Life on the Run (10 page)
Authors: Bill Bradley
My legs ache. Just one more game this week, then we have two days off. We will have played five games in seven days in four different cities.
I toss restlessly in bed, unable to relax. I remember that I forgot to take the telephone off the hook; I don’t want anyone to wake me early Saturday morning. I pick up the receiver and stuff it in a drawer under my undershirts. After twenty more sleepless minutes, I draw a hot bath and ease into its relaxing warmth. Foam from the liquid soap covers the water’s surface. After ten minutes of soaking and a slow towel-dry, I fall into bed and sleep. It is dawn.
S
ATURDAY DOES NOT BEGIN FOR ME UNTIL
1
P.M
.
WHENEVER
we return from a road trip late, the next day is always a jumble. Breakfast and dinner seem to fuse. At 1:15 I have a cup of coffee and a doughnut and at 3
P.M
. I have my usual pregame meal. I will not eat again until a midnight supper after the game. A friend and I walk for fifteen minutes through the streets of midtown Manhattan. Back at the apartment I read for half an hour. At 5
P.M
. I sleep for an hour. The alarm goes off at six. In preparation for the game, I stack several Rolling Stones records, dipping into my imagination to gather some aggressive enthusiasm. “You can’t always get what you want,” sings Mick the Jag, “but if you try sometime, you might find you get what you need.” Predestination with a rock beat, courtesy of satanic public relations. “I met a gin-soaked ballroom queen in Memphis…” That’s more like it—the throbbing beat, the intensity. “I can’t get no satisfaction, uh huh huh and I tried, tried, tried… can’t get no satisfaction.”
The cab ride to the Garden takes six minutes. The driver says that he went to junior high school with Holzman at P. S. 89 in Brooklyn. As I enter the Garden employees’ entrance, Frankie La Greca, the security man, waits at the desk. I joke with him about his weight, my weight, his Italian, my Italian, his job, my job, concluding in a jumbled yelling exchange consisting of a string of more-or-less connected monosyllables. I arrive in the locker room just before Red’s deadline, one hour before the game. Everyone is there.
Willis announces my arrival, “The Senator from New York, the President of the United Socialist Republic.”
“What you gonna be, Dollar, a Democrat or what?” says Frazier. I was given the nickname “Dollar Bill” because of the glint of my big initial contract, and because I’m celebrated among my teammates for my frugality. I’ve always said Frazier gave me the nickname as an incentive for me to buy some new clothes.
“He’s a liberal,” Whelan says.
“I bet his old man, the banker, ain’t liberal,” adds Barnett. “How about it, can I get a loan in Crystal City? Do they give loans to black people?”
“The liberal candidate from what?” asks Willis. “Where you gonna live, Dollar? When you gonna run? Give me a job as the bodyguard.”
“No, Willis,” says Frazier. “You gotta be the chauffeur.”
The locker room has become a kind of home for me, not simply a resting place. I often enter tense and uneasy, disturbed by some event of the day. Slowly my worries fade as I see their unimportance to my male peers. I relax; my concerns lost among relationships which are close and real but never intimate; lost among the constants of an athlete’s life. Athletes may be crude and immature, but they are genuine when it comes to loyalty, responsibility, and honesty. The lines of communication are clear and simple. The humor is repetitious, generally, but occasionally a brilliant spontaneity flashes—only because we are at ease in the setting of satin uniforms and shower nozzles.
On the road, the team is together constantly weeks at a time. As DeBusschere’s roommate for six years, I probably know him better than anyone except his wife. I sleep eight feet away from him for one hundred nights a year. At home, we see each other for games and practices. The members of my team have seen me, and I them, in more moods and predicaments than I care to remember. Our lives intertwine far beyond the court. It is a good life with congenial people. If victory and unity fuse on one team, life becomes a joy. It is a life that truly makes sense only while you’re living it. A few old friends can’t understand why I do it. I wrote in my journal during the 1970 exhibition season:
We left the University of Hartford yesterday. The Connecticut countryside in late September is a rich green, covered with thick trees just beginning to turn. Homes of stone, wood beams, and glass fill only small parts of spacious estates. The bus passes a Jewish community center. The road winds through the upper middle-class suburbs of Hartford, where everything looks in perfect order: finely trimmed hedges, manicured lawns, circle drives, thick walls, and station wagons.
The noises on the bus tell our story. Aretha Franklin, the original soul sister, sings from Willis’ tape recorder. “You and me, together, for eternity.” Dick McGuire, the assistant coach, mumbles about basketball, saying something inaudible. Cazzie sits talking with a reporter, “This year I feel stronger….” Danny Whelan sits in the front seat with Red Holzman and says, “You know this guy’s angle was never told. Fred Saigh, the owner of the Cardinals who went to jail for income tax evasion. Why he…” DeBusschere reads
The New York Times
and Barnett looks out the window at a college campus and says, “I bet they got fifty million dollars worth of buildings on this place….” The hum of the bus and “You and me, we shall be, together, for eternity.”
Bound together we ride, unmindful of the distinctive nature of our trip. We look through glass. People walk in the yards and on the drives. House after house passes. I wonder who they are and how they live. Are they like us? Could they know what our life is like? Everything seems to pass so quickly, never to appear again. The houses, the people, the cities will disappear. The life on the bus, our self-contained community, is the thing which shall remain for this year.
Willis says, “Connecticut is a nice state; there are good towns here. Yeah, this part of Connecticut is one of the nicest places in the country to live in.”
I hear him talk and think, “You couldn’t live here, Willis. You must believe that you are another man. Your life flows toward the big city, the wilderness, and the South. You wouldn’t like a community of wealthy landowners, corporate managers, and insurance executives. You can only guess what might be good if you had lived another profession and had another past. Maybe your opinion is not a misplaced dream but rather a disguise that your fame has allowed you to assume so that even you don’t recognize that you, as I, would be unhappy in this prim and proper Connecticut town.”
The airport tower looms on the horizon. We are flying to Atlanta on an Eastern 727 Silver Bird and then on to Memphis. We are grown men, driving to an airport together, living together, giving each other identity through our association, never realizing that that identity on a team in a bus or locker room is what we will lose upon retirement. We will miss this life of prolonged adolescence, caged from even the passing countryside and its people by the hum of the bus, the dreams of impossible relocation, and the strains of “You and me, together, for eternity.”
I hang my street clothes in my locker and put on my uniform. A rookie walks in and says, “Who can help me out? I need two tickets in different locations.”
“Don’t want your bitches to meet each other?” asks Barnett.
“I’ll give you a ticket if you let me have the lady sittin’ in it,” says a veteran.
“Forget it,” says the rookie.
As I walk out of the locker room a reporter is asking Frazier about his youth in Atlanta. “The white high school had all the best equipment and books,” says Frazier. “We got second-hand books and our school had no science labs. I thought I was okay because I did well in what we had. But then I got to college and found I wasn’t prepared. There was no way to know that in Georgia.”
I enter the training room to get two band-aids, the skin adherent, and tape for my ankles. Barnett and Jackson are talking about politics and they seem to agree for once.
“No, I didn’t vote last time,” says Barnett. “What’s the difference? The rich get richer and the poor get poorer, whoever wins.”
“Yeah,” says Jackson, “both candidates are controlled by the same interests.”
“You better vote if you want
any
say,” says Danny, who is busy taping Jackson’s ankle.
Danny’s new assistant is Barry, a boy about 24. He stood outside the employees’ entrance every game for two years asking for autographs before Danny invited him to the locker room. Now he works as a trainer’s assistant and Danny treats him like a son. Barry has limited powers of concentration. Yet he imitates perfectly the radio broadcasts of the Knick games including the advertisements. He also imitates the court mannerisms of Red and all the players. His life is literally Danny and the Knicks. “Hey, Barry,” a player shouts, “give us Red.” Barry puts his hands on his hips, glances at an imaginary scoreboard, stamps his foot, glares, shakes his head, mimes the words “bull shit” at an imaginary referee, and brings his hands together in a “T” to signal for a time-out. Everyone laughs, but Barry can’t stop for three more minutes.
Willis, who just walked into the training room, smiles. “Hey, boy,” he says to the rookie with the two women, “here’s your ticket.” He delivers the ticket and then takes two hot sand packs from the hydroculator and places them on his knee.
Willis Reed is making a comeback from an injury for the third time in as many years. During the 1970–71 season, an area about the size of a quarter above his left knee became inflamed. Doctors said he had tendonitis. “When they don’t know what’s wrong, they call it tendonitis,” teammates said jokingly. For Willis, it was no joke. An operation to remove the shredded portion of his kneecap tendon was declared a success in May 1971. By the beginning of the next basketball season, six months later, the pain had returned and spread to both sides of the knee. Another doctor brought in on the case said that only rest would heal tendonitis. Willis rested for the remainder of the season. The tendonitis had obliterated two seasons, 1970–71 and 1971–72, during which he played in thirty and thirteen games, respectively. Throughout the early summer of 1972, Willis worked on weights. Then, gradually, he started to run and began to shoot. He came to training camp in reasonable shape and said he felt no pain in his left leg. It took him most of the year to get back a modicum of timing. His quickness was gone forever. With his knowledge of the game and his sheer physical bulk, Willis helped us sporadically during the 1972–73 regular season. Slowly, he began to try the old moves and rebound without fear of reinjury. A touch of the old Willis returned in the final play-off series against Los Angeles, when he out-hustled and out-shot Wilt Chamberlain and we won our second world championship. The comeback year had a glorious ending. After the second championship, Willis signed a four-year contract in expectation of a complete return to form. Then in November, on the same Los Angeles court that six months earlier we had left as World Champions, Willis tore a cartilage in his right knee. After a two-week observation period, Dr. Donald O’Donoghue, of Oklahoma City, removed the cartilage.
The long months of rehabilitation with a weighted boot ended two weeks ago. He has begun again to run and shoot and he probably will play a little tonight. There is a long road ahead even if he wants only to regain his 1973 quickness. Forget 1970. But who could forget Willis then?
In 1970, Willis was the dominant member of the Knick team that won the World Championship, and he was the Most Valuable Player in the NBA. He combined power and mobility, playing the pivot with surprising inventiveness. Other centers were stronger and a few were quicker, but at some point in the game Willis would find and exploit the weak spot in his opponent’s style. Against seven-footers, he went outside where he shot with a feather touch. A series of quick “fakes” followed by a soft jump shot were his most effective tools against men of his own size. If, after a switch, he found himself with a smaller forward or guard, he simply turned and overpowered him. The move I liked best came after he had hit several jumpers moving to his left. He would turn with the same motion in the same place, as if to shoot again, but this time he would only show the ball. Then he would cross his left leg in front of his right, take a big step to put himself on the opposite side of the basket, stretch his left arm out, and flip a reverse lay-up against the glass.
He was the perfect center for our team that year. He set the best screen in the league. On defense, he sacrificed himself constantly, leaving his man open for the brief seconds necessary to stop opponents driving to the basket. After an opposing guard had his shot blocked, or collided with Willis, he usually gave up trying to reach the basket, choosing instead the safety of 20-foot jump shots. When called upon, Willis could score, though he rarely forced shots. Above all, Willis was an extraordinary rebounder. He had good timing and a sense of where the ball would bounce. If someone tried to block him from a rebound, Willis usually delivered an elbow to the sternum with audible impact. When he got his hands on the ball, no one took it away.
Willis was also the captain and leader of the Knicks during two championships. The role seemed natural for him and he was accepted by everyone. He was always the one to speak up when Holzman asked if anyone had something to add, and when Red was absent, Willis would sometimes speak to the team alone. If Holzman was “the boss,” Willis was “the player boss,” yet he kept enough distance from management to maintain his integrity in the team’s eyes. He also acted as counselor, talking individually with a depressed or angry player. His dominance came in part with his position: A team is only as strong as its big man. A center has to fight for his teammates or, more specifically, has to make the opponents believe he will fight. Willis never had trouble convincing anyone.
Willis Reed is six feet nine inches tall and weighs two hundred forty pounds. A close-cropped Afro frames his face and adds stateliness to his scarred eyebrows and wrinkled forehead. His lips are thin and they often part to reveal an engaging smile. When he grimaces, these same lips pinch together and his usually gentle brown eyes narrow until they are fiery slits.