Life on the Run (18 page)

DeBusschere looks up: “What’s with the guy? He’s a real tour guide.” Willis sleeps.

The next hand of poker pits Jackson against Barnett in a head-to-head duel. The game is seven card stud with deuces wild; the first two cards face down. After the sixth card Jackson has two kings showing. Barnett has two aces. The seventh card, dealt faceup, is a deuce for Jackson and Barnett gets an eight of clubs. They glance at each other and then back at the cards. Jackson raises $40. Barnett calls and raises $30. Jackson calls and raises $25. Barnett calls. By this time the tension is visible in both. Jackson’s hole cards are a six of hearts and a deuce. Barnett shows an ace and a deuce. Jackson loses $300.

The captain makes his next announcement. “On your left is Lake Powell. The Glen Canyon dam on the Colorado River created this enormous lake in southern Utah. It has a coastline as long as the western coast of the United States from Tijuana, Mexico, to Vancouver, British Columbia.”

The last hand ends just as the plane touches down in L.A.

“Hey, Dollar,” shouts Barnett as I walk by. “Let me have ten until my brother straightens out. He’s a humpback.”

“Who won?” I ask.

“Rich,” says Phil.

“Earl,” says Rich.

“Phil,” says Earl.

“Who?” I ask again.

“The rookie,” says Lucas.

The team gets its bags and registers at the Sheraton Airport Hotel. We left New York at noon and arrived in Los Angeles at 2:30. The three-hour time change assures each of us fewer hours of sleep for two nights. I’ll wake up around 8
A.M
. no matter how late I go to bed tonight. For me going East to West is always the more difficult direction. After checking-in, I head directly for the International Hotel Health Club. I ask DeBusschere if he wants to come with me to get a massage, and he gives his usual negative reply.

Occasionally during a season I will realize that I have done nothing for two weeks but use and care for my body. Games and practices bring injuries, and travel brings fatigue. Hot whirlpool baths, diathermy, ultrasound, ice packs, elastic wraps, aspirin, cold pills, vitamins, and sleeping pills are all part of the life. The body is constantly battered and ground away. During this year alone I have had a jammed finger, inflamed facia of the arch, a smashed nose cartilage, five split lips, an elbow in the throat that eliminated my voice for a week, a bruised right hip, a sprained ankle, a left hip joint out of socket, and a contusion of the left wrist. With all these I consider myself lucky that I have been free of serious injuries, which would have prevented me from playing. Still, minor injuries take their psychic toll. From the beginning of the season I feel relaxed, until I’m injured. Then every workout brings the fear of re-injury and every night brings the hope for tomorrow’s improvement. I wake up in the middle of the night and flex my knee to see if there is pain, or knead my thigh to see if the charley horse has begun to heal. I have often thought, while sitting in a whirlpool with an injury, that I would stay there twenty-four straight hours if only it would hasten the healing time.

The element of time separates our injuries from those of the weekend athlete: We must return to action as soon as physically possible. Some players, DeBusschere for one, have a very low pain-tolerance level, while others, such as Monroe, can play with excruciatingly painful bone chips. The constant question is how soon to return after sustaining an injury. To come back too soon risks re-injury and a further loss of time; to wait too long in a competitive environment can mean a drop in the team standings or loss of a position to a teammate. Doctors explain that many players can play again after serious operations like spinal fusions, sewn knee ligaments, or repaired achilles tendons because they work harder at recuperation. For example, when Dick Barnett snapped his achilles tendon in 1966 a lot of people thought his career was over; few athletes had ever made a complete recovery from that injury. But Barnett worked to save his playing life. Every day for four months he did a thousand toe raises, ran five miles on the beach and fifty times up ten flights of stairs, and jumped up and down in a swimming pool for an hour—a total of four hours a day working on his foot and leg.

A professional basketball player must be able to run six miles in a game, a hundred games a year—jumping and pivoting under constant physical contact. My body becomes so finely tuned that three days without workouts makes a noticeable difference in timing, wind, and strength. I believe that basketball is the most physically grueling of all professional sports.

Only the athlete himself really knows if he feels well enough for competition. Doctors don’t always understand the athlete’s healing time schedule. Sometimes I have been told I could play when I knew I couldn’t, and sometimes I have been told I couldn’t play when I knew I could. I usually consult three doctors when I have a fairly serious injury. After getting their opinions, which often differ, I decide, myself, whether I can play without danger of permanent damage.

Injuries after thirty occur more frequently and they are less responsive to treatment. Top condition is harder to regain and maintain. The real pro is not the twenty-five-year-old who can whip back into shape with two weeks of careless work but the veteran who tests his body each year to see if he still has it, knowing that someday he won’t. During the first week of training camp DeBusschere (age 33) went straight home to bed after every workout. The week was equally difficult for me. After running a mile twice a day for three weeks prior to the camp and shooting an hour a day for twenty-one straight days, my body still wasn’t ready for the two-a-day workouts under Holzman. The first day my calves felt as if a knife had split them open. My quadriceps the next day went into spasms so that each step felt as if the muscles had been replaced with armored plates. Pain spread to the back of the legs and around the knees. Two days later the back pain began along the sciatic nerve. It was a tiring pain, not sharp, but it felt as if the strands of a string were breaking until only one remained. Then there was the overall fatigue, which only sleep can cure, and there was never enough sleep. Finally, after the first two scrimmages, I realized that four months of normal life had ended, for I was so bruised that when I rolled over in bed I found my body studded with pain.

Most mature athletes have developed their own warm-up and training techniques, their own cures, their own diets. Ice seems to be the only remedy common to all. Applied immediately after injury ice can reduce the recuperative time for a sprained ankle from ten days to two. On late night flights many players sit with ice taped to their ankles or knees or feet throughout the flight. Whenever I get the first throat tickle of a cold I take nine thousand milligrams of vitamin C for four days. The remedy gives me immediate and positive relief. My diet is heavy with meat—steak, pork chops, calf’s liver. The only thing I stop eating in the off-season is desserts. With all the running during the season, I never worry about calories. Frazier eats a lot of health foods—vitamins A, B, C, E; protein powder, cod liver oil, and much liver, chicken, fish, carrots and spinach. Jackson tries to eat mostly fish, chicken, and vegetables, with very little meat. Lucas takes 27 pills a day ranging from six vitamin E’s to iron. DeBusschere cuts down on beer in the off-season. The club gives each player $19 a day on the road for food. No one starves.

Teammates often joke about the shape of my body and its limited athletic capabilities. They say I’m the only player in the league with the body of an eighty-year-old man. I am not well-proportioned, and even when I am in peak condition I can’t manage relatively simple physical exercises. I can’t do twenty push-ups, and I would need a winch to lift most barbells. Standing, legs straight, I can’t touch the floor with anything but my feet. With my physical equipment, just playing in the pros is a minor miracle.

Basketball is such a specialized skill that I restrict myself to it exclusively. I don’t swim or play tennis, or hike or ride bicycles, or lift weights during the season. Each sport calls upon a different set of muscles and physically I am concerned only about my profession. After each game or practice, ice packs and whirlpools and sometimes anti-inflammatory drugs like endicin or butazolidin save the body for another exertion. A friend likens my body to a jet plane. When it is aloft it can accomplish things with power and speed. When it is on the ground it is helpless, unmaneuverable, and in need of repair. As I sit with my feet in a barrel of ice or my back pressed to the whirlpool in a tub of hot water the comparison becomes reasonable.

One of the Knick team doctors (we have had seven in my eight years with the Knicks) classifies all athletes as tight or loose. A loose athlete is very limber, even when inactive. He can touch his toes and stretch without worry of muscle tears or pulls. For him even yoga represents no challenge. Danger for the loose athlete comes in the joints. While he never has muscle pulls, he frequently does have cartilage or ligament problems because his joints are loosely structured. Joe Namath, for example, is loosely structured. Fran Tarkenton is tightly structured. The tight athlete often has a longer career, free from serious injury, but it is filled with nagging little pulls and tears. I am a tightly muscled athlete who has to do stretching exercises the year around to maintain muscles that won’t tear when overextended quickly in a jump or lateral pivot. “You might try stretching morning and night,” the doctor said as I was recuperating from yet another pull. “Also running in sand is good, or jumping under water. Massage helps particularly—when the masseur knows his craft.”

I have had hundreds of massages in health clubs and massage salons in every league city. My normal routine after arriving in a town the day before a game is to find a facility where I can get a steam bath, whirlpool, and massage. The masseurs are adequate at the Washington Athletic Club in Seattle, the Phoenix Country Club, the University Club in Houston, and Postl’s Athletic Club in Chicago. My regular masseur in New York is Yick Pon Huey, who teaches at the Swedish Massage Institute. He is the best quadricep man in the United States. The best all-around health club in the country is the International Hotel Health Club in Los Angeles and Lou Jorn, the chief masseur there, has no peer.

I arrive for my appointment with Lou at 7
P.M
. After a ten-minute steam bath, a cold shower, five minutes in the mineral whirlpool, and another cold shower, I walk up the stairs to the massage room, a glass cubicle in the corner of the weight room. It is 10
P.M
. in New York; the flight was tiring and my body is just beginning to loosen up. I say hello to Lou and hop onto a table. A small man (5′8″, 160 pounds), he is one of the dying breed of legitimate masseurs caught between modern physical therapy which requires the use of machines under doctors’ supervision and the burgeoning “massage parlor” front for the oldest profession.

Lou says that a good masseur has to know anatomy—the muscle structure and where the nerves hook up. He must know how much pressure to apply and where, and he must remember that since no two bodies are alike no two massages should be alike. Lou works with his legs, not just his fingers, saving his energy by using leverage like a weight lifter. He says that the human hand conforms with any contour of the body and that the secret of massage lies in his fingers, which he conscientiously protects. “When I pull the muscle away from the bone,” he says, “my fingers hit the nerves and dilate the blood vessels in the muscles. No one else can do what I do with my fingers. They are like those of a great musician who never had a lesson. I was born with the talent.” Thirty years of concentration, intelligence, and trial and error have produced the Jorn Technique.

In his platoon-sergeant manner, Lou issues quick commands for me to roll over, put my head down, lift my legs—orders that are given without hesitation and that never allow a question of his purpose. I lie on my back with a towel covering my groin. Lou starts with the neck in order to loosen tension. His firm strokes hit the muscle knots “about the size of a pea” along the cervicle vertebrae and stop at the base of the skull, where veins and nerves bunch on their way to the brain. Other masseurs redden one’s ears, put too much pressure on the clavicle, or fail to distribute their strokes over the entire region, especially rubbing the side of the neck where the veins are instead of the bunched muscles along the vertebrae.

Next he takes my arm, and using his thumb and fingers, he splits the triceps, pulls them away from the bone, and squeezes them. The ability to straighten the arm comes from the triceps so everytime I shoot or pass they get used. Danny Whelan used to give Dick Barnett a pre-game massage of his triceps, just as he had done for baseball pitchers who won twenty games.

From the arms Lou goes to the feet where thumb and index finger rub along each side of the heel and into the arch. The strokes are short and hard. He detects some knotting in my arch. I react to the pain when he touches the area. He puts on less pressure but keeps up the jabs, widening them to the outer arch areas. Slowly he returns to the troubled area; gradually the knots break up. But, they don’t disappear. He tells me this indicates a problem in the calf. According to
The Story of Feet
, which is the best book Lou ever read about massage, all reflexes of the body end in the feet and each area of the body has its accompanying pressure point in the feet. Touching each area of the feet gives the masseur a quick preview of the painful weaknesses in the rest of the body. “The better conditioned an athlete is,” says Lou, “the more flexible his feet will be.”

He turns to the quadriceps and concentrates on the knee area and then asks me to turn over on my stomach. He splits the calf muscle with his thumb and says I need to strengthen my calf if I want to solve my arch problem, for the calf affects the arch as the forearm affects the palm. If the muscle is weak, too great a burden is placed on the arch, he says, and a muscle spasm and an inflammation of the fascia develop.

His size ten hands never leave the body. They move with long smooth strokes toward the heart. The pressure is constant until he encounters a knotted muscle in my lower back. There, he lets up, then returns, lets up, then returns again until it loosens and he can cover all areas with the same pressure. “If you ever bent a water hose you cut off the flow of water,” he says. “That’s what a muscle spasm does to blood circulation in the lower back. Americans sit wrong and wear bad shoes.”