Unguarded

by Lenny Wilkens

  That’s a huge change from the modern NBA, where most veterans will welcome a rookie and try to help him, especially if they see the young man has a good attitude, works hard, and has the talent to help the team win. Most teams have a few veterans who’ll go out of their way to introduce themselves to some of the rookies, to teach the young players the offensive and defensive schemes. When I coached the Cleveland Cavaliers, Larry Nance was an All-Star forward but he loved to take the rookies out for dinner, or even to his house where he had a small fishing lake. He wanted to put them at ease.

  That just didn’t happen when I was breaking into the NBA. With the St. Louis Hawks, I was just Rook.

  I remembered having watched the Hawks in that Finals game at Boston Garden, and how the Celtics just dared the St. Louis guards to shoot the ball. I remembered how slow those guards were, how they made so little impact on the game. In today’s NBA, I would have been greeted warmly by a team such as the Hawks, who were desperate for guards. The pressure would have been for the team to play me, because I was the first-round pick at a position where they were weak. But in 1960, it was just the opposite: The coach wanted to keep the veterans on his side, so he was reluctant to play a rookie, any rookie.

  A few days into training camp, I received a strange phone call from Joe Mullaney, my old coach at Providence.

  “Lenny, I heard a rumor and wanted to know if it’s true,” he said.

  “What rumor?” I asked.

  “I was talking to [Lakers coach] Fred Schaus, and he said you’ve been put on waivers by the Hawks,” Mullaney told me.

  I was dumbfounded. I hadn’t heard a word about being waived, cut, or anything else.

  “That’s news to me,” I said. “But I can tell you that I really haven’t had much chance to prove myself here.”

  Mullaney said Schaus would love to have me on the Lakers. Just imagine if that had happened and I’d ended up in the same backcourt as Jerry West. Wouldn’t that have been something?

  I never did hear anything else about the rumor, so I don’t know if the Hawks put me on waivers—and some other team claimed me, and St. Louis decided to keep me after all. Or maybe it was just a baseless rumor—but I did know that it was yet another indication that the Hawks didn’t like how I was playing.

  I just wished they had told me so to my face, and then told me what I needed to do to get better. The situation was so frustrating: hearing nothing… seeing the questioning stares… feeling like I was on some kind of basketball island… then being told by my old coach that he heard my team didn’t want me.

  When the season began, I was on the roster.

  I was the fourth guard, behind three veterans, none of them stars. I didn’t expect to walk in and start, but I was playing only one minute here, thirty seconds there. Even in the exhibition season, I started only once—and scored 12 points before I fouled out. I didn’t seem to be in their plans, whatever those plans happened to be. The worst thing was the silence, so those plans were a mystery to me.

  Early in the season, I ended up on the floor at the end of a close game. We were ahead by one point with twenty-two seconds left. I had the ball, and a clear lane to the basket. So I drove in for what should have been a layup.

  This was before the 3-point shot, so a 3-point lead would have been very significant.

  Anyway, I laid the ball on the backboard, and a player from the other team just took it off the board. It was a clear goaltending violation, but there was no whistle from the officials. The other team scored, and we lost by a point.

  In the dressing room, none of the players spoke to me. Several of the veterans just looked at me as if I were the dumbest man on the face of the earth, but they said nothing.

  Then Paul Seymour came up to me and said, “Well, Rook, did you learn anything?”

  I said, “Yes.”

  I thought we were going to talk about it, how I should have dribbled out the clock, or what other options I had.

  Instead, he just walked away.

  Not another word, just walked away.

  And really, how did he know if I had learned the right thing? He didn’t ask, and I found myself buried deep on the bench for several weeks after that. I sat on the bench knowing I had blown that game, that I should have just hung on to the ball until the clock expired. I took a bad gamble, and it cost us a victory. I now know that I was a rookie, feeling insecure, just wanting to make a big play; instead, it backfired. After that, I played very sporadically and briefly. Whenever I was on the court and made a mistake, I was yanked out of the game.

  One day, we had a game in Madison Square Garden. During warmups, I was making shot after shot.

  Seymour said to me, “Hey, Rook, how come you don’t shoot like that during the game?”

  I said, “How would you know? You never play me.”

  A little later, he came up to me and said, “OK, Rook, what’s on your mind?”

  “You have all these veteran guards who’ve been in the league for a long time,” I said. “I see them throw away four or five passes, and you leave them in the game. I get in there, throw away the ball once, and I’m out of the game. I’ve been sitting here for half the season, watching these veterans make the same mistakes they made back in training camp. Why don’t you pull them out?”

  “I want you to learn,” he said.

  “Just how much can I learn on the bench?” I yelled.

  For a long time, he said nothing—he was just staring at me, trying to size me up.

  “Rook,” he said. “You may have something there.”

  Then he just got up and left. I had no idea what that meant, but I spoke out because I had nothing left to lose. I was already nailed to the bench.

  The next night, we played the Knicks. Our guards were struggling. Early in the game, I was totally shocked when Seymour called me off the bench. The first time I touched the ball, I had Bob Pettit open down court for a fast break basket—and I threw the ball over his head. I glanced over at the bench, expecting Seymour to take me out. Instead, he looked the other way and stuck with me for the rest of the game. I scored 14 points, had 8 assists, and played decently.

  That was the turning point.

  The next night, I was in the starting lineup—and stayed there for the rest of the year.

  When it came time to find a place to live in St. Louis, my options were limited. Just as I couldn’t eat in some places, there were neighborhoods and landlords who made no secret of the fact that I wasn’t welcome.

  Sihugo Green set me up in an apartment in a mostly black neighborhood. Really, it was the upstairs of a house, owned by an Italian couple. They were concerned with one color—green. They worried only that I could pay the rent, not about the color of my skin. So that was a break. The place had hardwood floors and little rugs. You’d pick up a rug and on the floor was a sign reading, RUG GOES HERE.

  I made friends with a black guy who owned a grocery store in the neighborhood. He told me where it was OK for a black man to go, and where the danger zones were. I ate dinner at his house a few times. I was learning what it meant to be black in the South, even though some people were surprised to find Jim Crow alive and well in St. Louis.

  As my rookie season went on, the veterans began to accept me for one basic reason: I got them the ball. When I joined the Hawks, they didn’t have a play for the point guard to shoot: You were there to pass the ball to the forwards, Cliff Hagan and Bob Pettit. That made some sense, because Hagan and Pettit were All-Stars who later became Hall of Famers. They were the reason the Hawks consistently were Western Conference champions in the late 1950s.

  But a guard has to take a shot when he’s left open, or the defense will sag back and cover the players under the basket. In other words, if I didn’t take—and make—a few outside shots, it would be more difficult for Hagan and Pettit to score.

  To his credit, Paul Seymour understood this. He encouraged me to take those open fifteen-footers. He saw that the other teams were very worried about m
y quickness driving to the basket, so they backed off me, daring me to shoot. And Seymour gave me the confidence to shoot. As the season progressed, I found that you could talk to Seymour, that he was a pretty good guy, he was just a product of his age. We developed a mutual respect. But on the court, there were times when I was still just a rookie. I remember the first time I guarded Bob Cousy. I cleanly stole the ball from him, just took away his dribble. But the official blew the whistle.

  “How can you call a foul on a play like that?” I demanded.

  “Because it was a foul,” he said.

  “Come on, you know better than that,” I said.

  He stared at me and said with a straight face, “You can’t take the ball away from Bob.”

  “Hey,” I said. “If I were a star, you wouldn’t have made a call like that.”

  “Well,” he said. “You’ll never have to worry about that.”

  The official laughed, and I smiled.

  The NBA of the 1950s and 1960s was different in lots of other ways.

  I often hear how the players of today are quicker and more athletic than those of my era. All of that is true. People’s bodies have changed over the last forty years; life is physically easier because there are fewer debilitating diseases, partly because nutrition and medical care are better. On most of my teams in the 1960s, only a few guys consistently played over the rim. Today, virtually every player does that.

  Look at the pictures of today’s stars compared to those from the early 1960s. The current athletes are wider: They have wider shoulders, wider arms, wider legs. More muscle. Bigger bones. That’s a result of weight training and nutrition. In addition to a trainer, every NBA team now has a strength coach and a state-of-the-art weight room. These guys work out far more often than the players of my era, many of whom grew up being told they had better not lift weights, because that would make you muscle-bound and ruin the soft touch on your jump shot. Now, even the smallest point guard lifts weights. Every player wants to get stronger, and every player knows that unless you turn yourself into a WWF wrestler, weight training won’t hinder your movement or your ability to shoot. We were so far in the dark that we didn’t even know smoking was bad for you, that it robbed you of endurance because it had a negative impact on your breathing. We didn’t know what was good to eat, what was the best way to train, or even that it was a good idea to stretch your legs. We just played the game.

  That said, Elgin Baylor would have been a great player in any era. People talk about the amazing things Julius Erving and Michael Jordan did athletically, but I saw Baylor do many of the same things—only this was in the early 1960s. He had the spin moves, the dunks, the head-above-the-rim attacks on the basket. He played way above the pack.

  Bill Russell remains the greatest shot blocker I’ve ever seen, because he’d come up with the block in critical situations of the game—and he’d make sure that his team kept possession of the ball. He’d just tip the ball to a teammate, or to himself. Today, too many players want to hammer the ball into the seats; they block shots like a tennis player trying to ace a serve, hitting the ball as hard as possible so no one can touch it. That looks great on TV, very macho. But it’s not nearly as effective as Russell’s technique of almost gently guiding the ball to someone such as Bob Cousy, who’d start a fast break in the other direction. Compare that to the guy who blocks the shot and screams as it rockets into the crowd: For all the theatrics, the shot blocker’s team still doesn’t gain possession of the ball; it returns to the team that shot it.

  One of the most underrated players in basketball history is Bob Pettit, partly because he played in St. Louis. He had long arms that made him seem even taller than his six-foot-nine frame. Pettit averaged 26 points and 16 rebounds for a career that went from 1954-65, and most of the time, he played under the rim. But he blocked out. By that, I’m talking about the art of a big man putting his body between the basket and the player guarding him. The idea is to create room to rebound. If a player is on your back—or blocked out—it’s nearly impossible for him to jump over your back and grab a rebound without fouling. The best rebounders of today still do that. At the end of his career, Dennis Rodman had lost much of his leaping ability, but he still was a monster on the boards. Why? He blocked out. Charles Oakley never was a guy with pogo sticks for legs, but he blocked out. Bill Laimbeer couldn’t jump at all, yet he continually was near the league lead in rebounds. He blocked out. All over the NBA, coaches scream, “Block out,” at their players, and most of the time, the players ignore them. That’s because most of today’s players are so athletically gifted, they never learned to block out when they were young. They just went after the ball, figuring they could outleap anyone else on the court. Today’s players jump higher, but the players of my era were generally better rebounders for the simple reason that they worked harder at it, practicing basic fundamentals such as blocking out, creating space near the basket to rebound.

  Wilt Chamberlain was the strongest man in the NBA during his era, and I’m convinced he’d be that today if he were still in his prime. Wilt was different from many NBA players. He believed in weight training and didn’t care what some of the other coaches and players said. He was listed at seven-foot-one, 275 pounds, but he always seemed even bigger to me. He just towered over everyone on the court, not only because of his height, but also his strength. You had a feeling Wilt could score any time he wanted, as long as he wasn’t at the foul line. Wilt averaged 50 points in one season. He scored 100 points in a game. He averaged 30 points and 22 rebounds a game for his career. He averaged 46 minutes a game. No one knows how many shots he or Russell blocked, because no one kept track back then.

  Imagine how dominating Pettit, Chamberlain, Baylor, Russell, or Jerry West would be if they grew up in this era of basketball camps, intense coaching, weight training, and nutrition. You can’t compare players from one era to another without taking into consideration these environmental factors. Wayne Embry is one of my favorite people because he is such a gentleman. I enjoyed coaching under him when he was general manager in Cleveland. Wayne also was a six-foot-eight, 280-pound center. Wayne “The Wall” was his nickname, and he’d be a wall even by today’s standards. But just imagine how wide Wayne Embry would be today if he had been on a serious weight-training program, instead of just adding muscles by working on his father’s farm in rural Ohio. Oscar Robertson would dominate in any era. So much is made of a triple/double, a player getting at least 10 points, 10 rebounds, and 10 assists in a game. Well, Robertson averaged 31 points, 12.5 rebounds, and 11.4 assists for the 1961-62 season! No one knows how many triple-doubles he had, because no one bothered to keep track back then. I remember when Embry and Robertson played together, and I’d try to guard Oscar. He’d run me right into one of those Embry-picks, and I’d get lost in Wayne’s wide body. Do that just once, and you knew why he was called Wayne The Wall. Your jaw ached, your fillings came loose. You never defended Oscar again without keeping one eye open for Embry, just as the players of today will tell you that you never guard John Stockton without being aware that Karl Malone will show up and flatten you with a bone-rattling pick.

  When you compare players from the fifties and sixties to today’s, you have to remember that we were the best athletes of our time, and we’d presumably benefit from the same advantages today’s players have if we were somehow transported forward in time. I know that I would have been as good a player today as I was back in my era, and I believe that would be true of the best of our players from those years. It’s almost comical to think about how little we did to take care of ourselves back then. For example, a lot of players smoked. At halftime of the games, some guys would sit there, sweat pouring off them, and light up a cigarette right there in the dressing room, waiting for the game to resume. Of course, this was before anyone knew the full dangers of smoking, but I was really surprised when I first saw it happen, and suddenly I knew I wasn’t playing college basketball any more.

  One night, some of the
veterans took me out to a bar, and then pointed to an empty table.” See that?” said one of the players.” We’re gonna drink beers until we fill that table with empty bottles.”

  That was a real culture shock to me, and I knew I couldn’t drink with those guys and then be able to play the next day. I was surprised to learn how many players drank—and I mean, they drank a lot.

  As star center Johnny Kerr once said, “Back then, we did everything wrong. We smoked. We drank. We ate red meat and all the foods that are supposed to bad for you. But Lord, did we ever have a great time.”

  I didn’t smoke. I seldom had more than one beer. I watched what I ate, so I was an exception. But I also was very serious about basketball and conditioning. A lot of it was just common sense. How were you supposed to play well when you’d been out drinking all night? Some guys, you could smell the beer as they sweated it out in practice the next day. I just thought that wasn’t a professional approach to the game, and I wanted to be a very good pro.

  So if I had to fetch the veterans hamburgers, I did just that. I was the rookie, and rookies were supposed to get the veterans food or soft drinks if they told you to do it. Rookies were supposed to haul around these huge twenty-four-second clocks to practice, much larger than the twenty-four-second clocks you see today. Back then, they sat on the floor and probably weighed twenty-five pounds. No one wanted to carry those clocks, so the job fell to the rookies—and I was a rookie. I did it without complaint.

  But by the end of my rookie year, I was playing more like a veteran. I started the last thirty games, averaging 17 points. I set a team record for the highest shooting percentage by a guard.

  More and more, I heard veterans say, “Nice game.”

  Not much more than that, but those two words—“Nice game”—meant a lot to me, the Rook.

  The clearest sign of acceptance came when Cliff Hagan invited me to his house for dinner. Hagan was a product of Kentucky, a courtly southerner, so it wasn’t every day that he had a black man in his house. But he opened his door to me, and I’ll always remember and appreciate that. Hagan had huge hands; the ball looked like a grapefruit when he held it. He had a wonderful running hook shot and averaged 18 points while playing ten years for the Hawks. So when he broke the ice by bringing me to his home, it was a signal to the rest of the team that I belonged.