$3 Million Turnover

by Richard Curtis

  It’s my speculation, therefore, that one-drop of blood out of every 32 that courses through my veins is not Caucasian. Which may account for a lot of otherwise inexplicable things about me, such as how I’m able to be on scandalously chummy terms with black people.

  The maitre d’ led us to a big table by the railing separating the balconied dining area from the bar, and while we waited for our guests we indulged in daydreams about what it would be like to land Richie Sadler as a client. Some of these were pretty fantastic, yet when we thought about them some more they seemed perfectly capable of realization. For Richie Sadler was potentially a pivotal—no pun intended—figure in modern basketball history. Some said he held the key to its future, and that key was worth millions.

  From the birth in 1967 of the American Basketball Association in rivalry with the “establishment” National Basketball Association the two leagues had been conducting a costly and sometimes vicious salary war. Ethics, such as they were, went completely down the crapper as owners flaunted eligibility rules, conducted illegal drafts, and stole, seduced, bought, and all but shanghaied each other’s stars. Veteran players jumped leagues and hot collegiate prospects finessed astronomical bonuses and salaries. High school and even pre-high school kids were wined and dined five or even ten years ahead of eligibility, and whenever they shook hands with a pro scout they always seemed to come away with money stuck mysteriously to their palms.

  Merger had been proposed as a solution, the owners generally favoring it because it would deflate salaries and kill the price war, the players opposing it for the same reason. The question of merger also foundered on the shoals of prestige: the NBA didn’t feel the ABA was good enough. And big television money backed up NBA’s snobbery. The NBA had a network contract, the ABA did not, and that really hurt.

  Everybody agreed, therefore, that it would probably take a superstar, the basketball equivalent of a Joe Namath, to make a merger feasible. It had almost happened in 1969, when Lew Alcindor was drafted by the teams with the poorest records in both the NBA and ABA, the Milwaukee Bucks and the New York Nets respectively. Alcindor restricted the bidding to one offer each and actually hoped the Nets would get him because he loved New York. But the Bucks came through with the higher bid, $1.4 million, and merger talk immediately faded. But a few years later it began building to a crescendo again, with superstars like Julius Erring ramrodding ABA teams that were every bit as good as anything the NBA could field. By the time Richie Sadler came along, merger fever was once more in the air.

  I forgave myself for letting my imagination carry me away.

  At about 7:40 a collective gasp from the “plummies” crowded around the bar heralded the arrival of my would-be meal ticket. His murmured name rippled through the restaurant as the giant was quickly identified. I must say I was as awed as anybody in the room. It’s one thing to see a basketball player on the court with other basketball players; it’s quite another to see him lumber into an environment populated by mere mortals. I’ve been out to dinner with some pretty lofty men. Among my clients are four basketball players 6-foot-6 or bigger, and several football behemoths easily mistakable for Reo tractor-trailers. But Richie had a dimension all his own, and as he approached our table, trailed by his parents and sister, I knew what the Titanic’s captain must have felt when a certain iceberg loomed over his beam.

  Richie’s retinue was no collection of midgets by any means. Richie’s father, himself a former collegiate basketball player of some note, was well above 6-feet tall, though a substantial paunch detracted from the overall impression. The mother, a floridly dressed, brassy-looking broad with Midwest Nouveau Riche stamped across her hard face, was close to 6-feet tall herself. Sis was the shortest of the lot at about 5-9. She was also the biggest surprise. For some reason, I’d expected the traditional pigtailed kid sister, but she was older than Richie by, I’d say, three or four years. More significantly, she was a very attractive young lady. She wore a modest but tasteful linen pantsuit with a ruffled blouse, but it couldn’t conceal a willowy figure that seemed to drift over the carpet as if shock absorbers were implanted in her joints. Her face was oval with high cheekbones. Her hair was dark, her eyes green and observant. Unfortunately, the mouth spoiled it, not because it wasn’t pretty but because it was puckered in a resentful pout. She looked like a girl with a chip on her shoulder.

  All eyes focused on me as I stood to welcome the Sadler’s. We shook hands and made our introductions and, with some difficulty, settled into our seats. Seating Richie Sadler, to use another maritime simile, is like berthing an ocean liner. Either his knees lift the table clear off the floor or his outstretched feet create major disruptions within a five-foot radius. But after a minute or two of musical ankles, we finally got settled. Predictably, some jerk, a leering, flower-shirted dude in his forties who should have known better, sidled up to the railing and asked the inevitable: “How’s the weather up there, Wings?”

  Trish, God bless her, dipped her fingers into her water and flicked a spray of droplets into the guy’s face. “Inclement, you little schmuck,” she snapped. The place dissolved in laughter as he skulked back to the bar.

  “I told you she was a charmer,” Davis Sadler beamed at his family. He studied Trish in a distinctly unfatherly way.

  I took drink orders with my usual urbanity while sizing the Sadler clan up out of the corner of my eye.

  Davis and Bea Sadler looked like typical well-to-do Midwesterners on the surface, open-faced, friendly, a little loud and vulgar, bewildered and flattered by the prodigious attention bestowed on them ever since Richie’s genetic messengers had fucked up an order to stop his growth at 6-1. I guess you could describe the Sadler’s as Babbitt’s. But then the Babbitt’s, if I recollect my Sinclair Lewis rightly, were no simps, and like their literary counterparts these two had shrewd, hawk-like eyes, the eyes of opportunists, and between happy-go-lucky twinkles they examined me with clinical severity. I reminded myself that I was not there to entertain, whatever I reported officially to the Internal Revenue Service, and though I laughed a lot and loudly I kept my guard high against probing jabs that might catch me flatfooted.

  Richie was one of those kids you like right off the bat, a tousle-haired titan with soft friendly eyes and a voice and manner that proclaimed sincerity with every word and gesture. He seemed (and in the next couple of hours would prove) to be courteous, modest, well-spoken, and intelligent. He confirmed everything I had read and heard about him, and in the previous few hours I had read and heard a great deal.

  Immediately after his father phoned I’d done some crash research on Richie. I didn’t merely want facts and statistics but color, so I could formulate a three-dimensional picture of his personality and know what breed of cat I was dealing with. What emerged sounded approximately like a page out of Lives of the Saints. If I had what he had, I’d have become more egocentric than Caligula. He attracted money and power like a bull does heifers in season, and where there’s that much money and power you’ll always see greed and corruption billowing around it. Yet he had not been tainted. While he was still in high school some three hundred colleges had offered him every inducement you can name: scholarships, loans, cars, broads, even boats and airplanes. But he had walked away from all of them. At length he chose to go to Illinois, his father’s alma mater. “I like its academic and athletic tradition,” Sport quoted him as saying, “and I feel a strong loyalty to the state I was born and raised in.” The article went on to catalogue Richie’s virtues, which included but were not limited to humility, maturity, fairness, patriotism, and piety.

  The title of the Sport piece was, “Is This Kid for Real?”

  That was the question I’d asked Lonnie Seaforth when I phoned him in Cleveland to thank him for the recommendation and asked him what he thought of Richie. “Oh yes, he’s for real, Dave. As upright as an oak and slightly taller.”

  “Come on, Lonnie. Surely somewhere along the w
ay he accepted a dime for a phone call?”

  “Uh-uh.”

  “A car? A motorcycle? A trike?”

  “Nope.”

  “A little stinky-pinky with some homecoming queen?”

  “Dave, you don’t understand: the kid has all that. His father’s regional director of an insurance company and pulls down close to six figures. Richie wants a car, Richie gets a car. Richie wants a motorboat, Richie gets a motorboat. Scholarships? What does he need them for? He’s got the brains to make any college he wants on his own hook—and his old man has the tuition. He sends scholarship offers back saying they should go to the kids who really need them. And girls? Baby, he just has to wrinkle his nose and he has twenty pussies presenting to him! Look, man, Richie isn’t some poor, ignorant ghetto cat who goes berserk when he lays his hands on some big league bread. We’re talking about an upper-middle-class WASP with every privilege a kid could want.”

  I shook my head in disbelief. “Surely he must have a flaw or a problem or a vice or something, Lonnie. I mean, even the Messiah had a few hang-ups.”

  My client paused and thought about it. “Well, Richie does have one serious problem.”

  “Aha! What’s that?”

  “He only hits 82 percent of his free throws.”

  “I knew he was too good to be true,” I grinned. Then I fingered a New York Daily News clipping that had provoked my curiosity. “What about this Kentucky thing?”

  “You mean The Non-Game of the Decade? Oh, God,” Lonnie moaned, “You’re not going to bring that up.”

  “It sounded pretty fantastic to me,” I admitted.

  “Fantastic? The News is lucky Richie didn’t sue them off the face of the planet.”

  I looked at the clipping again. It was an item by a writer named Harry Leggett whose articles were no more inaccurate than those of most other sportswriters, which is to say it was a mélange of rumors, guesses, hunches, hopes, dreams, inventions, and occasionally, a correctly spelled name.

  It was about last winter’s NCAA tournament final, and as bizarre a mismatch as you’re ever likely to see. Richie’s Illini deserved to be there, of course, but the Kentucky Wildcats had reached the final rung on the wings of incredible luck. One of their opponents simply came out shooting cold, another was smitten with the flu, the next lost its star forward when he cracked a wrist bone slipping in his bathtub, etc. But alas, the Cinderella story seemed to be about to come to a shattering halt the night of the final. The Illini was healthy, up for the game, and, if their warmup was any indication, a lead-pipe cinch to make off with the title by at least twenty points. The official point spread, determined by The Greek in Vegas, was fifteen. And guess what? Illinois creamed Kentucky, 88-51. Forty-eight of the winning points were scored by Richie Sadler.

  No surprise, right? Well, it seems that a gambler named Manny Ricci had put up a ton of money, much of it belonging to an underworld syndicate, on Kentucky, taking the 15-point spread. And he had lost every last red cent. Thereupon he howled that he’d “gotten” to Richie Sadler and Richie was, for a consideration, supposed to shave points and keep the spread below 15. Richie had, in other words, double-crossed him.

  “Don’t you see?” Lonnie said. “Ricci lost his huge bundle and needed a reason, any reason, why the mob shouldn’t cut his heart out with a dull instrument, such as the heel of a shoe with a foot still in it. So Ricci invented this . . . this breathtakingly terrible story about Richie Sadler. I guarantee you, the only reason Ricci is still alive is he’s probably sworn to make the money good to his boss. As soon as he does, you’ll read about a ‘gangland fashion slaying’ with Ricci turning up one part at a time on the Hackensack Meadows. Let me tell you something, Dave. We become so cynical, we don’t recognize the genuine article when it turns up.”

  “Genuine article?”

  “A good person, a decent human being. Richie Sadler is such a one. Treat him like one.”

  “I haven’t got him yet.”

  “I think you will. You’re a genuine article yourself.”

  “That’s kind of you, Lonnie. What do you want?”

  “Brut is looking for a basketball star to do a commercial. Can you get me a whaddyacallit, an audition?”

  “Sure,” I laughed.

  “I never claimed to be the genuine article,” Lonnie said.

  The only Sadler who gave me a fuzzy reading was the sister, Sondra. What was behind that frown on her lips, and why did those heartbreaking green eyes appraise me so suspiciously? I had to find out before I blundered into some fatal error of diplomacy.

  “And what do you think of all this brouhaha over your brother?” I asked her.

  “You really want to know?”

  “I don’t ask questions capriciously,” I said.

  “I haven’t heard you ask any other way,” she replied.

  I must have been an interesting sight, sitting there with this silly-ass grin frozen on my face.

  Trish came to my rescue. Poking a cautionary toe into my shinbone, she said, “Oh, Mr. Bolt is simply in his ‘charming host’ bag tonight, Sondra. Deep down, he’s a man who doesn’t ask questions capriciously.” That cracked the girl’s frown slightly, and Trish followed up with, “You think this whole thing’s a drag, don’t you?”

  “You don’t know what we’ve been through with these agents, all day, all night—byechh.” She actually shuddered. She looked at me with open hostility, and of course now I had her pegged. She obviously pictured herself as the one sane head in the family, the bearer of the torah of common sense in a world that had lost its head over her brother. This was Richie’s protectress, his shield against corruption. And in her eyes, I was just as big a carrier of the contagion as every other agent she’d met.

  Trish looked at Sondra sincerely and said, “You don’t have any reason to believe this, but I want you to know Dave Bolt is not One of the byechhy agents.”

  I looked at Trish and said, “That’s one of the nicest things anybody’s ever said about me. I’m going to have it chiseled on my tombstone.”

  I caught Sondra smiling out of the corner of my eye and breathed easier. The first squall had passed, my boat had been rocked, but it hadn’t shipped much water.

  I ordered dinner and did my best not to flinch when the Sadlers asked for lobsters. Now, lobsters are so expensive these days that most restaurants are afraid to list the prices. I’d been reading the menu from right to left starting with the prices, but then decided what the hell, if I got Richie Sadler for a client, I’d buy the whole lobster industry and as much of the Atlantic Ocean as was necessary to sustain it. “Lobsters all around,” I said with an artless flourish to the headwaiter. “And a couple of bottles of Piper-Heidseck, preferably 1967.”

  Over appetizers we passed the time of day with gossip. Few basketball personalities, agents, owners, salaries, and scandals were left unturned. I don’t believe I scored too badly in this preliminary. Dinner was served and I kept conversation light, being of the school that says business is best conducted on a full stomach. Trish was wonderful, gabbing about the comparative merits of Bloomingdale’s and Bonwit’s and Bendel’s, and finally offering to take the two women shopping the following day. I was pretty wonderful myself, telling some naughty anecdotes about my days as a Dallas Cowboy, and even managing to elicit some honest-to-goodness laughter from Sondra.

  All this time I was inching up on The Big Question and taking further readings of wind direction and velocity. By dessert time it was clear it was blowing strongly out of Davis Sadler’s seat. It seemed that every time I asked Richie a question of any importance, his father answered for him. Richie appeared to accept this situation complacently enough, and so more and more I found myself addressing his father. Sadler had slowly dropped the Babbitt routine and revealed himself to be an ambitious, calculating man guided—I might almost say driven—by a single-minded vision of his son as
the quintessential basketball hero, the archetype by which all players past, present, and future would be measured; in short, the All-Time Greatest. It was kind of scary, how much he wanted for the boy. It was easy to see why so many other agents had fallen short of the mark, they’d only promised him the moon, and that wasn’t good enough. My problem was, I couldn’t make promises, except promises to try.

  Dessert came, then coffee, and then we went onto after-dinner drinks and I wondered if we were ever going to get around to what we were all there for. But at last Sadler nudged the ash out of the Upmann I’d given him—I keep a small cache of contraband Cuban cigars for just such occasions—and said, “Well, Bolt what do you think?”

  “Think?”

  “About Richie? About what’s the best thing to do?”

  It was a straightforward enough question, but ringed with more traps than the 17th hole at Pebble Beach. If I blithely proposed the wrong best thing to do I could end up with six buttery lobster bibs and no client. “It depends on how Richie feels about it,” I said evasively. “Let’s review his options. He’s been drafted by the Boston Bombers of the ABA and the Newark Nationals of the NBA. They were both terrible last year, but of course that was their first year as expansion teams. Whichever Richie plays for, he’s going to turn it around.”

  “Like Kareem turned the Milwaukee Bucks around,” Trish said. In his rookie year Lew Alcindor, now Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, took a team that had won only 27 games the year before and led them to 56 wins and second place in the Eastern division of the NBA.

  Richie looked appreciatively at Trish, then shrugged. “I kind of prefer Boston to Newark. Even though Newark is closer to New York, Boston is much more beautiful and has so many cultural advantages.”

  “Don’t forget,” I said, “you don’t have to play for either. If you wanted to play for another team, it wouldn’t be hard for me to arrange for you to be traded.”

  I looked at Richie’s father. He wore an impatient expression. “It’s not the team, it’s the league that counts, and I’d like to see him go with the ABA if we can get a good price.” He puffed on his cigar, wreathed himself in blue smoke, and looked up at Maxwell’s stunning stained-glass ceiling. “Wouldn’t it be something if the leagues merged because of my son.”