The Book of Basketball (89 page)

Do modern players realize that someone like Elgin paved the way for their eight-car garages and McMansions with the 1964 All-Star Game in Boston, or how the mood in the locker room turned defiant only when Lakers owner Bob Short tried to order Elgin and West around like two busboys? The story never developed legs historically, although we hear about Curt Flood and Marvin Miller all the time. That just goes with the territory with Elgin. Only diehard fans realize that, by any calculation, Elgin was the third best forward ever. From a historical standpoint, it definitely works against him that he never won a title or that there just isn’t enough “I can’t believe how good he was” videotape of him.
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He lacked that signature “thing” to carry him through eternity, nothing with the legs of Oscar’s triple double or Russell’s eleven rings. You rarely hear Elgin mentioned with the big boys anymore. Unless you’re talking to an NBA fan over the age of fifty. Then they defend Elgin and berate you for not realizing how unbelievable he was.

My theory? Everything that happened after Elgin’s playing career obscured the career itself. The Clippers hired Elgin to run them in 1986, and really, he’s been something of a punch line ever since. After purchasing Clips tickets in 2004, I wrote about him:

Blessed with a kind face and a happy smile, almost like the grandfather in a UPN sitcom, he’s the Hall of Famer who sits with the other embarrassed GMs during the lottery every spring. I have made many jokes about Elgin over the years.
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He’s an easy target. This is a man once described by TNT’s Reggie Theus as “a veteran of the lottery process”—and he meant it as a compliment. I wrote after last June’s draft, “Having Elgin run your team must be like getting in the car with my mom at night, when she’s careening off curbs and saying things like, ‘I can’t believe how bad my eyes have gotten’ and ‘We shouldn’t have ordered that bottle of wine.’ Just constant fear.” Well, Elgin wasn’t too happy about that one. Much to my surprise, he reads more Clippers-related articles and columns than one would think. When he found out I was coming for lunch, he wasn’t pleased. Coincidentally, he ended up in the Staples cafeteria at the same time; one of my lunch partners asked Elgin at the salad bar if he wanted to join us. Elgin glanced over at our table, noticed me sitting there and growled, “That guy’s an [expletive].” Only he used a seven-letter expletive, placing most of his emphasis on the first three letters. For instance, let’s pretend the word was
bassbowl.
Elgin would have said it, “That guy’s a
BASS-
bowl.”

People loved that story. Of everything I ever wrote for
ESPN.com
, it’s easily one of the most popular anecdotes I ever passed along.
You bassbowl!
I hear that ten times a year at the Clippers games. It took me two years to win Elgin over, but by his final season we were getting along really well. When I filmed an ESPN piece about shooting a half-court shot at a Clippers game, their organization had been splintered into various camps. I knew there was a festering power struggle when Dunleavy and I had a good-natured shooting contest for $100 and I ended up winning. We were on camera and I forgot to collect. Dunleavy disappeared.
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Elgin quickly limped over looking like he had just seen an old lady get mugged.

“He never paid you, did he?” Elgin whispered.

I shook my head. Elgin made a face.

“That’s typical,” he hissed.

When Elgin gets mad, he stammers a little. So the next few words came out like this: “And you-you-you know what else? He went first, but after you made your shot, he-he-he made it seem like he had last shot. Did you catch that?”

“I caught it,” I said. “I thought it was funny that he cheated.”

Elgin made another face.

“I’m glad you caught that,” he said. “I didn’t think you caught it.”

We ended up rapping for the next twenty-five minutes while the camera guys packed up their stuff. Every time I ever question my choice in life for a profession, I always come back to moments like this: talking hoops with someone like Elg, someone who will live on long after we’re both gone. The Dunleavy thing just killed him. You could see it. Even though Elgin was the most beloved figure in the Clippers office—and that’s an understatement—Dunleavy knew how to play the game and Elgin was too freaking old to bother. Times were changing with the Clippers. Elg could see the writing on the wall. I could see it in his face that day, and I could see it for the rest of that season. Worried that the 2008–09 campaign would be his last, I called a mutual friend to schedule lunch with Elgin in August. I wanted to write a column about him. At seventy-four years old, he was the oldest high-ranking NBA employee by far, the last link to the days of Russell and Cousy, when black players ate at a Greyhound bus station because nobody else would serve them, when you wrecked your knee and were never the same, when you played twenty-seven exhibition games in twenty days because your owner made you. One time I asked Elg how he felt about chartered planes and he flew off the handle.

“Sheeeeeeeeeet,” he said. “When I played, we flew coach and carried our own bags! We landed two, three, four times! You ever hear about the time we crashed in a cornfield?”

I heard. It’s the closest an American professional sports team ever came to perishing in a plane crash. For Elgin Baylor, it was just another thing that happened to him. That’s why I thought it would make for a great column—just lunch with Elgin, him ranting and raving about stuff like that. To make sure Elg would show up, I mentioned to our mutual
friend, “Make sure you tell him that he should have tipped in the Selvy shot. I saw the tape.”

A few hours later, my phone rang.

“Elg is going nuts,” our friend said. “He says you don’t know what you’re talking about. He says Sam Jones pushed him, that’s why he didn’t tip it in. He says Sam even admitted it to him afterward.”
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“I don’t know,” I said. “That’s not what the tape shows.”

“Well, you picked the right button to push. He’ll be there for lunch. Just be ready to hear about this for an hour.”

We scheduled a date and planned to see each other then. A week later, they postponed. We planned on rescheduling, then fate intervened: the power struggle escalated and the Clippers kept yanking Elgin around, finally canning him and handing his GM responsibilities to Dunleavy.
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The team’s employees were told that Elgin resigned, only the terse PR release that followed never mentioned anything about a resignation, nor Elgin’s fifty-year association with the NBA and all the hits he took along the way.
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We elected our first black president six weeks later, something that wouldn’t have happened without the strength of people like Elgin once upon a time. You are probably younger than forty, so when you think of him, you probably remember Elg wearing one of those Bill Cosby sweaters and wincing because the Clippers’ lottery number came too soon. That’s the wrong memory. Think about him creating hang time from scratch. Think of him putting up a 38–19 in his spare time. Think of him dropping 71 on the Knicks. Think of his eyes narrowing as they passed along his owner’s condescending message during that snowy night in Boston. Think of him retiring with dignity because he didn’t want to hang on for a ring. Think of him telling Rod Hundley that he couldn’t
play that exhibition game in West Virginia, not because he was trying to prove a point, but because it would have made him feel like less of a human being.

Elgin left the Clippers on the same day that Barack Obama took part in his second presidential debate. The two events weren’t related at all. Or so it seemed. On his final night in the NBA, his Clippers friends called and emailed to say goodbye. None of them heard back from him. Elgin Baylor was gone and didn’t want to be found. Fifty years, gone in a flash. For the most underappreciated superstar in NBA history, it couldn’t have ended any other way.

13. JOHN HAVLICEK

Resume: 16 seasons, 13 quality, 13 All-Stars … ’74 Finals MVP … Top 5 (’71, ’72, ’73, ’74), Top 10 (’64, ’66, ’68, ’69, ’70, ’75, ’76) … All-Defense (8x, five 1st) … 3-year peak: 27–9–8 … 4-year Playoffs peak: 27–9–6 (57 G) … leader: minutes (2x) … most career assists for a nonguard (6,114) … best or 2nd-best player on 4 champs (’68, ’69, ’74, ’76), played for 8 champs in all (8–0 in the Finals) … Playoffs: 22–7–5 (172 G) … career: minutes (10th), points (14th) … 25K Point Club

Here’s the enduring Havlicek question for me: would it have been better for him historically if he were black?

That question admittedly seems strange. If the Association nearly went under because it was too black, then why would Havlicek’s color be a negative? Because color never stops being the elephant in the room for white guys, that’s why. Remember when Bird clinched “best forward ever” status coming off three straight MVPs and his best statistical season? He had just finished off the ’87 Pistons in the most memorable way possible, with Magic-Bird IV looming in the next round … and you know what became a national story? Those moronic “he’d be just another good guy if he were black” claims from Rodman and Isiah. The pinnacle of the career of one of the five greatest players ever and people were still talking about color. This time, unfairly. But it always seems to come up. It’s a black man’s game. It just is. Shit, one of my first choices for a title was
The Book of Basketball:
A White Man’s Thoughts on a Black Man’s Game.
My publishing company talked me out of it. Can’t play the race card in the title. Or something. Everyone’s sphincters tighten whenever a white guy discusses race and sports. Malcolm Gladwell made one request for this book: an extended footnote where I compared the all-time teams for Whites, Blacks, Biracials and Foreigners and figured out who’d win a hypothetical tournament. He’s biracial. He loves talking about race. And I do too … but when you’re white, the degree of difficulty skyrockets. You can’t screw up. You have to say everything perfectly. You have no leeway. So I’m giving Gladwell that footnote—look, here it is
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—but had to write a two-hundred-word preamble so it didn’t come out of nowhere.

Back to white guys. When we evaluate them, they fall into six categories. Either “undeniably and stereotypically white” (think Mark Madsen), “white but effective” (think Matt Bonner or Steve Kerr), “deceivingly white” (the Billy Hoyle All-Stars), “nonissue white” (guys who excelled to the point that you stopped thinking about their color, like Bird or West), “totally overrated white” (guys whose stock became inflated specifically because of their color: think Danny Ferry or Adam Morrison), and “totally underrated white,” which I will define as “someone who was unfairly evaluated in the past tense because he was white.” We have one example for that last category and only one: John Havlicek. Read this next paragraph like you don’t know any better, then tell me what color you would have guessed.

So there’s this three-sport high school star who plays basketball exclusively at Ohio State, even though Woody Hayes lobbies every summer to play him at receiver as well. After getting drafted as a receiver by the Cleveland Browns,
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he lands on the Celtics as their number one pick and becomes an effective swingman for them, playing three different positions, guarding all types of players and even taking over in crunch time. What sets him apart is the way he runs and never stops running; he has the endurance of a Kenyan marathoner. Nobody can keep up. He runs and runs and runs. He fills the lane on every fast break. He sprints back and forth along the sideline trying to get open. He’s such a remarkable athlete that Boston sportswriters openly wonder if he should pitch for the Red Sox in his spare time. As his team ages and the scoring burden shifts to him, he never changes his balls-to-the-wall style even as he’s averaging 45–46 minutes a game. His teams finish 8–0 in the Finals; he leads them in scoring four of those times. He wins titles thirteen years apart with two totally different rosters. He wins the ’74 Finals MVP after playing 289 of 291 possible minutes, prompting
Sports Illustrated
to point out a few months later, “A case could have been made that [he] was more like Most Valuable in the Game Today. Or the Best Athlete the NBA has ever had—which would rank him right up there universally because few other sports demand anywhere near as much of an athlete as pro basketball.” He makes seven second-team All-NBA’s (including two thirteen years apart) and four straight first-team NBA’s. He makes five All-Defense teams; that number would have doubled if they’d had those teams during his first six years. He retires in 1978, but not before cracking the top five in nearly every relevant category except assists and rebounds. His peers remember him as one of the clutch players of his era, as well as one of the most athletic and versatile, with Bill Russell saying simply in 1974, “He is the best all-around player I ever saw.” He goes down for eternity as a physical specimen and elite basketball player of the highest order. The end.

Would you have said black or white? Admit it … you would have said black. And that’s the problem with Havlicek historically: he had a blue-collar
last name, a wife who looked like a classy newsanchor, two of the whitest looks ever (a crew cut in the mid-sixties, curly hair and bushy sideburns in the seventies) and one of those generic, aw-shucks personalities that was impossible to define. Good guy. Simple guy. White guy. That’s all we remember.
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Give him darker skin, Doc’s ABA afro, a snazzy Fu Manchu, and a name like Johnny Harmon and you know what happens? Havlicek becomes properly rated. I am convinced. (You were surprised to see him at no. 13 weren’t you?)
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Other than LeBron, no perimeter player fulfilled more functions on a basketball court than Hondo. Other than Malone and Kareem, nobody played at a higher level for a longer and more durable time. Other than Russell and Sam Jones, nobody won more titles. Other than Jordan and Bird, nobody had more
memorable
clutch moments. Other than Magic and West, nobody did a better job of reinventing his game as the years passed. Behind Bird, Magic, Russell, and Duncan, he might rank fifth on the Winnability Scale. Only Russell and Jordan came through more times for championship teams.