Trouthe, Lies, and Basketball

by Charley Rosen

  “I swear. But tell me why Davis is still employed?”

  He laughed. “Politics, money, race, TV ratings . . . All kinds of bullshit.”

  Then he chugged another helping of Jack and went into a thoughtful, troubled silence.

  My veteran teammates always had plenty to say about the coaches they’d played for or the testimonies of their buddies on other teams. So I already had a pretty good read on many of the league’s current coaches. And I ran down the list of franchises where the spirit of the game might still survive.

  Certainly not in Boston, where the unanimous opinion was that Doc Rivers was a bullshitter. Nor in Cleveland, where Mike Brown just let LeBron do whatever he wanted. In Houston, Jeff Van Gundy was more of a politician than a coach. Isaiah Thomas in New York was another smiley-faced bullshitter. Mike D’Antoni in Phoenix didn’t even know how to spell “defense.”

  Maybe Miami was where I belonged—where Pat Riley was a hardass but a terrific coach, who preached the team-game. Nate McMillan in Portland was a tough guy to play for, but was reputed to be an honest man. So was Jerry Sloan in Utah, Eddie Jordan in Washington, and Sam Mitchell in Toronto. Maybe in Detroit, where Flip Saunders seemed to be well liked by his players . . .

  But the guys agreed that the two most righteous coaches in the NBA were Gregg Popovich in San Antonio. And Phil Jackson with the Lakers.

  Maybe Coach Rich could help me get traded.

  So I broke the silence by asking him this: “How come I can’t get any run?”

  “Ha,” he grunted. “That’s ’cause Rashon Williams is gonna be a unrestricted free agent come July, so he wants to play at least forty minutes a game so he can score as many points as possible and get the biggest contract as possible. And the asshole is afraid to do nothing about it.”

  “Fuck me, then.”

  “You got that right, rook. You’re on the wrong team at the wrong time.”

  “Could I get traded?”

  He almost choked on a huge gulp. “Don’t make me laugh, man. “You a white boy with a too-big salary who ain’t showed shit yet. Even though you ain’t had the chance to. So you ain’t going nowhere. . . . Except to bed and get some sleep. The bus leaving in . . . eight hours. So, go! Scat!”

  “Aw, shit. I’m so fucking angry . . .”

  “Then you gotta play angry. Now, get outa here!”

  We beat Cleveland mainly because Williams scored 48 points and Mosley had 29. My PT was cut to two minutes each in my usual slots.

  HELP!

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  We didn’t tank any games, simply because we didn’t have to. We’d win one, lose two, win one, lose four, win two, lose six, and by Christmas our record was 8–16.

  Here were my per-game stats up until then: 7.8 minutes, 1.6 points, 0.9 assists, 1.9 turnovers, and 2.9 fouls. I shot 15–38 from the field (39%), which included 8–23 from downtown (34.7%), and I hadn’t missed any of my six free throws.

  Not much production or opportunity for a first-round draft pick.

  Then I got my “chance” during a nationally televised away game against the Lakers. After three quarters, we were losing by 23 points, but Williams had already scored 29, so he said this to me during the quarter-break huddle:

  “Go get ‘em, Rook. I’m done.”

  “You mean . . . ?”

  “Yeah. You go finish it out.”

  I was eager, delighted, determined, ready to play angry and prove that I belonged in the NBA. The only trouble was that, for some reason having to do with a Lakers scoring milestone he was approaching, Kobe Bryant was still in the game.

  In the six minutes we went head-to-head, he absolutely humiliated me, scoring every which way, from near and far—a total of 17 points. He also held me moveless and even blocked two of my shots. Even worse, I picked up 5 fouls trying to guard him and fouled out a minute after he went to the bench.

  All this while the whole world was watching.

  The only one who said anything to me after the game was Coach Rich. “Kobe’s a monster. A killer. He’s done that to better players than you.”

  On the bus ride to the airport, my cell phone buzzed. After I’d called Collison literally dozens of times, never got past his voice mail, and never received call back, it was him.

  “Elliot. This is Doug Collison.”

  “Yeah. ‘Call me anytime, twenty-four/seven, whenever, wherever.’ That’s what you told me, remember?”

  “Sorry, E. I’ve been real busy. Anyway, I did get your message. . . .”

  “Messages.”

  “Messages about wanting to get traded, so I called around the league and there’s nothing doing. Everybody I spoke to says the problem is your defense.”

  “But—”

  “Yeah, I know. You’re glued to the bench. They’re all aware of that, but still. . . . And today didn’t help at all.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Okay.” Then I ended the call.

  I was frustrated, disgusted, depressed. Orphaned. I was barely civil when any of my teammates spoke to me, and they soon stopped doing so. I didn’t even want to be seen in public, ordering room-service meals when on the road. At “home,” I made sure to have milk and cornflakes on hand for breakfasts. Otherwise, I got food delivered from nearby Chinese and Italian restaurants.

  I felt even worse when we played (and lost to) Toronto in OKC. I had a friendly schmooze with LeVonn at half-court while both teams were warming up before the game. But not only was he in the Raptors rotation, he blocked a layup of mine.

  I felt somewhat better when we played (and lost to) the Clippers two days before Christmas and I saw Marwane Wright sitting on their bench in civvies, his ankle not fully healed.

  Shit. I spent a lot of time reading, and also feeling sorry for myself.

  If it wasn’t for Coach Rich, I might have gone AWOL.

  Just about every night at around eleven o’clock when we were on the road, I’d go down to the hotel bar and find Coach Rich sitting by himself and drinking heavily.

  It got to be something of a ritual.

  I’d drink ginger ale while he emptied a bottle of Jack, and as the season progressed/regressed, our conversations got increasingly personal.

  I told him about my parents, my high school career, getting recruited and lied to by Carlton Lee, Coach Woody’s incompetence . . .

  “How come,” I asked him, “Coach Woody is so highly respected?”

  “Because Lee recruits the best athletes, because he wins, and because kids coming there think they’re gonna be the next All-American, lottery draft pick, and NBA All-Star. And because guys in the media only know, only care ’bout who gets the most wins.”

  Then, the more he drank, the more he started talking about what he called “coming up.” Over the next few weeks, I was able to put together pieces of his whole story.

  “I was born, bred, and buttered in Dark Town on the outskirts of Biloxi, Mississippi. Pappy was a preacher man. He didn’t have his own chu’ch, but he traveled around to deliver the gospel to them folks what lived way outa town and didn’t have no time to get to the black chu’ch on Sunday mornings. So the folks out in the country’d gather together at somebody’s house and he’d preach the Gospel to them, then go on to some other house. He’d do about ten houses every Sunday and wouldn’t come back home till after dark. Maybe he’d have twenty, thirty dollars in collection money, mostly all of it in coins.

  “My mama, she worked house-maiding in one a them big casinos that was on the big boats anchored offshore out in the bay. So me and my three brothers and one sister was always taken good care of. Clean clothing alla the time. I was the youngest boy, so I got the hand-me-down. They was patched some, but they was always clean as could be.”

  Coach Rich and his siblings were also well fed. “Chicken-neck stews, greens what we grew in the backyard, and some
eggs from the chicken what lived under the house. We was poor, but doing all right. And, same’s our neighbors and some kin, we didn’t know we was poor.”

  His older brothers were eager to enlist in the army, and two of them were killed in Vietnam. The other brother became a preacher like his father, but his tour in Vietnam messed with his head. “That Agent’s Orange is what done it. He was okay for a couple years, then he took to wandering around town with his Bible in his hands and shouting stuff from the Bible. Folks were kind to him. Giving him water, maybe some food. But he always came home for dinner.

  “What happened to my bothers is why my mama wouldn’t let me go join the army when I was old enough. Even though that’s what I wanted to do.”

  Instead, Coach Rich played sports. “I played first base in baseball. Defensive tackle and tight end in football. And basketball was what I was best at.”

  He was All-State in his senior year and accepted a scholarship to Ole Miss. “Alla us brothers and sisters stayed tight together there, so none a the crackers messed with us. Then I got drafted by the old Baltimore Bullets. That place was a real southern town, so no matter that I was playing good, I got into trouble there.”

  It all happened when he attended a basketball game between the best black and white high schools in the city. “Everything was real cool, and the black boys was killing them white boys. Then, in the last minute, one of them white boys dove at one a them black boys’ legs and dropped him to the floor. Undercut him like I still ain’t never seen. And that’s when the riot started. Blacks against the white, and being it was a white school, you can guess who had the edge. It was real bad, man. Chairs breaking over black boys’ heads. Black boys disappearing under a mob of white boys. Getting kicked and punched when they’s down.

  “So I ran out onta the court and tried to be a peacemaker, ya know? Pulling white kids offa the black kids. Not hitting nobody or nothing like that. Just saying for everybody to calm down. When the cops finally got there, they were alla them white dudes. And guess who was the only person what was arrested . . . Me.

  “Man, it was during my third year in the league, and I thought it was all over for me. The Bullets’ management wanted the league to suspend me indefinitely, but Stern said them no. So they were gonna put me on team suspension, but they wouldn’t tell no one how long.

  “Then the black community in Baltimore get roused up, and I got traded to the Clippers. LA, man. That’s where I want to live. Then I got traded some more. For sure, I wasn’t much of a scorer, but I could defense the shit outa most anybody. I wound up in OKC, and they aksed me to be a assistant coach when they said I couldn’t play no more. Maybe I had another two, three years left, but I agreed.

  “So here I am. Trying to clean up the shit what that asshole drops all over the place.

  “I know I can trust you, Rook, not to say nothing about what we’re talking about to nobody ’cause you just as fucked up as I am. But listen up. You young and you can play, so your time will come. So you gotta be patient. That’s your job. Be patient.”

  As patient as I was, nothing changed for the rest of the season.

  There was one shootaround right after the All-Star break when Williams didn’t show up. The media was told that he had “flu-like symptoms,” but the truth was that he was severely hung over from an all-nighter with a pair of gorgeous identical twins.

  In his absence, I got to dummy through the offense with the four remaining starters. And I was perfectly in sync with every step and every option of every play—even those that we had never employed.

  “Looks like it’s you,” Coach Rich said as we finished.

  Man, I was psyched! Here was my chance to show that I was a bona fide NBA player. I was buzzing so much that I was unable to indulge in my usual early-afternoon nap.

  More the fool me!

  I was still flying high as we moved through our pregame warmup routines. But then, just as we finished our layup lines (with me acting like a dunk-o-maniac), Williams appeared in full uniform.

  He was greeted by the rest of the team and especially by the wildly cheering fans, as though he’d just abandoned his deathbed. What heart! What courage! Willis Reed had nothing on him!

  So I wound up playing my usual six minutes. And stunk up the court.

  Despite Williams scoring 27 points (on 10–28 shooting), we were clobbered by the Spurs.

  And so it went.

  Later that same night, I was back in my room watching SportsCenter. One of the highlights they showed was USA having a 27-point lead over New Mexico State late in the second half. And, despite the game already being won and almost done, there was Coach Woody jumping to his feet to scream at the refs for botching a charge-block call.

  “You blind sons-a—” was all he managed to shout before keeling over and collapsing. Dead of a sudden heart attack before he hit the floor.

  The media was profuse in their praise of him. Some joker in the New York Times even called him the “best college coach of all time. Better, even than John Wooden.”

  Etcetera.

  Carlton Lee was named to replace him.

  During one of our continuing late-night conversations at a bar in Denver, I dared to say this to Coach Rich: “I don’t care if he’s fucking the queen of England, how can a moron like Davis still be coaching in the NBA? I can’t imagine any other coach who is worse than he is.”

  Rich laughed and said, “That’s ’coz you ain’t been around long enough. There been lotsa worse coaches.”

  “Like who?”

  Then he rattled off a list: Jerry Tarkanian with the Spurs, who “didn’t know shit from Shinola.” Roy Rubin, who coached the Sixers to a record of 4–47 in the 1972-73 season. Also Fuzzy Levane, Lon Kruger, Gene Littles, Bill Cartwright, John Lucas, Dick Vitale, Johnny Bach, Sidney Lowe, Larry Krystkowiak, Kurt Rambis, Fred Carter, Darrell Walker, and Leonard Hamilton.

  “Jeez,” I said. “That’s quite a list.”

  “Yeah. So Davis is right up there, but there’s a lot that was worse. And he does win lotsa games. Mostly ’cause Jenkins gets him plenty a good players.”

  We finished the season at 36–46, and five games out of the playoffs. And after the big tease, my game went totally into the shitter.

  I was disgusted with the coach, the team, and the NBA. So disgusted that I spent several hours a day sequestered in my ritzy house . . . crying. For the first time in my life.

  The thrill was gone, ripped out of my heart, turning my bright, young soul dark and odious. I never wanted to play basketball again. Ever.

  I tried convincing myself that if I worked hard over the summer, the joy would return. My defense would improve. And they’d have to play me.

  But, no. I couldn’t bullshit myself. That fanciful scenario was a long way from being the Trouthe.

  After an NBA team’s season is over, it’s customary for each player to meet with the coach and the general manager for what’s called “an exit meeting.”

  Since my appointment was fifteenth on the list, I had to wait around for three days when I was itching to leave OKC and go somewhere. Anywhere.

  I was the last player to meet with Davis and McCue, so I knew that I wasn’t deemed to be an essential part of their future.

  McCue was all smiles when he said, “I’m sure you agree, Elliot, that your performance was deeply disappointing.”

  “Yes,” chimed Davis. “We certainly expected better production from you.”

  Then McCue handed me a printout of my final statistics.

  Minutes Played – 7.1

  FG – 36.3%

  3FG – 32.1%

  FT – 89%

  AST – 0.6

  TO – 2.1

  FOULS – 3.2

  PTS – 1.2

  “Unsatisfactory defense is normal for a rookie,” said McCue, “but it’s your shooting percenta
ges that really alarmed us. We thought that you’d at least be much better there.”

  “Hold on,” I said. “With your vast experience, you must know that a good shooter needs to get enough shots to keep his stroke.”

  “That’s what practices are for,” said Davis.

  “No, no. He needs . . . I needed . . . shots in games. One-on-none shots in practice aren’t enough.”

  Davis started to object, but I silenced him with an angry wave of my shooting hand.

  “Lookit. I only played . . . what? Seven-point-one minutes a game? When you must know that it takes at least a six-minute rotation for any player to get into a rhythm. So playing three or four minutes at a time . . . No wonder I couldn’t shoot straight.”

  “You’re a professional,” said McCue. “It’s your job to always be ready.”

  “I was always ready, but I rarely had a chance to even break a sweat. That wasn’t fair.” I crumpled up the stat paper and threw it onto the desk. “These numbers are misleading.”

  They glanced at each other, exchanging frustrated sighs.

  “Numbers,” said McCue, “don’t lie.”

  So I stood up. “That’s bullshit because numbers are the easiest things to lie about.” I said this to McCue as I pointed at Davis: “You’re trying to pin this on me, but it’s him who fucked me up.”

  Then I stalked out of the room. And, as it subsequently developed, out of the NBA.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  OK. Now what?

  For starters, I reviewed my finances. I was getting about $34,000 every two weeks. Add another $2K per check once the second year of my guarantee was operative in July. Plus I had upward of $350,000 in an Oak City bank.