Unguarded

by Lenny Wilkens

  I had returned to school after the East/West game and graduated in June 1960 with a B average and a degree in economics. I was treasurer of the senior class, a perfect job for an economics major. I was vice-president of the Cadet Officers Honor Corps, which was an elite branch of the ROTC. I was also on the honor roll and was listed among Who’s Who for college seniors that year. Father Charles Quick was the head of the Economics Department, and he said he could get me an assistantship at Boston College, where I could earn my Master’s in economics and teach undergraduate courses to help pay for my tuition. His grand plan was for me to return to Providence as an economics professor. My specialty was money and banking. I read The Wall Street Journal every day. I wanted to know how money was made, how corporations worked, and why some businesses were successful while others failed. I loved economics, and the thought of teaching it was enticing.

  Then I was drafted by the St. Louis Hawks.

  As I think back, I remember meeting a guy named Marty Blake during the NIT in New York. I talked to him in a hotel lobby for maybe five minutes. There were a bunch of people around, and frankly, I didn’t catch his name or what position he held. Later, I’d learn he was a scout for the Hawks.

  My only other NBA contact came from Carl Braun, who was with the New York Knicks. He called a few days before the draft to say that the Knicks liked me, but not enough to take me in the first round. If I was still available, New York would make me its second-round choice, because they were going to take Darrall Imhoff with their first pick. I didn’t even know who Imhoff was, so that conversation meant little to me.

  All I know is that on the day of the draft, I was sitting in a class when I received word to report to the Athletic Department. On my way to the gym, a couple of students said, “Congratulations,” but I didn’t know what for. I had forgotten that this was the day of the NBA draft.

  Can you imagine a top college senior player saying that today?

  When I arrived at the gym, Joe Mullaney and Father Bagley (the athletic director) told me that I was the first pick of the St. Louis Hawks. They said a couple of local newspaper reporters wanted to interview me. I don’t recall what I said, because the NBA still wasn’t in my plans; I was pretty bitter about basketball after the Olympic fiasco, and I knew absolutely nothing about the St. Louis Hawks. I couldn’t name their coach or a single player. People don’t believe me, but at this point in my life, I had yet to even watch an NBA game.

  I realize this sounds very strange today. Even after I was drafted, I still wasn’t thinking about the NBA. The Hawks invited me to visit them in St. Louis during my spring break, but I turned them down because one of my Providence teammates was getting married, and I was his best man. That wedding was more important to me than whatever the Hawks had to say.

  I was still planning to teach economics.

  Today’s NBA draft is like the Academy Awards for these kids. They dress up in a new suit. They have family, friends, agents, and other members of their “entourage” at their side. Their names are called. They come to the front of the stage. People cheer. They are given a cap with the name of the team that drafted them. Their mothers and sisters are crying. Their agents are rubbing their hands, their eyes flashing dollar signs. It’s what a college commencement ceremony should be like, or maybe the Nobel Prize luncheon. But really, what have they done? They have yet to play a pro game.

  It’s totally overblown, and it leads some young players to having a wildly inflated view of themselves once they come to the NBA. They have the contract, the millions in bonus money, the cars, the house, the agent—and they’ve yet to play a pro game! It takes an exceptional individual to keep his hunger and his willingness to be coached after all that. The great ones can do that; they refuse to let the money and the other off-court trappings corrupt their games and their desire. But many kids just don’t have the strength of character to handle all the temptations, to realize that because they’ve suddenly become millionaires, they still have much to learn. If you don’t think so, then why do some rookies report to training camp so out of shape? Would they do that if their contracts weren’t guaranteed? I doubt it. Hey, it’s hard to keep working when you’re handed a million bucks at the age of twenty-one, and the contract says the millions are guaranteed to keep coming over the next three years.

  Not long after I was drafted by the Hawks, I was approached by Technical Tape, a company in New York that made tape, but that also had a basketball team in the Industrial League. This was a relatively big deal back in 1960, as companies such as Goodyear, Phillips 66, and others sponsored basketball teams. They signed top college players to work in their public-relations departments and play for their teams.

  In 1960, there were only eight NBA teams, so there were plenty of talented players available and a number of sizable cities without pro basketball. That was where the Industrial League came into play. Technical Tape had a couple of players from my old Brooklyn neighborhood, including a kid named Jim Daniels whom I knew. The coach of the Technical Tape Corporation, which was known as the Tech YTapers, visited me in Providence. His name was Stan Stutz, and he wanted me to play for him. He asked me to go to dinner with him. Since I didn’t know Stan, I asked a Providence teammate of mine to come along, sort of to help me feel at ease. The teammate said he’d come if we could get tickets to the Celtics game. I mentioned this, and Stutz secured the tickets. It turned out that the game at Boston Garden was against St. Louis in the NBA Finals. It was the first time I ever saw NBA players. I had a chance to watch St. Louis, especially the Hawks guards. They had Slater Martin, a great player who was getting ready to retire. The other guards were people such as Si Green, Johnny McCarthy, and Al Ferrari.

  I was watching that game and thinking, “I’m at least as good as those guys, probably better. They don’t shoot real well. They’re not real quick. They don’t run a team well at all.”

  As the game went on, I started to think that maybe I should give the NBA a try. That was on my mind when Stan Stutz talked to me after the game, telling me about Technical Tape and how he could offer me something like $9,500 to work and play ball for them.

  I still had no real interest in Technical Tape, but seeing that game had opened my eyes to the NBA.

  A few days after, I received a call from Ed Macauley, who was the general manager of the Hawks. He said he’d be in Providence the next day, and wanted to meet with me at the downtown Biltmore Hotel. He offered me $7,000 to sign. Then it was $7,500. I was twenty-one years old, I didn’t have an agent, and I didn’t have a father. My coach said he didn’t know much about the NBA, so if I was interested in the NBA, I’d have to handle the contract talks myself.

  I didn’t know the market value, but I thought $7,000 and then $7,500 was low—and I told them so. Then I said, $8,000—and they agreed.

  I thought about the $8,000, and I thought about the St. Louis guards. I knew that the Hawks needed me, because they were so weak in the backcourt. My economist-trained mind also said:

  1. Most accountants start at $6,600 a year.

  2. Most economists start at $6,000.

  3. I was being offered $8,000 to play basketball, which was something I really enjoyed doing. The Hawks had a couple of great forwards in Bob Pettit and Cliff Hagan, and I’d play with them. I decided to sign with the Hawks, but I wanted a better deal. I asked for a $1,500 signing bonus in addition to the $8,000 salary. I told the Hawks that I had been offered $9,500 by Technical Tape.

  They agreed to the bonus.

  Then I said, “I want a no-cut contract.”

  They said, “You want what? We never heard of such a thing.”

  I said, “A no-cut contract. Even if you cut me, I still get paid.”

  I was surprised, but Ed Macauley also agreed to that. I later realized Macauley couldn’t wait to get my signature on that contract, because I had sold myself short: Most first-rounders were getting $10,000 to $12,000, and Oscar Robertson supposedly signed for $15,000. I knew very little about the
NBA. St. Louis had won four Western Division titles without me. I worried that if I asked for too much, they’d decide they didn’t need me—and suddenly, what I wanted to do more than anything else was play pro ball. But I also had some doubts. Maybe I wasn’t as good as I thought. Put yourself in my position: I was making the first business deal of my life. I was totally overmatched. Later, Ed Macauley would admit that I was one of the easiest players he ever signed.

  But at the time, I didn’t know that. I took my $1,500 bonus check and put it in the bank. A few months later, I used some of the money to buy a car—my first real car. It was hardly like the Mercedeses and Corvettes driven by rookies today. It was a 1959 Chevy Impala convertible with a white body and a black roof. I got it cut-rate from a dealer in Providence who was a big fan of our team. I had been driving—get this!—a 1939 green Plymouth. The thing was nearly twenty years old, and I poured oil in it about every time I put in gas. I bought it for $100 so I had something to drive while in college.

  Now I could afford a car that would get me all the way to St. Louis. If I’d had any inkling of what I’d find when I got there, the car would have been the least of my concerns.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  IT WASN’T UNTIL I BECAME A PRO basketball player that I really felt the true slap of discrimination right across my face.

  In my rookie year with the St. Louis Hawks, there was only one other black veteran on the team, a guard named Sihugo Green. There were a few other black rookies in training camp. Green wasn’t with us on this day when we walked into a greasy spoon for lunch. The place was a dive; they should have been glad to see anyone come through the door, regardless of color, as long as their money was green.

  A white player named Rolland Todd was with us. We sat down in a booth and waited for service.

  And waited.

  And waited.

  The place was nearly empty, yet no one was paying any attention to us.

  We waited some more.

  Finally, the waitress asked to speak to Rolland Todd for a moment, and she told him that they couldn’t serve us.

  “Why not?” asked Todd.

  “You know,” she said.

  “Know what?” he asked.

  “They’re, well, black,” she said.

  That was the reason, and the waitress made no pretense about it. This was St. Louis in 1960, and there were places in St. Louis in 1960 where a black person would not be served, period. It didn’t matter if the black person in question was a pro basketball player, the top draft choice of the local team. Nor did it matter that the person in question had just graduated from Providence College with a degree in economics, or that he had done nothing in his life but work hard, play by the rules, and attend church on Sunday.

  Only the color of my skin mattered, and the skin of the other blacks with me.

  I was confused. I was angry. I was embarrassed.

  Nothing had prepared me for this. Growing up in New York and attending college in Rhode Island, I had seen and experienced racism, but it was a subtler kind, such as the slight by the Olympic Committee or the harsh stares of some white guys when I danced with a white girl. I had never heard anyone say, “You’re not good enough to be served a greasy burger”—in a joint that probably should have been condemned.

  It’s hard to explain to people who have never been in this situation how degraded it makes you feel, how you just seethe inside. I grew up without the advantages of most people, yet I’d made something of myself. I’d beaten the odds. I deserved some respect for that, not to be told, “Hey, you’re not the kind of person we want to have eat at our crummy diner.”

  Who was that waitress to judge me? How could anyone make a decision like that, without even knowing me? This was America, the land of the free. I believed it, and I tried to live it. I was in the ROTC. I was determined that no one would hold me down, that I was entitled to the same opportunities as every other American, and I planned to capitalize on those opportunities. Which I had by becoming a member of the St. Louis Hawks. Which I had by performing so well in the classroom that I had a chance to pursue a Master’s degree in economics at Boston College. Which I had by staying out of trouble and working one back-breaking job after another to help support my mother.

  Yet none of that mattered.

  All of this went through my mind when that woman only saw my black skin and decided that was all she needed to know about me.

  People say, “Shake it off, it was just a stupid woman in a lousy diner.”

  That’s true on the surface, but it was also something deeper, something that really opened my eyes to a world that was very new to me. I remember walking out of that diner feeling utterly humiliated. What did I do wrong? Why couldn’t I order a meal anywhere I wanted in St. Louis, assuming I could pay for it? What kind of life had I just entered?

  I don’t know exactly what I expected from pro basketball, but it sure wasn’t what I found. Much like that day in the diner, I found myself surprised, and sometimes ambushed, by what happened to me.

  After I signed with the Hawks, I stayed in New England and worked for the Gilbane Construction Company, pouring concrete. Can you imagine a number-one NBA draft choice doing that today? Probably if he wanted to, the team that signed him wouldn’t allow it, worrying that he’d get hurt building and tearing down concrete forms, which was another part of my job. I just figured it was a good way to make some decent money while getting physically stronger for the NBA. No one told me otherwise.

  The Hawks had a summer camp at Kutsher’s Country Club, which was in the Catskill Mountains of upstate New York. The team’s key veterans were there, guys such as Bob Pettit, Cliff Hagan, and Clyde Lovellette. For them, this was mostly a vacation. I was one of several rookies brought in. We scrimmaged with the veterans, and the games meant a lot to us.

  Just to show you what life was like in 1960, I’d never taped an ankle before I played. Never even thought about it. It’s commonplace today to tape a player before a game, and it has been for years. The first day, I sprained my ankle. I tried to keep playing, but it was obvious that I wasn’t myself. Part of my game was based on my quickness, jumping ability, and defense, but I could barely move. Yet no one said a word about my ankle. They had to know I was hurt, yet no one asked if I was all right.

  In fact, most of the veterans didn’t even say a single word to me. Not even a hello. Not a handshake. Nothing. Sihugo Green had gone to my old high school, but he was only slightly congenial. Even the rookies barely spoke to each other. I understood that, because we were all terrified that we wouldn’t play well and would get cut. Even though I had signed my “no-cut contract,” I still worried that the Hawks would let me go.

  So I played on a bum ankle, and the Hawks probably thought I played like some bum off the street. Not that I knew, since hardly anyone spoke to me.

  Paul Seymour was the new Hawks coach. He had been a hard-nosed guard in the NBA during the 1950s, a tough guy who liked to leave you bruised and limping after a game.

  He greeted me by saying, “Hello… Rook.”

  That was it. I lost my name, and gained a new one—Rook. Just like all the other rookies. All of us felt nameless, faceless, scared. Because this was pro basketball, I expected some serious coaching. I thought each practice would be critiqued, and I wanted to know what I did right and wrong so I could improve.

  Instead, I heard nothing.

  We really didn’t practice, we just played pick-up games.

  I left that summer camp knowing that the Hawks had to be disappointed in how I’d played. But Seymour didn’t say anything other than to tell me when I was to report to veterans camp.

  I didn’t realize that the NBA of the 1950s and early 1960s had so little hands-on coaching, at least on some teams. Often, the best player would retire, and he’d be named coach. His approach was usually to roll out the balls in practice and have the guys scrimmage to stay in shape. There was little individual instruction, little scouting, little of anything that would he
lp a rookie adapt to the NBA.

  In fact, most veterans either hated rookies or just acted like it. The rookie was there to take their jobs, to steal the food right off their table. The veterans seemed to have their own clique, and the rookies were the outsiders, the ones who weren’t in on the jokes, who weren’t sure what (if anything) to say or where to go. We trained at a place called Concordia Seminary, where there were two locker rooms. All the veterans were in one room, the rookies and free agents (guys not under contract) in the other. The practices could be brutal. I remember one scrimmage where every time I tried to cut through the lane, a guy gave me a forearm to the chest, or to the gut—a sledgehammer-like forearm to some spot of my body. The coach had to see what was happening, but he said nothing. I assumed he wanted to see how I’d react. Finally, I caught the ball, and the guy moved in on me, ready to deliver another fore-arm—only this time I whacked him in the face with the ball. Then we squared off, ready to fight, when other players stepped in and broke it up. Within a few minutes, we were playing again—and the forearms stopped.

  Marty Blake was the Hawks’ new general manager, and he’d sit at some evening practices with airline tickets in his hand. He’d watch practice, slapping those tickets against his knee. The players knew Blake was the general manager, they knew those tickets had someone’s name on them, and that after practice, Blake was going to go up to someone and hand him a plane ticket home. You were cut, just like that. Here’s your ticket, pack your bag, and don’t let the gym door hit you in the rear end on the way out.

  Blake seemed to take delight in sitting there, tapping those tickets against his knee, knowing that he was tormenting us, turning up the heat as if we weren’t already under enough pressure.

  It was a cold, heartless business.