Unguarded

by Lenny Wilkens

  At fourteen, the top amateur players these days compete on summer teams that travel all over the country for tournaments in places such as Las Vegas, Chicago, and New York. They’re recruited to play at different summer basketball camps run by the top shoe companies—and that leads to more travel around the country. They’re often recruited by different high-school coaches, although the high-school coaches deny this. Many of our current NBA players attended more than one high school or college. They didn’t have money, but they had beepers, cell phones, and jewelry. Where did that come from? Some of the summer teams in New York and other big cities are sponsored by agents. Some of these kids come from messed-up home situations, and they end up on the street with the wrong people because those people are willing to slip them money in exchange for hanging around with a kid who may be a star one day. They may not be giving the kids drugs, but they’re exposing them to a lifestyle these kids aren’t ready to handle. The player’s entire focus is on a pro contract. I’m not knocking the kids, I’m just saying they’re products of a system that often corrupts them, especially if they don’t have strong parents or some other relatives in the picture.

  So here is the situation: The best high-school players are constantly being recruited by summer league coaches, by high-school coaches, by college coaches, by summer camps, and by renegade adults who want to be their agents. None of this is healthy psychologically, nor does it lead to making the kids better players. Too often, they aren’t coached in the fundamentals of the game, because no one wants to get in their faces and tell them what they can’t do. They worship at the shrine of the dunk, which is a symbol of how the game has changed. At Providence, Joe Mullaney hated the dunk because he thought it took away from team play, put too much emphasis on the individual. There are times when a dunk is a good play, a strong, powerful statement when it occurs as a player is trying to score inside while an opponent attempts to block the shot. In that situation, the dunk may even be the best possible play. But we have guys who seem to be auditioning for the Slam Dunk Contest on breakaway layups, twirling and spinning and making their bid to appear on ESPN Sportscenter. The kids see this, and they imitate it. I modeled my game after the older, team-oriented athletes whom I played against on the New York asphalt, and so it’s natural that the kids of today would take after what they see on TV, especially ESPN. But the game isn’t highlights, and a brief clip rarely shows team basketball. It usually features players doing something like a dunk to draw attention to themselves. And some coaches of high-school and college players don’t want to demand too much because the player might quit and take his talent elsewhere. This is especially true if the coach is inexperienced, or at a school that hasn’t had a winning reputation.

  I think about a player like J. R. Rider, whom I had in my last year with the Atlanta Hawks. He is a wonderfully talented but confused young man. He attended two junior colleges and Nevada-Las Vegas. That’s three colleges in four years. He played in the NBA for three years in Minnesota, three in Portland, then got cut near the end of his first season with Atlanta. He was virtually uncoachable. He felt no connection to his team or his teammates. He wanted to do things his way, because he had always been allowed to do so. Fines meant nothing; he just wrote the checks. He figured some team, some coach, would always want a guy who could score 20 points a game, even if that player didn’t feel like showing up on time or passing the ball. The keys in my life were hard work, discipline, a strong spiritual life, and an accent on academics. For me, basketball was a way to a free college education, which was enough of a winning lottery ticket for me and my family. The bouncing ball was not my heartbeat; if I’d had to, I could have lived without it. Rider and many young players of today would have no idea what I’m talking about when I say I had no problem playing on the freshman team, even though I knew I was good enough to start for the varsity.

  Too many kids pick their college with one thing in mind: How quickly can that school get me to the NBA? What they need is to wait a little bit, to let their minds and their maturity level catch up with their basketball skills. Too many kids enroll in a college, don’t get as much playing time as they think they should as a freshman—and they transfer. Sometimes they attend two or three different schools, becoming basketball gypsies. They play for too many different coaches. They don’t develop an identity with a school, any real sense of being part of a team. All that switching around reinforces their “Me First” mentality, which is not good in basketball or life. Furthermore, kids lose credits when they transfer, so they often leave school without a degree. And how many young men actually have a significant NBA career? Not more than twenty-five each year, and that’s probably being very generous.

  If these young people had a year of freshman ball that virtually guaranteed them plenty of minutes in a less-pressured setting where they could work on their basketball and their schoolwork at the same time, it wouldn’t end all the corruption that comes from the summer leagues and some high-school situations, but making freshmen ineligible for the varsity would cut down on the number of kids transferring, help academics, and slow the frenzy about a career in the NBA.

  I say all this as someone who averaged 21 points as a freshman while our team had a 23-0 record. We were good enough to beat the varsity, but I didn’t feel cheated being on the freshman team. I waited, and in my first varsity game, I scored 18 as we beat Fairfield, 80-63.

  The story in the Providence newspaper read, “Wilkens starred defensively throughout the fray, constantly harassing the Bridgeport Jesuit school’s guards and tying up their offense.”

  You can say they don’t write sports like that anymore, and we’re all probably better off for it. As a sophomore, I led our team in scoring, and I was the only sophomore selected to the Eastern Conference Athletic Conference (ECAC) All-Conference team.

  In our junior year, we added a player named Johnny Egan, who was a High-School All-American, highly recruited, and the first guy I heard talk about the NBA. Supposedly, the Celtics wanted him. I was established as the star of the team when Johnny joined it, yet he received far more publicity. If I wanted to, I could have let that become a problem between us. Instead, I kept an open mind when it came to Johnny. I found that I liked him personally, that he wanted to win as much as I did. We formed a terrific backcourt. I didn’t worry that Johnny would get more shots or more hype; I didn’t worry about having to share some of the limelight, or share the ball. I wanted our team to receive a bid to the National Invitational Tournament, which was bigger than the NCAA tournament back then since every game was in New York. This was an era when teams didn’t travel coast-to-coast as often as they do today; The Garden was still considered a basketball mecca, and it was where every college basketball player wanted to play at least once in his life. Furthermore, the New York media dominated the country even more than they do today, so the NIT was a great place to get “discovered.”

  I really wanted to play in front of the fans from my hometown. When we made the tournament, we beat Manhattan College in our first game, then followed it up with a double-overtime victory over St. Louis. The New York media found me in that game.

  Louis Effrat wrote in The New York Times: “Pandemonium followed the buzzer that ended the marathon. Those Providence players who were not lifted on shoulders were knocked down by numerous fans. Hats, eyeglasses and St. Patrick’s Day flowers were flying all over the Garden, and the special police and ushers had no chance to check the rush…. The most credit for cutting the Missouri Valley team down to size must go to Leonard Wilkens, a 6-foot-1 junior from Brooklyn Boys High. Aside from his 30 points, Wilkens’ alertness, his ballhandling and his steadying influence paid off in the end.”

  Gene Roswell wrote in the New York Post: “Len Wilkens, a defensive genius, has a simple basketball philosophy, ’Never let the other fellow’s right hand know what your left hand is doing.’ By actual count, Wilkens made 15 steals and so many deflections the Providence statistician stopped recording after he passed 18 i
n the first half.”

  St. Louis was the top seed in the tournament, which is why that victory was so impressive to the New York media. When I fouled out of the game with 1:05 left in the second overtime, I received a thunderous standing ovation, which meant a lot to me because it was in New York and my family and Father Mannion were at the game. We didn’t win the NIT, but I had been noticed in the media capital of the world. Providence also received a tremendous amount of publicity from the NIT. Over seven thousand of our fans had followed us to New York. When we bused back to Providence, fans started cheering and waving at us from the Rhode Island state line all the way to the campus. We received an escort from the Rhode Island state police. It was a wonderful experience, and it let us know that something very special had happened with our basketball team.

  Yet I still wasn’t thinking about the NBA.

  In my senior year, we lost only four games. I was being called a defensive specialist. One of my best games saw me hold a guy named Al Butler to 11 points; Butler was the leading scorer in the country at the time. We returned to the NIT, but we lost in the finals to Bradley, which had a great forward named Chet Walker who later became a star with the Chicago Bulls. Even though we lost, I was voted the tournament MVP. In the regular season, I averaged about 14 points. In the NIT, that went up to about 25 per game.

  When my college career was over, I was the second-highest scorer in school history. But I was known more for my defense, my rebounding, and my ballhandling. I had grown to be six-foot-one and 180 pounds. In some ways, I felt I was underrated. I played for Joe Mullaney, an interesting guy who could balance three broom-sticks—one on each hand, and one on his nose!—and could juggle three basketballs at once. During games he would pace back and forth, howling at the moon (or at least the officials), and seemed ready to pull out his hair. He was an entertaining guy to be around. I knew he appreciated me, but I was like most players—I thought I was a little better than the coach did, or at least better than I thought the coach considered me. Maybe I was just being too sensitive because I wasn’t recruited out of high school, and then saw other guys come to Providence with a lot more hype and a lot less talent than I had. If nothing else, that kept me from getting a swelled head, and I learned a lot of basketball from Joe Mullaney. He was far ahead of some of my first NBA coaches. Coach Mullaney emphasized double-teaming and trapping defenses, something seldom seen in the NBA of the early 1960s. He had far more complex offensive schemes than the pros. And he even used a blackboard for his Xs and Os! You’ll find this hard to believe, but I don’t remember a single time in my early NBA years when a coach wrote on a blackboard: We just scrimmaged, or practiced shooting on our own. Defense was strictly man-to-man, with little help coming from a teammate. Coach Mullaney gave us a graduate course in basketball, and in some ways, going to the NBA felt like I had returned to elementary school, at least in terms of strategy.

  After the season, I was invited to play in the East/West All-Star Game, which was a big deal. All of the best college seniors were invited, and they all accepted the invitation because they knew all the pro teams scouted the All-Star game very seriously. Today, most of the top college players turn down a chance to play in the various All-Star games, believing it will do nothing but hurt their stock in the NBA draft. But in 1960, scouting was so primitive that you could have a good career at a school in the Midwest or on the West Coast and maybe never be scouted, or just be seen once. Very few games were on TV, so there was little film on players—just the opposite of today. A kid who plays at a top program such as Duke has virtually every game on some cable or network channel, and NBA teams hire video coordinators who do nothing but put together tapes of the top players. Teams will have tapes of some kids playing in as many as twenty-five games, in addition to all the scouts who’ve seen them play live. That’s why a top pick today can say, “I don’t need to play in an All-Star game, you’ve seen me enough already.”

  In 1960, every top college player wanted exposure. At the East/West games, I was transferred into another world. These guys were talking about NBA careers, and a few were every bit as obsessed with it as the kids are today. They constantly talked about what teams might draft them, who coached those teams, who played on those teams, and how they’d fit into those teams. I also was careful not to say anything because I didn’t want the other players to realize how little I knew about the NBA. I played on the same team with Jerry West, who had been a star at West Virginia. The word was that West would play for the Lakers, who had just hired his college coach, Fred Schaus, as their new coach. West and I were named co-MVPs of the game, which meant a lot since Oscar Robertson was on the other team and Oscar was one of the greatest players—ever.

  What I really wanted out of that game was an invitation to travel to Denver for the tryouts for the 1960 Olympic team. There were twenty-four players going to Denver for the Olympic trials, and the Olympic people were going to base their decision for some of the spots on who played well in the game. Since I was co-MVP with Jerry West, I assumed I would be on my way to the tryouts: Our team had won, 67-66, and as I recall, I scored my team’s final eight points. I had 18 points, West had 23.

  West went, I didn’t.

  I found out that they were taking publicity pictures of the players whom the Olympic Committee wanted on the team the day before the game. The committee had a much stronger say over the composition of the roster than coach Pete Newell, as I later learned. They had already made up their minds before the game and had lied to us. I had received a letter saying the game would have a tremendous bearing upon the makeup of the Olympic team, so this wasn’t just something from my imagination. I had outplayed three or four guys in that game who were picked over me—and I knew I was a better player than they were. To me, the Olympics were huge. I wanted to represent my country. I had taken part in the ROTC program in college. During my senior year, my basketball goal wasn’t the NBA, it was the Olympics.

  That’s why I was so upset when the final decision was made. It was a scam, and it was hard for me not to believe race played a part in it. I know several blacks were selected—Oscar Robertson, Bob Boozer, and Walt Bellamy—but I also think they were worried about the black/white ratio on the team. One kid was invited to Denver who scored something like four points in the East/West game. How could they explain that? He came from a smaller basketball school, he didn’t play nearly as well as I did, yet he made it, and I didn’t. He was white, I’m black. There are very few things in this life that I really wanted, at least when it came to basketball, but the Olympics was one of those. Pete Newell coached the team, and later he told me that he wanted me on the roster. I believe him. I was an unselfish point guard who made his reputation as a defensive player; I would have been a perfect fit for a team full of high-scoring stars. Pete Newell knew that, and I have a newspaper clipping from 1960 where Newell said, “Wilkens is terrific, I don’t know why he wasn’t named to the team.”

  Down deep, I knew, and it was like a dagger to my heart. There was a lot of politics involved, and the Olympic coach really had little say in picking his own team. I think they were worried that there would be too many black players on the Olympic team, too many blacks on the world stage, so they enforced an unofficial quota, and I was one of the victims. There also was a bias toward players from the Industrial Leagues, most of whom were white and seemed to be assured of spots on the team.

  I was named an alternate for the team. While Pete Newell had Oscar Robertson and Jerry West, he wanted me to be the point guard because both West and Robertson had played a lot of forward in college. I tried not to believe that race was behind the decision, but there was no other explanation; when I looked at some of the other guys on that team—Jay Arnett, Adrian Smith, Les Lane, and Allen Kelley, all white players—I could come to no other conclusion.

  This was the first time in my life that I believed I had been held back because of the color of my skin. They still could have invited me to the trials. The New York Times wrote a
scathing story on the slight by the Olympic team, and coaches such as Joe Lapchick (St. John’s), Gene Smith (Cincinnati), Ned Irish, and Frank McGuire (North Carolina) endorsed me, yet nothing happened. Eleven players from the East/West game were invited to the trials, but the co-MVP was not. So I stayed home, and I couldn’t even think about the Olympics without having a sick feeling for some thirty-two years, not until the 1992 dream team.

  On the day of the 1960 NBA draft, I was in class.

  I wasn’t in New York at an NBA draft party that would be carried on TV. I wasn’t in a fancy hotel suite with an agent. I hadn’t just spent months trying to figure out what team would draft me, nor had I been traveling cross-country, meeting with one group of NBA executives after another, being interviewed and working out so they could get to know me and decide if I was right for their team.

  I didn’t have an agent. This was 1960, and no one had an agent. The NBA of 1960 wasn’t considered the meal ticket for an entire family. It was the best basketball league in the world, but few people knew it. The Boston Celtics had one of the greatest teams the world had ever seen, yet they didn’t sell out Boston Garden. Few NBA teams sold out.

  The games weren’t played in luxurious arenas with corporate boxes with wine and cheese and caviar served to the prime customers. They were often found in something called an “armory,” an old barn of a building that smelled of stale cigar smoke, spilled beer, and hot dogs on the grill. Those places were dark, and felt like a great place for a boxing match, which often was the big money-maker for those old buildings. The NBA of 1960 wasn’t the big business that it is today. In most cities, it was number three in the minds of sports fans—behind baseball and football. In some cases it was fourth, as a lot of people also loved and followed boxing. The game was great, but the money was small, the exposure minimal, and there was no reason to believe that was going to change.