Life on the Run (27 page)

Fifty percent of the people in the Phoenix area have been here less than 10 years. In 1950 Phoenix was a town of 50,000 people; now 800,000 live here. Scottsdale has increased from 10,000 to 100,000. The Valley of the Sun—Scottsdale, Phoenix, Sun City area—has grown from 100,000 in 1950 to 1.3 million. Such rapid growth produces unevenly scattered development. Private enterprise, unfettered, built Phoenix and many of the rugged individualists still remain. Barry Goldwater’s house and the Wrigley mansion are two prominent landmarks. For them, and their kind, economic freedom is America’s most cherished ideal. Government is anathema. They have yet to feel the compelling need for belonging to a group, brought on by the limits of individualism in a crowded, complex, technological world. They have not confronted the twin yearnings, unity and freedom, felt by so many Americans equally and simultaneously. For Western conservatives, belonging is less important than freedom. In this sense, Phoenix is a simpler and perhaps a healthier place than Chicago; yet it is young. As more and more people flee the weather and regimentation of the urban East for Phoenix, this single-minded dedication to economic freedom will end. One can already see what lies ahead as surely as the smog hangs over the city three days out of five. Phoenix is in the terminal phase of the American frontier spirit.

We turn onto Van Buren at 40th and come face to face with “The Strip.” Thirty-eight motels dot the next 16 blocks of Phoenix. The first motel built in the United States was near San Luis Obispo, California, in 1924. Today there are over 43,500 motels in the United States accounting for over two-thirds of all commercial lodges. Some of the places on “The Strip” existed before half of the present Phoenix population arrived. All seem to be flourishing as more transients seek refuge in the cool anonymity of a motel room—a home for those Americans whose only mobility is horizontal. A sign outside Chuck Meyer’s House of Television says, “Work for the Lord, pay is small, retirement benefits are out of this world.”

A short distance from the State Capitol we turn left and head into the mountains, passing through pungent orange groves and clumps of giant cactus and beginning to climb the steep road leading to the lookout of South Mountain Park. We see no other cars in the park. From the metal map at the summit you can see downtown Phoenix, with its houses and offices arranged in small, neat squares, and sitting under a cloud of smog. As the squares of farms surrounding the city get larger and greener, the smog decreases. Beyond, vast expanses of desert, pierced only by the highway to the mountains, show how much room is left for settlement by the twentieth-century pioneers now poised in the motels. We stay a few minutes in the afternoon breeze and then I head back to the hotel for an hour’s sleep before the game.

“Did you ever see a rabbit do it?” I hear Willis Reed ask as I enter the locker room later that night. “Shit, it’s over before it begins; the female, she lies down like she was shot. Horses are different. Once we had a mare and we bought a visit from a stud; that motherfucker was this big [stretching his hands apart at least three feet]. You got to guide him into the mare. We missed and he shot his load all over us, he was so excited.”

I put my bag down, undress, and begin taping my ankles as Barnett picks up the conversation. “Hey, Luke,” he says, “ever hear from ‘the breath’ anymore?” Lucas ignores Barnett’s ribbing. “We’re in Milwaukee,” continues Barnett, “and this bitch calls on the phone, starts goin’ into this and that and how she’s all hot for Lucas, who’s playin Mr. Nice Guy, just listening. She talks on the phone for an hour with this breathing rough-ass voice. Her phone game was together—
too… geh tha!
[spoken like three tuba blasts]. She probably weighed 278 or 78.”

“Barnett was shouting, ‘Give it up, bitch,’ as I was talking,” says Lucas. “Who knows, maybe she was just lonely.”

“Or had the phone between her legs,” says Barnett.

“Hey, wait a minute,” says Jackson, “did she say she had an older sister?”

“Yeah,” says Lucas.

“She called me, too,” says Jackson.

“DeBusschere and me, too,” I say. “Whoever’s in the room she talks to. Last time she said she was out at a motel by the airport where the heat was off and she had to stay in bed to stay warm. I never saw her though.”

“Right,” says Barnett, “and if you did you wouldn’t let us know. She’s got to be a chiwollephant.”

The soft side of every hardened pro is his experience with women on the road. Locker-room “styling” and “telling the fellas” about the night before are sometimes part of the routine. Occasionally a groupie is passed around and compared until she becomes NBA Jane, or Connie, or Carol. Most players, however, keep their experiences private; for them discretion is the key. Along with the professional tensions of the road flows a parallel, intensely personal set of emotions. The women complement the games, providing a respite from the competition for some and a chance to regain the confidence lost in a bad game for others. After the season, the attachments fade and, though their memory is special, become a part of just another season. But during those brief encounters life seems fuller on the road; whatever their duration such moments are genuine, alive, exciting, troublesome, dangerous, sad, and so unlike much of the travel through our jet-age America.

Team athletes on the road take their place in a long line of males in flight from domesticity and its responsibilities of one woman and family. The road symbolizes the same thing for a basketball player as the forest, frontier, or sea did for some of America’s greatest writers: Like Rip Van Winkle who escaped through sleep, or the Pathfinder who blazed trails through a wild environment, or Nick Adams who escaped through fishing, the pro player escapes through a life of games on the road. Being away with the fellas makes up an essential part of the job. No player glorifies the virtues of male companionship, but when women reporters first began entering locker rooms, the furor that erupted was in part due to the encroachment of women on a last refuge from their threatening presence.

But there is no need for the team to serve as a substitute for mother or wife. Each town has its own supply of women and ostensibly gives to each player the chance to escape the trap of an all-male world. Only at the end of his career when the constant motion of away games stops and the player must depend much more on one woman and family, does he realize that all the women along the road have not helped him to mature but rather have allowed him a continued flight from responsibility.

A strong and inseparable bond exists between the innocent, beautiful girl and the pampered athlete. Both are objects in the eyes of most people. Both are given credit only for their physical attributes, and receive inordinate prizes for them. They are told they are something special, Miss America and the All-American, without understanding what qualities beyond the superficialities of face and body hold importance in life. Both become subject to a dangerous vanity. Both live in terror of the day their glory will end and frequently live life hard and fast in anticipation of the day their age will show. An athlete knows the world of a beautiful girl. Maybe that is why DiMaggio and Monroe stuck in the American imagination as an example of a mythic match.

As the seventies have progressed, athletes have acted more freely and taken on a peacock look, as careful with their platform shoes and hair dyes as any manicured woman. The age of athlete chic has arrived. Jocks are no longer sweaty monsters but purveyors of “manly scents” and transforming hair sprays. Likewise, beautiful women have begun to admit that they, like the athlete, work at their beauty. The female sports movement followed the glamour girls’ exit from the workout closet. The bonus babies of the beauty business are the natural progeny of the bonus babies of the sports world.

The Knicks take the court in the empty Phoenix Coliseum, one week to the day before chaps-wearing, bow-legged cowboys will be riding and roping calves under the same roof. The crowd gradually fills the arena. We go through warm-ups to musical accompaniment—“Aquarius.” The fans begin their own warm-ups:

“Hey, Bradley, you yo-yo.”

“Frazier, you better check your money bags, you’re too pretty for mugging in New York.”

“Red. Hey, Holzman, you
were
the best coach. Now you run an old-age home. Go back to New York, you bum, and take your overpaid greasers with you.”

“DeBusschere—you wearin’ your hair coloring tonight?”

“Hey, Bradley, Bradley, go back to Rhodes.”

Crowds differ. The Garden crowd during the warm-up before a big game crackles with anticipation; the blasé Forum crowd in Los Angeles often leaves before the game’s end—beating the freeway traffic is more important than seeing the final minutes. The public address announcer in Philadelphia captures his audience and visiting players with the staccato timing of his pronunciation; the Boston crowd fills the air of the old Boston Garden with a loving adoration of the Celtics and covers the balconies with simplistic banners such as “Celtics Pride Cannot Be Denied,” “Heinsohn’s Heroes,” and “Celtics—a team for all seasons.”

Phoenix is one of the least hospitable places to play. The fans, many of whom don’t understand professional basketball, attack referees and visiting players in the way the father of a high school star berates the league’s next best player. Their animosities stem from deep-seated prejudices and not from judgment; they frequently boo when the referee is simply enforcing the rules, such as giving a player an extra free throw. The hostility is full of misconceptions and occasionally takes the form of racist remarks.

Under the basket near the visiting bench the same two long-legged women sit every game. They cross their legs suggestively, toss back their jet black hair, stare occasionally at their favorite visitor of the night, and provide distraction if the game turns dull.

I have played basketball before audiences in eighteen countries and hundreds of U.S. cities. On only two occasions have I felt the crowd as a collective body provide dramatic comment on the society outside the arena.

Once Walt Frazier was having a bad game in the play-offs. When he came out for a rest the Madison Square Garden crowd booed him for what seemed like five minutes. During my rookie year, when I failed to fulfill the public’s expectations, I was frequently jeered, ridiculed, and once even spat upon, but never did I receive as vicious a booing from twenty thousand people. Frazier’s face twitched as he sat on the bench, the towel placed to his mouth.

“Take the ordinary ethnic, white, working stiff,” said a reporter covering that game. (The reporter had once worked for a politician, not uncommon for a sports reporter.) “He works on a dangerous job, leaving home at seven and getting home late in time to face his old lady and a screaming kid. He’s too tired to think of sex more than two or three times a month. He saves his money, scrounges for a ticket to the Knicks, gets into his double knits that still don’t hide his pot, and goes to the Garden. There he sees Frazier, this black who can get women, white or black, whenever he wants, who is making $300,000 a year for playing—not working—and seemingly doing it easily. Then there he is, playing poorly; so the guy boos, thinking that the overpaid son-of-a-bitch deserves it. I have watched lots of crowds and those boos for Frazier were vicious. They were like the ones Robert Kennedy met in the spring of 1968 when he finally decided to run for President. They were the boos of a powerful resentment saved for the man who exudes sexuality. Kennedy faced it and so does Walt Frazier.” Whatever the explanation, the boos seemed to hurt Clyde deeply.

The other unusual crowd reaction occurred in 1965 in Budapest. I was a member of the American team which had just won the basketball competition in the World University Games by defeating the Russians in the final. We stood on a platform at center court where each of us received a medal and a bouquet of flowers. After our first-place presentation we were asked to walk around the infield of the twenty-thousand-seat, outdoor arena. The crowd was yelling, clapping, waving, and throwing flowers at us throughout our triumphant parade. After we finished our walk and stood at one end of the stadium, the second place medals were presented to the Russians, who then followed our path around the interior of the stadium. For them there was no noise. Total silence. So startling was the contrast that I felt sorry for the Russians who had played just as hard. Looking up into the stands I saw why there was silence. The Hungarians were clapping, except their hands missed in midair. Ten thousand people moved their hands in the way a baseball umpire signals safe. The Russians were still the conquerors.

After the warm-ups DeBusschere feels sick and tells Red he can’t play. He retires to the locker room, his head pounding as if it were the bit on an oil drill. Every player has two or three games a year when the pace and intensity of the schedule prevents him from working. Playing a hundred games a year most players are conscientious about their nights off, waiting if possible until they are out of town with a minimum of TV or press coverage and against a weaker team. Athletes can play on “rest” nights, but probably poorly, and they risk serious injury due to illness and slowed reflexes. If it were a war and the player was a soldier, he would fight and probably make it. But that is the point: Basketball, even at the professional level, is not war and the only thing that the iron-man has to show for his ability to play every game is (maybe) a shortened career. We are human beings, perhaps depreciable, but we don’t come with five-year guarantees. I once had hopes of being an iron-man until I realized that the masochism needed to become one prevents me from performing consistently well or enjoying a game. When an arch inflammation or a muscle pull keeps me out, the fans can think whatever they like. After years of limited absence and unlimited effort on the court, I think they must know I’m not dodging it. DeBusschere had earned his right to take himself out, too, through all his years of maximum competitive effort.

Holzman never protests a player’s injury assessment. He checks with a doctor, when possible, but ultimately leaves the decision up to the player. That is another aspect of his genius. He knows that after the game the heroes are humans who hurt as much from migraines as anybody else. He protects us.