The Hard Way on Purpose (7 page)

Some guys would give you exactly what it cost to go buy them a hot dog, and some would give you a random handful of crumpled bills and tell you to keep the change. This was usually how I reckoned which ones were famous and which ones were not. In this case, I wasn't aware of how much I had been handed because to have looked down at the cash would have been to risk seeing more than my teenage, inadequate self could bear, so I quickly closed my fingers over the money and turned to leave.

“Hey, kid—how much did I give you?”

I looked into my hand and answered sideways toward the floor, “Five.”

“Get me two.”

*  *  *

Under any circumstances, I suppose, being a ball boy for an NBA team is an unusual first job. I wasn't aware of that then, inasmuch as no teenager is aware of the unusualness of his life until other people start to point it out to him, a bittersweet gift that, so far, had not been granted to me. It was a job. I was paid $15 and two complimentary tickets per game. Because the tickets often went unused, I didn't consider them part of my compensation package. I did, however, value the half-used rolls of athletic tape I often scrounged from the trainer's-room floor. With better adhesion than masking tape, it was useful for hanging posters on my bedroom wall. Even on the most humid summer days, James Dean and the Police stayed put.

*  *  *

The main focus of my work was to touch nothing.

This seemed the only prudent approach to a working life in a room full of physically superior men who were naked about 40 percent of the time, whose own sense of their bodies was at once primitive and evolved, the floor around them littered with the ubiquity of their constantly changing shells, from street clothes to ankle wraps to uniforms to sweats to naked for showers to towels to ice packs to street clothes again: sweat-soaked socks and sodden jockstraps, unraveled bandages and spent towels, satiny uniforms stewing in the funk of blood, snot, pasty perspiration, and midshelf cologne.

Another kid seemed positively charged by this atmosphere, walking through the locker room gathering great handfuls of “socks and jocks,” a term he used as though he were the maître d' and it were the house specialty. He had a habit of tapping players' bottoms with all the cheerful encouragement of a father teaching his son to ride a bike and calling them either by their known nicknames or the impromptu handles that came to him on the wings of some locker room Muse:
Bingo! A.C.! Footsie! Sweets!

I had learned to keep my fingernails on the long side so that when I did have to pick up anything dropped on the floor, I could use them as a set of tweezers, keeping to a minimum the contact between my own skin and another man's intimate apparel.

Look—I'll just come right out and say it: I once witnessed a seven-foot center trying to pop the pimples on his back, a physically difficult task even for a gifted professional athlete. My perspective on the entire matter of my employment was cast.

*  *  *

I knew I was surrounded by absurdity, but I may have been the only member of the organization with absolutely no context for how profound the situation actually was. I wasn't aware that I had happened into one of the most deranged and downtrodden locker rooms in the history of the NBA, that of the early-1980s Cleveland Cavaliers. I wasn't aware that the team was on its way toward what was then the longest losing streak in NBA history: twenty-four games. I wasn't aware that it was unusual for only two thousand fans to show up for a pro basketball game in a twenty-thousand-seat arena. Nor did I recognize that my boss—Ted Stepien, a fleshy millionaire with a long, sparse comb-over, oversize, squarish glasses, and a nasal whine that sounded like milk curdling—was considered by many to be the worst owner of any franchise in the history of American professional athletics. (He gained sports immortality by virtue of the NBA's “Stepien Rule,” which limits an owner's ability to trade future first-round draft picks. By the time the emergency legislation was instituted by league officials, Stepien had given away nearly a decade's worth of first-rounders, offering them like shore-leave cash for whatever journeymen were available. His approach to catching lightning in a bottle, it seemed, was to fling the bottles wildly off a cliff.)

I knew my situation was odd, but it had nothing to do with any of that. I knew my situation was odd because I was aware enough to know something was going on that I couldn't understand, but not aware enough to know what it was. (This, incidentally, is a good description of what it feels like to be seventeen years old.) Even among all these notable misfits, I was an outsider. Where others were baffled by the then-lavish $700,000 salaries the owner was paying to the likes of James Edwards and Scott Wedman, I was confounded by this “three seconds” Mr. Stepien was constantly carping about from his floor seat behind the basket. For all the problems of his franchise, this rule restricting how long an offensive player could stand in the free-throw lane seemed to be the singular thing Stepien cared about. Or maybe even knew about.

“Three seconds! Hey! Three seconds on that guy! C'
mon
! Threeee secondsssss!”

Stepien—who not only sat in on half-time meetings, but also sometimes tried to diagram plays, to the bewilderment of almost everyone else—went through four coaches in a single season. One of them, Chuck Daly, celebrated his firing with champagne. Stepien predicted Daly would never again have such an opportunity as he'd been offered in Cleveland; Daly almost immediately established a dynasty as coach of the Detroit Pistons and is now in the Basketball Hall of Fame.

To me, that hyperactive rate of turnover was the definition of normal. I saw players and team employees come and go with the frequency of courthouse pigeons. By the time the third coach arrived, I just took it as a given that his days were numbered. I was far more intrigued by the way brand-new sneakers piled up in the dressing-room trash cans after games. Players undressed and just threw their sneakers into the garbage. Perfectly good leather Converse and Reeboks and Nikes. If only I wore a size 13.

Even to my perspective—which was something like that of a French Revolution time-traveler who found himself suddenly in an episode of
Miami Vice—
a clear, profoundly paradoxical moral conflict existed between frugality and wastefulness in the locker room. While the wastebaskets filled up with $100 sneakers, the refrigerator with the postgame food for the players was stocked with soggy, low-rent sandwiches—chip-chop and ham salad and the like, hand-wrapped in cellophane. Even as the owner threw lucrative contracts to the likes of an aging Bobby Wilkerson, the equipment guy had to reuse the name banners sewn to the backs of the uniforms. When Dave Robisch was unloaded from the team, the trainer's assistant carefully unstitched the panel and, on its blank reverse side, ironed the synthetic letters of the new guy's surname: C-A-L-V-I-N.

This tension grew as it became more and more clear that the team was in deep financial trouble. There were rumors that the astronomical payroll wasn't being met. We ball boys hadn't been paid in weeks, and because I had recently been named “head ball boy” (a promotion that was, at best, titular), the others were pressuring me to speak up on their behalf, which made me uncomfortable for many reasons.

*  *  *

“He fired Joe Tait.”

“What?!”

“He did. He fired Tait.”

“No way.”

“Yeah way.”

Even I knew this was huge. Joe Tait was the radio announcer for the Cavs, the only one they'd ever had, and to say he was the voice of the team is only a flimsy metaphoric cliché. He kind of
was
the team. My much more sports-oriented brother had an album of season audio highlights issued after the “Miracle in Richfield” year—1976. In our sports universe, this is what constituted a “miracle”: the Cavaliers made the play-offs. They lost in the conference finals, but that didn't stop the legend, especially with Tait's modulated Midwestern twang providing the narration.

Tait was the perfect voice for a hard-bitten sports town, a decidedly unfancy man in a decidedly unfancy place. Devoid of modifiers and metaphors and unwilling to spin tall men into legends, he served his descriptions straight. He had only two catchphrases: “Wham with the right hand!” and “Have a good night, everybody.” One is meat, the other potatoes.

Most of that album is a collage of Tait's calling the action in a voice that sounds like an uncanny chamber quartet: bugle, trombone, bassoon, and kettle drum. And the whole thing comes to a climax in one of the greatest play-by-play ejaculations I've ever heard. Anyone who has lived in northeast Ohio for the past generation knows the call:

Bingo on the run . . . the gun . . . he shoots . . . no good . . . rebound Clemons! . . . Scooooorrrre!!!

Because of the distorted euphoria of that final syllable, some circles of local conspiracy theorists still believe Tait is not actually bellowing “Score” but is screaming “Fuuuuucccckkk!!!” in uncontrolled celebration, a theory that seems to be more a projection of desire—we want those who deliver our news to share our response to it—than plausible possibility.

We all knew Tait from the pressroom, a great big man in a sweater, unassuming, but also, by nature, commanding. He would acknowledge us, which was a particular demarcation. There were those who recognized you were there, and those who did not. Tait recognized us. So when word spread through the ball-boy ranks that the man commonly referred to as “the Voice of God” had been canned by Mr. Stepien, it was like hearing the president had been shot. The story we heard was that Tait had said something during one of the game broadcasts critical of Stepien—something that was almost impossible to avoid even in an objective account of the events of any given day.

Stepien responded to the public outcry by telling reporters that announcers are “a dime a dozen.”

Joe Tait was reinstated after Stepien, having lost $15 million in three seasons, sold the team in 1983. Tait remained the voice of the Cavaliers until 2011 and is in the Broadcasters Hall of Fame.

*  *  *

Only one person seemed to openly recognize the absurdity of our collective situation. That was Don Ford, a benchwarmer who averaged 1.1 points and 9.6 minutes a game in the 1981–82 season. Ford had arrived from the Los Angeles Lakers in a player-and-picks deal that included, naturally, a swap of first-rounders. The Lakers received the Cavs' 1982 first-round pick, which they used to draft James Worthy, who almost immediately became a superstar and is now in the Basketball Hall of Fame. The Cavs received the Lakers' 1980 first-round pick, which they used to draft Chad Kinch, who played in forty-one games of professional basketball and was out of the NBA after one season.

Don Ford was pretty much the opposite of everyone I'd ever known: a handsome, lanky surfer-type from Santa Barbara with longish blond hair and a wry self-awareness. While his teammates spent their pregame hours getting treatment for sore joints and injuries, or reviewing stats, or clumsily insulting one another, Ford just sort of elaborately hung out. People whose entire lives have been defined by what they do with their bodies—athletes, cowboys, strippers, etc.—tend to have specific physical personalities. The basketball players I saw each exuded this dynamic. The big men expressed their bigness in every gesture, in the way, for instance, they pulled the snaps loose on their warm-up pants as though they were Vikings shaking out the broad sails. The point guards had a nimble precision even in the way they ate their postgame chip-chop sandwiches. Don Ford, however, was the only player I knew whose physical personality was one of expert relaxation. Even when he was on the court, he was loose and windblown.

One of my duties was to bring basketballs around the dressing room to be signed by all the team members. Everyone had his own curlicued scrawl, perfected over the years into nonchalance. Ford did too, but always added a little hipster dash, sometimes signing
Disco Don Ford
or
Devo Don Ford
. He was the only player who ever addressed me with what seemed like genuine interest. I didn't resent the others for their demeanors, which resided generally in the regions of distraction, disinterest, and dismay. Although I never came to understand the game they played for a living, I did come to understand the effect of their existence within it—something people rarely get to see, even in our era of deeply intense celebrity fascination. I came to understand the way public people create, by necessity, a force field of self-preservation. I saw what it was like for them not even to be able to step from the shower into a towel without someone coming up to ask for something—an interview, an autograph, a basketball to be signed. It's a skewed survival technique: to have to shield yourself from adoration. Realness, for them, had to be achieved through an artificial process.

Don Ford seemed unique because he seemed entirely real, aware not only of his own place in the world, but the places of those around him. (As an addendum, I never blamed pro athletes for being slightly out of touch with reality. The reality in the locker rooms I experienced was something like a bacteria to be avoided.) Ford would ask me questions, just small talk about school or my family or even, half-jokingly, what I thought of the team's chances that night. I would stiffen up and hate myself for not being able to just answer his questions, to be like him—cool and casual; knowing.

He seemed aware that we were all losers by association, and that it wasn't the worst thing in the world. In an interview one time, he referred to his team as the “Cleveland Cadavers.” The local media picked up on it and a new nickname took hold: the Cadavaliers.

One night, Ford sat looking at his game check, leaning way back in the chair in front of his wooden locker stall. He wouldn't be with the team much longer—everyone knew that—but he had another year guaranteed on his contract.