Basketball

by Alexander Wolff

  He called Ron Culp in his room, “Do you have something to close up a wound?” he asked.

  An odd request, Culp thought, something to close up a wound. “Jack, what kind of wound?” Culp asked, slightly puzzled.

  “Well, I’ve hurt myself, I’ve got a wound,” Ramsay answered.

  That’s odd, Culp thought. Ramsay, usually so candid, was being unusually evasive. “What kind of injury, Jack?” he asked, intrigued now.

  “Well, it’s an injury to my head,” he said. “An unusual one. You better come up here.” So Culp with his kit went up to Ramsay’s room where he found the coach with a bloodsoaked cloth around his head. At first Culp was alarmed: was this the denouement of all those Ramsay late-night walks? “Jack, for god’s sake, what happened?” the trainer asked.

  “You know,” said Ramsay, “it’s an old hotel and they have a very small pool here.” He sounded, Culp thought, very sheepish.

  Lanier’s play was strong; midway into the third quarter the Bucks were up 85–59. At that point Ramsay went to Bates and Jeelani, the one a very recent veteran of the Continental league, the other of the Italian league. Both of them were, at their best, freelancers, clumsy in a system, strong in games where nothing else worked. They quickly brought Portland back. Bates had 14 points in 15 minutes, Jeelani 16 points in 15 minutes. They closed the score to 98–93 with 7:49 left. Ramsay sent in his regular lineup. The Blazers collapsed.

  The next night in Chicago it was even more dramatic. It was a slow, heavy game—everyone, it seemed, worn out by the long season. Bodies moved slowly. Watching his team play against Artis Gilmore, knowing exactly what it should be doing, Ramsay was enraged to see the Blazers walking through their assignments, giving Gilmore position close to the basket again and again. His players looked like sleepwalkers. With four and a half minutes left in the third quarter, Chicago was ahead by 17 points. In came Bates and Jeelani. In the final 17 minutes, the two of them, freelancing and gunning, playing with enthusiasm and excitement, combined for 43 points. Billy more than anyone else simply took over the game. When he had the ball it was as if everyone on the court stopped to watch him. He drove to the basket and scored, then did it again. Chicago changed defensive guards and still he did it. Then they began to drop off him, conceding the jump shot to stop the drive. Immediately he started hitting jump shots. With Portland behind by two points everyone cleared out so he could drive on the immense Artis Gilmore. He took off, drove, jumped, faked, brought Gilmore up with him, pumped again, still held the ball and then, at the last second, dunked. The Chicago arena broke into spontaneous applause. In the end Portland, playing sloppy defense, let Gilmore hit two easy shots from the inside and Chicago won. As Bates walked off the court, the Chicago announcer said: “Billy Ray Bates scored points.” He paused. The Chicago crowd began to roar. “Sixteen of them in the last quarter.” The noise was deafening.

  The locker room, except for a crowd of reporters around Billy, was grim. They had done a terrible job on Gilmore. “You don’t stop Artis once he has the ball,” Buckwalter was saying, “you prevent him from getting it where he wants. Otherwise he’ll score all night. He’s too damn strong.” Gilmore had eleven of fourteen, all short, easy shots. The coaches had diagrammed exactly what they had wanted done, and nothing had happened. Ramsay was trying to deal with the Chicago reporters. He hated losing so close a game after so exceptional a comeback. Right now it didn’t matter that it was an un-Ramsay-like manner of play that had brought them back.

  In a corner a Chicago reporter was interviewing Billy Ray. “Billy, how would you play defense against Billy Ray Bates?” “Well, you know,” said Billy, “I can go to the hoop and I can shoot outside. ‘How do you play defense against me?’ Hard to say, hard to say.”

  Bobby Gross, the last survivor of the classic team—Twardzik had flown home earlier with a sore neck—was talking about how good a passer Bates was, how he could with those huge hands and his great strength hold on to the ball until the very last split second and then still pass. “I don’t know if he can play in a pattern,” Gross was saying, “but he’s good, isn’t he? Something special.” Gross felt disconnected from the new team. He was a part, he said, that no longer fit. There was no resonance, no rhythm to this team. He was sure he was going to be traded. He had become a $300,000 a year benchwarmer. Weinberg, he said, would not like that. The trade of Lionel had been the final straw. He had badly needed Lionel for his game; they had always understood each other, and knew what they were going to do as if they had their own secret radar. With Lionel on the court, said Gross, if you gave up the ball, you always knew you might get it back. On this team he tried to pass and because the others were not good passers themselves they were rarely ready to take it. The key to passing was anticipation, two men sensing that the same thing would happen, not that it had happened. Anything in the past tense, indeed the present tense, in this game was already too late. Ramsay was pushing Gross to take his shot. But that was alien to him, his instinct was always to look for the pass first. The night before, in Milwaukee, the Bucks had doubled a Blazer guard and the ball had come to Gross, who was wide open for a shot. He had looked at the basket, looked for a pass, hesitated that fraction of a second and by the time he was ready to shoot the defender was back. Two days later, Ramsay was still angry. “Can you imagine that!” he said. “Can you imagine that! They double us, we beat the double and he waits until his man returns!” In the Chicago game his line was dispiriting. He played eighteen minutes, shot zero for six, shot no fouls and had one assist. It was a line for a player on his way out of the league.

  Several days later Ramsay was still annoyed at Gross. Gross was talking openly with other players of his discontent and the fact that he would probably be with another team the next year. He had been quoted in the Oregonian recently saying that basketball was not the only thing in his life, that he had a new baby daughter and that his family was also important. Ramsay, reading the story, had not liked it. That was one of the things wrong with this team. Too many interests outside of basketball. No one was single-minded enough. To Ramsay an athlete was someone consumed by his sport, who in-season during his brief career thought of virtually nothing else. The game was first. Only later, if there was time left over, should there be anything else. Ramsay’s own life was organized perilously close to that idea.

  He took Gross aside and told him there would be a new team the next year. It would resemble the team of the past and would need Gross’s skills. But he also said that Gross must stop living in the past. The championship season was over. There were new strong teams in the league and the accomplishments of the past quickly became meaningless. Gross, listening to Ramsay, was not so sure that he would be back, nor that he wanted to be.

  Two nights later they went to Oakland for an important game with Golden State. There were only six games left in the season after this. San Diego was faltering now too. The Portland bus reached the Oakland Coliseum around 5 p.m. While the other players waited in the locker room taking their time getting dressed—there was after all always too much time before a game—Billy dressed and walked out into the empty arena and began shooting baskets. Bucky Buckwalter, walking through the arena, saw him there, a distant lonely figure practicing in a huge darkened room before empty seats. He stopped and watched Billy for a few minutes, suddenly realizing that this moment was devoted not so much to improving Billy Bates’s touch but rather to reconnecting him to reality, to prove to himself that it really was all true, that he was finally playing in the NBA. That night Ramsay went to Billy much earlier than usual. He scored twenty-two points and helped send the game into overtime, which Portland won. Afterwards reporters were asking him about a key play in which he had driven to the basket and scored.

  “Well, I knew I could beat the old guy,” he said.

  “What old guy?” a reporter asked.

  “You know, the old guy who used to play for Boston,” he said. Thus did Billy Ray Bates describe Jo Jo White, one of basketball�
�s great stars, then all of thirty-three years old.

  He was a star now. The NBA made him its Player of the Week. People wanted him to endorse their sneakers. Writers continued to seek him out. On the flight home from Golden State he took aside a writer who had interviewed him two weeks earlier when he had first arrived in the league. “You going to write all of that, aren’t you?” he said. “Write all of what?” the reporter asked. “All of what I told you about growing up, about how we had no electricity and no indoor plumbing.” The writer said yes, he was going to write it. “That means everywhere I go in the NBA and every time I’m on television, people going to look at me and think of me going to the bathroom outdoors and growing up without electricity. They’re going to think about it.” He thought for a moment. “They’re going to think about Billy Bates out there in that old shack.”

  Frank Deford

  During more than fifty years at Sports Illustrated, Frank Deford (1938–2017) smartly explored the icons and meaning of our most conventional sports with an assured voice. But he could just as confidently escort the reader on a tour of subcultural Americana, whether Soap Box Derby, bowling, or the Miss America Pageant. Deford was second-team All-City at Baltimore’s Gilman School and played basketball briefly at Princeton, until Coach Cappy Cappon, having taken note of his contributions to The Daily Princetonian, said, “You know, Deford, you write basketball much better than you play it.” At SI he first made his name on the hoops beat, filing during the 1960s on historic titles won by Bill Russell’s Celtics and Texas Western College. By the 1970s he had an updated calling card, the profile that lit up the back of the book and featured a reliable virtue: though never hit jobs, they always had an edge to them. The edge wasn’t that of some switchblade flipped out in a clinch. It came rather from Deford’s ability to pull back or bore in—to see a person’s life in a grander sweep or put a subject on the metaphorical couch. With the clarifying aid of a subhead (“Bobby Knight may be tremendously successful on the court, but off it, Indiana’s basketball coach often stalks the insignificant”), the title of this 1981 piece, “The Rabbit Hunter,” could serve as Knight’s epitaph. Though events would take nearly two more decades to unspool, Deford foretold the volcanic coach’s end: in 2000, several months after Indiana placed Knight on “zero-tolerance” notice for his behavior, the school fired him for grabbing a freshman on campus, a random Bugs Bunny the coach felt had been impertinent by saying, “Hey, Knight, what’s up?” Decades later, what wear so well are the story’s broad sensibility, authoritative voice, and refusal to treat even an exasperating subject unsympathetically.

  The Rabbit Hunter

  Success is feminine and like a woman; if you cringe before her, she will override you. So the way to treat her is to show her the back of your hand. Then maybe she will do the crawling.

  —William Faulkner

  I: RABBITS

  AS BOBBY KNIGHT is the first to say, a considerable part of his difficulty with the world at large is the simple matter of appearance. “What do we call it?” he wonders. “Countenance. A lot of my problem is just that too many people don’t go beyond countenances.”

  That’s astute—Bobby Knight is an astute man—but it’s not so much that his appearance is unappealing. No, like so much of him, his looks are merely at odds. Probably, for example, no matter how well you know Coach Knight, you have never been informed—much less noticed yourself—that he’s dimpled. Well, he is, and invariably when anyone else has dimples, a great to-do is made about them. But, in Bobby’s case, being dimpled just won’t fly.

  After all: DIMPLED COACH RAGES AGAIN. No. But then, symbolically, Knight doesn’t possess dimples, plural, as one would expect. He has only the prize one, on his left side. Visualize him, standing in line, dressed like the New Year’s Baby, when they were handing out dimples. He gets the one on his left side. “What the bleep is this?” says little Bobby, drawing away.

  “Wait, wait!” cries the Good Fairy or the Angel Gabriel or whoever’s in charge of distributing dimples. But it’s too late. Bobby has no time for this extraneous crap with dimples. He’s already way down the line, taking extras on bile.

  “Countenances,” Knight goes on, woefully. “I just don’t have the personality that connotes humor. It kills me. I get castigated just for screaming at some official. And the other coach? Oh, he’s perfect, he’s being deified, and I know he’s one of the worst cheaters in the country. It’s like I tell my players: your biggest opponent isn’t the other guy. It’s human nature.”

  Knight happens to be a substance guy in a style world. Hey, he could look very good in polyester and boots and one of those teardrop haircuts that anchormen and male stewardesses wear. Very good: he’s tall, 6′5″, and dimpled (as we know) and handsome, and the gray hair and embryonic potbelly that have come to him as he crosses into his 41st winter are pleasant modifying effects.

  In the early ’60s, when Knight was a big-talking substitute on the famous Jerry Lucas teams at Ohio State, he was known as Dragon. Most people think it was in honor of his fire-snorting mien, with the bright and broken nose that wanders down his face and makes everything he says appear to have an exclamation mark. Only this was not so. He was called Dragon because when he came to Ohio State, he told everybody he was the leader of a motorcycle gang called the Dragons. This was pure fabrication, of course, but all the fresh-scrubbed crew cuts on the team lapped it up. It was easy. People have always been charmed by him; or conned; anyway, he gets in the last word.

  It’s never neat, of a piece. When Knight stands up, coaching, with his hands in his pockets, he looks like a street-corner guy. But with his tousled hair, the tie forever undone, there’s also a childish aspect to his appearance:

  Wear your tie, Bobby.

  All right, Mom, I’ll put it on, but I won’t tie it tight.

  The boy-coach who got his first major-college head-coaching job at 24 may be middle-aged now, but still, every day, in some way, adolescence must be conquered again. “Listen to me,” Woody Hayes pleaded with him once. “Listen to me, Bobby, because I’ve made a lot of mistakes and you don’t have to repeat mine.”

  The real issue isn’t the countenance, anyway. The real issue is the rabbits. And Knight knows that. In the Indiana locker room before a game earlier this season, Knight was telling his players to concentrate on the important things. He said, “How many times I got to tell you? Don’t fight the rabbits. Because, boys, if you fight the rabbits, the elephants are going to kill you.” But the coach doesn’t listen to himself. He’s always chasing after the incidental; he’s still a prodigy in search of proportion. “There are too many rabbits around,” he says. “I know that. But it doesn’t do me any good. Instead of fighting the elephants, I just keep going after the rabbits.” And it’s the rabbits that are doing him in, ruining such a good thing.

  Pete Newell, the former Cal coach, a mentor: “There are times Bobby comes so close to self-destructing.” Edwin Cady, a Duke University professor, after the Indiana Athletics Committee he chaired recommended Knight’s hiring in 1971: “He’s in a race now between overcoming immaturity and disaster.” And even the warmest, most benign observers of the man offer variations on these themes.

  Others are much more critical—especially since the sad events of July 1979 at the Pan American Games in Puerto Rico when Knight, the U.S. basketball coach, was arrested for aggravated assault on a police officer (and subsequently convicted in absentia and sentenced to six months in prison). “Bobby’s so intelligent, but he has tunnel vision,” says another Midwestern coach. “None of that stuff in Puerto Rico had to happen. On the contrary, he could’ve come out of there a hero. But he’s a bully, always having to put people down. Someday, I’m afraid, he’s going to be a sad old man.” Says an Eastern coach, “He’ll get away with the bullying and the vulgarity only so long as he wins. But the shame is, he’s so smart, and he’s so faithful to his principles, so why can’t he understand that other people have principles too?”

  S
uch criticism doesn’t necessarily affect Knight in the ways and to the extent that most people imagine. In a sense, he enjoys being misunderstood, so no one can get a fix on him. It’s like the effect Indiana’s good defense has on the coaches of its opponents: “The average coach wants his team to score points.” Knight says. “It’s his character, his machismo, whatever you want to call it, that’s at stake. So if I make a coach concerned enough about my defense stopping his offense, then he’ll forget about my offense.”

  Though Knight may not give a hoot whether most people like him, it genuinely upsets him that anyone might think he’s impulsive, much less berserk: “Hey, I’m not dumb and too many people look at our operation as if we’re all dumb here,” he says. “Only people really involved here know what the hell we’re doing. See, I don’t think people understand what I can or can’t do. They’re not cognizant of my situation and what I know about myself. I always know what I’m doing.”

  Yet as intelligent as Knight is about most things, as searching as his mind is, he’s also encumbered by a curious parochialism that too often brings him to grief. When all is said and done, his difficulties in Puerto Rico resulted mostly from his inability to concede that San Juan isn’t just another Chicago, or that the Pan Am Games aren’t another Mideast Regional—and it’s their own fault that they’re not. Knight’s mind is too good to be wasted on a mere game—and he probably recognizes that—but he’s personally not comfortable away from the precisely circumscribed environment in which college basketball is played. Therein lies the great conflict in him.