When the Garden Was Eden (9 page)

To some, he came off as bitter: born too early to be justly appreciated or compensated for the magnificent player he was. In an age before free agency, Robertson had to take what his owners gave him, but was typically front and center when the players began to collectively fight back, beginning with a movement to procure a pension plan. Robertson and the Celtics’ Tommy Heinsohn, mentored by union general counsel Larry Fleisher, were enraged when the owners didn’t take them seriously. They made plans for the players to boycott the 1964 All-Star Game.

Scheduled to be televised nationally by ABC, the game represented a major marketing leap forward for the NBA. Unaccustomed to such player effrontery, the league was in a foul, combative mood. On a snowy day in Boston, the Lakers’ owner, Bob Short, sent a Boston Garden security officer whom Heinsohn knew as “Chris the cop” to inform the players that they would be fired if the game was canceled. Robertson told his colleagues that the owners had to be bluffing. Burying the biggest names in their marginal business would amount to professional suicide.

“I remember we were in the locker room and some of the guys didn’t want to go through with it,” Robertson told me. “I said, ‘If you don’t, I suggest you leave.’ ”

If there is a moment to which the modern-day millionaire ballplayer—from Jordan to James—might trace the genesis of his staggering wealth, it would be when Elgin Baylor took his cue from the Big O and sent back the message: “Go tell Bob Short to fuck himself.” The owners bent on the pension plan. Robertson then went out and demonstrated what they would be getting in return for their money, staging a basketball clinic with 26 points, 14 rebounds, and 8 assists. His MVP award might have stood for Most Valuable Proletariat. And if his All-Star leadership wasn’t enough to sufficiently pry open the owners’ wallets, it was Robertson, again, who risked their wrath by attaching his name to an antitrust suit against the NBA in 1970. Six contentious years later, the era of free agency dawned.

Robertson was born in a small Tennessee town but grew up in one of those more northern inner cities that lent credence to Reed’s and Frazier’s contention that the segregated South had its advantages. Robertson starred on an Indianapolis high school that fielded the city’s first all-black squad to win state championships in Indiana, but was ordered to celebrate out of town by local leaders who were afraid that they, as Robertson said, “would go on some kind of rampage and burn the city down.”

As much as any triple double (he remains the only player to average one for an entire season, 1961–62), he could still summon the ignominy and outrage of being in a restaurant in the uniform of the United States Army and being made to feel like the invisible black man. “I couldn’t even get a sandwich,” he said.

In the entirety of his career, Robertson made a fraction of what Jordan and later James could claim in salary and endorsements from a single season. But he was, indisputably, a man of and for the sixties, hot-wired for a decade that was dedicated to challenge and change. The rewards that he carried across the years could be stored only in his mind and heart, never the bank. Nonetheless, Robertson was eager to disclose all that he’d earned.

“A lot of guys will say now they were involved in the movement, but what did you do at that time?” he said. “What did you say?”

AS A MATTER OF PERSONAL POLICY
, the most political of all basketball players chose to say nothing, skirting inquisitions with a skilled evasiveness that occasionally struck interviewers as churlishness.

“I was extremely suspicious of being asked about the war,” Bill Bradley said. Nor did he care to expound on the country’s issues related to race, religion, or poverty, he added. “Why were they asking me? They were asking me because I was a well-known basketball player and therefore I was a celebrity. I would basically say, Look, I’m no different than any other 24-year-old. There are a lot of other people whose answer to that question is going to have a lot more import.”

Bradley was seated across a conference room table at the Fifth Avenue offices of Allen & Company, a boutique investment firm serving media and entertainment moguls, where he worked as a managing director. Far from my working relationships with Reed, Frazier, Monroe, and others, this was the first time I had sat down with the former senator from New Jersey for a formal interview. He had departed the New York basketball scene before I arrived on the beat, though I had been around him when he returned for special events—Old Knicks jersey-retirement ceremonies and the like. For a few years, we actually lived in the same town, Montclair, New Jersey, and occasionally I would see him at the local YMCA, usually on the treadmill.

“You know, I’ve read your column for years,” he said upon sitting down. “I would have sworn you were black.” Startled, I took the mistake as a compliment, an acknowledgment that without a face to identify me by (the
Times
does not run columnist photos), he had made a judgment based on what he had read and that I had come across as an empathetic analyst of the NBA’s majority African American player base.

But I wondered: Was Bradley’s unwillingness as a player to share his political and social thoughts also a result of his own sensitivity to the commotion he had caused just by deciding to play in the NBA? Did he intuitively understand that to become part of a truly committed team meant that his personal ambitions beyond basketball could not become part of any public locker-room discussion?

As it was, Bradley thought he was already attracting too much undeserved attention. After two years at Oxford, in April 1967, Bradley signed a record four-year, $500,000 rookie contract, $25,000 a year more than Cazzie Russell was being paid. The Knicks called a major press conference at Leone’s and bought the Oxford man of honor a new suit.

So eager were they to show off their prize that they arranged a scrimmage with some of their players and draft picks—including Walt Frazier—at the old Garden. They invited the press to watch, and that was just the beginning of the hype. By the time Bradley finished a stint with the Air Force Reserve and joined the Knicks in mid-December, it was out of control. The Garden attracted a sellout, 18,499, for his debut game, against a team, the Pistons, who would have normally drawn 10,000, tops. Fans roared at the sight of Bradley on the layup line. Photographers were shooting his every move. In the radio booth, the levelheaded Marv Albert was caught up in the frenzy, too. “I was literally calling his pregame shots,” Albert said.

Two minutes after Bradley sat down on the bench between Butch Komives and Dick Van Arsdale for the start of the game, the fans were chanting his name, screaming for the coach, Dick McGuire, to put him in. McGuire didn’t relent until the second quarter. Bradley played seven minutes, hitting one of his patently coiled jumpers on a fast break, the ball delivered by Cazzie Russell. The building erupted.

The general reception to Bradley was so overwhelming that it was bound to provoke the opposition. He remembered Bill Russell having the Celtics run him into bone-crunching picks in the backcourt that season, most of them set by a brick wall named Wayne Embry. When he played for the first time against the Lakers, coached by his college mentor Butch van Breda Kolff, the Lakers were forced to sit through a long-winded pregame discourse on Bradley’s prowess. At the end of it, Elgin Baylor piped up from the back, “Uh, Bill, is it okay if we try to guard him?”

Bradley understood the capricious nature of both fan and reporter. He knew how long he had been away from regular and high-level competition and what he was being set up for. “I came in, I’m the Great White Hope, I’ve got a big contract, I’m supposed to save the team,” he said. “But I’m playing guard, and after ten games it’s pretty clear that I’m not cast properly. I’m failing and then the public turns, people spit at me, throw coins at me, it goes from great adulation to hostility and anger. Then I go out on Eighth Avenue one day, get hit by a car, and that was kind of a symbol.”

He was only shaken up in the accident, but the Oxford man wasn’t enjoying the school of hard knocks when all he had wanted to do, at least for a season or two, was break in slowly, on and off the court. “I felt that I had been dropped into a black world and therefore I had a lot to learn,” he said. “I knew that I was going to learn a lot more from the black players than they were going to learn from me.”

WHILE BRADLEY HAS OFTEN SAID
that he had “unlocked the part of me that I’d closed off” while shooting around in an Oxford gymnasium, there was more to the story of his decision to play in the NBA. In trying to settle the inner conflict, the competing callings to public service and the pro game, he sought out Mo Udall, the Arizona congressman, who had briefly played pro basketball in the old NBL. Udall, in turn, sent Bradley to see Byron “Whizzer” White, who had shoehorned in a few years of pro football in the early NFL before going on to become a JFK-appointed Supreme Court justice.

Udall told him, “If you like playing, you ought to play. The key is what you do with your free time.” What Bradley quickly discovered—beyond the social education of traveling with men whose life experiences were for the most part nothing like growing up as the only child in a Republican home in Crystal City—was that basketball was an itinerant, high-pressure life, but one also filled with an extraordinary amount of downtime along with a lengthy off-season.

Outside the arena, Bradley happily slipped the dreaded White Hope syndrome. Without fanfare, he found his way uptown to Harlem, to work with kids who were trying to manage their own escape—from the cycle of poverty and drugs—and salvage an education in Urban League street academies, which were considered early versions of charter schools. Its employees and volunteers were called street workers.

Dr. Eugene Callender, who was executive director of the Urban League’s Greater New York chapter, didn’t need to be told who Bradley was. Callender had been a pretty fair ballplayer himself, a 5'10" guard who was one of two black players on the Boston University team in the mid- to late forties. “Basketball was huge in Harlem, but so was heroin,” he said. “I remember the sound of the ball—
bomp, bomp, bomp
—all day and night, or whenever they weren’t shooting up.” There were other players who were civic and socially minded, native New Yorkers like Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. But Callender especially appreciated Bradley’s involvement. “I always gave him a lot of credit,” he said. “Especially in those days; it couldn’t have been easy for him to come uptown.”

It wasn’t long before Bradley was traveling much greater distances, to more forbidding places, shaping a more global perspective. He read Kipling’s “The Man Who Would Be King,” a short story about two adventurers from British India who travel to a remote part of Afghanistan. Wanderlust grabbed him.

“One off-season, for two months, I was in India, Iran, Afghanistan, all over, and this was a trip that was very formative for me,” he said. “I mean, here we are with Afghanistan in the center of the news for how long now? Well, I’ve been to the northwest provinces, went with a Pashtun guide, into villages that were 15,000 to 18,000 feet high. In one we met the village elder, and I’m sitting on his rug, shoes off, legs crossed, having tea, and what did he want to talk about? The Israeli-Palestinian issue, 40 years ago. So when people say now, ‘Oh, that’s not important to people in Pakistan and Afghanistan,’ well, that wasn’t my experience. So my point is that basketball allowed me to grow in ways that were unforeseen when I began, in terms of my personal and social experiences. If I had left Oxford, gone to law school, and never played pro ball, I would never have done that.”

Traveling the country with the Knicks provided an abundance of downtime built into the itinerant madness. “Bradley never wasted a minute on the road, at the airport,” Marv Albert said. “He always had a book, a newspaper, a discussion with someone he met. There was never any idle time, goofing around.”

But Bradley also relished sharing a locker room with Reed and Frazier, a room on the road with Dave DeBusschere, and the street-honed wit and wisdom of Dick Barnett. What other profession would have provided such diversity of people and places?

None would have provided weeks off to explore, maybe even get a feel for what it was like to work inside the political arena of Washington, D.C. “One off-season, I worked in a congressman’s office,” Bradley said. “He had graduated from Princeton, and I had handled the tenth reunion of his class when I was a sophomore. I took care of all the people coming back. I got to know him, and then when I was at Oxford he asked me to write a paper on NATO for him in, like, 48 hours. I couldn’t do that, but then he asked me to come out to a place close to Oxford, and I did and he introduced me to Mo Udall. And then he asked me to come down and work for him in the summer of ’69.”

That congressman was Donald Rumsfeld. Bradley recalled:

So I was there for about three weeks, and then Nixon appointed him the head of the Office of Economic Opportunity, the OEO, which is the poverty program. Well, Sargent Shriver and the whole Kennedy thing was a big deal to me, so when he said, “Do you want to come with me on the poverty program?” I said, “I only have about another seven weeks and I’ve got to go to training camp. But sure.”

So I remember we walked into the seventh floor of the office building, his office—big office—and there was a rectangular table and a big stack of papers on it. And those were résumés. And Rumsfeld says to me, “Would you look through those résumés and make a recommendation as to who you think might be good on staff? And if you want to interview them, interview them.” And so I interviewed several people.

Let the record show that Dick Cheney—whose political career officially began in 1969 as an intern for Congressman William A. Steiger—began his climb through the Republican ranks as one of Rumsfeld’s OEO staff members in 1969. “You could say,” Bradley sighed, “that I’m responsible for some of what’s happened.”