by Bill Bradley
“Part way into the first quarter it looked like someone jumped on Willis’ back,” Phil Jackson says about the film of Willis’ Los Angeles massacre. “Suddenly Willis totally lost control of himself. Anything that moved he hit. After five minutes he had knocked out two Lakers, broken the nose of a third, and downed a fourth. Finally a Knick teammate about his size snuck up behind him and said, ‘Take it easy, Willis, it’s me!’” The story of that night made the rounds of the locker rooms. No one ever challenged Willis again.
Thirty minutes before game time Red asks the reporters to leave. There is a surprising amount of tension in the air. We have been on a losing streak, and a win tonight will keep us in the running for first place in the East. Waiting for Holzman to begin his pre-game talk each player has his own nervous habits. I bite my nails. Willis tapes his fingers and adjusts the hydroculator pad on his knee. Lucas keeps counting with his thumb touching each one of his fingers in rapid order as if he were filing their tips. DeBusschere and Earl stare straight ahead. Some of the rookies concentrate on chewing gum. Jackson scratches and scratches his leg.
The Lakers field a less interesting team than in the recent past. From Cooke’s triumvirate of Jerry West, Elgin Baylor, and Wilt Chamberlain, only West remains. The regal threesome never won a championship together. Only when Elgin Baylor was forced into retirement and Chamberlain had one of his most peaceful, satisfying, and successful years did Los Angeles finally win it all. That year the Lakers beat the Knicks four games to one in an anti-climactic title series. I was very happy for West, a man of quiet dignity and prodigious talents. I felt the championship was more his than Wilt’s, whose talents and personality even in victory stood apart from the team.
The highlight of those play-offs was the Los Angeles-Milwaukee semifinal pitting Wilt against Jabbar. Wilt, in that series, at last became a popular big-man. He defeated the proud, independent Muslim, who for a brief moment due to his size, outspokenness, and misunderstood religion became the designated villain that Chamberlain’s arrogance and size had always made him in the public mind. Wilt had finally become an American hero.
For fifteen years Wilt Chamberlain was the dominant single individual in professional basketball, a team sport. His massive height and weight (7′2′, 260 pounds) sometimes made him seem a colossus. It brought almost incomprehensible achievements. During one year he averaged 50 points per game and in one game he scored 100. He averaged 30.1 rebounds per game for his career. Against Boston once he got 55. He led the league in rebounding eight times and once in assists. In practically every department of the game for which individual statistics are kept, Wilt’s name is etched in the record book.
Wilt played the game as if he had to prove his worth to someone who had never seen basketball. He pointed to his statistical achievements as specific measurements of his ability, and they were; but to someone who knows basketball they are, if not irrelevant, certainly nonessential. The point of the game is not how well the individual does but whether the team wins. That is the beautiful heart of the game, the blending of personalities, the mutual sacrifices for group success. No one man can dominate every aspect of a game—serving as a daddy and assuring victory through his effort alone. The essence of the game is selectivity, knowing one’s limitations and abiding by them. Some players are capable of exercising several skills but often their team situation requires that they concentrate on only one. If an individual claims superiority in everything, then it is impossible to avoid the ultimate responsibility for victory or defeat. A team wins or loses; an individual who audaciously claims pre-eminence must win. Wilt could not eat his cake and have it too. If he had been a part of the team he alone never would have been blamed for defeat. But, since he sought statistics to justify his superiority in every aspect of the game, he could not avoid responsibility for the game’s outcome. So the more often Wilt lost (perhaps because he did have mediocre teammates) and tried to absolve himself by referring to his individual achievements the more he became, in the eyes of fans, a giant who should never lose. What seemed like a paradox was really a misunderstanding of the game. It was as if Wilt were a big tank fighting in a jungle, possessed of all the latest equipment but unable to win a guerrilla war. The more Wilt accomplished individually, the more he came to symbolize failure.
Accompanying Wilt’s statistical self-justification was a veneer of sportsmanship. It seemed as if Wilt almost choked on the familiar aphorism about sports taught to all American children: “It’s not whether you win or lose but how you play the game.” Wilt apparently applied this prescription selectively to professional basketball, where its reverse is true and where aggressiveness is essential for success. Some people even say that the reason he didn’t win every year was because he played too passively. He never developed the killer instinct necessary for team victory. In his rookie year he was constantly battered, kneed, elbowed, tripped, and gouged. He did not hit back. Instead, he threatened retirement. In his duels with Bill Russell he patted him on the behind when Russell made a good play, showing what Wilt thought was magnanimity. It was as if he were paralyzed within his enormous body, unwilling to strike out for fear of injuring an opponent or demeaning himself. Above all, Wilt, sensitive to being called a bully, made sure he never took unfair advantage. If someone said Wilt could only score by dunking, he retaliated by taking fall-away jumpers. If critics questioned his passing ability, he stopped shooting and rolled up the assists. He seemed driven to be the best, and on everyone else’s terms.
Another familiar aphorism heard in America is that a man is free to fly as high as his ability will take him. But, a person born to vast inherited wealth has a better chance to succeed than a poor man. Likewise, a man with unparalleled physical equipment is more likely to succeed at sports than a man with an average body, no matter how hard the latter works. Although we continue to teach the democratic ideal of equality, inequality surely exists in abilities and power. Those few people who are more fortunate—Rockefellers or Chamberlains—receive the average man’s resentment together with his admiration. If their work exposes them to public curiosity, they must be prepared to handle that resentment in all its intensity.
Wilt has dealt with the public for over twenty years. When people started showering favors and money on him as a 6′11″ fourteen-year-old, he learned to manipulate them to his own advantage. Though he rarely failed to get things his way, he must have felt the fans’ resentment. They asked for his autograph and then told him that anyone seven feet tall should be able to score thousands of points.
To those who weren’t fans and didn’t recognize that his size meant superior physical ability, he was regarded as a freak, a giant, labeled different and weird. His height alone subjected Wilt to stares, pointing fingers, and inane questions. A man whose head rises eighteen inches above the crowd can never have a normal existence. Add the fact that Wilt is black in a racist society and it is easy to see how he had to retreat inside himself, if only for protection.
Wilt’s personality survival kit apparently included a decision to confront his public. It seemed as if his only chance to escape the resentments attached to his career was to win the fans over with his ability and conquer the non-sport public with his fame. Clearly a team championship was not sufficient for Wilt’s personal needs. He seemed determined to become one of the best-known bodies in the world. Homes, women, cars, money, only provided accompaniment to his primary quest—celebrity. Only widely publicized supremacy in all statistically measured areas of the sport or life could suffice. Then and only then might he soften the resentment that his style and size had engendered.
I have the impression that Wilt might have been more secure in losing. In defeat, after carefully covering himself with allusions to his accomplishments, he could be magnanimous. Sometimes waxing philosophic he would wonder publicly why the American character insisted on victory. He would relate objectively the limitations of his own team. He would imply that basketball was just a small part of his life, a life which
encompassed presidents and queens, millionaires and movie stars. He would be polite with writers, talking with them as if their interest in him was somehow unconnected with the game’s outcome, or even with basketball.
Acceptance of defeat had been Wilt’s final error. If there is anything the American public hates more than its villains, it is a favorite who flaunts it and then blows the victory. Wilt’s emphasis on individual accomplishments failed to gain him public affection but made him the favorite to win the game. And, simultaneously, it assured him of losing. A team hero who loses receives sympathy, compassion, and understanding, like Jerry West or Willis Reed. An individual star who loses only gets a derisive laugh of good riddance, until he loses often enough to become a symbol for losing, the ultimate insult.
Each game has a pace of its own. One can never be sure of how a game will end by checking the score at half-time. I have been on teams that lost 30-point leads. I have come from 25 back to win. The score means little. What is important is being able to sense the mood of the opponent. What I feel is his will. A team sometimes gets behind 20 points and caves in; it just gives up. The team tries but its execution becomes sloppy; the players don’t get back on defense as fast, or play as tenaciously against their men. They take bad shots, start to bicker among themselves, and in their ultimate discouragement talk to their opponent about their own teammates’ shortcomings.
I sense tonight’s game against the Lakers is over by half-time. We have a 21-point lead. During the third quarter the Lakers make their move, cutting it to 12. We hold and then increase our lead to 18. With six minutes gone in the third quarter, I know we have it.
For the rest of the third quarter, I just watch Frazier. Occasionally he infuriates me when he doesn’t pass the ball as much as I would like, and DeBusschere sometimes, after running six times up the floor without getting a shot, will throw up his arms in anger and shout “pass the god damn ball.” But there is no denying Clyde’s ability. I am on the same court but I’m a spectator. He plays with smooth and effortless grace, as if he were a dancer revealing the beauty of a body in movement. It’s somehow right that he doesn’t sweat much. His build is perfect for basketball: tall, erect, and thin. He can move with deceptive speed. The jumper, its fake, and the drive are his repertoire—he does not have a lot of moves like Monroe. He is classic in his economy of motion, though an occasional behind-the-back dribble shows there is still a flirtation with flamboyance. Holzman says that people should get to see him practice, for that’s where he plays complete basketball. Tonight he’s doing a pretty good job of it in Los Angeles. He shoulder fakes and hits two jumpers; a third time he draws the foul, and follows with a baseline drive and a fade-away, at which several players on the Los Angeles bench shake their heads in awe. The next time downcourt he uses a change of pace dribble that makes the defensive man look ridiculous: Tonight he could make anyone look bad.
The crowd excitement at games brings out Clyde’s supreme efforts. “It’s like dancing,” he says. “When you hear a certain record you dance and you can feel it. That’s the same way I feel about the roar of crowds. They help me get psyched up. If the game is tied in the last five minutes and I make a basket, I’m telling myself, ‘You’re ready now, Clyde. Now you’re going to come up with the steal, or get the rebound, or make three more baskets.’”
Confidence and determination are big parts of Frazier’s personality. The confidence is displayed with unmistakable bravado. The determination, which the public rarely sees, rests at the core of a kid from Georgia who went to a predominantly white college and made it against the odds. “I wanted to go home that first year,” he says. “I was shy and talked different from the other kids there. In class it seemed like everybody was staring at me; it seemed like me against the world.” The results of his poor preparation and difficult adjustment showed after his freshman year when he became academically ineligible and had to sit out his sophomore year of basketball. He soon noticed how people’s attitude toward him changed. The coach gave him no academic help, forced him to work out everyday playing only defense, and refused to help him get transportation to Atlanta at Christmas. Frazier says that, with the help of a kind black teacher, he discovered himself, as a person, that year. He married. He learned to study and to accept responsibility and by the end of the year pulled his grades up to the B—range. “I made everything I got,” he remembers. “It’s like in sports: You don’t quit, you keep fighting back. Before the year of ineligibility I was like my father, riding with the punches and believing anything goes. Then, I became more like my grandfather. I married and took on responsibilities.”
One can see Clyde’s determination even in aspects of his financial affairs. Treading a fine line between extravagance and caution, he doesn’t feel he is flamboyant. The Rolls Royce, the New York co-op, the Atlanta house are investments to him; the mink and sealskin coats were free. Becoming an overnight millionaire is not his style, he says. “I would rather save my money. Like I have a lot of tax-free bonds. You don’t get a hell of a return but you don’t lose. That is my primary concern, not losing. Some people say, ‘Get in the stock market. You will double or triple.’ I don’t care about that.”
Toward the end of the game Frazier makes three steals and two difficult drives. He finishes with 44 points and wins the knitted shirts as star of the game.
“Why were you so hot?” asks one reporter.
“Is this your best effort of the year?”
“What are you wearing tonight, Clyde?”
“Are the Knicks going to catch the Celtics?”
“Let’s go,” says Whelan. “The bus leaves in ten minutes.”
We arrive at the airport fifty minutes before departure. Players wander into the coffee shop and the newsstand. I sit opposite the departure gate reading a book about Nova Scotia. A section I had read on the flight to Los Angeles discussed the Oak Island mystery, raising the possibility that the pirate Captain Kidd buried some of his treasures on this small island in Mahone Bay off the Nova Scotia coast. I see Lucas standing alone at the empty air insurance counter and, since I had mentioned the treasure to him, I walk over and say jokingly, “Want to be partners with me in a search for the Oak Island riches?”
“I’ve got my own goldmine after these past two days.”
“In what?” I ask, “puzzles?”
“No.”
“Magic?”
“No.”
“Well, what is it then?”
“Hyperberic medicine.”
“What’s that?”
“Ralph,” says Lucas, “my plastic surgeon friend out here in Hollywood—the one with the gorgeous wife—told me about it last fall because he’d been using it. I told him to get all the figures together. This trip he did and I haven’t slept in three days it’s so fuckin’ great!”
“What is it?”
“The Navy doctors have researched it for two years. Their findings are going to be made known in September at a medical conference in Canada. Once it gets out, the shit’s gonna hit the fan. Vickers, a company in England, makes a hyperberic chamber, which means a pressurized oxygen chamber. You sit in it for fifteen or twenty minutes a day, for a week and you’re a new man. One treatment lasts six months. I’ve seen pictures of burns healed overnight at the naval hospital in San Diego. It grows hair—makes you feel younger. Guys come out of there and they want to screw everything that moves—that’s what it does for your sex life. It also helps concentration. It does it all.”
“So, how do you make money?”
“I’ll get a loan for 90 percent. It takes six months to deliver right now, and we only need sixty chambers to get started. Ralph and I could finance that.”
“How?”
“Shit, Ralph makes $600,000 a year as a Hollywood plastic surgeon. He operates every morning from 9:30 to 1 P.M. and charges $1,500 for fixing tits and $1,200 for noses. He made $400,000 last year from tits alone. If everything works out after September everybody will want to climb into these cham
bers, and if I work it right we’ll have a corner on the market for the machines. We’ll get locations near hospitals and country clubs and we’ll hire a pulmonary physiologist to run each one for a salary plus percentage. There is no way we can miss.”
“Who miss?” asks Jackson.
“Luke,” I reply.
“Oh, I thought you meant Clyde.”
“Yeah,” I say, “that was some game. The Lakers really miss Wilt.”
Chamberlain had slowed down a lot but he was still intimidating during his last year, before he signed a $600,000 contract to coach in the ABA. Players would test his quickness by challenging him and when Wilt bent to gather himself for the jump, the challenger would shoot the ball before Wilt could uncoil. That act was called “freezing him.” Other teams tried to have their center set a screen for a good shooter; Wilt never switched out and the shooter had easy seventeen-foot jump shots. At the end players were willing to test his finesse and quickness, but no one tested his strength.
“Wilt is probably laughing in the living room of his million-dollar house, the one with 20-foot ceilings that remind him of the Baptist Church of his childhood,” I say to no one in particular.
“Laughing all the way to the bank,” a rookie says.
And then Barnett adds: “People out there in the streets starvin’ and this sucker goes and builds himself a million-dollar house.”
By the time we pick up our bags in San Francisco it is 2 A.M. We board a bus which will take us to a motel near the arena in Oakland. San Francisco is Danny Whelan’s hometown. He grew up during the 1920s in the Mission district where his father ran a grocery store. “If you had a couple of dollars then, you were a millionaire,” he says. Every time we get into town he sees his kids from a first marriage, often bringing them to the game, and he visits some of his old friends: carpenters, bartenders, brewery workers, who still live in the district. San Francisco has changed since he left. The Mission district is no longer the Irish Catholic neighborhood where, as Danny remembers, “200 people stood in front of the radio store listening to the Dempsey-Tunney fight and pulling for Tunney all the way.” The district still has the best weather in San Francisco according to Danny, and although it has become a Hispanic ghetto, it’s home for him and he relishes the thought of his return, even at 2 A.M.