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PALS
It soon became obvious that we had hit a great river with giant fish at an almost perfect moment. Even fishermen of no distinction, like Steadman and me, caught five or six fish a day. The average size was fifteen pounds. More important, it was not just the catching; it was the ongoing pleasure of it all.
MEN WITHOUT WOMEN
GQ,
September 2002
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HE GOT A SHOT IN THE NBA, AND IT WENT IN
From the New York Times, February 7, 1999
It began about a year ago as the most casual kind of palship, one formed in a New York gym. We were working out next to each other on stationary bicycles. He came over and said that he understood that I was working on a book on Michael. Michael, of course, is Michael Jordan. He knew Michael a bit, he volunteered, because he was a Carolina guy, and had played ball there a very long time ago. Perhaps he could help with the access. That did not strike me as likely. Somehow he did not look connected to the high-powered modern-day world of basketball. Instead, he looked quite ordinary, just another man in his 60’s, a little shorter than me, perhaps 5 feet 9 inches or 5-10. His name, he said, was Tommy Kearns, and for a long time the name meant nothing to me; during most of the ensuing three or four months of our regular conversations I did not think of him by his name, but rather as the pleasant, helpful Carolina alumnus from the gym, a man who was, judging by the sweat on his workout clothes and the slightly chunky outline of his body, working even harder than I to keep his weight down. In the modern age when a player is usually at least 6–5, and with a body fat content of under 7 percent, he did not look like a player; that was emphasized by the fact that the New York Liberty players practice at our gym and from time to time as we talked we would look at the sleek, powerful bodies of young female professionals, all of them, it seemed, stronger and taller than we were.
But our palship progressed. We both liked to talk basketball. He was smart and likable, and he clearly knew the inside of the Carolina program extremely well, who was in and who was out. Dean Smith was Dean to him, yet he clearly was not a name dropper. After a few weeks during the early months of the legwork on my book, he began to guide me through the intricacies of the Carolina hierarchy, and at a time when I was still struggling to gain access to Smith himself, he tried to be helpful.
The Carolina basketball world, it should be noted, is tightly bonded and largely sealed off from the outside world: a cult, Chuck Daly, the former Penn and Detroit coach once told me, a good cult instead of a bad one, but a cult nonetheless. Outsiders, particularly writers, are likely to remain outsiders forever. Kearns was clearly in the club; he played golf with Smith at Pinehurst each summer with many of the best-known Carolina alumni, a kind of Dean Smith Invitational. That is very much an insider’s game; Carolina coaches, Carolina alumni and a few trusted outsiders who had treated Carolina players well, like Jerry West, Rod Thorn, Kevin Loughery and Daly, were the ones asked to play.
Our friendship progressed over the year. We talked about the game, and about Michael, and Kearns tried, unsuccessfully, to get me to try spinning, a hyped-up form of stationary bike riding. Then, late in the season when I was checking out the Carolina basketball brochure, looking up some of James Worthy’s statistics, I happened to stumble into some of Kearns’s records. Tommy Kearns, it turned out, had been a third-team all-American in the mid-50’s, but even more, he had been the playmaker—that was before they were known as point guards—on the Carolina team that in 1957 had gone undefeated and beaten Kansas and Wilt Chamberlain for the national championship.
I mentioned this to him with some measure of apology the next time we spoke at the gym: “You really were a player, weren’t you?” And with that he started telling me a very good basketball story from a very different era. He had been in the vanguard of New York City kids whom Frank McGuire had recruited back in the mid-50’s and put on his reverse underground railroad to North Carolina, as part of a plan to bring winning basketball to a school (and region) which, in basketball terms at least, was largely an underdeveloped area. Basketball was not yet a truly national sport and the game was still more often than not a city game—played best, it was believed, in New York. But it was a bad time for the college sport in New York. The point-fixing scandals of the early 50’s had destroyed the sport locally. Once-powerful programs had been closed down. McGuire himself had coached at St. John’s before seeking a kind of sanctuary at Chapel Hill.
After landing at Chapel Hill, McGuire had almost immediately started to import his own boys. He was the son of a New York cop and he was good at recruiting city boys; if in Carolina he had something of a strange accent, and if he seemed a little flashy, very much the outlander, then neither of these things was true when he went after kids in the boroughs. He was very good at visiting kids in their homes, usually accompanied by someone very successful from the same neighborhood who vouched for him. He liked to do most of his recruiting in the homes—where he could make a better read on the lifestyle and the ambitions of the parents and therefore tailor his pitch accordingly—rather than in fancy restaurants where the parents might be uncomfortable. He visited the home of Tommy Kearns, who was a big-time schoolboy star in New York, some four or five times. In those days the Catholic high schools held tryouts for scholarships—the players the coaches wanted got them, and Kearns had played for Lou Carnesecca at St. Ann’s, a traditional powerhouse; he had been an all-city playmaking guard, quick, scrappy, and smart with the ball, with a good outside shot. Under his direction, St. Ann’s in 1954, his senior year, had been national Catholic school champion.
McGuire badly wanted Kearns, and the fact that the senior Kearns was also a cop living in the Bronx did not hurt—it was an easy house in which to make a read. The recruiting sessions were, Kearns remembered, largely devoted to McGuire’s attempts to overcome the doubts of Kearns’s parents about sending their son to so alien a part of the country. After all, Chapel Hill was in the heart of the Bible Belt South, and Tom Kearns Sr. was wary of what would happen to a good Irish Catholic boy down there. But, Kearns remembered, McGuire was a masterly recruiter, and if you listened to him, the conversion was going to be quite different—he and his boys were going to convert the Protestants to Catholicism, and do it through the Trojan horse of basketball. And so in time Kearns became one of four New York City kids McGuire recruited for his class of 1958, fittingly enough, all of them Catholic. Already waiting for them down there, a year ahead of them in school, was a young man of consummate talent who was a great pure shooter, Lennie Rosenbluth, also a New York boy, who was Jewish. That would make their team essentially all New York, four Catholics and a Jew: Kearns; Pete Brennan from St. Augustine’s in Brooklyn; Bobby (no kin to Billy, who came after him) Cunningham, from All Hallows in the Bronx; Joe Quigg from St. Francis Prep in Brooklyn; and Rosenbluth from James Monroe in the Bronx.
Their arrival marked the beginning of big-time basketball at Chapel Hill. They knew the game, they were well ahead of the national curve in basketball savvy, they knew how to shoot and set picks and make cuts and, above all, how to pass. They compensated for a lack of height by deft defensive positioning. Freshmen could not play for the varsity in those days, but the Carolina freshmen were undefeated and often beat the varsity in practice. As sophomores, they played regularly and went 19-7, and then in their junior year everything tumbled right and they went 32-0. The heart of the team, as the Raleigh News and Observer later noted, was Kearns. In the National Collegiate Athletic Association semifinal, they beat Michigan State in three overtimes. Then, playing in Kansas City, Mo., they had to play against a Kansas team led by the seemingly unstoppable Wilt Chamberlain. They were ranked No. 1 in the country because they were unbeaten, and Kansas, which had lost once, was ranked No. 2, but there was no doubt which team was favored; it was Kansas by about 8 points, playing virtually at home and led by the mighty Wilt.
Before the game, McGuire, wanting to fire his players up and wanti
ng to end any possibility of intimidation, had turned to Kearns, the smallest player on his starting team, and said, “Tommy, you’re not afraid to jump center against Wilt, are you?” and Kearns had shouted out, “Hell no!” So he had jumped center, and Wilt had got the tip, but having Kearns jump center had set a tone of Tar Heel cockiness. (“My wife still says that jumping center against Wilt in the national championship game is the defining moment in my life, the one sure thing which will be in my obituary,” Kearns said the other day.) The message had been given, Carolina was not afraid of Kansas, and it eventually won, again in triple overtime. The game, little underdog Carolina against awesome Kansas, had caught the imagination of the country and the region; from that time on, noted the writer Jonathan Yardley, who was about to enter Carolina, basketball became not merely a sport, but a religion in the area—in that sense, what McGuire had promised the senior Kearns proved to be true.
Their next year was not so successful. Rosenbluth was gone, and Quigg was injured and they did not do so well. The irony of a great athlete’s story—deeds once so important to so many people, thousands cheering, but deeds now largely distant memories for all but those few who actually played, men who had regained anonymity in their lives—struck me forcefully as he finished the story. He had told this story outside the locker room of our gym and as we were about to part, he said, almost casually, “I played in the N.B.A., you know.” He paused and added: “Briefly. I still hold the record for the best field-goal percentage. One for one.” And then he was gone. Not sure whether to believe him or not, I went home and took out my trusty National Basketball Association record book, and there it was, a great line: one game, one field goal attempted, one field goal made.
It was a statistical line for the Walter Mitty in all of us—and I thought based on that we ought to have lunch so I could hear the rest of the story, and so we met again. In 1958, when he had graduated from Chapel Hill, there were only eight teams in the fledgling N.B.A.—with 10 players each. The year that Tommy Kearns came out, the league was just beginning to change and there was the early surfacing of black players—Elgin Baylor went first in the draft that year. Even more important, Syracuse, which took Kearns in the fourth round, took a seemingly unknown guard from Marshall named Hal Greer in the third. Kearns, who had played in a number of all-star games, had never even heard of Greer. Basketball drafting and scouting was hardly big time, and Tommy Kearns had never, as far as he knew, been scouted. It was several weeks after the draft when a letter arrived from the Syracuse owner, Danny Biasone, setting Kearns’s salary at $7,500 if he made the team. Nothing in those days was guaranteed.
The numbers, he soon realized at preseason camp, were going to be tough given the limited 10-man rosters and the need to keep the payroll down. The veteran guards on the team were Larry Costello, Al Bianchi and Paul Seymour, then 30 years old and a 12-year veteran. The question was whether Seymour would be a coach or a playing coach. If he only coached there was one more spot on the roster. But Biasone was not a wealthy man—his money came from the ownership of bowling alleys, and so all economies were critical. The competition was tough: the coach himself if he chose to play; Costello, who was very, very quick; Greer, clearly an ascending star (“a little bigger, a little quicker and a little bit better shooter than me”); and Bianchi. Some teammates thought it was going to come down to a choice between Greer and Kearns, and that was ominous to Kearns.
Kearns had a good camp, but in one of the last preseason games he came down off balance from a rebound and hurt his ankle and it cost him several weeks. When he was finally ready to play, it was in a game against Cincinnati. Syracuse, as Kearns remembers, was well ahead in the second half when Seymour sent him in: in time, the ball had come to him on the outside (“four or five feet outside the foul circle”) and he had taken his shot and it went in. “It would be a 3 in today’s game,” he noted proudly. All told, he had played seven minutes. The next day Seymour made his decision. He called Kearns in and said: “Tommy—it’s been great. We really like you and your game. But I’ve decided to stay on and play, and so we have to let you go.” That was it. There were no agents to call European teams in those days; he was gone that day. Hal Greer, who came in with him, went on to play for 15 seasons (39,788 regular-season minutes to Kearns’s 7), becoming a Hall of Fame player who averaged 19.2 points a game. Kearns played for a time in the Eastern League and then went back and married a girl who had gone to Duke, and worked in Greensboro for 10 years as an investment banker before returning to New York. He was, he told me, a man with no regrets: he had got a great education from a great school, he had helped win a national championship, and in the record book it still shows that he was the best shooter ever in the N.B.A. You could look it up.
MEN WITHOUT WOMEN
From GQ, September 2002
On this February morning, my friend Dick Steadman and I looked more like little Michelin Men than fly fishermen. We were fishing for giant brown trout in Tierra del Fuego, on the Río Grande near the southern tip of Patagonia, and had layered ourselves in lightweight long johns, chinchilla long johns, sweaters, Gore-Tex waders, windbreakers, river boots and mudguards. Fly-fishing should be graceful, but there was nothing elegant about our movements on this day. No decent bureau of tourism would have wanted to photograph us—the fish perhaps, but not us.
We were at the bottom of the American hemisphere, 7,500 miles from home. If you go any farther south, you get penguins. What makes the Río Grande worth the time and cost of the journey and the stay at the lodge is that it offers the rarest of fishing possibilities—to catch the giant brown trout, which, being anadromous, live in the ocean and return to freshwater at this time of year to spawn. They eat a far richer diet than their freshwater kin and can easily reach up to thirty pounds.
It was the second time that Steadman and I, along with our friend Richard Berlin, had come here: A year ago, we had fished the same river at roughly the same time of year, but it had been much harder for us. The water had been high, the wind had been very stiff, and it had been extremely difficult for even some of the more skilled fishermen to reach many of the pools; for Steadman and me, locked as we are in a kind of perpetual apprenticeship as fly fishermen, it had been exceptionally hard. A year ago, when we would return from our twice-a-day outings the first thing I would do was hit the Advil bottle. Nonetheless, I had caught about ten fish during the week, and the largest had been twenty-two pounds. A bad week here is like a superlative week anywhere else.
This year, by contrast, we had been told that all the stars were perfectly aligned. The runoff from the mountains had been marginal. The water was way down, from high on our chests in 2001 to knee level most of the time. We would be able to reach any pool we wanted. There were lots of fish in the river, we had been told, and they were big. Our week may well be the best in years, we thought. And yet, and yet … I would believe it when it happened.
But even if we fished under optimum conditions, it would not be easy. On this first morning, Steadman and I, despite all the predictions of easy success, were being skunked. The wind was well over thirty miles an hour, and I was not able to cast easily. I tried casting right-handed, but I kept hooking myself on the back. Fortunately, I am partially ambidextrous and can cast left-handed, and that helped, but only so much. It was a hard morning, and I was wondering by late morning whether I was doomed, whether there was some kind of mark on me—and on Dick Steadman as well—whether we simply had tried to go above our proper station in the universe of fishing by coming here and the fishing gods were telling us, accumulated American Airlines miles or not, that we did not deserve to fish here.
For there was a certain hard truth here, one that no fisherman likes to admit, especially in print: I am not a particularly good fly fisherman. My grade, if I am being generous, is a C+. I handle light spinning gear with considerable skill, but I remain embryonic at fly-fishing—I came to it late in life, and my schedule is not built around it. I handle a fly rod every two or t
hree years for a few days at a time, and just about when I get into a rhythm my fishing time is over and I regress. Moreover, I am reluctant to bring the obsessive quality that drives so much of the rest of my life to my time fishing. Far more than most of my colleagues, when I am on a river I am guide driven, reluctant to be pulled into the aficionados’ discussion about hatches and choices of flies. I fear trading innocence for excellence, that in the process some of the sheer pleasure of the doing will be lost, although I am aware that my attitude remains something of an affront to the purist.
Dick Steadman is a more serious student. He has been my friend for thirty-two years. We have fished together with questionable results in all sorts of lodges—Panama, Costa Rica, Venezuela—over the years. We met in 1970, when I was working on The Best and the Brightest and he had just finished a tour in the Pentagon as a deputy assistant secretary of defense. We became immediate friends, and for about twenty years we both had houses in Nantucket and owned a boat together and would fish two or three times a week for bluefish and striped bass. He is an uncommon man; I don’t think I know anyone else who has so high a level of intelligence and yet is so grounded and so in control of his ego. He is one of those rare people who can always see the equities in any question, even when they go against their own interests.
Steadman’s ability to command respect—instantly—from other men is like nothing I have ever seen. Normally, to do this a man has to have excelled at something other men admire—athletics, war—and has to be over six two. These things matter greatly to men, as do looks. I am convinced Robert Redford’s appeal has always been greater to men than to women because he has the looks and the manner most of us would have liked to have had—and of course did not—when we were in high school, when these attitudes about how we should look and behave were indelibly set. Steadman, though very attractive, has no war record, did not command a battalion and was not a great athlete. He is about five eight. Little of this helps him on the normal Richter Scale of male charisma. Yet he possesses a palpable sense of command, purpose and grace, and there was no doubt in my mind that if our group was in some kind of crisis during this trip, it would be only a matter of minutes before he became, without anyone saying anything, our leader.
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