No Heavy Lifting

by Rob Simpson

  “Shhhh!” was his quick response.

  “What are you doing?” another reporter asked me, leaning backwards.

  I had no idea, frankly. But I suddenly realized these reporters were already busy. Chicago head coach Jerry Sloan was addressing the media and answering questions in front of the closed door. I fumbled for my microphone and hit Record and Pause on my tape recorder. I then slid around the coach’s left side and put my mic under his face.

  I tried to listen intently but was simply too caught up in the scene. Shortly, one by one, the reporters began to drop off. They had heard all they needed to hear and began to move on. A few went through the door behind the coach and into the Bulls dressing room. I stayed until just three other reporters were left. Then I bolted, to avoid having an accidental one-on-one situation with Jerry Sloan. I wasn’t ready for that, and I had nothing to ask.

  I pulled open the locker room door and almost collided head-on with a fast-moving trainer who was cruising out in a hurry. I spun around and tried to gather my senses. The visitors locker room was like a high-school locker room, with simple cage lockers and tile flooring. However, unlike my high-school locker room, the players here were mostly big, black, and naked. I could hear the showers through an opening at the far end of the room. Players came in and out carrying or wearing towels. Media types clustered around in small groups. The players calmly answered questions as they put on their clothes or packed small gym bags or toiletry bags.

  I thought I recognized Reggie Theus. Then I thought I recognized David Greenwood. A group of reporters stooped over him.

  “Yeah, that’s David Greenwood,” I said under my breath. I’ll go join them, I thought.

  In a nervous fog, I took about two steps and tripped. I stumbled forward and barely held on to my tape recorder. Still attached, the microphone and its cord slipped out of my hand and hit the floor. Just as I gathered myself, I stumbled a second time. I reached out and touched the floor with my left hand to stop a headfirst plunge.

  In an instant, I reeled the cord in hand over hand, cradled my equipment, gathered my senses, and stood upright. Immediately, I looked down to my right and realized what had happened.

  I had tripped over Artis Gilmore. Actually, I kicked him as I tripped over him. Twice.

  Gilmore growled at me.

  Yes, Artis Gilmore, maybe the biggest, meanest, most physical centre in the NBA in his era, growled at me. He was seven-foot-two and weighed 265 pounds; he sported a big afro, a Fu Manchu moustache-and-beard combo that connected to his sideburns. He was sitting on the floor with his back against a locker, legs fully extended, with large ice packs strapped to both knees. He was huge, nasty looking, and in pain. His legs seemed to stretch halfway across the room.

  Meanwhile, I was in full Barney-Fife-who-just-saw-a-ghost mode.

  “Hubbada, hubbada, hub-bah, bah, bah.” It was the only time in my life I actually swallowed my voice. I thought he was going to eat me, or at least just crush my skull. I squeaked out a “sorry.” He stared at me for a few more excruciating seconds and then looked back down at his knees and adjusted his legs. Now his knees and his ankles hurt.

  Moments later, the stress of the situation rushed me. I sort of blacked out on my feet. I was standing in a room holding a tape recorder and microphone, mentally spinning in circles. I had no support. It was me, a fifteen-year-old suburban white boy, the media, and a dozen professional athletes.

  What seemed like an eternity probably lasted only five seconds. That’s when I realized that only Artis and I had been involved in the incident. As preoccupied as I was with my awkwardness, no one else was paying the slightest bit of attention. At least that’s how it seemed.

  “Simmer” at age seventeen, sitting in the Andover High School radio station.

  My next move — what else — interview Artis. I cautiously moved over to him and leaned over. “Can I ask you something?”

  He grunted, “Yeah.” I asked him two or three questions, he gave me relatively brief answers, and I wished him good luck. I then carefully stepped around Artis and made a beeline for the locker room door.

  I stumbled out into the corridor and decided to take a quick little breather in the press room. I wandered in, moved my little brown bag out of the way, and sat down in a cage locker for a moment. That’s when I made a startling discovery.

  The Jerry Sloan and Artis Gilmore comments were lost forever. I never recorded them. I never released the pause button.

  After a couple of deep breaths, I moved on. I made my way back into the tunnel and down towards the Pistons locker room. When I took a right into the recessed entry way, the door was closed.

  Obviously, everyone who needed or wanted to go in had done so. At this point, I wasn’t positive that I had free rein, nor did I have the confidence to wander in, despite the “backstage pass” that dangled above my crotch. After an uncomfortable moment, a security guard stepped over and saved me. It was the same guy who sat just behind the Pistons bench and kept an eye on the crowd during the games.

  “What’s up?” he smiled and asked.

  “Just hangin’ out for a moment,” I said, shuffling awkwardly. “I was just in the Bulls locker room and . . .”

  “You can go in. It’s wide open now,” he said, gesturing to the door.

  “Yeah, thanks.” I paused for a moment as if to suggest I knew that already and then made a move for the locker room.

  For the second time that evening, just as I reached a door, someone else came rushing through it. This time, instead of a Bulls trainer, it was a Pistons public relations assistant. The door crunched into my shoulder with a dull thud and then continued into my hand and my plastic tape recorder.

  As I grunted, more startled than pained, the tape recorder fell three feet to the concrete below.

  Oh no, I thought, as I watched it fall in what seemed like slow motion. Of course, it didn’t land flat on its back or on its side; it hit the ground on an angle, right on the corner by the battery compartment.

  Crack! The compartment lid popped off and four C-sized batteries came bouncing out. Two stayed close, one did three flips toward the middle of the tunnel, and the last one rolled downhill in a hurry. The security guard stopped the bouncing battery with his foot. The other renegade picked up speed as it left the locker room entryway, took a right-hand turn, and headed down the tunnel towards the big door. The big door was open. If the battery kept its momentum, it could roll twenty yards to the end of the courtside stands.

  Meanwhile, the PR guy who had rocked my world continued on his way up the tunnel after a brief “sorry.”

  After scooping up the recorder, the compartment lid, and the batteries nearby, the pursuit began. The security guard handed me battery number three as I bent over to keep an eye on the runaway. A few players’ friends and relatives milling around inside the tunnel chuckled. As I cradled what I had collected, I took a step out into the tunnel and noticed the runaway battery turning a left partway down the slope. After a fifteen-yard roll, it came to rest at the feet of four very well-dressed African-American women, after caroming off one of their shoes. They didn’t notice the Rayovac and continued chatting.

  “Excuse me,” I said, red-faced as I reached down between the collection of legs.

  “No, excuse me, honey,” one said with a smile as I picked up the bastard battery. The group laughed together.

  Never to this point in my life, despite some pretty solid efforts, had I ever felt like such a dork. I put the tape recorder back together and walked past the security guard into the Pistons locker room.

  “Watch out,” he said smiling.

  Relief replaced apprehension as I finally entered.

  What a difference being the home team makes. The visitors not only had to travel and play in front of a hostile crowd, but their locker room was a joke compared to the home team’s. While the visitor
s made do with simple basics, the Pistons locker room was beyond comfortable, with a carpeted hallway beginning just inside the door. As I walked ahead, I passed a coach’s room on the right and then a training room. Longtime trainer Mike Abdenour was rubbing the legs of a player who was laid out on a table. The media could see what went on in there, who was getting taped or iced, but like in the other major sports, the training area was definitely off limits. After another ten steps, I stood in the players’ locker area. It opened to the right: twelve tall lockers, with name plaques above and plush carpet below. Music thumped from speakers in the ceiling. Every Pistons interview would have accompanying music in the background. Bump, thump, bump.

  The Pistons appeared dejected after the loss. A few sat on stools and answered questions, a few dressed, while a couple of stragglers wandered out of a door from the showers. This night, twelve players and maybe eight members of the press, including Eric, half-filled the room. Again, the lowly Pistons weren’t exactly Detroit’s number-one draw. Their season included separate losing streaks of seven, eight, thirteen, and fourteen games. The last streak closed out the season, finishing a larger, miserable run that saw them lose thirty-one of their last thirty-four games. They finished sixteen and sixty-six. And you wondered why high-school kids were getting press passes.

  I spotted Eric interviewing John Long, a local favourite who played college ball at the University of Detroit, as did his Pistons teammates Terry Duerod and Terry Tyler.

  Eric shifted his weight a lot, and his extended microphone hand shook. Long appeared pained, and he finished his answers quickly. Eric thanked him, shut off his recorder, turned, saw me, smiled, and bobbed his way over.

  “Howsh it goin’?” he slobbered.

  “Just fabulous, how about you?”

  “Good.” A big smile came across Eric’s face as he brought his head close to mine. “Pwetty cool, huh? Huh? Look at dis.” Eric gestured to the rest of the room. “The NBA man, you know? Pwetty cool?”

  “Definitely,” I answered. Eric was bugging me, but he was right. It was pretty cool. To this point, despite some moments of extreme angst, it was a (potentially) once-in-a-lifetime experience. I scanned the room, took it all in, and then suggested scramming. “Are you done, wrapped up?”

  “Hmm, yeah. Let’s go,” he answered.

  I followed Eric to the locker room door.

  “So, when’s our next game?” I asked hopefully on the way out.

  Eric smiled and kept on walking.

  ~

  Eric Forest is a customer care manager for American Airlines at JFK. He’s bilingual, French and English, and his “impediment” when we were in high school was actually just an accent. If only the rest of us knew how fortunate he was to fluently speak two languages, but we were teenagers, pretty much jock brains, and it was 1980.

  THE GAMBLER

  “Gambling is a disease of barbarians superficially civilized.”

  Late English author Dean Inge

  I paid my bookie Lon about $110,000 in losses over a ten-year period. In year eleven, when I went up eight grand, he never paid me. He still hasn’t. That’s when I quit. It was 2006.

  During that decade, I did what many who gamble on sports do — let’s face it, there’s plenty of us; illegal sports betting in the United States has been estimated to do hundreds of billions of dollars in annual business — I screamed at football officials on the television; I constantly went back and forth to my computer or phone checking scores, whether I was out to dinner, walking the dog, or home watching TV; and I rearranged my financial life so that I could pay off my losses.

  Annually flushing ten grand down the toilet takes its toll, especially during a period when I was making only between forty and 110K a year. Of course, with all the other costs of life — house, car, wife, kid, taxes — it didn’t make a whole lot of sense. But I was compulsive.

  I wouldn’t refer to myself as an addict. I could go periods of time without making bets, skip parts of seasons, but being what my recent ex-girlfriend refers to as a lifelong jock comes with its disadvantages. We often hear about the dilemma professional athletes go through when they have to retire from their game — the struggle to adjust to a different life. Well, what about amateur athletes, those of us who played soccer, hockey, baseball, and/or pick-up basketball their whole lives and are no less mentally competitive than any pro athlete? One part of the urge to gamble is an extension of the competition, the need to win. The rest was the adrenaline rush of actually winning and, of course, the thought of cashing in.

  The losing cost me a couple of investments and a ton of unnecessary stress. The winning is what galled me to quit. The scumbag I had paid faithfully all those years decided in the end, once the amount got a bit too large, that he wasn’t going to honour his commitment back. More accurately, he kept my winnings from the Costa Rican service he worked with for himself. Apparently, he was spending my money to bet on the horses in San Diego.

  See, if I lost, I’d send him the money, he’d take his cut, and then send the rest to the big boys offshore. If I won, he was supposed to forward the money to me. He took his cut all those years, and when it came time to pass along a significant win, he pocketed it instead. He was the go-between; the actual bets were made on an 800-number. Many of you know exactly what I’m talking about. Obviously, the percentages and arrangements between a bookie and a service can vary.

  I quit while I worked covering the Boston Bruins on TV. In my virtuous good-sportsmanship mind, I refused to bet on any Bruins game; I felt it wouldn’t be sporting. But I did bet on NHL games, and I killed it. Once I decided to bet on hockey, I was nailing three-team or four-team parlays on an every-other-day or every-third-day basis. It was ridiculous. And at the end, I was throwing down and often making $200 to $400 on my straight-ups.

  (In a parlay, instead of making just a straight up bet, as in Detroit over Chicago, you make three, four, or more picks all on one bet, and you have to get them all correct. Being that it’s more difficult to predict multiple outcomes instead of just one, your odds and your payout go up accordingly. So instead of winning twenty bucks on twenty bucks in a straight up bet, in a three-team parlay I’d risk twenty dollars to win a six-to-one return, as in $120. It’s bad for the bookie when a very confident gambler starts routinely winning ten-to-one four-team parlays when they’re betting $100 a click.)

  By the way, a gambler who wagers big money, thousands and tens of thousands of dollars, and mostly loses, is known as “a whale.” Bookies adore them and have no problem accepting their money, life savings or not. But then again, that applies to losers from any socio-economic status, bookies and casinos are very, very, happy to take your money.

  When I didn’t get paid for those winnings, I finally said enough was enough. I haven’t placed a bet on any kind of game since. I was so disgusted, so disinterested in re-entering the “market” with another potential scumbag, I bowed out completely. No counselling, no group therapy, no hesitation — I just quit cold turkey. I logically and emotionally realized, like my conscious decision to quit wasting my time watching television for the most part, that there were many more productive and enlightening ways to spend my time.

  This doesn’t make me special. I’m no different or better off than my acquaintances and friends who did require some outside help. We’re all victims. Of what, ultimately, I don’t know. I will say this: the fact that TV sports networks and radio talk shows routinely tout their picks, the betting lines, and everything that goes with it, isn’t helping. I had one good friend drink himself to death because of his gambling losses.

  It appalls me that the province of Ontario sponsors Pro-line, which allows for gambling on pro sports, including hockey. When I watched James van Riemsdyk of the Toronto Maple Leafs fire a shot on goal one night at the Air Canada Centre but then didn’t ever see the shot registered, I thought, I wonder if JVR’s or the team’s shots-on-goal total is
a gimmick bet on Pro-line? Did the off-ice official take the under? Pro-line is a bad idea on a lot of levels, especially for the young hockey fans of Ontario.

  In my situation, it didn’t help that I was a sportscaster. Sportscasters are privy to a lot of facts and numbers and are surrounded by other so-called experts. Television, radio, and newspaper sports guys, it would be safe to say, gamble in much higher numbers per capita than the general public. Trust me when I tell you that portions of major sports network newsrooms could just as easily be referred to as “gambling dens.”

  It starts out harmlessly enough. I was making ten or twenty dollar bets on college football games with an occasional two-team parlay (returns about two and a half to one odds) and two-team teasers. In football, teasers allow you to add six points to any line in either direction on two different selections, and you have to get both predictions correct to win. It’s a straight up bet financially — bet twenty bucks to win twenty bucks. But let’s say the line on the Green Bay–Detroit game was Packers minus five. Meaning if you bet on the Packers straight up, they would have to beat the Lions by more than five points for you to win the bet. In a teaser, instead of betting twenty bucks for Green Bay to beat Detroit by five, I could give myself six points, making the bet Detroit minus one. I’d take Green Bay. I’d then have to include a second similar selection and get that correct as well. Maybe if the Patriots were a four-point favourite over the Jets, I’d make it New England by ten, and take the Jets plus the points. So the Jets could lose, but they’d have to lose by less than ten. If I got both halves of the teaser correct, I’d win the bet. It’s called a gimmick.

  Gimmicks make it more fun. Gamblers like it; bookies love it. Bookies also count on you gradually betting more and more as time goes by.

  In 1994, I might have been betting twenty to fifty dollars a game. In 2004, I was betting $100 to $400 a game. Not insane, but getting there.