Values of the Game (4 page)

When Wilt Chamberlain played against Bill Russell, it was a classic matchup rooted in mutual respect. Chamberlain was the dominant individual in a team game. He amassed incredible statistics—50 points per game was his average in one year, 27.2 rebounds per game another year, and his record for a single game was 100 points. Russell, on the other hand, was the ultimate team player—his Celtics won eleven championships in thirteen years. With lightning reflexes and an intense mental concentration, his only objective was the team’s victory. Russell would not always outplay Chamberlain, but he would often outfox him. They would encounter each other around half a dozen times a year before the playoffs, and they usually played their best games against each other. Each pushed the other to higher levels of performance.

You don’t have to be a star to win respect. The tenth, eleventh, and twelfth men know they’ll see little playing time, yet the quality of a team is often enhanced by those at the end of the bench. If they see their jobs as working hard in practice to push the starting five and playing a positive role in the team dynamic off the court, they can be essential to a championship. Swen Nater pushed Bill Walton in every practice at UCLA. He played in few college games, but he was good enough to be drafted by the NBA in the first round. Ken Shank pushed me every day in practice at Princeton, and toward the end of my career as a Knick, Phil Jackson did the same thing. Mike Riordan, Bill Hoskett, Don May, and John Warren got little public credit for our 1970 championship, and Dean Meminger, Hawthorne Wingo, Henry Bibby, and John Gianelli missed out on personal glory in 1973, but in both the Knicks’ championship years they got plenty of credit from their teammates.

There is an extra dimension to the respect that exists among teammates—a respect beyond that accorded the rules, the coach, and the opponent. Teammates on a team that wins will never be strangers. Teammates on a team that wins the state tournament in high school, or the conference championship in college, will forever be bound by their mutual achievement. In the pros, from exhibitions to playoffs, a team plays more than a hundred games a season. Players often have four games in five nights in four different cities. By late February, fatigue is the common enemy. Often there’s not enough time for sufficient rest even if a player manages his day wisely—yet each night he has to go out and push hard to win. Dave DeBusschere, his face drawn from the long season, and Willis Reed, with his brow furrowed and heating packs on each knee, used to look over at each other in the locker room of the fourth town in five days, and their glances alone seemed to say, “I’m tired to my bones—I don’t want to go out there. But if you do it, I will too.”

Out of this kind of team commitment comes a deep respect. After a game, each man knows that everyone has given his all. It’s an honest and open relationship; there’s no suppressed anger because someone didn’t set a screen, or rebound, or hustle on defense, but instead the assured knowledge that on that night the team went as far as its collective abilities permitted. If the outcome is a loss, the attitude is that we lost because we were beaten, not because we didn’t extend ourselves fully. The conviction that each man did his best is unshaken.

If you play basketball long enough, you develop a deepening respect for the game itself. When I was the Knicks representative in the players’ union for nine of my ten years with the pros, the hardest thing for me to do was to think only of the union. I had to wonder whether the NBA could meet our demands without damaging the game. While I always overestimated the danger, my instinct was probably the right one: Players have an obligation to assure the game’s quality—not just for reasons of self-interest, but also out of respect for what the game means to millions of fans. Point-shaving, drug scandals, and lazy players reflect badly on the sport. And once the sport is in disrepute, a player’s reputation is not far behind. Ultimately, the game is what people want to see; a star player attracts customers, but it’s the game that keeps them coming back.

It’s possible to drive fans away. Gratuitous violence (Latrell Sprewell assaulting his coach), high ticket prices ($1,350 courtside tickets at Madison Square Garden), and a perception that players care only about the money (Kevin Garnett’s rejection of a $100 million contract as insufficient) quickly put barriers between the fans and the game. Likewise, players who are approachable and honorable draw fans to the arena. Chamique Holdsclaw of Tennessee honors her school by her openness and good humor. Horace Grant of Orlando consistently shows a sensitivity to kids in the stands. Kevin Johnson of Phoenix helps children who are poor by funding a youth development center in his hometown of Sacramento. David Robinson gives twenty-five tickets each home game to disadvantaged young people in San Antonio. A team takes on something of a neighborly quality when players willingly sign autographs, appear at various functions for free, and are aware of the power of their example on others. By midcareer, most professional players have realized that they have an opportunity—even more, an obligation—to fill a community role along with simply getting rich. Sometimes players neglect this wider off-court obligation and focus only on themselves. By the time these players are ready to retire, they have little identity broader than their eroding skills. When the post-basketball world puts new demands on their character, they find that the worth of their basketball career begins to disappear behind them like footprints in a desert windstorm.

Even on the professional level, basketball is more than a business. The memories that accrue, the values learned, the human emotions shared, all bind you to the game. For most players, those memories are vivid, and those values have been internalized. They act as a counter to the materialism that surrounds the game. Once you’ve learned to show respect in basketball, you’ve probably received it as well. Then you can feel how easy it is to give even the least important person his or her due.

Team players know exactly where they are in relation both to their opponents and their teammates. Off the court, they come to understand the fleeting nature of victory while appreciating the breadth of support needed to achieve it. Knowledge of one’s strengths and weaknesses remains a necessary but not sufficient step to success; acting on that knowledge requires perspective.

“Winning brings out the best in people who are good and the worst in people who are not,” Pete Carril wrote in his memoir. You can see that pattern of behavior forming as early as high school. Some players become insufferable when they win. Others handle victory with modesty and dignity, and earn admiration for it. “When you win, don’t crow; when you lose, don’t cry,” Arvel Popp, my high school coach, used to say. A perspective on victory comes from knowing who is responsible for it in a team sport. Never is it one player.

In 1965, I set the record for the highest number of points in an NCAA tournament game: 58. Several years later, when Austin Carr of Notre Dame scored 61 points in a game, people asked me whether I was disappointed that he had broken my record. My answer was that I didn’t care, that records were made to be broken. Like batons in a relay race, they are passed from one athlete to another. In team sports, the only record that’s important is the team’s, not a team member’s. UCLA’s ten NCAA championships in twelve years and the Boston Celtics’ eleven NBA championships in thirteen years are the most impressive and important records in basketball. I predict that they’ll never be broken—until they are.

Basketball, perhaps above all other sports, affords a unique perspective on a fundamental moral issue of our times: the need for racial unity. Bill Russell once said that the reason he liked the game was because it was about numbers, while much else in life was politics. The implication was that given the politics of life in America, a black man would not be able to rise with his ability, because somewhere along the line racist thinking and racists acts would subvert his achievement, whereas in basketball you got the rebound or you didn’t. The ball went in or it missed. There were no artificial barriers between ability and reward.

On a February evening in 1998, an organization called XNBA assembled in New York City to give its first awards to basketball players, owners, and coaches who had shaped the modern game. Bill Russell presented an award to Red Auerbach, his old coach—the man who had won nine NBA championships in ten years but had been named Coach of the Year only once. Russell got right to the point about his friendship with Red. “I never considered him a social innovator,” Russell said, “but Red did things. For example, the Celtics… were the first team to draft a black player, a number one draft pick from one of the Negro colleges; the first team to start five black players; and the first team to hire a black coach. And I never once thought that Auerbach did that for any other reason but that he thought this was the best man for the job. And that’s the only way to do things like that.”

You can’t play on a team with African Americans for very long and fail to recognize the stupidity of our national obsession with race. The right path is really very simple: Give respect to teammates of a different race, treat them fairly, disagree with them honestly, enjoy their friendship, explore your common humanity, share your thoughts about one another candidly, work together for a common goal, help one another achieve it. No destructive lies. No ridiculous fears. No debilitating anger.

Why, of all the places in America, is that ideal closest to being achieved on a basketball court? I believe it’s because the community of a team is so close that you have to talk with one another; the travel is so constant that you have to interact with one another; the competition is so intense that you have to challenge one another; the game is so fluid that you have to depend on one another; the high and low moments are so frequent that you learn to share them; the season is so long that it brings you to mutual acceptance. That is not to say that no racists have ever survived a multiracial team experience with their prejudices intact, but my guess is that the numbers are few.

Basketball shows you how thin the line is between victory and defeat, and how we all live most of our lives in the middle, between the two. In 1970, the Knicks played the Lakers for the biggest prize in basketball, the NBA championship, and I found myself playing against my childhood heroes—Wilt Chamberlain, Elgin Baylor, and Jerry West. The series took a number of dramatic turns, with a devastating injury to Willis Reed in the fifth game and constant press comments about which was the better team, the old stars or the new upstarts. Everything came down to the seventh game.

As we approached the championship game, I began to see our campaign as something like Tolstoy’s idea of war: It was not great generalship that was decisive, but rather the accidents—the unforeseen was what dictated events. Fate, in the form of Willis’s torn abductor muscle, had intervened. In such circumstances, though you have prepared meticulously, you still look for a way to seize the initiative. No advantage is too small to be pounced on.

During the warm-ups in the Garden, West, Baylor, and Chamberlain limbered up for what they thought—absent Willis—would be their first championship together. Then Willis appeared from underneath the stands. The audience erupted in a roar as loud as Niagara Falls. The unpredictable had occurred again. The advantage shifted, and each Knick felt tremendously uplifted. DeBusschere recalls that Chamberlain, Baylor, and West stood at the other end of the court, their warm-up stopped, just watching Willis, his lips pursed in determination, take his last shots before the game’s opening buzzer. If Willis’s entrance had changed the momentum all by itself, the first two minutes, in which he hit his first two shots, sealed the Lakers’ fate. They seemed dazed; the pressure had reached even my childhood heroes, and they were carried away in the current. Chamberlain’s 45 points in the sixth game, against essentially the same team, dropped to 21 in the final. Baylor and West couldn’t break out of the reversed momentum. Our team stuck together and we won.

The game could have easily gone the other way were it not for Willis’s heroics, our home court advantage, or the fact that Walt Frazier’s opponent, Dick Garrett, was an old teammate from college who still stood in awe of him. If any one of these countless variables had shifted, the outcome could have changed, but none of them did. When we needed to perform, we did. There would be other times in other places when it wouldn’t go so well. One year later, with Willis suffering from tendonitis of the knee, we would lose in the Eastern finals to Baltimore. Two years later, a slightly different Laker team defeated us in the finals four games to one, in a series that, had a few baskets in the fourth game gone in our favor, could have stretched to seven games—and then who knows what might have happened? Each time I think about those moments, I remember how intense they were and the perspective they gave me about how life works: about the importance of continuity, the ability to see beyond the immediate, and the fragility of balance. Awareness of this sort leads to gratitude for the bounty that life does bring you, and to a determination to live it to the fullest.

Beyond the game on the court, there is the larger world of your dealings with the public and its representatives, the press. Having the right perspective on yourself as a public figure is no easy task. The problem can crop up early in your playing career. As a high school athlete you can get some press attention and suddenly feel self-important and separate from your team. Fame, you learn, is like a rainstorm—it comes on fast and then goes just as quickly, often leaving behind a certain amount of destruction.

I always felt that the public was owed a good performance on the court, and I tried to give as close to 100 percent as possible every night, but as a pro I was never any good at the postgame interviews. Mine usually amounted to little more than restatements of the box score—besides, other teammates liked to do them. Yet I knew, and many players know, that the press is not the adversary; the first thing to understand is that most reporters are just trying to do their job. Relating to them as professionals worthy of courtesy and respect is infinitely preferable to feigning friendship or avoiding contact.