in a full scrimmage, just three-on-three. He never heard from the Clippers again, something which was to haunt Shue later in that same season.

  By mid-February the Portland guard situation was desperate. Lionel Hollins was gone, Dave Twardzik, the other lead guard, was playing with a body exhausted by injuries. His legs, Ron Culp told Ramsay, were dead. Anytime Twardzik played more than twenty minutes in a game, he paid for it the next two or three days. Ramsay seemed to be losing confidence in T. R. Dunn. Ron Brewer, who had started the season so strongly, was apparently losing confidence in himself. Jim Paxson, the first-round draft choice from Dayton whom Inman had been so high on, was playing erratically, a disappointment to himself a
nd to Ramsay. His court vision and intelligence were excellent, but he had been drafted as a shooter and the team needed points and he was shooting poorly. He was playing tight. Because of all the other injuries he was getting an exceptional chance to play and he was doing very little with it. Midway through the season, Ramsay had begun to wonder if Paxson, product of a secure middle-class home, son of a former professional player who had given up the sport to take over a successful life insurance business, was tough enough to play in the NBA. He never contested referees’ calls on the floor, never seemed to fight back. Rather he accepted things. Ramsay was convinced that one thing common to all superior professional athletes was a certain meanness or toughness, whichever you wanted to call it, a desire to leave their mark on opponents. Possibly Paxson, so fine and intelligent and secure a young man, lacked that. He might, Culp thought, be too stable for the league. In early February, before Buckwalter began to push for Bates, Inman was scouting the Continental league looking for a big man. But he was also looking at guards. Inman, onetime star of the San Jose Spartans and a connoisseur of offbeat team nicknames, loved the idea of the Maine Lumberjacks. He went to Hawaii to watch the Hawaiian Volcanoes against the Lumberjacks. That way he could see Stan Eckwood, whom he had liked from the previous draft, and Billy Bates, whom Buckwalter and others had talked of. By the time Inman caught up with the Lumberjacks in Hawaii, Uporsky had been fired, replaced by the owner’s son, who coached only home games. That fact, the flakiness of it, excited Inman even more. “What kind of plays do you run?” Inman had asked Bates and Eckwood before the game. “Oh, we don’t run plays,” Bates had answered, “we just take the ball down and shake and bake a little.” “Well,” said Inman, “what do you talk about before a game?” “Where we’re going to go after the game,” said Eckwood. Inman watched Bates and liked him, the power in the body was self-evident, the hands were huge, and Bates could, in Inman’s coach-talk, “pass for profit in heavy traffic. A big plus.” But there was something extra Billy Bates had, something that could neither be studied, nor taught, and that was an essential instinct for the game. It was something you were born with, and Billy Ray Bates had it. Intrigued, Inman located Uporsky in Arizona. They had similar tastes. As scouts both had wanted Calvin Natt. Uporsky had even coveted Seattle’s other first-round draft pick that year, Jimmy Paxson. “Mike, is he the best in your league?” Inman asked.

  “Stu, he may be the best in your league. Only Westphal has more natural ability. I’d get him on a plane before anyone else finds out,” Uporsky said.

  Inman watched two games in Honolulu and then followed the Lumberjacks to Alaska to watch them against the Anchorage Northern Knights, another perfectly delightful name. He had taken Bates to lunch. When he had arrived Bates was surrounded by kids, signing autographs, asking each of them if he was or she was going to the game that night. Inman liked that—score more points for Billy Bates. “If I were your best friend,” Inman told Bates at lunch, “I would tell you that what you’re in now is the worst environment I can imagine for you. No coaching, no plays, no discipline. You’re blessed with great skills, Billy, and you’ve got a great body. No one can teach you to shoot like that or jump like that. But there’s a thousand players like you all over the country in the Rucker and the Baker and a hundred other leagues. Every city has them and they’re talented and they watch some pro game and they think, ‘Hey, I’m better than the pros.’ Maybe they can do one little thing better, go to the hoop, dunk. But that’s not basketball. Can they play in a team? Can they play in harmony with four other players? I think you can but you’ve got to be able to want to do it. We want to sign you, Billy. Do you know who Coach Ramsay is?”

  “I’ve seen him. Gets angry at referees a lot.”

  “He can teach you how to see your teammates, he can help you. Do you want to try it?”

  “Yes, sir,” said Billy Ray Bates. “I want to play in the NBA more than anything else in the world.”

  So it was that Billy Ray Bates, in February 1980, the season three-quarters gone, joined the Portland Trail Blazers. The signing was not without its acrimony. Bates was represented by Steve Kauffman, the young Philadelphia lawyer who had befriended him and was still trying to get him loose from his unfortunate first contract. Portland wanted a five-year contract, with only the first full season guaranteed. The money, if it ever came through, was acceptable but not particularly good by NBA standards. Kauffman was dubious; it put all the burden on Billy and implied little responsibility on the part of the Portland franchise. If Billy was convenient to them then they had him for a very long time. If he failed then they were out free. Kauffman believed that it was an unfortunate pattern, that they used their maximum leverage at a player’s greatest moment of vulnerability, and that there was a dangerous payback. He wanted a two-year contract if possible and a three-year one at most. “You’re squeezing my kid and it’s wrong,” he said. Portland finally came down to four years. Kauffman advised Billy Bates not to sign it. “We’ve got to sign it,” Billy Bates said. “I’ve got to get my chance to play. I can’t fail again.” “Go ahead then,” Kauffman said, but he did not like the contract; he wished there were more generosity of spirit shown in it.

  Among those in Portland who did not seem especially elated by the arrival of Billy Ray Bates was Jack Ramsay. He had not been impressed by Buckwalter’s original recommendation and he had no great yearning for a player whose skills were apparently so different from those he sought. The last thing he wanted this late in the season was a raw, untutored kid who had never played in a system. When he talked of Billy Ray Bates it was as if he were talking of an outsider, someone who was not really on the team. Among other NBA coaches and general managers, most of whom knew a good deal about Billy Bates’s reputation and even more about Jack Ramsay’s system, there was a good deal of amusement at the idea of Dr. Jack Ramsay trying to coach Billy Ray Bates.

  But the Blazers had already changed. The treasured Calvin Natt had come at a high price and one day he might be an exceptional player for Ramsay’s system, but he was not ready yet. It was clear that Natt was in his own way a project. He was a rookie and more, a rookie with his second team in one year. He did not know the plays. There was even a question of whether he was the right man for the position. He was an immensely powerful young man, perhaps the strongest player at small forward in the league, but was he a small forward—quick, deft, good passer—for the Ramsay system? Or was he a slightly shorter power forward, a hardworking player, but not supple enough for the position? He was not as good a passer as Bobby Gross, and his game was one of power, and one-on-one moves. When the ball came to him it rarely went to anyone else; his presence altered the ball flow, sometimes stopped it. Calvin Natt, it soon became clear, was not exactly the player they had needed. If he was to be effective it would be on a very different team.

  When Billy Ray Bates arrived in Portland there was something touchingly innocent about him, uncorrupted. But no one knew what was just beneath the surface, and that was troubling; if he became successful, would he change? Would he start arguing with Ramsay for more minutes, talking about being traded? Would he swagger? Would he demand to renegotiate his contract? For the moment he was completely unspoiled and grateful to be there. “He still calls everyone ‘sir,’ ” said an amused Herm Gilliam. “Young and innocent, isn’t he?” In his first road game he dressed for the game Lumberjack style, that is, changing at the hotel. He arrived for the bus in his warmup clothes, while the others were still in their civilian finery. That amused them. Back in Portland he drove to practice on the first day with Ron Culp. In the background, as they drove, stood the majestic Mount Hood. “There’s no snow here, right?” he said to Culp, pointing to the Portland streets they were driving through. “That’s right, Billy,” said Culp. Billy pointed to Mount Hood. “How come there’s snow up there?” Culp began a long explanation of elevation, temperature and snow. It was not, he realized, very successful. In the end he had not just confused Billy, he had confused h
imself. The next day they drove by the Willamette River. “There any fish in there?” Billy asked. “Yes,” said Culp. “You ever caught any?” Billy asked. “No,” said Culp. “Why not?” asked Billy, absolutely perplexed, such a grand opportunity passed by. I don’t know, Billy, thought Culp, I just don’t know.

  At first Ramsay did not use him very much. Perhaps for a few minutes late in games already gone. But word about him spread throughout the league and crowds began to gather around the baseline when the Blazers came to watch his dunks. Finally Ramsay used him because he had no one else and because his team was playing so poorly. They were struggling for the last spot in the Western conference playoffs, slightly behind San Diego, and they were playing listlessly. They went to Milwaukee with only nine games left in the season, with the competition for the last playoff spot more and more heated.

  On the morning of the Milwaukee game, Jack Ramsay, physical fitness freak, devoted exerciser of the Ramsay body, went swimming in the pool of the Pfister Hotel. He tried to swim every day, some twenty laps if possible on good days, many more on bad ones, swimming on the good days to keep in shape, swimming farther on bad ones to exorcise demons and burn off the anger and frustration. On this morning Ramsay was preoccupied with the faltering nature of his own team, and with a new burden, the news that the great center Bob Lanier had managed to trade himself from Detroit, where his presence meant little because the team was so bad, to the Milwaukee Bucks, a rising and aggressively talented team, where he might help create a championship. Ramsay was dissatisfied with his own center lately; Tom Owens was, in the phrase Ramsay used to friends, playing soft. Angry about games past, worried about games to come, especially today’s, he dove in and swam as hard as he could, forgetting that the Pfister did not offer an Olympic-size pool, and soon smashed his head against the far end, splitting his scalp badly. Blood began to pour out.