Life on the Run (8 page)

DeBusschere looks distracted and tired. He takes a warm-up hook that misses the rim. Chicago for Dave is the best and worst of cities. He played baseball here with the White Sox. There isn’t too much left from those years but the friends. There’s one in particular, a Greek-American with whom he usually spends most of the night before the game, drinking in “just a few joints Nick and I found.” DeBusschere sometimes surprises me the next night by playing a great game, but often he is fatigued. He is 33 years old. Still, he prepares for the game and expects himself to perform as if he had rested for two weeks.

DeBusschere is the best defensive forward in basketball. There is always physical contact between him and the man he is guarding. Resting his forearm on his opponent’s chest or waist, he rarely gets screened; sometimes pushing his man in order to get past the screen and not to switch. He places his body chest to chest with his opponent’s, somehow avoiding a foul and still preventing his man from beating him on a drive. DeBusschere plays the percentages. He knows he can’t block the shot of a good jump shooter, so he tries to force his man to shoot while off balance. There are areas of the court in which he allows his man to maneuver uncontested and other areas in which he fights his man for every inch. He channels a player toward areas of the floor that are out of that man’s optimum shooting range. Given the choice of battling Dave for 48 minutes to get good shots or of taking more difficult shots farther from the basket, many players resign themselves to the bad shots. When DeBusschere guards a taller player or a great one-on-one player, he tries to deny him the ball by “overplaying” (placing his arms or body between the offensive man and the passer rather than between his man and the basket). If the ball moves quickly to the opposite side of the court, DeBusschere beats his man to the spot on that side of the court at which the player is most likely to receive a pass. Like all great defensive players, he enjoys playing defense. “You are always in a game when you play good defense,” he says. “I like to hound my man constantly—make him feel like I’m never going to let him breathe. I don’t want him to feel I am ever an inch away from him. Wherever he goes, whatever he does, I anticipate first. I start in the afternoon before the game, thinking about how I can upset the man I guard. It is hard work, but you can make it fun.”

Tonight, as usual, DeBusschere will guard Chet Walker. Theirs is a rivalry which dates back to high school. DeBusschere was from a Catholic, all-boys high school in Detroit. Walker grew up in Benton Harbor in southwestern Michigan and went to the public high school there. DeBusschere shot well from the outside and played with good fundamentals. Walker was the first player in his high school’s history to dunk the ball. They met in the Michigan State High School Finals at East Lansing before a crowd of 15,000. Both played well. DeBusschere, who had a stronger supporting cast than Walker, fouled out with five minutes left in the game, but his team pulled it out for the 1958 state title.

In professional basketball two athletes’ careers often become intertwined. They may be friends and may even have come from the same city or neighborhood, but only when they are on the court do they feel the intense rivalry that exists between them. The more times one player meets another, the better he gets to know not only the other’s abilities, but also his personality. Subtle weaknesses become glaring shortcomings to one who knows how to exploit them: a tendency to lose your temper, a hesitation to take a pressure shot, a preference for the flashy low-percentage move, a fear of losing, an inability to cope with changing tactics. Mutual respect develops between many pairs of players. Mutual enmity festers between others.

The buzzer sounds to start the game, and DeBusschere, unstrung by the warm-up, is already on the bench drinking water. I ask him how he feels. He says he’s ready. I’m not convinced. Holzman and Barnett suggest an opening play. The game begins.

The Bulls are at their best, and soon they lead us by ten points. Walker takes DeBusschere to the baseline twice, fakes, and scores easily. Dave does not discourage him with aggressiveness. He is a step behind as Walker flashes across the lane and takes a pass for an easy lay-up. He can’t seem to keep him away from the ball. The Knick guards do not move the ball to the open man, or go into quick one-on-one moves. Instead, they dribble without penetrating to the basket until the twenty-four second clock is about to run out. Then they force shots. I am smaller than the Chicago forward I play against so I try to overplay him. He takes me low, near the basket, and simply shoots over me. I draw three quick fouls. I also miss four open jump shots. Holzman replaces me with Phil Jackson, the Knicks’ third forward, who at 6′7″ and with extremely long arms, is a better defender.

Phil envelops opponents. His specialty is the “double team” in which, flailing his arms, he drives the man with the ball toward one of the corners, preferably where the half-court line meets the out-of-bounds line. Once there, a second defender leaves his man and plugs the only outlet, thus trapping the man with the ball. A bad pass or a steal often results. When Phil makes his move, you can see panic on the face of an inexperienced player. Generating pressure and threatening contact are at the core of Phil’s defensive game.

John Jackson, a shipbuilder from Bristol, England, came to America in the 1660s with his brother, Jay. They settled in what is now Portsmouth, New Hampshire, where the family practiced its trade until the American Revolution. At that point John’s grandson sided with the English and, as a loyal Tory, chose to leave the newly formed United States of America. King George III of England deeded 50,000 acres to him on the Ottawa River in Pembroke, Ontario. There, the offspring of John Jackson farmed the fertile river valley soil, and intermarried with neighboring O’Briens and Clemonses. To this day, Joe Jackson, Jr., Phil’s older brother, retains the deed to the Jackson home in Portsmouth which they held throughout their years in Canada. It has been preserved as the oldest frame house in the state.

Joe Jackson, Phil’s father, is part of the John Jackson branch of the family. He quit school in Ontario at fourteen and worked on the farm, which, after generations of split inheritances, had dwindled to 200 acres. Winters, he traveled north to the lumber camps at Hudson Bay, where he labored first as a cook’s assistant and later as a lumberjack. He devoted more and more time to his work as a lay preacher in the Lutheran Church. He married and had one girl. During a second pregnancy, both mother and child died. Simultaneously, the Great Depression hit the farm, bankrupting him. Mr. Jackson took these events as signs from God. He headed west to become a lay preacher in Montana. There he met an evangelist named Elizabeth Funk.

She was the daughter of Peter Funk, who came to Montana from Weyruth, Saskatchewan, when strong anti-German sentiment during World War I had forced him and his family to leave. Mr. Funk set up a stable and boarding house business for Indians at Wolfpoint, Montana. He worked as a wrangler of wild horses. After breaking them he would sell them to individuals for riding or to the U.S. Army for meat. “My gramps was out to make his fortune,” says Phil, “which he never did. It was a tough land to make money in.”

Elizabeth Funk was valedictorian of her high school class and captain of the girls’ basketball team. She received a teacher’s certificate and worked in a one-room schoolhouse for two years. At 22 she went to a Pentecostal seminary in Winnipeg, Manitoba. After leaving there, she joined her brother Peter and sister Nell, and formed a team of traveling evangelists. Nell would later become a missionary in China, be placed in a concentration camp by the Japanese, and, after World War II, teach on rooftop schools in Hong Kong, but now she was busy telling the people of Montana about Pentecostalism. The procedure for the Funk family was the same in every prairie town. They stood on street corners playing the accordion, proclaiming the imminent arrival of Christ, and asking people to come to a service that night. In the upper room they had rented for the occasion, they sang. They played the piano, the guitar, the accordion; they encouraged the “spirit of the Lord” to move among the congregation. Sometimes they spoke in tongues. The Funks became well known throughout Montana during their seven years of constant travel. Once, it is said, Betty Funk, the blond, blue-eyed proselytizer, even performed a miracle on a boy born without eyes.

When Joe Jackson met Betty Funk, they fell in love and married. Phil Jackson was their third child. The Jacksons were a ministerial couple “living for the Lord.” Their first parish was in Haver, Montana, followed by churches in towns of the Northwest such as Hamilton, Anaconda, Miles City, Great Falls, Williston, and Fairfield. Betty preached Sunday night. Joe preached Sunday morning and took care of the church finances. “My father was compassionate and thorough,” Phil says. “My mother was competitive and brilliant—a prophetic evangelist who dealt with the books of the Bible like Revelations and Isaiah and the concept of the world’s end. Every Sunday since I was born the apocalypse has been coming next year. My parents saw it as their job to get everyone ready.”

Phil didn’t see a doctor until he was six, and he did not receive a penicillin shot until age fourteen. When he was injured, the first act, in accordance with Biblical tradition, was the laying on of hands and the rubbing on of olive oil. Other than eyewash, Mercurochrome, and band-aids, the only treatments for illness were the herbal remedies of the old West. For example, a staph infection was treated by a poultice of old bread crusts, onion, oatmeal, and milk wrapped in a hot towel. Every fall for one week each Jackson child had to take a cold preventative made of sulphur, honey, and deer lard.

At age sixteen, when Phil stood six feet five inches, he abandoned his first love, baseball, and chose basketball as his favorite sport. He acquired keys to the Williston, North Dakota, town armory. Alone, he sneaked past the stage that stood at one end of the hall to the tile basketball court, where for hours he worked on his hook shot.

Phil’s high school team became known statewide. Their nearest opponent was a hundred and twenty miles away and some games involved round-trip journeys of six hundred miles. The team traveled in the cars of the coach and assistant coach, driving along Highway 2 through the butte country and the Badlands of North Dakota. Slowly, they crossed into the north central part of the state, where the land became flat, and grazing land gave way to farms and trees. The high school gyms held 1,500, with bleachers on the stage. At many games, fans stood three deep along the sidelines and under the basket. Outside, the temperature was ten degrees below, and the wind made it feel like forty below. If the windows had to be opened to cool the crowd, condensation formed on the playing surface and occasionally it froze, leaving a thin layer of ice on the court. Win or lose, the memory of a game passed quickly, for the team spent most nights of away games in the motels of North Dakota. One might feel down about losing, but sleeping four players to a room, two to a bed, made any prolonged depression difficult.

Jackson’s style as a player developed in accordance with his build, which reminds me of a clothes hanger turned upside down. Tall and thin, with long arms (42-inch sleeve), he seemed to be off balance constantly. When he ran or jumped or shot he seemed to be caroming off unseen opponents, able to right himself with just enough time to make the necessary move. It was as if his arms served as separate sides of a scale which never achieved equilibrium but constantly fluctuated from side to side. He surprised big men by his defensive skills and made them feel they were being guarded by a man with three sets of arms. He shot his hook with great accuracy while coming across the middle. In high school he led his team to a second-place finish one year and a first the next in the North Dakota State Schoolboy Tournament. A center from a rival school surpassed Phil in individual statistics, but together they were easily the two best players ever to compete in North Dakota. The other high school star failed to improve in college and faded like so many before him; but Phil continued to improve each year at the University of North Dakota, and New York drafted him in 1967.

With Jackson’s substitution, the Knicks seem revitalized. He blocks two shots, steals three passes, and over a span of four minutes gets six rebounds. Frazier hits four jumpers and we tie the score. Chicago seems befuddled. Jackson hits a hook across the middle and then takes a lead pass from DeBusschere and dribbles the length of the floor for a reverse lay-up. Barnett smiles and shakes his head, unable to comprehend how, despite his apparent awkwardness, Phil can get the job done. On the last series of plays in the first half, Jackson blocks his man from a rebound, only to see the ball bounce to a Chicago guard, who attempts a drive for a lay-up. Phil leaves his man, lunges across the lane as if out of control, and swats away the ball just as it is about to hit the backboard. Goal tending is not called. The buzzer sounds. The Knicks are up by three at the half.

I believe that basketball, when a certain level of unselfish team play is realized can serve as a kind of metaphor for ultimate cooperation. It is a sport where success, as symbolized by the championship, requires that the dictates of community prevail over selfish personal impulses. An exceptional player is simply one point on a five-pointed star. Statistics—such as points, rebounds, or assists per game—can never explain the remarkable range of human interaction that takes place on a successful pro team. Personal conflicts between team members will never surface if there is a strong enough agreement on the community’s values and goals. Members of the Budapest String Quartet disliked each other personally, but collectively still made exquisite music. They did so in part because they had a rigid score that limited the range of personal interpretation. The cooperation in basketball is remarkable because the flow of action always includes a role for creative spontaneity; the potential for variation is unlimited. Players improvise constantly. The unity they form is not achieved at the expense of individual imagination. That creative freedom highlights the game’s beauty and its complexity, making the moment when the ideal is realized inspiring for the players, thrilling for the fans.