Basketball

by Alexander Wolff

  Still Bates had to be tested, like everyone else. He has had a radio show in Ohio since 1949, and one time a while ago, when he was staying at the Knights’, he asked Bobby to do a five-minute tape with him. Bobby said sure, but then he put Bates off and put him off. Finally, one day Bates said, “You know, Bobby, I’ve had that radio show for 30 years without you on it.” And with that, he put on his coat and headed for the car. By the time Bates had started up the driveway, Knight was out there, waving for him to come back, and as soon as Bates arrived back at his home in Ohio, Bobby was on the phone to him. Knight was still in control of himself. But not of events.

  “Bobby has got so much,” Bates says. “And nobody can ever get him. He doesn’t cheat. He doesn’t drink. He doesn’t even chase women. But for some reason he thinks he has been a bad boy, and no matter how successful he becomes, he thinks he must be punished.”

  This may be the best clue of all. Certainly, Knight accepts success defensively, if not suspiciously. His office celebrates underdogs like Truman and Lombardi, who weren’t expected to triumph but, given the chance, thrived on their own sweet terms. And Patton is in evidence, as you might expect. A mean-spirited quote of his hangs on the wall, keynoting a display—an anthology—of paranoid sentiments.

  Patton warns ominously that if you strive for a goal, “your loyal friends [will do] their hypocritical Goddamndest to trip you, blacken you and break your spirit.” A flanking prayer advises, “If man thwart you pay no heed/If man hate you have no care. . . .” And an essay entitled “The Penalty of Leadership” warns, “The reward is widespread recognition, the punishment fierce denial and detraction.”

  Is it really that lonely at the top?

  Knight also passes out copies of If to visitors.

  And yet, as wary as he is of the hypocritical rabbits all around him, Knight is, in many respects, even more unsparing of himself. The game, we hear so often, has passed so-and-so by. With Knight, it may be the reverse; he may have passed it by. But he loves it so, and therefore he must concoct hurdles so that he can still be challenged by it. He even talks a lot about how nobody is really capable of playing the game well. Ultimately, it may be the final irony that the players themselves must become interlopers, separating him from the game.

  Already he has gone so far that at age 40 winning is no longer the goal. “Look, I know this,” he says. “If you’re going to play the game, you’re going to get more out of it winning. I know that, sure. Now, at West Point I made up my mind to win—gotta win. Not at all costs. Never that. But winning was the hub of everything I was doing. And understand, I’ve never gotten over West Point. Winning had to be more important there, and I had a point to prove. I was just coming off a playing career during which I didn’t do as well as I’d hoped. I had to win. And so, to some extent, I won’t change.

  “But somewhere I decided I was wrong. You could win and still not succeed, not achieve what you should. And you can lose without really failing at all. But it’s harder to coach this way, with this, uh, approach. I’m sure I’d be easier on myself and on other people if just winning were my ultimate objective.” He pauses; he is in his study at home, amid his books, away from all the basketball regalia. “I never said much about this before.”

  It was a good secret. Now, Bobby Knight is one step closer to utter control of his game. Now all those dim-witted rabbits cannot touch him. They’ll be looking at the scoreboard and the AP poll, judging him by those, but they won’t have a clue, not the foggiest. Nobody holds a mortgage on him. Now, you see, now we are talking about definition.

  Nancy says: “People keep asking me if Bobby is mellowing. We’re not mellowing. What we are, we’re growing up with the game. You’ve got to remember that not many people get a chance to start coaching in their 20s. We’re not mellowing. Growing up is still more of the word for us.”

  There is still so much time for the Knights to take what is theirs and enjoy it. It can be a great life (someday).

  David Bradley

  The son of a minister who worked as a historian and journal editor for the African Methodist Episcopal Church, David Bradley (b. 1950) counted himself among the first generation of Bradley men since slavery not to include a preacher. As a child David spent summers accompanying his dad as he drove around the South conducting Christian Ed workshops. Thanks to multiple scholarships, he then made his way from his hometown of Bedford, a largely white farming community in southwestern Pennsylvania, to the University of Pennsylvania, where he met another contributor to this volume, John Edgar Wideman, who became his first writing teacher and a lifelong mentor. After earning a master’s at King’s College London, Bradley published two novels, the second of which, The Chaneysville Incident, won the PEN/Faulkner Award in 1982. That’s when Esquire asked him to write this profile of Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. Around the same time, Bradley largely abandoned fiction for essays and journalism, which he practiced between gigs in publishing and teaching, including twenty years on the faculty at Temple and another ten at Oregon. When Bradley writes that “the inevitability of [Abdul-Jabbar’s] retirement holds more dread for me than for him,” his observation is simply that of a fan identifying with his hero. But their respective lives each featured a traumatic loss. Bradley makes brief mention of the 1983 fire that destroyed Abdul-Jabbar’s oriental rugs, trophies, and treasured collection of jazz albums; the author had no way of knowing that, decades later, he would be victimized by a similar incident, when a leaky toilet in Bradley’s home outside San Diego led to flooding that ruined two thousand books in his library.

  The Autumn of the Age of Jabbar

  EARLY DECEMBER 1982. I am seated at the bar of the Tavern on Green, which rests in a gentrified neighborhood a few blocks from the Philadelphia Museum of Art. The Tavern on Green is not normally a sports bar, but tonight there is a late-night telecast from the Coast, where the Philadelphia 76ers are doing battle with the Lakers of Los Angeles.

  The last time the two teams met was in the championship series the previous June. Then the Lakers cut in the turbocharger of their Ferrari fast break and cruised over the Sixers as if they were the Pennsylvania Turnpike. The same thing had happened two years before. And so, in Philadelphia, this game is an affair of honor. Which means Philadelphia fans are out for blood.

  They believe they will get it. In the off-season the Sixers agreed to pay $13.2 million over the next six years to Moses Malone, formerly of the Houston Rockets. If Malone can neutralize the Laker center, seven-foot-two Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Philadelphia fans say, this will be the year they’ve been telling the Lakers to wait until.

  This night Malone earns his money, outscoring Jabbar 29 to 15, out-rebounding him 14 to 2. The Sixers triumph by 10 points, and the Tavern on Green resounds with cheers and jeers, most of the latter being directed at the televised image of Jabbar, who, with his incredibly long arms and legs, his knobby knees and elbows, his balding pate, and his bulging protective goggles, looks like a meditative praying mantis.

  “Look at him,” one watcher snarls. “He loses and he acts like he’s bored. He thinks it’s a business. And those dumb goggles: What does he have to wear them for? And what is this name business anyway? It’s all PR. He’s the most overrated player in basketball.”

  I am a Lakers fan. I have been one since the late Fifties, when Kareem Abdul-Jabbar was a six-foot sixth-grader who answered to the name Ferdinand Lewis Alcindor Jr. And so I launched into a counterargument from the Kareem Abdul-Jabbar Media Guide: high school all-America who led New York’s Power Memorial Academy to a 95–6 record; three times consensus college All-America who powered the UCLA juggernaut to a three-year 88–2 record and three consecutive NCAA championships; in thirteen years as a professional a twelve-time All-Star, six-time league Most Valuable Player, who is the leading active player in points scored, second all-time in that category behind the legendary Wilt “The Stilt” Chamberlain, and almost sure to pass him in a season or two, anchor of three world champion teams, one in Milwaukee, two in
L.A., one of only twelve to play on championship teams in two cities. Maybe, I say, if he looks bored it’s because he has just about done it all. “What’s with him,” somebody whispers. “He in love with that Kareem or something?”

  Not exactly. But I did hug him once.

  SEPTEMBER 1968. I was a freshman in college, preoccupied with freshmen of the opposite sex. One young lady seemed especially friendly and appealing. I made inquiries. “Aw, man, forget it,” I was told. “She’s been dating Lew Alcindor.” I let it go; the competition was overwhelming. Alcindor was athletic, militant, televised, and upsetting to the establishment; the ultimate BMOC credentials for a black in 1968. And he was tall too.

  Controversy focused on his eighty-six inches (or was it eighty-eight? There was always a suspicion that he was taller than advertised). It gave him an “unfair” advantage. It would destroy the game. Bill Van Breda Kolff, then the Lakers’ coach, who knew he would never get to sign Alcindor and who already had Wilt Chamberlain, suggested that rather than try to bring Alcindor into the NBA, “each team in the league should give him one hundred thousand dollars and tell him to go to the beach.”

  There was a lot about Alcindor that people found unfair. It was unfair that he had forsaken his high school coach, Jack Donohue, who had moved on to Holy Cross and could surely have used a seven-foot center. (What coach couldn’t have used a seven-foot center in 1965?) It was even more unfair that Alcindor should go to UCLA, whose Bruins had already won two consecutive NCAA championships and whose coach, John Wooden, was already established in a Trinity with Red Auerbach and Adolph Rupp.

  Of course, UCLA got its comeuppance when, in the exhibition game intended to show off the brand-new Pauley Pavilion and honor Coach Wooden, Alcindor brashly scored 31 points and hauled down 21 rebounds and piloted the freshman team to a 15-point landing on the NCAA-champion varsity. But the comeuppance did not come very far; a year later, in his varsity debut, Alcindor scored 56 points, and Wooden, speaking of the acute anxiety Alcindor must inspire in other coaches, said, “He even frightens me.”

  That anxiety prompted the NCAA, after Alcindor led the Bruins to an undefeated season and championship, to ban the dunk shot. Nothing was said officially about Alcindor, but unofficially they called it the Alcindor rule and Wooden at the time declared that there was “no question that the rule is designed to curtail the ability of one player.” It did not work; Alcindor compensated for the lost dunk with pinpoint passing and a shot he had been using for nearly a decade—what years later would be christened the “skyhook” by sportscaster Eddie Doucette and pronounced by Bill Russell “the prettiest thing in sports.” He took the Bruins to two more championships. But by the time they won the second one, he was in trouble with the media.

  It was not entirely his fault. His high school coach had put him under a gag order, and the UCLA athletic department applied a similar restraint to the entire freshman team. But somehow the policy was interpreted as being Alcindor’s idea, which caused resentment among reporters. And once the ban was lifted, Alcindor’s behavior seemed to lend credence to the interpretation. “I hadn’t come to school to spend my time buttering up the press,” he later said.

  Things might have been easier for him if he had. He might have gotten more sympathy during his sophomore year, when anonymous threats against his life were taken seriously enough for UCLA to hire a bodyguard. His physical problems might have been viewed with more understanding; his migraine headaches might have been presented as truly debilitating, rather than as ailments on the order of a hangnail (fortunately Wooden himself was a migraine sufferer, and understood), and the scratched eyeball from which he suffered when UCLA lost its first game in years, to Houston, might have been seen as a legitimate reason for Alcindor’s subpar performance, rather than as a lame excuse.

  But sometime during his sophomore year his inexperience with the media had led him to speak earnestly but incautiously about his interest in Malcolm X, the teaching of Islam, and his belief that racial hatred was destroying America. It was hardly an unusual manifesto for a college sophomore in 1966 or 1967, but athletes, particularly black college athletes, were not supposed to have such thoughts or fool around with weird foreign religions. (America was still determined to call Muhammad Ali Cassius Clay.) When, in the fall of 1967, it was learned that Alcindor had met with black militant athletes, notably San Jose State track stars Tommie Smith and Lee Evans, to discuss a possible boycott of the U.S. Olympic team, it became clear to much of the public and most of the media that Alcindor was “angry.” And so UCLA’s loss to Houston and Alcindor’s poor performance before a prime-time TV audience satisfied a lot of people politically.

  The results of the rematch did not. After UCLA’s 32-point win, Alcindor strolled out of the locker room wearing a red, orange, and yellow African robe. “It was my way,” he explained later, “of saying I’m black and here it is, man, you can take it or leave it.”

  It was months before Smith and John Carlos would commit the ultramilitant acts of wearing long black socks and hoisting black-gloved fists during the playing of “The Star-Spangled Banner” at the Mexico City Olympics; Jabbar was the first prominent college athlete to be identified as a “black militant.” And by the time Smith and Carlos joined him in the militant ranks, he had gone to a Sunnite mosque on 125th Street and asked for instruction. In late August he had had his shahada, a kind of Muslim baptism. He returned to Los Angeles for his senior year not only an angry black but also a Muslim with a name that translated roughly as “generous powerful servant of Allah”: Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.

  And then, just before his first professional season, Jabbar sold his story to Sports Illustrated. What he told confounded the expectations of a goodly chunk of America.

  His childhood had not been the mass media–produced black experience with poverty, illiteracy, unemployment, cultural deprivation, rats, roaches, and drugs as standard equipment. His father was a graduate of the Juilliard School of Music and an avid reader; Jabbar’s youth had been full of music, his home crowded with a “zillion” books. That home had not been a “ghetto” railroad flat; he was raised in a predominantly white housing project in the grassy precincts of northern Manhattan—his bedroom overlooked not a garbage-strewn alley, but the cool beauty of the Cloisters museum. His was not the stereotypical saga of endless hours working just on flashy moves, dreaming only of being a professional basketball player—he had wanted to be an architect. He had lost respect for his high school coach, who exploited his name and once used the word nigger as a motivational device. He had “more important things” on his mind than the loss that ended Power Memorial’s seventy-one-game winning streak. He had not only dated a white co-ed, he had broken off the relationship because it “wasn’t worth having both our lives wrecked by all this pressure.” His first car had been a Mercedes-Benz. He not only thought John Wooden, the “Wizard of Westwood,” made occasional mistakes in coaching, he believed Wooden’s midwestern morality constituted a personality flaw. And even with a professional contract that one reporter characterized as giving him “the entire eastern half of Wisconsin plus the Strategic Air Command” and while standing on the brink of what everybody who knew the sport admitted could be one of the most spectacular careers in the history of basketball, he was looking beyond to what he would do when he finished. “What I really want to do,” he said, “is play ten or twelve years in the NBA, see what I can do there against the big guys. Then I’ll go back to more normal things.”

  All of that was bad enough. But Jabbar admitted to the sin for which no black can be forgiven: once upon a time he hated white people.

  LATE APRIL 1982. It is a heady time if you are a Lakers fan. The team has done a number on the Western Conference of the NBA, winning its division by five games, bettering the record of the winner of the other division by nine. The team has a few days’ rest while also-rans quarrel in the preliminaries of the play-offs. The rest could be all-important. It has been a long season, and Kareem Abdul-Jabba
r has just turned thirty-five.

  That is a fact the media have been making much of. For Jabbar is at a dramatic point in his career. He has played his “ten or twelve” seasons, but he could play a few more. He may have lost a step or two, but then, he always had a step or two to give. And so his path lies somewhere in the strip of badlands that lies between “veteran player” and “too damned old,” and the vultures are gathering above him.

  To make it more dramatic, Jabbar seems to have changed, to have become willing to risk some of his austere dignity. He has appeared in a comic motion picture, Airplane, and engaged in a little good-natured one-on-one with his critics. He has clowned around for Sports Illustrated’s cameras. He has signed a contract for an autobiography. Some people say that all this Jabbarian jocularity has to do with the possibility that, after the 1982–1983 season, he may become a thirty-six-year-old free agent, in search of a team and a city, in need of all the good exposure he can get. Others say he’s mellowing with age.

  On April 16, his birthday, Lakers coach Pat Riley gives him a present and lets him sit out the last half of a meaningless game. Two days later, during the telecast of the season’s final game, broadcasters Bill Russell and Dick Stockton make note of that, and make repeated reference to Jabbar’s age. He is, they agree, still a dominant factor, which isn’t bad for a thirty-five-year-old. They mean it as a gruff masculine tribute, but to me it seems patronizing, as if he were some kind of toothless senior citizen remarkable because, despite approaching senility, he can still play the kazoo. I am a little sensitive about Jabbar’s age. We are of a generation.