Life on the Run (9 page)

As the New York Knicks meshed in 1969, Red Holzman’s role in the development of unselfish team play was crucial. With rules, personal manner and organization he clearly established himself as boss. But, he also encouraged contributions from players, sometimes deferring to their judgment. A player rarely made a suggestion that Red had not thought of before. Still, he allowed each player to believe that his help was essential. He told us we were as good as any team and that potentially we were the best. He had no technical secrets or remarkable innovations. As he said, “Everything done today was done twenty years ago, you guys just do it better.”

The real genius of Holzman lies in his handling of players. A comment on a plane or in an airport might relate tangentially to a previous game, but it is always delivered low key. He never tells players exactly what he wants them to do beyond the general rules of “seeing the ball” on defense and “hitting the open man” on offense. He prefers to shape a player as he performs. Toward some players he is stern; others he cajoles and flatters. A few he abuses verbally. Each of his moves is calculated to manipulate the player toward action which Red thinks will bring victory.

Most men would have failed as coach of the New York Knickerbockers. Great college coaches often cannot make the adjustment from coaching boys to controlling men. Holzman does not beg players to do good deeds, nor does he set up elaborate codes of conduct. He expects everyone to act as a responsible adult and he treats players accordingly. To rookies and substitutes he says, “If we miss a practice, it’s up to you to find a place to work out on your own. Just make sure when and if you’re ever called upon to play you’re in shape.” To veterans he says, “No one drinks in the main bar of the hotel where the team stays. That one belongs to me.” And, “If you manage to get lucky, don’t fall asleep on top of the covers. I don’t want any colds.” To all players he says, “If we win you will have a lot of free time; if we lose you belong to me.” In his first year as coach we lost often, and during one twenty-five day stretch we played eight games and had twenty-one two-hour practices. Everyone learned quickly that life was more pleasant if we won.

Other men Holzman’s age who become coaches in the NBA have difficulty communicating with black players. They overdo their understanding of blackness so that it comes off artificial. Or, they can’t understand black pride or individuality, and sometimes even slip into a careless use of a code word like “boy.” Holzman never makes racial mistakes. Everyone is subject to the same treatment. It seems natural that he senses the right course, for he grew up a Jew in a non-Jewish world, where discrimination was a very real part of his own life. He understands the dividing line between paranoia and reality. He also had coached black and Latin players in Puerto Rico for seven summers prior to becoming the Knicks’ head coach. It was there that he learned the flexibility in approach that allows for different life-styles and different values on his teams. It was there that he learned to discard his own non-basketball perceptions when they clashed with a player’s in an area unrelated to the game. It was there that he learned to enjoy a way of life different from his own in New York.

Holzman knows that whatever happens on the team, the next day brings another game. Whenever crowds become vicious he says that it is nothing compared to Ponce, Puerto Rico, where frequently after games the visiting teams had to wait at center court for an hour, surrounded by police, until the fans calmed down. I have the feeling that the Ponce experience has given him confidence in handling any player in any situation.

Some coaches who try the professional ranks can’t take the road schedule physically or emotionally; being away from home for 100 nights a year is too disorienting. But for almost ten years Holzman was the New York Knicks’ chief scout, traveling constantly throughout the United States from November to April. He set his own schedule, booked his own plane and motel reservations, made his own appointments, and picked his own game to watch. He became accustomed to the vagaries of road life. The strain of the away-from-home schedule as a professional coach is for him merely a continuation of well-formed travel habits.

Many coaches in the NBA do not understand the press and public relations job that a coach has to master. Holzman had seen six Knick coaches fired while he was the chief scout. At a certain point, the press had always contributed to each coach’s downfall and each victim had assisted his own demise with careless remarks in unguarded moments. Holzman never says anything bad about anybody to the press; if possible, he says nothing. That way, players do not read the paper to find out what the coach thinks of their game, and no sportswriter can extract from him the name of a player on whom to pin defeat. Left with little material from the source, the writer develops his own interpretations. Holzman’s “cooperation” exasperates some reporters, but it works beautifully. He has mastered probably the most tricky aspect of being a New York coach. He will probably never be a celebrity. But then, he only wants to be the Knick coach.

In technical terms, Holzman avoids the average professional coach’s mistaken emphasis on offense. Many coaches assume that a professional team can run more plays than in fact is possible. They insist on rigid adherence to a pattern, and then after their approach brings losses, they are not flexible. Instead, they develop major personality clashes with players, which brings more losses, or they give up trying to coach and watch one-on-one chaos, which also brings more losses. “If you play good, hard defense, the offense will take care of itself,” Holzman says. All the things Chicago does well on defense, the Knicks do equally well when we play Red’s way. He believes that at least a third of offense should come from defense. A quick steal or a double team or an interception can lead to a basket with very little offensive effort. Wearing a button-down Oxford shirt, a striped tie, and dress slacks at a practice during the season, Holzman crouches and pivots, explaining what he means by “seeing the ball.” He urges us never to turn our backs to the ball, always keeping our men and the ball in sight. Even when there is too much one-on-one, he emphasizes defense before he admits that there is an offensive problem. In all these ways, Holzman is the right man, in the right place, at the right time, and as a team the Knicks prosper—most of the time.

The second half play in Chicago takes a turn for the worse. I quickly get my fourth foul. Phil returns but he gets three quick fouls, too. Meanwhile, Walker is having a great night against DeBusschere. Chicago wins by sixteen. Even in defeat, there is a star of the game. Frazier, who in the fourth quarter led a desperate charge for recovery, is awarded two knitted shirts.

The tiny locker room is now jammed. I am in the shower. Reporters are asking me questions and spray is soaking their notebooks. They want to know about Walker’s night, about the Chicago defense, and about our inability to sustain our second and fourth quarter spurts. I retreat into the hot water which offers a more peaceful state of mind. My neck muscles loosen. I hear only the hiss of hot pellets striking my head. I think back over the nights on the road. I chuckle about the time in Cincinnati two years earlier when DeBusschere bet me $50 I couldn’t monopolize the post-game TV interview conducted by an opinionated announcer who frequently criticized players. I talked for four straight minutes in answer to one question, much to the consternation of the interviewer, who glanced hurriedly at the camera several times from under his toupee. He never realized what was happening. I won the bet and the following week received four letters from viewers who said the interview was either a great practical joke or I was crazy.

Phil asks me what I am grinning about. I say it’s just a joke I remembered. Then I turn to the soap which has softened into a yellow mush stuck to its tray. As I stand in the cramped shower stall I think about the insulated world we professional basketball players live in. We travel from city to city, sometimes as if we were unaware of a larger world beyond our own. Every city we enter is full of crises and problems that never reach us in a hotel room. The daily worries and pressures of workers concerned about how to pay for food, housing, or medical care never penetrate the glass of our bus window. To do our job, we have to remain healthy and follow orders. In any airline terminal even the sad scene of a soldier’s farewell or the joy of a family reunion often by-pass us making no impression. In the airports that have become our commuter stations we see so many dramatic personal moments that we are calloused. To some, we live romantic lives. To me, every day is a struggle to stay in touch with life’s subtleties.

Yet events of the larger world do buffet us sometimes. I remember a phone call that interrupted a press conference I was having with the local sports reporters on my first visit to Chicago as a Knick. It was 1967 and a former college classmate had been killed two months earlier in Vietnam. His wife, whom I had met twice, had read in the newspaper that I was in town. She wanted to talk with somebody since things were tough for her just then. There was not much to say.

A night in early 1973 at the Chicago Stadium stands out in my memory too. I was kneeling at the scorer’s table, preparing to reenter the game in the second quarter, when I heard the public address announcer say, “Ladies and gentlemen, attention please. President Nixon announced tonight that a cease-fire in Vietnam will be signed on Saturday, all POWs will be returned and all American troops will be home in sixty days.” Scattered pockets of twelve and fourteen among the 17,000 in attendance stood and applauded. There was none of the catharsis of a V-J Day. It was as if people had forgotten the war. The turmoil of those years flashed across my mind and I thought about my friend’s wife.

I towel dry and dress in silence. The reporters have gone. Danny Whelan zips his equipment bag. I grab a beer and head for the bus.

I wonder sometimes what effect our group has on other people as we travel around the country. Here we are at Chicago’s O’Hare Airport. We saunter, limp, swear, and tug at our tight-fitting clothes. The Filipino bartender draws us five glasses of draft beer. We guzzle them. Three soldiers at the end of the plastic bar look up from their glasses full of Scotch. They can’t be more than nineteen years old. Our conversation trails off after the first beer. Two players leave to make late night calls to Chicago girl friends. Silence, then the heads of soldiers and players alike rotate, turning left to right as a lady with peroxide hair walks past the bar window. “What an ass!” the bartender says. No one responds. We are too tired. We down one last beer, pick up our bags, and head for the Knick charter. The automatic ramp is broken so we walk down concrete stairs to the outside. The night is clear and cold. Looking under the tail of the plane I see others lined up at angles. The pavement is wet and gritty from the salt spread to melt the ice. Then, the freshness of a winter night becomes the staleness of a grounded airplane reeking of gasoline fumes. We taxi down the runway. Planes are being repaired in big hangars; searchlights pierce the black night like white arrows. A quick jolt, speed, momentum, lift, ascent, flight, the deep hum of engines. It is 1:15 in the morning. I eat Macadamia nuts, shrimp cocktail, salad, steak, baked potato, five pats of butter, brussels sprouts, and cherry pie. I drink a beer, three Seven-Ups, three Cokes, and milk. There are card games, crossword puzzles, scotch, the
Chicago Sun Times
and
Chicago Tribune
, news of yesterday, today; the unmemorable reflex of another flight.

One of the stewardesses sits across the aisle from me and we talk. Her name is June and she has flown for seven years. She has soft brown hair, an attractive face with blue eyes, and a careful manner. She ranks high in stewardess seniority. That’s why she chooses the Knick charter—four girls to handle twenty-five people. A veteran of the Cincinnati-Detroit-Columbus route and the New York-Los Angeles transcontinental flights, she can now choose among any routes or charters available. She says that she has just visited the two stewardesses with whom she shared an apartment in her first year of flying. One of them was recently given a bonus for heroic work during a crash landing. The other just had a difficult abortion. For June the thrill of working at a decent salary in the so-called romantic world of travel has passed. She left her parents in a small Minnesota town where her picture appeared in a local paper when she won her wings. The life no longer holds excitement, or escape, or independence for her. She shopped the Loop in Chicago, visited Disneyland in Los Angeles, toured the Empire State Building and the Statue of Liberty in New York, learned how to move around San Francisco—until her destinations held little interest for her. She turned then to people because, “After all, they’re more important than buildings.” She had affairs in some cities where friends began an evening with a quiet dinner or invited her to a loud party. The affairs came from the plane, from the men who understood the road and its disorienting quality. She had thought at separate times of marriage with two of them, one of whom seriously thought of marrying her. But it didn’t work out.

Flying keeps many stewardesses in a limbo between Hollywood and Duluth. Many have expectations they can never meet, and all run the risk of becoming impersonal after so many passes, so many invitations, so many unrealized dreams. There are those who see the deception of the exaggerated glamour; after several years they quit or get married or take an office job. The rest, as long as the schedule is hectic enough, don’t have to think about the past or the future, just about making the airport bus on time.

The plane touches down at 3:45
A.M
. Frazier, Jackson, and I share a cab as usual. The driver takes the Van Wyck Expressway to Grand Central Parkway to the Long Island Expressway to Van Dam Street to the 59th Street Bridge. As we cross the bridge the smell of freshly baked bread filters into the car, one of the few pleasures of early morning travel.

Manhattan is between day and night. Only a few floors are lit in the skyscrapers as janitors wrap up their night’s work. Newspaper trucks and garbage trucks move on empty streets below the skyscrapers, preparing the city for another day. Cabs pass us taking night people home. A couple on Second Avenue, leaning against each other for balance, hail a cab. She wears his suit coat. Men leave the massage parlors of 53rd Street. A lone hooker stands at the corner by the New York Hilton. A few people talk outside the doughnut shop on Eighth Avenue, waiting for it to open. The doorman of my apartment building tells me he is sorry about the loss in Chicago but he can’t feel too badly because he made $100 betting against us. I get into bed around 5:30
A.M
.