Life on the Run

by Bill Bradley

  “Why’d you do that?” I say to the official. “He didn’t embarrass you out here.”

  “Yeah,” the ref barks back, “but he said the magic word.”

  “What!”

  “Anytime someone says motherfucker on my court, I’ll give a technical.”

  “Why, you never heard it before out here?”

  “Every time I do it’s a T.”

  “Oh,” I say, “but you wouldn’t if he said shit-face or son-of-a-bitch, you mean if he called… you… a motherfucker, that’s the only time you’d give a technical. Not if he called you just an asshole.”

  The referee’s face reddens.

  “O.K., O.K.,” I say, “I just wanted to know so I could tell the team. Thanks.”

  Basketball is impossible to officiate well. Most of the calls are dependent on judgment, which in turn is dependent on the official’s vision, his angle, his emotional state, and his partner. The result is colossal inconsistency. Sometimes I can make contact with hands all night without being caught and the next game the official calls three quick fouls for the same kind of play. Sometimes I can jump into my defensive man on the shot and get a foul, while the next night the same move is called charging. Players universally complain about officials. Too many fouls slow the game; too few calls make it physically dangerous. Each player has his own favorite official and his worst enemy. The players’ union has considered black-balling the poorest officials, but it is impossible to reach a consensus on who they are. The problem is experience. Pro basketball is very different from college, and only by officiating in the pro league can an official get experience. Teams of three or four officials would cover the game more thoroughly, but they would cost more money than the owners are willing to spend on the game. About the only thing that can be done is to eliminate personal idiosyncrasies and vendettas from officiating. There is no place for player baiting or quixotic technical fouls. A good example of how referees abuse their power is in their treatment of rookies, telling them to be quiet or to expect no breaks their first year. When I was a rookie I saw little action, averaging sixteen minutes a game. The first game I played in during the last quarter was at Boston. With a minute to go, I was fouled. I had one and one, two shots, and the Knicks were up by one. Needless to say, I was nervous. The referee, Earl Strom, handed me the ball at the foul line and said with a smirk, “Now we’ll see what you’re made of.”

  Seattle opens their lead in the fourth quarter to eight points. Everything we do goes wrong. It is as if no one wants to touch the ball, much less shoot it. No one will take the offensive responsibility. When one of us finally asserts himself, it is outside the flow of the team and leads to forced shots. Holzman calls time out and berates each player.

  “You gonna let that guy go around you again, Clyde?” he says. “All defensive team, my ass, their rookies can’t wait to get you.”

  “Goddammit, box out!” he says to me. “We can’t let ’em keep getting three and four shots! They’ll push you right off the court if you don’t hit back! They get the ball anywhere they want it.

  “Yeah, I know, those dumb cocksuckers,” he says pointing to the refs, “they aren’t gonna give us anything. Don’t waste your time again! I’ll do that. Let’s go out now and play some defense. Stop poundin’ the fuckin’ ball into the floor, guards; it’s gotta start with you. And you forwards, don’t stand around with your thumbs up your ass! Move to the open spot. O.K., let’s go.”

  With three minutes left in the game Seattle leads by twelve. Suddenly we catch fire. Frazier steals two passes. Earl hits two jumpers. I hit one and DeBusschere gets a tap-in. It’s a four-point ball game now. The intensity of the game has doubled. They are beginning to panic. Russell calls time out with one minute to go. Upon returning to play, they hold the ball trying to play for a good shot, low, just before the twenty-four second clock expires. The ball rims the basket. Lucas, now playing center, gets the rebound, passes it to me. I feed Earl, going to the basket for a fast break lay-up. Seattle didn’t have anyone protecting. Now we’re just two points back with forty seconds left. They hold the ball again; the crowd is on its feet. Their young guard dribbles cautiously looking at the clock. Suddenly, as quick as a frog’s tongue, Frazier slaps the ball away from him, gains control, takes six dribbles, shoots and scores. The game is tied. The same guard immediately dribbles the full length of the court and fires a clumsy shot from the deep corner. It is a flagrant “get-backing” and as he launches it I figure we’ll have a chance to win when it misses. But, it goes in, eliciting tumultuous approval from the crowd. We call time out and set up a last-second play to try to tie the score. Twelve seconds remain. The play calls for me to shoot from the corner. Frazier in-bounds to Earl. When I come around Willis’s screen, the center switches on to me. I’m cornered. Earl begins to penetrate to the basket, sees DeBusschere, passes it. DeBusschere takes a 16-foot jump shot. It misses. We lose by two points and pandemonium breaks out in the Seattle Coliseum.

  “Why you guys waited,” Holzman says in the locker room, “until three minutes left in the game to start playing defense, I’ll never know. We should have won by twenty. It’s a shame to let a bunch of rookies be heroes. Get a shower; bus leaves in thirty-five minutes.”

  Two things strike me about the game as I shower. If Dave had hit the last shot we would have won. I know it. Yet to think he lost it is wrong. We all lost it in the third quarter when we stank. The important thing about a last-second shot is not just to make it but to have five guys willing to take it; ready to shoulder the responsibility. No one criticizes Dave; he accepted his role tonight. But our play in the last three minutes is more of a mystery. Why did we wait? The road, the time of the season and place in the schedule provides only a partial explanation. Some games need a spark to come alive—a fight, an embarrassment, a referee’s call, or an inspiring individual effort. Tonight we waited too long before we decided that indeed we might lose. Good teams have a tendency to be complacent. It is as if we tempted fate, sure of our ability to rescue any situation before disaster. The realization that a loss was imminent jarred us to action, but too late.

  SIX

  THE NEXT MORNING THE BUS LEAVES THE HOTEL AT 7:00 FOR the airport. Most of the players are half asleep as we move through the wet, deserted streets of early morning Seattle and pull onto Route 5 toward Tacoma. Below and to the right of the freeway is the site of the new Seattle Superdome. A little later we pass the Boeing development center. Big 747 and 727 jet planes stand unattended on runways bordered by enormous repair hangars. On the other side of the highway is an abrupt incline crowned with apartments and houses. A sign on the side of one house says, “Jesus is coming.” As we approach the vicinity of the airport, Danny grabs the touring microphone in the bus for a little early morning entertainment. “On your left,” he begins, “is the Lewis & Clark bargain clothing store where Clyde—Clyde, wake up—for $15.95 you can get a whole suit, shirt, cuff links, an extra pair of pants, shoes, socks, underwear, and everything. On your right you will see a little white frame house with a picket fence; that was my birthplace.”

  “Tell it, Big Time,” shouts a rookie.

  “W. C. Whelan, do it,” says another.

  The bus doors open and we stroll through the airport, wasting the forty-five minutes at the newsstand or coffee shop before departure to Phoenix. I buy a magazine and head for the gate. After take-off I open it to a story about Mickey Mantle at his home in Dallas, Texas.

  “‘At night,’” the author, Roger Kahn, quotes Mantle as saying, “‘my knee can hurt so bad it wakes me up. But first I dream. I’m playing in the stadium and I can’t make it. My leg is gone. I’m in to hit and I can’t take my good swing. I strike out and that’s when it wakes me. Then I know it’s really over.’

  “‘I loved it,’ he says, ‘his voice throbbing with intensity. Nobody could have loved playing ball as much as me, when I wasn’t hurt. I must have fifty scrapbooks. People sent ’em to me. Sometimes after breakfast when the boys
get off to school, I sit by myself and take a scrapbook and just turn the pages. The hair comes up on the back of my neck. I get goose bumps. And I remember how it was and how I used to think that it would always be that way.’”

  The words seem to jump off the page at me. I remember the last time we were in Portland, Oregon, when Mickey Mantle was staying at the same hotel. He was in town as part of his job with a Dallas-based insurance company. Five years out of baseball, he was the principal guest at a luncheon honoring the great Indian quarterback for the University of Washington Huskies, Sonny Sixkiller, who had just joined the insurance company. Mantle stood in the lobby for over an hour on that stormy afternoon. He chatted with Danny and said hello to some of us players, but mostly he just stared at the rain. As I watched from across the lobby and listened, the rain beating against the window began to sound like thousands of hands clapping in wild applause.

  There is terror behind the dream of being a professional ballplayer. It comes as a slow realization of finality and of the frightening unknowns which the end brings. When the playing is over, one can sense that one’s youth has been spent playing a game and now both the game and youth are gone, along with the innocence that characterizes all games which at root are pure and promote a prolonged adolescence in those who play. Now the athlete must face a world where awkward naiveté can no longer be overlooked because of athletic performance. By age thirty-five any potential for developing skills outside of basketball is slim. The “good guy” syndrome ceases. What is left is the other side of the Faustian bargain: To live all one’s days never able to recapture the feeling of those few years of intensified youth. In a way it is the fate of a warrior class to receive rewards, plaudits, and exhilaration simultaneously with the means of self-destruction. When a middle-aged lawyer moves more slowly on the tennis court, he makes adjustments and may even laugh at his geriatric restrictions because for him there remains the law. For the athlete who reaches thirty-five, something in him dies; not a peripheral activity but a fundamental passion. It necessarily dies. The athlete rarely recuperates. He approaches the end of his playing days the way old people approach death. He puts his finances in order. He reminisces easily. He offers advice to the young. But, the athlete differs from an old person in that he must continue living. Behind all the years of practice and all the hours of glory waits that inexorable terror of living without the game.

  I have often wondered how I will handle the end of my playing days. No one really knows until that day comes. DeBusschere says that as long as one doesn’t puff up with the unnatural attention given a pro athlete, and keeps a few good friends, the adjustment should be easy. I don’t know if he really believes it. Tom Heinsohn says you don’t realize how much you love the game until you miss it. Forced into a premature retirement by injury, he yearned for the life again so much that he took a 75 percent cut in salary to coach the Celtics. One retired player told me he noticed the end at home in his relationship with his wife. The fears and resentment that were formerly projected into the team now fall on wife and children, making life miserable for all. Holzman says that he never regretted the end, for when it came he had had enough basketball and wanted out. In my case, I’ve been preparing for the end since my first year, but even so I can only hope that I will manage easily the withdrawal from what Phil Jackson calls “my addiction.”

  When DeBusschere announced his retirement after getting a ten-year contract to become General Manager of the New York Nets, many newspapers said that he was retiring at his best. Once, after a speech I gave, a man came up to me and said, “Retire while you’re still at the top. Whizzer White did it. Jim Brown did it. Bill Russell did it.” DeBusschere talks about how sad he felt for Willie Mays struggling at the end of his brilliant career. He calls Mays’ play embarrassing. He also says of several players that they played one year too long.

  In the same way that it is difficult to watch your father grow old, it’s difficult to watch your favorite player become increasingly unable to do the small things that made you admire him. But unless a man has a better opportunity, why should he stop doing something he loves? Fans want stars to retire on top in part to protect their fantasies. That makes no sense; consider Jerry West or Oscar Robertson, whose last two years of struggle didn’t diminish the twelve previous years of achievement. In a way it made them more likable than if they had sought to retain an heroic level through early retirement. The decline is sad but human, for it is the one thing that strikes ineluctably in professional sports. To miss it makes a pro’s experience incomplete.

  The end of a player’s career is the end of the big money and big publicity, and at that point the future depends on past prudence and levelheadedness. The specter of Joe Louis or Sugar Ray Robinson haunts many players. DeBusschere believes that of all the Knicks Frazier will have the most difficulty adjusting to the post-playing days. I’m not so sure. “My biggest motivation not to go broke,” says Frazier, “doesn’t come from the example of Sugar Ray or Joe Louis, but from my father. When he lost all of his money, he lost everything. The new ‘Caddies’ and other presents that used to arrive at the house stopped coming. I hold back spending too much money more than I would if I hadn’t been around when something happened to my father.” Frazier clearly has thought about the change of living standard but DeBusschere wonders also whether Clyde can adjust to a life of less publicity after nearly ten years in the New York spotlight. Though his life seemingly focuses on externals, and remains naively vulnerable to the quixotic taste of strangers, I believe Clyde does seem to understand the precarious path he treads and he confidently prepares for the end with little concern for the potential terror. Maybe no fall can be as hard and damaging as that which he witnessed his father take many years before.

  Perhaps the last word on the end of a player’s career comes from Danny Whelan. “When the fan is kissing your ass and telling you that you’re the greatest,” says Danny, “he hates you. They want to get you down on their level and they can’t when you’re on the top. After you retire just go to that guy who was buying you drinks when you were a player and ask him for a job. He’ll show you the door. The fan likes to step on a player after he’s finished playing if he gets a chance. A good example is Sweetwater Clifton. Just the other night some guy says he remembers Sweets with the Knicks and asks me if I know what he’s doing. I shut up. If I had told him that he’s driving a cab in Chicago the guy would have got his nuts off. Players would be better off to change their names and start anew.”

  The plane flies from the lush greenery of the Pacific Northwest to the desert of Arizona. A city comes into view; it appears as a greenish-gray geometric design placed in the middle of brown blotting paper. “If you look out the plane to your right,” the captain announces during the descent, “you will see the London Bridge at Lake Havasu, near Phoenix, Arizona.”

  A warm, dry wind blows steadily as we leave the plane. Inside the antiseptic terminal, we pick up our luggage and move to the bus outside, opposite a row of taxis. DeBusschere reads the Phoenix afternoon paper while the bus moves along the palm-lined drive to the airport exit. I ask him to let me see it when he’s finished. Passing through a poorer section of town, manicured lawns disappear. Small yellow-gray frame houses with front porches that sag on each end, stand in the middle of dusty plots of land. “We’ve just passed the projects,” says a rookie.

  Another player hums Otis Redding’s hit, “I’ve Been Loving You Too Long,” and a third, hearing the song, reminisces, “Hey, remember J. R. on Saturday night radio out of Nashville, brought to you by Randy’s Record Shop?”

  “Yeah, I remember,” a rookie says. “Jimmy Reed be singin’ “Just ‘A Runnin’… Just ‘A Hidin’” [he begins to sing]…. That’s blues.”

  “Yeah, man,” another player says. “I’ve seen motherfuckers down South sittin’ next to that radio on a Saturday night cryin’. Especially if they got a little white lightnin’ in them. They’d be listenin’ to the blues and shaking their heads, ‘Oh, m
y, yes.’”

  DeBusschere throws me the paper opened to a story about a house owned by the Phoenix Suns’ Dick Van Arsdale, who was my roommate during my rookie year. He is a handsome man, 6′5″ and blond, with a personality as sturdy as his durable legs. I had returned to Oxford after the 1967–68 season to take examinations for my degree, when one morning at breakfast I read in the International Herald Tribune that the Knicks had sent Van Arsdale to Phoenix in the expansion draft. It was my first contact with owner-controlled player movement. My reaction was sadness at losing a good friend, but, in retrospect, the more important effect was that I came to understand the power of owners. “They can send me anywhere overnight,” I thought. “How can you form close friendships if the next day you might be gone?” I had always seen trading from the fan’s viewpoint, but then I saw the human cost involved. I don’t like the fear their power over me evokes. I don’t like the idea of a man owning, selling, and buying another man as if he was an old car.

  The Van Arsdale deal occurred during the off-season and Dick had time to relocate his family. If the trade had taken place during the season, Van, like any other player, would have had 48 hours to report to his new team, whatever the hardship. By signing a contract, players automatically agree to the possibility of a forced move without advance notice. Sportswriters jokingly refer to the movement of “horseflesh.” General managers point out how trades benefit all parties, as if they were the “invisible hand” of basketball. Owners call their control of players essential to the structure and integrity of professional basketball. After Van’s departure I realized that no matter how kind, friendly, and genuinely interested the owners may be, in the end most players are little more than depreciable assets to them.