And they all wanted a piece of Gornan. Martin Fishall and Coach Van kept him insulated at first, but it became clear pretty fast that he knew how to handle himself, and that he actually liked talking to the press. He had a knack for playing the bad boy, and with no effort at all he had them eating his “Vanilla Dunk” bullshit for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.
At practices he more or less behaved himself. The Jordan skills were pretty dynamic, and Gornan was smart enough to know how to work them into the style of the rest of the team. It was a little scary, actually, seeing how fast something new and different was coming into being. The Knicks’ core had been solid for a couple of years—but of course the Jordan skills weren’t going to sit on the bench.
Gornan was initially polite with me, which was fine. But nothing more developed, and by the third week of camp what had passed for politeness was seeming a little more like arrogance. I got the feeling it was the same way with Otis and McFront. He seemed to have won a friend in Sal Pharoah, though, for no apparent reason. We played a lot of split-squad games, which meant I got to start at center for the B-team. As such it was my job to clog up the middle and keep Gornan from driving, and I got a quick taste of what the other teams were going to be facing this year, with Pharoah playing the muscle, setting picks, clearing the lanes for the kid’s drives. It was a bruising experience, to put it mildly.
One afternoon after one of those split-squad events I found myself in the dressing room with Pharoah and Elwood.
“You like protecting that fucker,” said Elwood. “Why don’t you let him take his licks?”
Pharoah smirked. He and Elwood were the two intimidators on our team, and when they went head to head neither had any edge. “It’s not about that, Elwood,” he said.
“He thinks he’s fucking Michael Jordan,” said Elwood.
“As far as the team’s concerned, he is Michael Jordan,” said Pharoah. “Just like I’m Moses Malone, and your stupid ass is Maurice Lucas.”
“That white boy’s gonna ruin this team, Sal.”
Pharoah shook his head. “Different team now, man. Figure it out, Elwood. Stop looking back.” He wadded up his sweaty shorts and tossed them into the bottom of a locker, then headed for the showers.
“What was that shit?” Elwood snapped at me, the minute Pharoah was out of earshot. “ ‘Figure it out.’ Is he trying to tell me I’m not making the cut?”
“Don’t be stupid,” I said. “You’re in. McFront’ll sit.”
“White boys don’t sit. ’Less they suck as bad as you.”
“I think you’re wrong. Don’t you see? With Gornan they’ve got their token white starter. You’re a better player than McFront.” What I was saying, of course, was that the Maurice Lucas skills were more valuable than the Kevin McHale skills. Which was true, but it didn’t take team chemistry into account.
“Two white forwards,” he said. “They won’t be able to fucking resist.”
“Wrong. You and Pharoah both in there to protect Gornan. All that muscle to surround the Jordan skills. That’s what they won’t be able to resist.”
“Huh.” He considered my logic. “Shit, Lassner.”
“What?”
“Shit,” he said. “I smell shit around here.”
* * *
At the start of the season Coach Van played Gornan very conservatively, off the bench. He was a rookie, and we were a very solid team, so it was justifiable. But not for long. When he got in he was averaging more points per minute than Elwood or McFront, and they were points that counted, that won games. He was a little shaky on defense, but the offensive impact of the Jordan subroutines was astonishing, and Gornan was meshing well with Sal Pharoah, just like in the practices. Otis Pettingale’s offense at guard was fading a bit, but we had plenty of other weapons. Our other guard was Derrick Flash, who with Maurice Cheeks’s skills was just coming into his own. We reeled off six wins in a row at the start of the season before taking a loss, to the Hyundai Celtics, on a night where Gornan didn’t see many minutes. That was the night the chanting started, midway through the third quarter: “Vanilla Dunk! Vanilla Dunk! Vanilla Dunk . . .”
The next night he started, and scored forty-three points, in a game we won easily. He was a starter after that. McFront was benched, which broke the heart of his fan club, but the sports pages agreed that Elwood belonged on the floor, and most of them thought we were the team to beat. We should have been.
The trouble started one night when we were beating—no, make that thrashing—the Disney Heat, 65 to 44, at the start of the third quarter. I was in, actually. I guess Gornan had been working overtime with the programming guys, and he hauled out a slam-dunk move all of a sudden, one where he floated up over three of the Disney players, switched the ball from his right to his left hand, and flipped it in as he fell away. It was a nice move—make that an astonishing move—but it wasn’t strictly necessary, given the situation.
No big deal. But a minute later, he did it again. Actually this time he soared under the basket and dropped it in backward. As we jogged back on defense I heard Elwood muttering to himself. The Disney player tossed up a brick and I came up with the rebound, and when I looked upcourt there was Gornan again, all alone, signaling for the pass.
I ignored him—we were up more than twenty points—and fed it in slow to Otis. Otis dribbled up a few feet, let the Disney defender catch up with Gornan, and we put a different play together.
Next time the ball got into Gornan’s hands he broke loose with it, and went up to dunk. The crowd there in Miami, having nothing better to do, started cheering for us to pass it to him. Elwood’s mood darkened. He began trying to run the team in Otis’s place, trying to set up plays that locked Gornan out of the action. I could feel the resistance—like being part of a machine where the gears suddenly start grinding.
Coach Van pulled me out of the game. From the bench I had a clearer sense of how much Gornan was milking this crowd, and of how much they were begging to be milked. He was giving them Michael Jordan, the legend they’d never seen themselves, the instant replay man, the one who stood out even in a field of stars. And the awful thing about Gornan’s theatrics was that they worked, as basketball. We were up almost thirty points now. He’d reduced the Disney team to spectators.
A minute later Elwood joined me on the bench, and McFront went in. Elwood put a towel over his head and then lowered his head almost below his big knees. The bench got real quiet, which meant the noise from the crowd stood out even better.
Elwood toweled off his head and stood up suddenly, like he was putting himself back in. He turned and looked at me and over at Coach Van. Then he spat, just over the line and onto the court, and turned and walked toward the locker room.
Coach Van jerked his thumb at me, meaning I should go play therapist. I guess my contribution wasn’t sorely needed on the court. Sometimes I wondered if they kept me around because I knew how to talk to Elwood.
I found him dressing up in his street clothes, without having showered. When he looked up at me I almost turned and ran back to the bench. I held up my hands, pleading not guilty. But of course the skin on those hands was white.
“You see that shit out there,” he said. It was a command that I nod, not a question. “That’s poor taste, man.”
“Poor taste?”
“That dunk is from the third game of the ’91 finals, Lassner. That’s sacrilege, hauling it out for no reason, against these Disney chumps.”
“You recognize the dunk?”
“ ’Course I recognize the dunk. You never watch any Jordan tapes, man? That dunk is a prayer. He can’t just—”
“Whoa, Elwood. Hold on a minute. You’re sampling, I’m sampling. This isn’t some purist thing here, man. Get some perspective.”
“Michael Jordan, Lassner. You ever see the tape of Michael crying after winning in ’91?”
“At least he’s on our team. Jeez, what would happen if you had to play against the almighty Jordan, or somebody with
his skills—you’d probably fold up completely!”
“It’s not just the dunks, Lassner. He won’t play defense. He’s always up the court cherry-picking, waiting for the easy pass. Michael was a great defensive player!”
“C’mon, Elwood. This is a show-time league and you know it. You’re one of about five guys playing serious defense. Everybody goes for the fancy moves. That’s what the sampling is all about. He’s just better than most, because he’s got the hot skills package. Somebody had to get the Jordan skills.”
“It didn’t have to be some little white jerk.”
Once it was out it was kind of a relief. Black and white was the issue. Of course. As much as that was supposed to be a thing of the past. I’d known all along, but in some stupid way I guess I’d thought not saying anything might make it better.
“I’m a white guy with a black guy’s skills,” I pointed out.
He waved it aside. “Not important. It’s not Jordan. You play white, anyway.”
What was it about basketball that made it all seem so stark? As though it were designed as a metaphor—the white style of play so plodding and corporate and reliable, the black style so individual and expressive and so often self-destructive, so “me against the world.” When a black guy couldn’t jump they said he had “white legs,” or if he was slow it was “white man’s disease.” Basketball was a white sport that blacks had taken over, and yet the audience was still pretty much white. And that white audience adored the black players for their brilliant moves—thanks to sampling, that adoration would probably kill the sport—and yet was still thought to require the token white face, for purposes of “identification.”
Solve basketball, I sometimes thought, and you’d solve everything.
“Okay,” I said. “He’s a jerk. But ‘white jerk’ shouldn’t matter. Jordan wasn’t a black separatist, as I remember. I mean, call me naive, but scrambling the racial stuff up was supposed to be one of the few good things about this sampling deal, right?”
“Michael’s career meant something,” Elwood mumbled. “Should be treated with respect.”
“Look who turns out to be Mr. Historical,” I said. “You gotta get hip, Elwood. Basketball is Postmodern now.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Means Michael’s career might have meant something, but yours doesn’t, and neither does ‘Vanilla Dunk’s’—so relax.”
* * *
Once Gornan started hauling out the real-time poster shots, the media wouldn’t let it go. He was all over the sports channels, dunking in slow-mo, grinning and pumping his fists. He made the cover of Rolling Stone, diamond earring flashing, spinning a basketball with one hand, groping a babe with the other. Then his agent started connecting with the endorsement people, and you couldn’t turn on the tube without seeing Vanilla Dunk downing vitaburgers at McDonald’s, Vanilla Dunk slurping on a Pepsi or a Fazz, Vanilla Dunk checking out the synthetic upholstery inside a new Chrysler SunFrame.
With Gornan playing the exuberant Michael Jordan game and Elwood playing angry, we kept on winning. In fact, we opened up a sizable lead over the Celtics in the division, and it wasn’t necessarily a good thing. Being too far ahead was almost as bad as floundering in the basement of the division. Without the tension of a tight race to bind us together as a team all the egos came rushing to the forefront. Otis was struggling with accepting his fading powers and diminished role, and we all missed the way his easy confidence had been at the heart of the team. McFront was sulking on the bench. Pharoah was playing hard, trying to make the new team work, trying to show by force that Gornan fit in. Meanwhile, Gornan’s theatrics got more and more outrageous, and every slam dunk was another blow to the dam holding back Elwood’s rage.
One afternoon in Oakland before a game with the IBM Warriors someone made the mistake of leaving the TV on in the visitors’ clubhouse. Elwood and Otis and I were sitting playing cards when a pre-taped interview with Gornan turned up on the sports channel.
Somewhat surprisingly, the interviewer seemed to be trying to work around to the subject of race. “How’d you choose your nickname, Dunk? Why Vanilla, in particular? What point are you trying to make?”
Gornan shrugged. “Hey, don’t get heavy,” he said. “They call me Vanilla ’cause I’m completely smooth and completely sweet. It’s simple.”
“Why not something else, then?” said the interviewer. “Chocolate, say.”
Gornan laughed, and for a minute I thought he was going to grant the man his point. Instead he realigned his sneer and said: “Chocolate don’t go down smooth.”
“What are you saying, Dunk?”
“Nothing, man. Just that I’m not chocolate. That’s why I’m like a breath of fresh air—I go down smooth. People are ready for that, ready to lighten up. Chocolate’s sweet, but it’s always got that bitter edge, y’know?”
And then, God help me, he turned to the camera and gave it a big wink.
I got up and shut the TV off, but it was too late. Elwood had already slammed his cards down on the table and stalked out. Otis looked sick. I prayed that Gornan wasn’t in the locker room. I went through and found Elwood out on the edge of the floor, watching the Warriors take their warm-ups.
At game time we managed to get out on the floor without any explosions. But from the opening tip-off I knew it was going to be a bad night. When the ball got into Elwood’s hands he drove like a steamroller up the middle and went up for a vicious dunk. Then he stole an inbound pass and did it again, only this time he fouled his man on the drive. Everyone on the floor looked nervous, even the Warriors—even, for once, Gornan, who was usually oblivious.
The Warrior hit his free throws and the game resumed. The pattern came clear soon enough: Elwood was calling for every pass, and when he got it he was going up for the dunk, every time. He was trying to play Gornan’s game, but he was too big and strong, too angry to pull it off. He was stuffing a lot of shots but he’d accumulated four fouls before the second quarter. When Coach Van finally pulled him he had twice as many points as Gornan or anyone else, but the Warriors were ahead.
He sat until halftime, and with McFront in we got the game tied. During the break Coach Van called Elwood into an office and closed the door. Meanwhile Gornan was off in his usual corner of the locker room smoking a cigarette, but he had a hollow, haunted expression on him, one I’d never seen before.
Elwood was back in for the start of the third quarter, and whatever Coach Van had said to him in his office hadn’t worked: he picked up right where he’d left off, breaking for insane inside moves at every opportunity, going up for ill-fated dunks and making some of them, smearing a lot of guys with his sweat. The Oakland crowd, which had been abuzz with expectations of seeing the Vanilla Dunk Revue, fell to a low, ugly murmur. When Elwood got called for another foul I was almost relieved; that made five, and with six he’d foul out of the game, and it would be over
But he wasn’t quite done. On the next play he pulled down a rebound and dribbled the length of the court, flattening a Warrior on his way up. I waited for the ref’s whistle, but no whistle came. The Warrior center braced himself between Elwood and the net. Elwood ran straight at him, tossed off a perfunctory head fake, and then went up with a spinning move, his bulk barely clearing a tremendous head-on collision with the jumping center. He jammed the ball down with both hands and hit the glass so hard it shattered.
Suddenly the arena was dead silent, as Elwood and the Warrior center fell in a tangle amid a rain of Plexiglas fragments. When the two men got up unhurt, the roar started. The referees called the game a Warrior victory by forfeit, and Elwood took them on single handedly; we had to drag him off the floor.
When we got him into the clubhouse we found Gornan already showered and in his street clothes, giving his version of events to the press.
* * *
I looked up the details on Maurice Lucas’s career once. I was working on a theory that the basketball skills you sampled contained an el
ement of the previous player’s personality, some kind of style or attitude that was intrinsic to the way they played, something that could be imparted, gradually, to the later player, along with the actual basketball skills.
Well, bingo, as far as Maurice Lucas and Elwood Fossett were concerned. Lucas, it turned out, spent a considerable part of his career feeling misunderstood and underpaid. Specifically underpaid in comparison to the white players on his team. As a result he spent a lot of time playing angry. I mean apart from the forcefulness that came with him (and Elwood) being so big and strong, his game was specifically fueled by rage.
Another result of the conflicts in his career was that he was widely understood to have dogged it, to have played intentionally poorly, as a kind of protest, during some of the key years of his career. Which got me thinking: the skills that Elwood inherited might also contain an element of this struggle that Lucas was waging against himself, to suppress his skills, to not give the best of what he had to the company men he hated.
Elwood wouldn’t have known, either. Maurice Lucas’s career was before his time. Elwood’s interest in basketball history went as far back as Michael Jordan’s rookie year.
* * *
McFront started in Elwood’s place the next night, and Elwood went back to the lockers, got dressed, and walked out. Gornan had a great two quarters, undeniable as basketball, unsurpassable as spectacle, and in the locker room at the half he was more exuberant than usual, clowning with Pharoah and McFront, turning the charm he’d previously saved for the media on his teammates. It was a fun scene, but it made me a little sick to see Elwood being drummed out so easily, even if he’d opened the door to it himself, with his walkout.
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