Life on the Run (19 page)

After the massage, which takes an hour, Lou splashes hot alcohol over the body and towels it dry. The hot alcohol evaporates but, unlike cool alcohol, it doesn’t startle. He puts the rubber club shoes on my feet and finishes the massage with a slap on the heel. Now it is just a matter of showering, dressing, and returning to the hotel—rejuvenated.

T
HE NEXT MORNING RIGHT ON SCHEDULE I WAKE UP AT
8:15. When I get downstairs to the coffee shop I notice Earl Monroe sitting alone at the end of the counter. Earl and I begin to talk. He has a lump under his left eye. I noticed it on the plane. I ask him how he got it. He says that after the last game in the Garden, day before yesterday, he ran into a little trouble trying to get a cab at 8th Avenue and 31st Street. It was raining, he says; and Tina, “my lady,” was standing under the canopy that extends from one of the Garden entrances to the street while he was in the street trying to flag a cab. Four white guys standing on the curb started shouting, “Hey, boy! Hey look at the boy in the rain.” Earl said that he ignored them but they kept it up. When a cab came by and splashed water on him it seemed to set him off. He turned, walked to the curb and shouted, “I ain’t no boy; don’t you ever call me boy again.” Pow! One of the whites hit Earl, who staggered back, quickly regained his balance, and came at his assailant. When Earl wrestled him onto the street the man’s three buddies started to join the brawl, but Tina held them off with a spray can of mace. Earl was landing the blows when a black man—a stranger, either a Garden employee or a worker in the post office across the street—recognized him. He came over and pulled him off with the words, “Come on, Earl, you don’t need this. Here’s a cab.” Earl and Tina got into the cab and left. As Earl thought about it he became more angry and wanted to resume the fight. He got his car and returned to the scene. No one was there. “It be’s that way sometime,” Earl said as he ate his eggs, staring at the plate.

How many times, I thought, will racial hatred erupt unexpectedly before I learn that it is a part of the American experience. Two hours after Earl thrills 20,000 people with his skill and reaps significant financial gains for doing so, he is just another “nigger” to part of white America—even a half block from center court. These years in professional basketball, which is 65 percent black, have made an indelible impression on me.

I have been living in a world blacker than any with which I had contact as a boy. Crystal City in the 1950s was still a border town—unsure of its Civil War loyalties. I had relatives who fought for the North and some who sympathized with the Confederacy. The Union Army honorable discharge paper of my great-grandfather hung on my bedroom wall. When I was eleven a Civil War hat craze swept the country. In my class the mix was nearly even between kids who wore Confederate hats and those who preferred the Union blue. No one knew what the respective sides stood for except one wanted slavery and the other did not.

I had no idea about the horrible facts of slavery until I studied them as a history major in college. All I knew at home was that my parents said it was wrong. Likewise, my first-hand knowledge of black people then was superficial. I had noticed the black faces of convicts on road gangs in Georgia and Alabama while driving with my family to Florida for the winter. I had heard the usual racist jokes about blacks’ intelligence and physical characteristics. I had known several blacks through sports and school but none well. Once in southern Missouri our teenage baseball team walked out of a restaurant when the owner refused to serve our black catcher.

But of all the blacks I knew Alex best. He was a Negro who assisted our family for fifty years. Due to my father’s severe arthritis, it was Alex who gave me boxing lessons at age eight and raised my first basketball hoop at age ten. Although he became a part of our family, he never talked much about his own life. Nothing then, not even a careful reading of American history, had prepared me for the impact my teammates have made on me.

Living together eighteen hours a day for six months a year forces one to see a person, not a race. Sure there is black language, and black attitudes, and black suspicion, but each man is different. Generalities about race become unacceptable against the diversity of human traits. And yet I have changed in some ways because of my black friends. It is hard to say exactly how but after witnessing their joys, fears, perceptions, and spontaneous reactions for seven years I am different. I regard authority a little more skeptically than I once did. I am more interested in experiencing life than in analyzing it. What happens to me today and tomorrow is more important now than it used to be when I worried about the next decade. And, I feel less guilty about the black man’s experience in America, realizing that though some of my friends have come from a poorer background, it did not lack in the richness of family love and joy. I not only think less in terms of a black race but also in terms of other group labels. But, above all, I see how much I don’t know and can never know about black people.

“How’s the record business,” I ask Earl.

“It’s a challenge, it keeps me moving,” he says with a smile. “It’s almost like playing ball because you have to fight guys and block out guys just to survive much less to reach your goal.”

Earl Monroe is an independent record producer. The name of his company is Scorpio Rose; Scorpio because that’s Earl’s astrological sign and Rose because that was his mother’s name. He controls everything related to his main musical group, Meng-US. Earl gets a professional arranger to refine the group’s original composition and once that sound meets his approval, Earl then “runs with the tape” to several record companies. If one of them likes the recording it will try to sign the group to a three- or five-year contract, under which the record company takes 22 percent of all revenues derived from record sales and agrees to pay for all the expenses of the studio. In his contract discussion with one record company, Earl noticed that the company’s 22 percent came from 90 percent of the total revenue instead of 100 percent. He says that the discrepancy occurs because the standard recording contract was written at a time when phonograph records had a 10 percent allowance for breakage in transportation and that now with acetate records the hedge is unnecessary. Earl expects to alter the clause in his future negotiations for Meng-US.

Earl arranges for promotion of the group by getting their record played on radio stations. After the record makes the airwaves and people start to request it in retail stores, Earl must assure adequate distribution. “They’ll only go to the record store once for it,” he says. Finally, he handles all bookings of his group, having successfully placed them in the Howard Theater in Washington, D.C., and at several places in the Virgin Islands. Ideally, Earl would like to have enough groups to take his own show on the road, hitting the big arenas in each city. Right now, however, he is just trying to do a good job with Meng-US. “Talent will come to you,” he says. “It’s just a matter of getting out there and getting a track record.”

Even with his gradual approach Earl sees the music business as a natural way to fortune. Calling himself the “music man” he points out that Elton John and Stevie Wonder are making millions of dollars annually from their records, publishing rights, royalties, and public appearances and that even during the Depression the entertainment business prospered. Earl does not exaggerate the possibility of big money. He hopes that when he is finished playing basketball he will be in the music business full time. He prepares himself by doing the detailed, mundane work of his profession, making valuable contacts and learning from experience, which he hopes won’t cost too much. In his first year with the group he lost $50,000, but now he is breaking even and sees bright days ahead.

“I don’t believe in saving for a long-range future,” Earl says. “Whatever I do I want to do it soon. I want to make it and do things between now and when I’m forty. If I’m not all right after that, then it’s my own fault. I want to spend my middle years at leisure. I’ll make my own decisions and then I don’t have anybody to blame but myself.”

Shortly after breakfast the team leaves by bus for practice at Loyola College. When I get onto the court Barnett is challenging rookies. He is dressed in a tan rubber sweatsuit and although he has only been shooting fifteen minutes he is soaking wet. “Come on chump,” he says to a rookie, as he fakes a shot and drives past him for a basket. “Five, four, three, two—good!” Although the other players leave after practice, Barnett stays, going through his routine, shooting the hook, showing the ball, faking a drive, stopping, pretending to jump into his imaginary man and shooting—swish. Later, he sits in the training room and says, almost as if he were a rookie, “So this is the NBA. Shit. I remember when I got my first uniform in grade school. I took that motherfucker home and put it in the drawer and during the night I got up four times to try it on and make sure it was still there. It’s a long way from there to here.”

“Barnett’s a brother from a different part of Africa,” Phil Jackson once told me. “He never follows the pack; he’s a lone wolf. He came into the league with gold teeth, no hair, spats, a bowler hat, and a cane. He toned down his dress but he’s still not run of the mill. He claims he had the original Afro when he let his hair grow in 1964. I loaned him an electric shaver one night in 1968 to cut his fifty facial hairs and he hasn’t shaved since.”

Barnett launches into a story about the time he played former football great Jimmy Brown one-on-one. Brown and Barnett happened on the same night to be at a nightclub in Los Angeles called Maverick’s Flat. Brown, who considered himself the greatest all-around athlete ever, walked up to Barnett and challenged him to a one-on-one game outside behind the club on a concrete court. Barnett did not agree to it. Brown insisted. Barnett agreed to play when they set a $100 game stake.

“How was he, Dick?” I ask.

“He was holdin’ and shovin’, but he was a pretty good player.”

“Who won?”

“I won by four or five. He never paid me though. I’m still waitin’.”

“Don’t hold your breath,” someone says.

After practice, I head for a conference with a tax lawyer about my current income tax situation. He has been proposing a tax shelter in real estate.

“In me younger days,” said Peter Dunn’s Mr. Dooley in “Opinions,” “’twas not considered respectable for to be an athlete. An athlete was always a man that was not strong enough for work. Fractions drove him from school and the vagrancy laws drove him to baseball.” Today Mr. Dooley’s assessment of professional sports seems outdated, undemocratic, and definitely unprofitable. Sports has become a world-wide $100 billion a year industry that has remained comparatively unknown as a business. “The professional sports industry,” begins the Brookings Institution report,
Government and the Sports Business
, “provides a fascinating subject for students of the relationship between government and business. Virtually every major public policy toward business—antitrust, labor relations, taxation, even the constitutional prohibition against slavery—has a potentially significant application to sports.”

Details about the ownership of professional sports franchises have been, like those of other lucrative businesses, obscure to the public. As long as attention can be focused on the game and its personalities, the men in blue suits only have to count the money and parade through their communities as if they are public benefactors. After all, it has been claimed that pro sports does everything from insuring community pride to contributing to social stability. Predictably, the men who write laws are only too eager to accommodate the proprietors of fantasy land. Tax laws provide owners with loopholes big enough to drive a Sherman tank through. They allow for depreciation of people (players) on the theory that we are property belonging to the owner. They also allow an owner to determine what percentage of his purchase price is for players (depreciable assets) and what for the cost of the franchise (equity). Thus an owner might purchase a team for $4 million and arbitrarily state that the property cost $3.5 million and the right to operate the franchise half a million. The selling owner, however, in the same transaction might state that the property’s value is half a million dollars and the franchise is $3.5 million. He chooses to allocate as little as possible to players (property) because that portion of his sale is taxed as ordinary income while the franchise sale is given capital gains treatment. The truly outrageous aspect of the transaction is that buyer and seller are permitted legally to declare different values for their own tax purposes. Owners also benefit directly from the public coffer. Arenas are often constructed with taxpayer’s dollars through bond issues. They are justified frequently by claiming that such public generosity will make a city “big league”; a nebulous term to say the least. In addition, owners often derive revenue from control of concessions at their games and, in the few private arenas, from building rental.

The financial considerations are considerable but until 1967 the control of player movement was an even greater bonanza for owners. Unlike other businesses, a player could not move freely from job to job. He was arbitrarily sent to a team by an impersonal draft and, once there, was perpetually bound to that team by a reserve clause, de jure or de facto; the only way he could leave was if the owner wanted to trade him. These restrictions gave assurance that there would always be a cheap, predictable flow of talent to stock the teams. The league assigned a franchise to a city and gave the owner an exclusive right to operate in that city. Likewise the owner control of player movement gave the businessman a monopoly over talent. If a player wanted to play he had no choice but to acquiesce in the system. Big TV contracts gave owners sums never foreseen by the early operators of professional basketball, and with the brighter prospects of pay TV the future seemed even more profitable. But as with many monopolies, it was too good to last. The mass exposure alerted other businessmen to the profit opportunity and in 1967 they started a second professional league which bid vigorously for players’ services. Also, at about the same time the players finally grew up and started a union.