We turn now to Kevin McHale and his overstay in the three-second zone. All night long Gary Briggs has been badgering Earl Strom and Mel Whitworth to call three seconds on Kevin McHale. This is one of the things trainers do best. It seems to be what they were put on this earth to do, at least once the game starts. Former Knicks trainer Danny Whelan started shrieking “Three! Three!” from the opening tap-off in a voice that could have alerted the beleaguered citizens of London to take to the shelters in 1940, had the sirens suddenly ceased to function.
This scenario is repeated every night in the NBA. At the exact moment Briggs was hollering at Strom and Whitworth to call three seconds on McHale, for example, Detroit trainer Mike Abdenour was probably screaming at Ed Middleton and Mike Laverman to call three seconds on Houston’s Akeem Olajuwon in the Pontiac Silverdome. Once the game starts, trainers do three things. They keep track of fouls, both personal and team; they keep track of timeouts; and they yell at the officials to call three-second violations on the other team’s inside people.
Referees are not deaf. They can absorb information during the course of a game, and they certainly want to get things straight. Kevin McHale does continually set up shop on the edge of the foul lane. He does stray into the forbidden three-second area on occasion, and logic dictates that if this game has progressed through thirty-three minutes and fifteen seconds of playing time it’s entirely possible McHale has been guilty of a three-second violation, at least once.
It is, furthermore, entirely possible that Mel Whitworth had decided to monitor the three-second situation a little more closely. Gary Briggs’s incessant carping on the subject was impossible to ignore. There certainly could be some validity to the charge.
The Celtics had come into possession of the basketball when Williams attempted a hook and Parish rebounded. The Celtics came upcourt at a moderate pace, and McHale went to work on the left hand side of the lane. Time, perhaps, to take John Williams back into the Torture Chamber.
He moved into the lane. Mel Whitworth was on that side of the court, standing a few feet out of bounds. Gary Briggs was there to remind him about McHale’s affinity for the real estate inside the foul lane. McHale was in there and Whitworth started his count. One thousand one—McHale is still in there—one thousand two—McHale is still in there—one thousand thr—McHale is now exiting the lane—eee. McHale is now out. This may have been a two and seven-eighths second violation. It may have been a two and nine-tenths second violation. It may have been a two and ninety-nine one-hundredths second violation. But it was not a three-second violation.
But Whitworth has decided that it is time to cite McHale. Now we know who Mel Whitworth would have voted for in 1987 had he been a member of the Academy.
Dave Kindred
He would go on to be a columnist at the Washington Post, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and The Sporting News, respected for his lapidary prose and untrimmed point of view. But a formative experience for Dave Kindred (b. 1941) came in a smaller market, during eleven years as Kentucky basketball beat reporter and then a columnist for the Louisville Courier-Journal. Even to a former point guard at Atlanta (Illinois) High School, that Bluegrass stopover revealed how deep the game could run. Every year Kindred would take two weeks to drive around the state in search of basketball stories, listening to Kentuckians like the proprietor of a general store in Letcher County who told him, “If a lump of coal ain’t Jesus Christ, basketball is.” Much of that reporting turned up in his 1976 book, Basketball: The Dream Game in Kentucky. By 2010, in semi-retirement and having found his way back to downstate Illinois, Kindred also brought his career full circle: he sat in the stands at the games of a girls’ team near his home, the Morton High Lady Potters, and faithfully posted dispatches to Facebook and the web, his compensation nothing more than a box of Milk Duds slipped to him by the coach. “It feels right,” he said. “It’s where I started, in little gyms around Illinois. It’s a game I love, and the Lady Potters play it with class, elegance, and grace.” Those three virtues show up in this 1988 column from Kindred’s big-time period, written after Pete Maravich’s death. It’s as lean and simple as the deceased was showy and complex. With his opening sentence, Kindred invites readers to see his subject. Throughout, he’s faithful to the writer’s oath to show, don’t tell. And the final sentence offers one last look at Maravich doing what he did best. All told, it’s a newsreel elegy put to the page.
Pete Maravich
JANUARY 6, 1988
YOU’D BE afraid to take your eyes off Pete Maravich. You’d be afraid that the moment you looked anywhere else, he’d do something you’d never seen before and would never see again. Creative genius works that way. The deed would spring full-blown before the thought occurred to anyone, even Maravich.
Many players moved with greater grace, Earl Monroe for one, but none moved with more purpose than Peter Press Maravich. An inelegant collection of bones, the skinny 6-foot-5 Maravich flailed his way downcourt, all elbows and knees, sharp angles rearranging themselves, that mop of hair flopping in antic rhythm to his gallop, an Ichabod Crane on the fast break, and you dared not blink.
Only Wilt Chamberlain commanded more attention on a basketball court. And even Chamberlain didn’t have the ball all the time. Maravich holds the NCAA career scoring record of 44.2 points a game. He scored more than 50 points 28 times. In a decade as a pro, he scored 25 a game. Yet he was only secondarily a shooter. Maravich was a ballhandler, nonpareil.
As if telekinesis were one of Maravich’s gifts, the basketball did his bidding. We see it spin on his fingertips. We see it move behind his back and over his shoulder. In reports of his death yesterday, we saw a film of Maravich on a fast break, the ball floating ahead of him, untouched, and what does he do? He moves his right hand around the ball, a blur he does it so quickly, making a circle around the ball until he slaps it to a man on the left wing, not so much a pass as a deflection, not a deflection as much as imagination made real.
The basketball was part of Maravich, soulmates. Five years old, he could dribble through his house blindfolded. He took the end seat at movies so he could bounce the ball in the aisle. He dribbled the ball on the street from inside a moving car. A Maravich fan called WSB radio and read a poem he’d written on Pete’s death, a line of which said, “At night he went to bed with a basketball in his hand.”
It couldn’t have been easy to be Pete Maravich. His father, Press, was a failed pro player who became a coach. After his father’s games at North Carolina State, Pete practiced alone for hours. At LSU, the father now coaching the son, Press Maravich told reporters who compared Pete to Bob Cousy, “Cousy never saw the day he had moves like Pete.”
Their obsession exacted a high price in pain. As good as Pete Maravich was, his teams were never good. Many people blamed Maravich, said he needed the ball too much, wouldn’t share it. Off the court, it was worse. His mother, an alcoholic, committed suicide. He had only basketball to comfort him, and it was no answer. Too many mornings in too many cities, Maravich woke up lost in an alcohol fog. He would come to say, “The only thing that ever mattered to me was basketball. I sold my soul to the game.”
After retiring from the NBA at age 33, a burnt-out case, Maravich began a search for himself. It took odd turns to meditation, vegetarianism, astrology. He painted a sign on a barn roof inviting extraterrestrials to capture him. In time he married and had two children. He said he met Jesus Christ. He preached alongside Billy Graham. He ran basketball camps with religion a part of the daily routine; as deep as the wounds of basketball had been, he loved the game too much to blame it for his failings.
It has been said that Maravich was a white man playing black man’s basketball. That wasn’t so. Maravich’s work was distinctly and only Maravich’s. No one, not even Cousy, ever had such hand-eye skills. And certainly no one without such skills could have dared ask that all eyes be on him all the time.
“One of these nights,” he said as a senior at LSU, “I’m going to hit
all my shots.”
A listener said, “Come on.”
“Yes, if I take 40, I’ll make 40,” Maravich said. “I don’t know when it’s going to happen—in college or where—but it’ll happen.”
Maravich redefined basketball. His genius stretched the boundaries of the acceptable. In the late ’60s only Maravich dribbled between his legs on the fast break; only Maravich threw behind-the-back passes across the court; only Maravich put up odd-angled, off-balance shots, hook shots, bank shots, shots from downtown, thrown from the shoulder, shots from the hip, “Pistol Pete” blazing away.
He died during a pickup game on a basketball court at age 40. Friends said he had become a happy man, the circle closed in peace, “and now,” to finish the Maravich fan’s poem, “he’s gone to heaven with a basketball in his hand.” The television news shows ran a film clip of that last pickup game, guys walking through the motions, laughing. The last we saw of Pete, he banked one in from 17 feet.
Alexander Wolff
Alexander Wolff (b. 1957) pushed at basketball’s boundaries with Big Game, Small World, his 2002 travelogue about the sport’s global spread, which appeared just as U.S. dominance was diminishing internationally and non-Americans were injecting new life into the NBA. Several years later, after moving to Vermont, he explored the opposite extreme, ginning up a wholly local story by founding the minor-league Vermont Frost Heaves and writing about their brief life and two ABA titles for Sports Illustrated and its fledgling website. Wolff primarily covered the colleges during thirty-six years on the SI staff, writing from NCAA title games on a tight Monday night deadline over nearly two decades. In 1989 he got a tip that legendary UCLA coach John Wooden hadn’t slept beneath the covers of his bed since the death of his wife, Nell, four years earlier. Wolff honored Wooden’s wish that the public be spared that intimate detail, and it was left to others to divulge it later. But its truth added a layer of poignancy to everything the old coach did choose to share about their marriage. “I can’t think of anything more presumptuous than suggesting someone get over the death of a spouse,” Wolff said. “But I felt I’d been drafted into the role of messenger by his former players and other coaches, who desperately wanted him engaged in the game again.” Wooden eventually did emerge from his despondency, living a strikingly public life until his death in 2010 at age 99.
The Coach and His Champion
JOHN WOODEN will not be in Seattle this weekend. Instead, the greatest basketball coach ever—the man who so completely made the Final Four his private reserve that the fans and the press and the rest of the college game couldn’t get in on the fun until he retired—will be at home, in Encino, Calif., in what is called the Valley.
He will not stay home because he is unwelcome in Seattle. Men like Bob Knight and Dean Smith have implored him to come, to grace with his presence the annual meeting of the National Association of Basketball Coaches, which is held at the Final Four. But their entreaties have been unavailing. “We need him at our convention,” says current UCLA coach Jim Harrick, who is the sixth man in 14 years to try to wear Wooden’s whistle. “He is a shining light. My wife and I have offered to take him. I hounded him so much that he finally told me to lay off. The more you badger him, the more stubborn he gets. But I can see his point. The memories would be really difficult.”
To most coaches, memories of 10 NCAA championships in 12 years, including seven in a row, would be sweet and easy. Indeed, this spring marks the 25th anniversary of Wooden’s first title, the championship won by UCLA’s tiny Hazzard-Goodrich-Erickson team, the one he likens to his first child. But beginning in 1947, when he was coaching at Indiana State, and continuing for 37 consecutive years, Wooden attended the coaches’ convention and the Final Four in the company of his late wife, Nell. At 78 he’s not about to start going alone, not now.
Nell was perennial, consensus All-Lobby. She knew the names that went with the faces, and she would whisper cues to her husband as well-wishers approached. He needed her with him, for she was as outgoing as he was reserved. A few coaches didn’t cotton to Nell’s presence, for they had left their own wives at home and knew that the usual boys-will-be-boys shenanigans would never pass unnoticed before Nell’s Irish eyes. But her husband wasn’t for an instant to be talked out of bringing her, just as today he isn’t to be talked into going without her.
So Wooden will spend college basketball’s premier weekend in much the same way he passes all his days now. The games on TV will be mere divertissements. He will take his early-morning walk, past the park, the eucalyptus trees and the preschool his great-granddaughter attends. Each evening he will speak to Nell in apostrophe before retiring. He may whisper the lines from Wordsworth that he finds so felicitous: “She lived unknown, and few could know/When Lucy ceased to be;/But she is in her grave, and, oh,/The difference to me!”
Sunday will be for church, for the long drive to Nell’s grave in Glendale and for their children, their children’s children, and their children’s children’s children. At night he will repair to the bedroom of the condominium he and Nell shared, in which virtually nothing has been altered since her death four years ago. Wooden sleeps fitfully these days, as if expecting a call. He talks often of death but does not fear it. “No fear at all, absolutely none,” he says. “I’ll confess that prior to losing Nellie I had some.”
Upon finishing his morning constitutional—a doctor prescribed it in 1972 because of heart trouble—he often will sit down in his study, underneath the pictures of the 10 national championship teams that were hung, at Nell’s suggestion, to form a pyramid, and a poem or aphorism will take shape. He remarks on how effortlessly this one flowed from him one morning:
The years have left their imprint on my hands and on my face;
Erect no longer is my walk, and slower is my pace.
But there is no fear within my heart because I’m growing old;
I only wish I had more time to better serve my Lord.
When I’ve gone to Him in prayer He’s brought me inner peace,
And soon my cares and worries and other problems cease;
He’s helped me in so many ways, He’s never let me down;
Why should I fear the future, when soon I could be near His crown?
Though I know down here my time is short, there is endless time up there,
And He will forgive and keep me ever in His loving care.
And how did you imagine John Wooden spending his later years? The mind, the values, the spring in his step—they’re all still in place. He could probably take over a misbegotten college varsity, demonstrate the reverse pivot, intone a few homilies and have the team whipped into Top 20 shape in, oh, six weeks. He continues to stage summer basketball camps in which you won’t necessarily meet famous players but you may actually learn the game. He answers his own mail, in a hand that you’ll remember from grammar school as “cursive writing.”
He books most of his own speaking engagements, although several outfits have solicited his services. Audiences rarely ask about Nell, but he tends to bring her up anyway. He usually refers to her as “my sweetheart of 60 years, my wife of 53, till I lost her.” The cards he sends to family and the checks he makes out for the children’s trusts, he signs in both their names. “That pleases Nellie,” he says.
His life is lived to that end. “I won’t ever leave here, because I see her everywhere,” he says in his—their—living room. “I miss her as much now as I ever have. It never gets easier. There are friends who would like to see me find another woman for the companionship. I wouldn’t do it. It would never work.”
He takes the morning walk in part because she insisted he take it. He has continued to participate in the camps because his share of the profits goes into the trusts, and family was so important to her. He gives the speeches, usually on his Pyramid of Success—a homespun collection of life principles—because, if you riffle back through the Norman Rockwell scenes of their life together, back to high school in Martinsville, Ind., yo
u’ll see it was Nell who persuaded taciturn Johnny Wooden to take a speech class to help him out of his shell. He struggled until the teacher, Mabel Hinds, who knew of his fondness for poetry, gave him a copy of Thomas Gray’s Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard, which made the speaking easier.
He still knows Gray’s Elegy cold, and in Martinsville in January, at a banquet on the eve of ceremonies to dedicate the 12-year-old high school gym in his name, he recited it. With all manner of acclaim being slung at him, he intoned this stanza as if raising a shield to protect himself:
The boast of heraldry, the pomp of pow’r,
And all that beauty, all that wealth e’re gave;
Awaits alike th’ inevitable hour.
The paths of glory lead but to the grave.
“And they do,” he added from the dais. “We’re all going to go someday.”
“As a coach, did you ever lose your temper?”
The postprandial question comes from the audience in Martinsville. Wooden’s answer provides a lesson about self-control: “I always told my players to control their tempers, and I couldn’t very well expect them to if I wasn’t setting a good example myself. I lost my temper once in a while. But I never lost control. I never threw anything. I never threw a chair.”
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