Several of his teammates circled around him but he stubbornly held onto the ball and finally spun for a fadeaway jump. It was amazing he got the shot off at all with thirty fingers waving in his eyes like a swarm of bees, but the ball came off the backboard sharply, we captured it and broke fast for a quick score.
Once again our triple defense contained Richie, who obstinately refused to pass off and kept trying to take it in himself. We stole the ball, brought it down, and set up a four-man alley for Timmie, who scored a honey of a layup to tie the score.
The strategy held and we battled to a 20-20 tie. The play became furious now and Richie, finally realizing his mistake, started passing off in a classical display of playmaking, but his teammates couldn’t get off a decent shot.
Then we got a break. Tatum tried a long jumper. It bounded high off the rim and into my hands. I glanced down the court and found Timmie Lee rocketing toward the basket, two steps in front of Richie. I hurled the ball with all my might and hit Timmie perfectly. He veered in under the backboard for what seemed like an easy dunk. But suddenly and inexplicably he tripped and went sprawling into the crowd.
Rubbing a bleeding knee, he came back onto the court, sputtering. “You tripped me, man.”
Richie put his hands on his hips and looked down at Timmie with open-mouthed astonishment. “I never touched you!”
Timmie smacked his palm with his fist. “You fuckin’ tripped me, man, what you talkin’ ‘bout?”
“You tripped over your own shoes, man, don’t blame me.”
Timmie turned to the crowd and appealed. “He tripped me.”
“He did, we saw it,” they yelled. “He tripped him. The motherfucker tripped him.”
“I haven’t laid a finger on you all game,” Richie said righteously.
“I don’t give a shit what you done, faggot, you fuckin’ tripped me.”
We muscled in between them before they could come to blows. The argument continued and I pulled Richie aside. “Why don’t we just take the play over?”
“No way,” he said scornfully. “He tripped and it’s our ball.”
“Come on, son, winning isn’t worth all these bad feelings.”
“I can’t help his bad feelings,” Richie replied, tearing away from my grip and walking away.
The dispute raged on and neither party would compromise. Finally I looked bleakly at Tatum and shrugged. He held up his hands in a what-are-you-gonna-do? gesture and that was that. The game ended in a bitterly controversial tie.
I felt I should say something to Timmie Lee but saw him talking to a smooth-looking black man dressed in a purple suit with a frilly shirt, broad-brimmed planter’s hat, and platform shoes. He had a consoling arm around Timmie’s shoulders and there was something in his proprietary air that made me uncomfortable, like watching a pimp strolling with his whore.
“Who’s that, Tatum?”
“That’s the cat I wanted to talk to you about, Dave. His name is Warnell Slakey and he’s bad.”
“I’ve heard that name.”
“Probably so.”
“What’s his game?”
“He calls himself a college liaison representative or some shit like that.”
I snapped my fingers. Slakey’s name had come up several times in conversations with college coaches. He was one of a host of leeches who batten on the ignorance and inexperience of ghetto kids, in this case their ambition to be basketball stars. The way he worked was first to insinuate himself into the graces of promising high school basketball players, slipping them money and doing them favors, speaking knowledgeably about college and pro sports, boasting of his intimate friendships with all the coaches, his familiarity with the deans who control scholarship money, his long list of basketball stars who had made it to college or the pros as a result of his string-pulling.
Probably 5 percent of this was true, but the kids were invariably impressed and dazzled by his sharp clothes and big new car and they’d ask him to help them get introduced to coaches or scouts. Of course he was delighted to—for a fee. One way or another, the kids would come up with the money—as often as not it was literally begged, borrowed, or stolen—and he’d then make a few phone calls. Occasionally he really did convince a scout to come around for a look at his “client,” and one thing would lead to another and the prospect would be offered a scholarship—on which Slakey would take a commission.
What the kids didn’t realize was that sooner or later scouts would come around of their own accord anyway, since this is what they’re paid to do. Or they’d follow up tips from high school coaches. If a kid was good enough, chances were he’d be funneled onto the scholarship trail without the help of the Warnell Slakeys.
If Slakey were merely a parasite that would be bad enough, but I’d heard worse about him, and Tatum confirmed it. “Motherfucker claims a commission on everything. Scouts come around to the schools, Slakey tells the kids he got him to come down and watch them play, and makes them pay him a fee. A kids gets a scholarship, Slakey may not have lifted so much as a finger for him but puts the arm on him for a cut, claiming he swung the deal.”
There was a word for it: extortion.
“How does he enforce the shakedowns?” I asked.
Tatum thrust his chin in the direction of a couple of muscular characters trailing Slakey and Timmie.
“Is Timmie into him for anything?”
“He’s borrowed some money off of him,” Tatum said, “but I don’t think things have gone any further—yet. But I’m nervous, Dave. Slakey has a way of surrounding you till you’re a captured man. And Slakey doesn’t take kindly to kids who don’t cooperate with him. He plays rough.”
“Why don’t you send Timmie around to see me?”
“I was hoping you’d say that.”
He walked over to Richie, leaning dejectedly against a fence pole. “Sorry it ended this way, kid, but don’t worry about it. These things happen. You played a helluva game. You’re gonna be everything they say.”
As they were shaking hands Timmie Lee squirmed out of the protective arm of Slakey and strode across the court to where we were standing. We all tensed, because the look in his eye was not one of brotherly love. Yet when he reached us he said to Richie, “I’m sorry, man.”
I was uncertain what he was apologizing for, but realized it wasn’t as important as the fact that he had enough guts to say he was sorry. Richie took his hand, then put his arm around him. “I’ll see you in the pros.”
We crossed Seventh Avenue and caught the downtown bus. Richie, head and arms still glistening with sweat, sat with his hands clasped and his head bowed, looking out the window pensively at Central Park as we lumbered down ll0th and turned onto Fifth Avenue. Every once in a while he would shake his head.
“Well,” I said, “what do you think, Wings?”
“Fantastic. You know, Mr. Bolt, I’d take any five of those guys and match them up with the college all-stars and give you even money. I’ll bet they could even handle a few of the poorer pro teams.”
“Probably not. They don’t have the discipline. But one-on-one, some of them are as good as half the stars in the big leagues.” I looked at Richie and got the feeling he was just making conversation. His eyes were staring far away, and I sensed he was back on the court on 130th Street, replaying the incident that had broken up the game.
“Forget about it, son. It was just one of those things.”
He gazed at me and opened and closed his mouth several times as if debating whether to say something to me. Finally he said, “You don’t think I tripped him, do you?”
“I didn’t have a clear view. But that’s not really the point anyway. The point, in my mind at least, is that you should have offered to do it over.”
“I suppose you’re right,” he said, lapsing into another long silence. He was still brooding when we got off the bus at
56th Street. We walked to his hotel on 55th and lingered under the canopy. I felt he still had something he wanted to say. When at last he came out with it, it was with a shy, almost Cupid-like grin, and he absolutely floored me. “I did trip him, you know.”
I gaped. “Hit me again, podner?”
“I tripped him.”
“But not on purpose!”
“Yes. On purpose.”
“Good sweet Jesus, boy, what’d you go and do that for?”
“I had to stop him somehow,” he replied ingenuously. “He was about to score the winning basket.”
“But...”
“I just kicked his back foot into his front one. My father taught me that.”
“But... but...” I could do nothing but stammer.
“He’d been cheap-shotting me all game long.”
I felt a surge of indignation. “What the hell has that got to do with it? A foul is a foul. If he fouled you ten thousand times and you only fouled him once, yours is still a foul.”
“I know, but—well, I’m not sure I can explain it. See, most of the time I can win on my own. I can afford . . . I can afford to be fair. I build up a reputation for fairness—establish credibility, you might say. But every once in a while, there’s a situation—like today. When that happens, I draw on my credibility and everybody believes me.” He grinned like a child.
“You mean, you build up cheating credits?”
A hurt look came into his eyes. “I call them honesty credits.” He shrugged. “Everybody does it to some extent.”
“True, true. I just didn’t think you needed to, what with your gifts. I also didn’t realize how badly you need to win.”
“I’ve got to win,” he said, and I thought I detected a cloud of little-boy fright pass across his face. I wondered at what point in his childhood triumph had become imperative. For some reason I thought of his father.
Suddenly, and inexplicably, I laughed.
“What’s so funny?”
It came to me. “Oh, I guess I’m relieved to know you’re not a 100-percent saint.” He smiled with me, a kind of Bambi smile that made him all the more likeable. I put my hand on his shoulder and thumped it. He wasn’t the genuine article after all.
But he sure as shit was the closest thing to it.
Chapter III
I only had to cool my heels for a minute in Niles Lauritzen’s anteroom before Connie gave me the nod, but it was a minute richly spent contemplating the nape of Connie’s neck and assembling my thoughts for the meeting with her boss, the commissioner of the American Basketball Association.
Interestingly, I knew Connie’s neck a lot more intimately than I knew her boss. It’s an unwritten policy of mine to make friends with the secretaries of VIP’s because secretaries hold the keys to such vital information as whether the boss is really down the hall taking a leak or actually avoiding speaking to you, or who he has in the conference room and how long they’ve been in there, or what’s in the letter she just put in the mail to you. I don’t always take them to bed, of course, even when they want to be taken, but in Connie’s case it had been the natural outcome of a rather steamy party thrown for Howard Cosell at the Playboy Club. Short and compact, redheaded and introverted, Connie could never have passed for a Playboy bunny; but in bed she was every keyholder’s fantasy come true, and we carried on like goats for a couple of weeks before a long business trip put a natural punctuation to the affair. We had remained flirting friends, and now she was going with my best friend, Roy Lescade, a sportswriter for the New York Post.
The meeting with Lauritzen was not as pleasurable to think about, filled as it was with vast uncertainties, but it promised, ultimately, far greater rewards. I had met the commissioner on several social occasions and we’d hobnobbed amicably, but we’d had no real dealings, and why should we have had? My business, essentially, was with the owners, not the league. And even at that moment, in the case of Richie Sadler, the logical thing would have been to approach not the commissioner but Stanley Vreel, owner of the ABA’s Boston Bombers. But the stakes were not of the variety that dictated a logical approach; indeed, I was about to venture into a terra incognita whose topography defied logic. The only thing I had to guide me was the history of insanity in the negotiations over basketball stars’ salaries in the last ten years.
I was determined to be perfectly insane.
With an ironically courteous nod to Connie, I shouldered open the door to Lauritzen’s office and stepped into his intimidatingly spacious inner sanctum. It was decorated entirely in golds and reds, with ochre carpeting and tooled crimson leather seats, plush window hangings embroidered with fleurs-de-lis, and scrolled ormolu on everything but his Stenorette. Even the specially commissioned paintings of basketball scenes by Morton Kalish were done in reds and golds to fit in with the appointments. I felt like a clashing intrusion in my blue blazer, and I ruminated that such discomfort might be deliberately planned by the commissioner to keep visitors off-balance. Lending credence to this notion, the commissioner himself was attired in a suit and tie so perfectly coordinated with the decor that it was hard to believe he hadn’t brought a swatch of his carpet to his tailor.
I always felt a little odd in the presence of the commissioner anyway, simply because he was not the man you’d expect to find standing at the helm of a basketball federation. For one thing, he didn’t give the impression he’d ever played the game. He couldn’t have been more than 6-feet tall, was rather portly, and had the kind of doughy face you’d expect on a bank manager or shoe salesman. He also liked the distillate of corn mash more than a man in his position should, though he held his liquor well—and where I come from that’s considered a higher virtue than patriotism. Nonetheless, despite appearances he’d been an All-American at St. John’s and put in a couple of high-scoring years in the 1930s with the New York Celtics before drifting into college coaching, front-office work, a public relations position with the NBA, and, ultimately, “czar” of the ABA. And also despite appearances, he was a damn good czar, too. In the four years of his administration he’d managed to accomplish many things his predecessors had been unable to do, such as the imposition of the tightest clamp on pill-popping of any professional sport going. For that alone you had to take your hat off to him.
“Hello Dave,” he said, shaking my hand warmly and escorting me over to a gold-inlaid mahogany liquor cart.
“I think I’ll pass if it’s all right with you, sir.”
He looked offended for a moment, then clapped a hand to his forehead. “Oh hell, I forgot,” he said, looking embarrassed.
This was a reference to a segment of my life I’d just as soon forget, a two-year bat after my injury-forced retirement from football that is still, when I close my eyes and try to recall it, just a funky alcoholic haze filled with the blurry images of a wife and daughter and home and career all swept away in a river of bourbon.
“That’s all right,” I said. “It’s just that at 10 in the morning, coffee has infinitely more appeal to me.”
He buzzed Connie and ordered coffee for both of us. While we waited, Lauritzen asked, “Do you still like to be called ‘Lightning’?”
I shrugged. “I lost the nickname when I got out of football, but it seems to pop up now and then. I’m content with ‘Dave.’”
“I also remember when they called you ‘Sleeper.’”
I grinned. “That goes back some, to Fort Worth High. They dubbed me that because I was always surprising the opposition. I was just a shrimp then, but I could burn ‘em. I’d have kept the name too, but after graduation I started growing again, mostly in the arms and legs department. By the time I got to college there wasn’t any way I could pass for a sleeper.”
Connie brought in a silver coffee service. It flashed so brightly I had difficulty making out the rosy swells of her breasts as she stooped over in her low-cut blouse and placed the tray on
the coffee table.
“Of course,” I said, stirring a spoonful of sugar into my cup and looking meaningfully at Lauritzen, “I’m still something of a sleeper in a few ways.”
“So I’ve been told.”
That got my curiosity up. “People think I’m worth talking about, do they?”
“Don’t sell yourself short. You’re considered one of the better agents in the field, Dave. The only person you don’t promote aggressively enough is yourself.”
“I come from plains settlers, Mr. Lauritzen. High visibility was considered bad form. Folks that stuck their heads up too high usually caught a Comanche arrow in the eye. My daddy told me to keep my head down and my pecker up—and that seems to have carried me through life pretty well.”
The commissioner brushed a silver sideburn with his index finger. “How does that apply to Richie Sadler’s career?”
“Ah, you know what I’m here for, then?”
“It wasn’t hard to guess. You were seen at Maxwell’s Plum with Richie on Friday night—or don’t you read Earl Wilson’s column? —and you call me first thing Monday morning to make an appointment with me second thing Monday morning. My only question is, what do you want with me? Your business is with Stanley Vreel up in Boston. He drafted Richie and it’s his money, if he wants to spend it.”
“No, you’re my main man, sir. It’s all going to come back to you anyway, because the price I’m asking can’t possibly be met by one club. In fact, I’m not sure it can be met by one nation.”
He smiled nervously. “But Richie does want to go with the ABA?”
“Naturally, I’m going to have to sound the NBA out too, and if they offer a billion dollars I suppose I’ll have to consider it. But Richie really does want to go with the ABA if you can meet his terms.”
His nervous smile became a nervous laugh. “Well at least I know you’re asking less than a billion dollars.”
He sipped his coffee silently and appeared to have sent his mind down the road a mile or two to guess what I was going to ask and how he was going to react. Then he dabbed at his mouth with a delicate linen napkin and said, “It would be silly for me to deny that the ABA wants Richie Sadler and wants him very badly. I think he could open the door to big television money, and beyond that, to merger. It would also be foolish for me to tell you we’re not prepared to subsidize his purchase by the Boston Bombers. But you have to understand that the league is not fundamentally a bank, and certainly not a gold mine. To subsidize any deal with Richie Sadler, I have to assess the other ABA owners, and they’ve been squeezed hard already by some other player acquisitions. So ...”
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