Life on the Run (23 page)

I have only twenty-five minutes before lunch, not enough time to get back into the book I’ve started, but plenty to finish the magazine in my bag. I ponder the decision for a minute or two, looking out the window at the cars passing on the freeway. I luxuriate in small decisions such as these. Making a choice has always fascinated me, and the delight in weighing each side and then acting remains the same for me however insignificant the decision.

After lunch I take my book to the Hyatt House courtyard where I sit alone, enclosed on all sides by the four-story motel structure. Astroturf edges the shimmering rectangular swimming pool. Scrubby pines and ten-foot palms dot a more distant area covered by worn soil. Bright red wastebaskets and green vinyl sun chairs add touches of emotion to the courtyard the way games highlight the away schedule. The newly watered sod smells fresh and clean. An occasional airplane roars overhead, but mostly the sounds are of birds and of trees blowing in the wind. The breeze drops the temperature to the fifties, while occasional bursts of sun provide a soothing warmth. It’s not exactly a walled monastery garden but it’s a quiet niche and on the road that’s pleasant.

In the locker room that night at the Oakland Coliseum everything goes as usual except that Danny’s son, Pat, stands enraptured, watching his father work. Barnett sits next to Frazier as Danny tapes DeBusschere’s ankles. Danny says something to his son, who replies, “Okay, Dad.”

“That gets you every time, doesn’t it Dan,” says Frazier, “when a little boy calls you Dad.”

“Yeah, it sure does,” says Danny. Both smile and shake their heads as if in agreement over a fundamental truth.

“Stop it, Clyde,” interrupts Barnett. “You’re making me cry.”

“What’s the matter, Rich, you never felt that way?” asks Frazier.

“No, not the way you two go at it.”

The conversation changes quickly to a movie star who follows the Knicks. Each player ventures his opinions of the star: his life, his approximate income, his hang-ups, his best roles, his dress, his appearance, and his knowledge of basketball. Finally Frazier asks, “Is he doin’ it with the girl that has the frizzy hair?”

“Yeah,” says Barnett as he leaves the room for his workout, “he be the instructor and they experiment with wild herbs.”

While Barnett is on the court everyone talks about his age and his battle to stay in shape, as if each of us was a wife looking at her husband’s changing body.

“He’s never gonna lose weight eatin’ all those nuts,” Frazier says. “He says he only eats fruit, then I see him buyin’ a candy bar.”

“I asked him last week and he claims he’s at 198,” says Jackson. “That’s just three pounds heavier than his playing weight.”

“Shit,” says DeBusschere, “he must have redistributed it awful fast to get those rolls of fat around his hips.”

Going through warm-ups I don’t have my concentration. Only the game itself, played properly, will kindle my excitement. That’s one of the advantages of being hooked on the team game; it can be a source of inspiration. Winning is a necessary constant in a happy team life. But there are nights when style, meaning a
team
victory, is more important than competitiveness, which accepts any kind of victory. I can never tell which nights just winning will be enough. Tonight I know that my enjoyment will increase in direct proportion to the extent we achieve a team-style victory.

Unpredictable as it is, such an approach makes games more interesting, for there are gradations of victory. But it makes the practices harder. My determination to practice three hours a day from age fourteen to twenty-one came primarily from my competitive drive to be the best possible player, not from a sense of enjoyment for the game. When I practiced in high school and college I would break down my shots into their components. I would execute my moves and then repeat; think and repeat, until I had them. While practicing, my basketball fantasies would emerge—putting a move on Oscar Robertson, hitting a running hook shot to win a game, using the reverse pivot in the championship. When I returned after two years away from the game in 1967, I couldn’t sustain basketball fantasies for a long practice, much less the sheer concentration necessary to master new moves or shots. I found myself, instead, thinking about things other than basketball as I moved around an imaginary semi-circle twenty feet from the basket, hitting fifteen shots from each of five spots on the floor. My mind wandered to politics, movies, money, women, food, the future. The longest I can practice alone now is about forty-five minutes.

With my dedication to lone practice gone, the team is everything. How the team does affects my feelings about the game and myself; sometimes, I think, too much. I am obsessed with my work of team basketball. In a way my personality, formed as it was on a steady diet of Calvinist religion, is amenable to the idea of team play. Self-denial is nothing new for me. The conflict comes because I have to interact with others to accomplish my goal of team play. My problem is that my aspirations demand that I create something I cannot control completely. I do not depend on the outside for recognition. The press and public approval mean little to me. What is important is my own judgment as to whether the team plays according to my estimation of how an ideal team should. My actions are often determined by what I feel will bring about the ideal and victory. It is a more complicated process than simply playing or being the star. Some friends say I am functioning in a world that bears little resemblance to reality. At times I feel as if I am an artist in the wrong medium.

But there are a few games every year when I am neither personally competitive nor in pursuit of my team ideal. I simply play for the joy of the game, shooting and passing without calculation. I forget the score and sometimes go through a quarter without looking at the scoreboard. I don’t
think
about my movements. I feel good running and bumping, and I get an overall sense of whether we are playing well, executing intelligently and precisely, by the crispness of the passes, the timing of the plays, and the enthusiasm with which we communicate. On those enjoyable nights fatigue is a stranger.

There is a dimension of the game that only the players and maybe the fans in the first couple of rows can appreciate—the sounds. I hear the court noises of sneakers squeaking, 230-pound bodies hitting the floor and slapping into each other, the ball bouncing up from the floor, the quick staccato shouts of play numbers, the long whine of complaint to a referee, the hoarse voice of a coach baiting officials and bellowing instructions, the fan noise of shouts, and in the background the loud roar of applause and cheering. Tonight I hear:

“Hey, baby. What’s happenin’?”

“You guys ready? Okay, Reed, get in the circle.”

Tweet, tweet—clapping—

“2–1-F. 2–1-F.” Thud. Thud.

“Screen, screen, watch the pick.”

Squeak—roar of waterfalls.

“Defense! Defense! Defense!”

“Force him to middle, get over screen.”

“Blue, Blue, Blue!”—Pop!

“Number 24—intentional foul—two shots.”

“What… I just tried to steal.”

“That’s enough—nobody runs my game. Two shots. First one is dead.”

“How’s your leg, Jeff? How’re the kids? What are you doing after the game?”

“Reed, you’re finished—DeBusschere, you’re getting old—San Francisco will win it this year—a Knick funeral.”

“Nate the hat trick man, one more and you took the collar, big fella.”

Swish—“In your eye.”

“Willis, Willis, out here, here go Will.”

Thud, Thud, Thud, Thud—“Break to the middle.”

Whoosh! Twap—swish.

Buzzzzz—“Final score: New York 102, San Francisco 96.”

The star of the game is Willis Reed, for the first time this year. He wins two knitted shirts and a swarm of reporters.

“Do you think you got it back tonight, Will?”

“How did your knee feel?”

“When was the last time you had twenty points?”

We arrive at the San Francisco airport at 11:30 for a 12:30 flight to Seattle. At midnight the place is quiet, so quiet it is eerie without the monotone departure announcements, the sounds of powerful jet takeoffs, and the bustle of crowds. Now, there is only the murmur of scattered groups. A family of American Indians sits across from me in the waiting hall, casting disapproving glances at a long-haired youth passing their bench. The woman constantly pulls at her dress in a vain attempt to get it below her knees. A serviceman sleeps on an empty bench. His buddy says they are waiting to be first in line for military fare the next morning. Muzak filters into the background. Three teenagers in jeans and safari jackets prowl the airport alert and curious. Phil talks to a girl in the coffee shop. Willis treats three girls to drinks in the bar. Red and Danny drink scotch at a corner table. DeBusschere, a writer, and I stand at the bar. I drink two beers. DeBusschere is drinking scotch. A gambler seated next to us prepares for a 2:30
A.M
. flight to Las Vegas where he hopes to repeat his $15,000 win of the previous month. He refuses a beer and drinks Southern Comfort.

After twenty-five minutes we make our way to the security checkpoint. The players are allowed to skirt the body search segment. A sportswriter walks in our group. I get the guard’s attention.

“Hey!” I say, “this guy’s not with us.” The security man stops the reporter for a body search. We laugh. I say that I was just kidding but the guard says he better search him anyway.

When the reporter catches up with DeBusschere and me at the plane, he says, “I’ll be around when Bill Bradley is just another answer to a trivia question.”

Inside the plane the card game has started, with Earl, Rich, Phil, and the rookie “talking trash” and laughing. The reporters, Danny, and Red play the “old-movie” game.

“Who played Rafael in ‘Desert Song’?”

“Which movie had the butler who always said ‘Mr. Worthington’?”

“Who was Errol Flynn’s first wife?”

“What was the real name of the sheriff in ‘Gunfight at the OK Corral’?”

I ease into a seat next to DeBusschere. We sit quietly until after drinks are served. The game was hard. We are tired and a little tipsy. Dave turns to me and asks, “Do you think we’ll still be friends after basketball?”

“Yeah,” I say smiling. “I’m sure we will.”

Friendship on a team is often misunderstood. People talk about teams as families, as groups that eat, sleep, work, and play together. But on many teams the friendship aspect is overblown and even hypocritical. I could never understand owners who treat players as sons in public and cheat them on salary in private, or owners who are surprised when players whom they have cheated later resent them for it, or coaches who talk about their “family” and then the next year trade players away, or teams that one year publicize a unique meshing of personalities and then the next year have players who won’t pass the ball to each other, or coaches that switch roommates to prevent cliques and produce angry, isolated players.

I have heard people say that dissension developed on a particular team because the players never saw each other off the court and didn’t care about each other as human beings. Outsiders envision players as having intense personal relations with each other, sharing innermost thoughts, fears, and hopes, sort of an extension of summer camp into adulthood. That’s not the way with the Knicks.

Each player on the Knicks has his own territory. Frazier, Willis, and DeBusschere are the voices of the Knicks to the press. Lucas and Barnett are the promoters. In addition, DeBusschere and Frazier never put themselves in a position where they may appear to be competing with a teammate. For example, they often relax in shooting games and never play one-on-one with teammates; everyone understands. Each player brings his own personal strength to an area and it is different from every other player’s. All realize that the greater freedom to “do your own thing” comes only from the interest generated by winning, so no one seeks to take all the credit or seize all the opportunities; anger and dissatisfaction never last.

Griel Marcus in
Mystery Train
, a book on rock and roll music, says of The Band, “Friendship can be a means of community. But if one does not live in the world, then one will feed off the small world of friendship until there is nothing left.” Partly because we rarely see teammates in New York off the court, the road becomes a pleasure enhanced by the absence of personality conflicts. Our contact with each other is rationed to the phones, buses, hotels, and arenas where we live as a group, drawn together and bound, but not like pressed steel. It is as if we come together for mutual reinforcement and then disperse into the world, each following his own separate interest. Roommates, though, are a different story.

I am somewhat stunned by DeBusschere’s question. Will we be friends? I hope so. There is so much in our relationship that is left unspoken, but it is hard to imagine it ending. Living together makes for a strong bond. All the telephone calls, nights out, shared toiletries, mutual kidding; all the knowledge of mundane things like sleeping, drinking, and eating habits, clothes preferences, sexual preferences, pet peeves. Each of us has much to tolerate in the other. Sometimes we keep our luggage in the same room in a town and never see each other. But that is precisely what is good about our friendship. There is no need to feel guilty for not socializing together every night on the road. We have different interests and friends. I don’t ask a lot of personal questions, and he respects my privacy. Within the boundaries of that friendship there is much room for good times, affection, and deep respect.

We share basketball and our complementary views of the game. When that is gone I believe that, unlike a lot of professional athletes who are friends for the moment, we will remain close through the post-playing years. Since meeting Dave, I feel easier with small groups of strangers. I can relax over a beer, even with people I’ve just met. His honesty, friendliness, and total lack of pretension are constant sources of the strength of my feeling for him. I can’t believe those qualities will change. Yet the fear is there; the fear that what is now so good and true and strong will prove to be just one more elusive human contact, that we will pass through each other’s lives and out, that somehow the self-contained protective world of basketball has been too generous to us, and that the real world may prove too strident, too troublesome, too fragmented for even our friendship to bear.