You never get used to this. Never. You deal with it, you try to control your anger, but you never get used to it, and deep down it gnaws away at you. Not all the time—you can suppress it—but then something else happens and it comes out.
In St. Louis, there was a cafeteria-style restaurant that had pictures of several Hawks players in the window, including me. Everyone knew the restaurant only served whites, but there was my picture. They thought I was good enough to be in their window and maybe help bring in business, but I wasn’t supposed to eat there. The hypocrisy galled me. I decided to go in there and dare them not to serve me. I got in line, and they put the food on my plate. Hardly anyone said a word to me. Everyone was staring, but no one had the guts to challenge me. I took some solace from that, because I was ready to tell them about the picture in the window, and ask how dare they not serve me? But I ended up eating in silence, then I left.
At first, I thought that I had made a point. But later, I thought that maybe they weren’t sure if I was black or white. Sometimes, people would just ask, “What’s your racial background, your heritage?”
If that’s not an insulting question, then what is? People asked that question more often back then—not just about race, but ethnic background. It was more of a concern than it is today.
I always told them that I was black—or now, I say I’m African-American.
I know that there have been times when even black people have stared at my light skin and wondered, “What is he? What is he mixed with?”
This made me resent people’s attitudes, but never made me feel uncomfortable or ashamed about who I am. My attitude is that I’m just as good as you, period—and I don’t care who you are, or what color you are, or even who you think you are—and I was never afraid to tell people that even if it made them uncomfortable.
When all this was going on in St. Louis, America was often referred to as a “melting pot.” That’s what they wrote in the history books, about how people came from everywhere—all countries—to America, where we all were supposed to be treated as equals. And God said we all were equal in His sight, and we were supposed to be One Nation Under God, right? Then why would anyone care about my racial background? And where was the church in all this, especially my Catholic Church? That really angered me, because the priests had to know better, but so many of them were silent for so long. This still didn’t shake my faith in God; as with the silly rules that prevented Marilyn and me from exchanging our vows in front of the altar, that was man, not God. I would never indict God for the failings of men.
It was into this setting that Marilyn came to live with me. We first stayed at the Plaza Square Apartments, but we were shopping for a house, and found one in the St. Louis suburb of Moline Acres. It had been repossessed by the bank. It was a great buy, but it needed some work inside. A friend and I would go there to sand and buff the beautiful wooden floors, paint the walls, spruce the place up. The neighbors saw us, but I later figured that they probably assumed we were just two black guys who had been hired to do the work. The house had been vacant for a while, so no one knew who bought it.
Until we moved in.
Then the FOR SALE signs popped up, one after another after another. No one came to the house to meet us. No one knew, or cared, that I played for the St. Louis Hawks. It didn’t matter that we’d put a lot of work into the house and had it in better shape than it had been for years. Or that I had an economics degree from Providence. Or that Marilyn was college educated. Or that we were a young couple with solid values who just wanted a nice, safe place to live and we could afford to buy the house.
Nothing mattered at all except that we were black.
Our next-door neighbor was amazing. We had carports, which are like garages, only there’s a roof but the sides are open. They were right next to each other. Sometimes we both were out there at the same moment, but this guy not only refused to even say hello, he’d also make sure that he got out of his car with his back to me, and would walk into the house that way, even if it meant he had to go the long way around his car. He’d do anything just so he wouldn’t have to look at or talk to me.
It was comical… almost.
I didn’t want anything from the guy. But he was so filled with venom and prejudice he refused to even acknowledge that we lived next door. It was just pathetic.
We had a collie puppy named Duchess. After a while, the for sale signs weren’t enough, the cold shoulders and stony silence from the neighbors weren’t enough, the ugly glances when they saw us outside weren’t enough.
They had to poison our little dog.
At least someone did. How low could they go, to kill a little dog? It was about as cruel an act as I could imagine, and making it even worse, there was no way to find out who had done it. Marilyn was shattered when our dog was poisoned. Part of you wonders, “What will they do next?” But my wife is a very strong-willed person, as those who know her now will be quick to tell you. She never said, “Maybe this isn’t a good idea. Maybe we should move.” She was mad and wanted to find out who killed our dog. If anything, that made her more determined to stay. No one was going to scare us, to run us off. We had as much right to live on that street as anyone.
We stayed at Moline Acres for three years, then realized we needed a bigger home. Marilyn found a home she really liked in a neighborhood she really liked. I was on the road with the Hawks, so the plan was that when I came home, I’d visit the house, and if I liked it we’d buy it. The real-estate agent was anxious to sell to us. She knew we had the money to buy. By the time I returned home, the agent had called us and was crushed: She explained that the house was no longer on the market, at least not to us. It was in an area called DeFere, and the neighbors had pressured the owner of the home not to sell to us. They heard we were black and they didn’t want us on their street. Not long after that, I was invited to speak to the DeFere Chamber of Commerce. I was still hurt, and I just turned them down. Now, I’d have gone and told them at the meeting, “You think I’m good enough to come here and talk to you now, but I’m not good enough to live in your neighborhood.”
We later found a home in a neighborhood called Town & Country. It was a nicer place than the home we first wanted to buy, and the neighbors were very open and several became good friends of ours. So in that respect, it worked out.
Nonetheless, all of us are shaped by prejudices either for us or against us. I’ve always taken it as a challenge to show you that I’m as good as you, that all I need is an opportunity to show that I’m a good neighbor, a person you’d want to know. But these things tend to linger. They do affect you. And they pop up everywhere. A few years later, I was in church in Ohio, and the Catholic Church has a thing called the Sign Of Peace, where you shake the hand of the person next to you and say, “Peace be with you.” The man next to me—a white man—refused to shake my hand. Here he was in church, claiming to believe in God, and he wouldn’t shake the hand of the guy next to him in a pew. He was a hypocrite, and I told him so to his face when we walked out the door. He was just stunned, and I think he then felt bad and wanted to sort of melt, just disappear. He wasn’t sure what I was going to do next, but I just walked away without another word. What else would I want to say to that man?
I try to keep race out of things, but it’s hard not to think about it when you’ve experienced your share of prejudice. And I also know that what I’ve endured is nothing compared to what so many people in this country have faced. But suppose you are a black man and you walk into a restaurant at about the same time as a white guy. Maybe you were there just a minute before, but they wait on him first. You tell yourself that maybe they didn’t see you get there first, but part of you wonders: Did they wait on him first because he’s white? You can’t deny the thoughts that cross your mind, but you also can’t let them make you bitter, or they’ll destroy you—and I was determined not to let that happen.
CHAPTER SEVEN
THE LIFE WE LIVED as pro basketball players in the
1960s would be unimaginable to the players of today. There is much they are able to take for granted—and I’m not saying that’s a bad thing. But I wonder how well they’d function under the conditions that prevailed when I first broke into the NBA.
I ask myself that question as we travel on our chartered jet, with every seat first class, every aisle wide, every player well fed. We even have a video system so we can watch tapes of the games. All of this on a jet, our own jet, where we don’t need a ticket, we don’t even have to walk through an airport: The bus just drives us onto the runway and right up to the door of the plane. Takeoff is whenever we’re ready. That’s how virtually every NBA team now travels from city to city.
Then there are the hotels: Ritz Carltons, Four Seasons, Hyatts, Westins, and Marriotts. All first class. All with a staff that wants to make our stay “enjoyable,” as they like to say in the advertisements. Suppose you’re playing Monday in Cleveland, and you have a game the next night in Boston. Here is what you do: Late Monday afternoon, you pack your bags at the downtown Cleveland Marriott, and you call the bellman, who takes the bag. You never see that bag again until you arrive at the Westin in Boston.
In the meantime, a bus takes you from the Cleveland Marriott to Gund Arena, where you play the Cavaliers. After the game, a bus takes you from Gund Arena to Cleveland Hopkins Airport, where your jet is on the runway, waiting for you. You fly for a few hours, eat a first-class meal, then arrive in Boston. There, a bus is waiting for you and takes you from Logan Airport to the Westin in downtown Boston. There, your bags are delivered to your rooms.
For many NBA players, this is the only way they know. It’s how the NBA has traveled since the early 1990s, when most teams switched from flying on commercial planes to chartered jets or their own private jets. Given the demands of an eighty-two-game schedule that carries you from one end of the country to the next over a six-month period, this type of travel makes sense. It helps avoid fatigue, and it keeps the players as rested as possible. I still marvel at how far we’ve come in the NBA, in everything from salaries to arenas to travel. There are a few things about the old NBA that I liked, such as the closeness of the players and fewer distractions because the money wasn’t as big. But no one in the league now would want to travel or play in the places we did during my early days in the NBA.
One of my very first road trips as a pro was to Detroit, where the Pistons played in a place called Olympic Stadium. They led us to what was supposed to be a locker room, only a locker room is supposed to have lockers, right? This joint had nails in the wall. That was where you hung your clothes—or you could spread them on a folding chair. Olympic Stadium was built for hockey, and the place felt like a refrigerator. It was so cold sitting on the benches, they had heat lamps installed to keep the players from icing over.
That was my first look at the NBA.
Detroit was bad, but places such as Boston Garden weren’t much better. Most of the arenas were dark, smoky, gritty, and more than a little depressing. It’s strange to see pictures of those crowds from the early 1960s. Most of the men are in suits, ties, and formal hats. The women are in dresses. A lot of people smoked right there in the arenas, and the smoke hovered over us. You could see it every time you looked up at the lights.
In the dressing room, your last name was written on a piece of white tape, which was stuck right next to your personal “nail” in the wall of the dressing room at Boston Garden. Then Red Auerbach—or someone—made sure that the temperature was either ninety degrees or fifty degrees in there. Always too hot or too cold. And the same was true with the water in the showers. The Celtics blamed it on the problems with the old building. Maybe they were right, but we always had our suspicions. Either by design or because of incompetence, Boston Garden was no bargain for a visiting team, and not just because the Celtics had such great players. In my early NBA days, I was shocked that so many of the places we played were worse than the arenas and dressing rooms I saw in college. I mean, every locker room I had in college at least had lockers.
From 1961 to 1966, the NBA had only nine teams. Usually, there were only ten active players on the roster. Each team usually had a player on the injured list, but that meant there were only one hundred professional basketball players. In this era, pro basketball was a distant third in the pecking order of most sports fans, well behind major league baseball and pro football. In some areas, it also was dwarfed by major college sports. The games were carried on TV only once a week—yes, one game a week, and it usually featured Bill Russell’s Celtics against whatever team had Wilt Chamberlain at center.
We flew in the early jets, the kind that had to stop in places like Des Moines or Rapid City to refuel if we were flying cross country. We were like any other passengers; we waited in line for tickets, and we sat where we were told. We usually flew at the crack of dawn, because we had a game that night and didn’t want to risk missing it by taking a late-morning flight, then running into weather or scheduling problems. When I was with the Players Association, one of our victories was to convince the league to order the teams to give us three-for-two airline seating. That meant that the team had to pay for the three seats across the row, but only two players could sit in them; the seat in the middle was open between the two guys, so we had a little room to spread out.
Commercial airplanes are built for the average guy, who is about five-foot-nine. NBA players run at least a foot taller, and those big men ended up flying with their knees nearly jammed under their chins. Sometimes we could get into the first-class cabin, but that depended upon availability, and most first-class cabins back then didn’t have enough seats for a full NBA team. That created another problem: Suppose only six first-class seats were open. Who sits there? Do all six seats go to the players, or does the coach sit there? The players never wanted the coach up there, which confused me at first; the coach is the boss, so he should be up there. Of course, that was exactly the reason they didn’t want the coach up there: In first class, the drinks were free, and they wanted the coach in the back of the plane so he wouldn’t know what, or how much, the players were drinking. Generally, the seating got assigned on seniority, although some of the taller young guys felt they should sit up front, because they needed the extra leg room. This was yet another problem the coach had to sort out.
Today you’d play that night game in Cleveland, then fly immediately afterward to Boston. In my era as a player, we’d play that game in Cleveland, go back to the hotel, and wake up at 5:00 A.M. to be at the airport in time for a 6:30 A.M. flight to Boston. That meant we hardly slept at all: Who can go directly from playing a game right to bed? Few people in any job go right from work to bed. Most people want to at least eat something. Usually, it seemed like we had just dropped off to sleep when the phone would scream in our ears with the wakeup call. You’d see teams trudging through the early-morning airports as if they were the walking dead, which was exactly how we felt. Say you had four games in five days in four different cities—which happened several times a year. By that fourth game, you had no idea where you were, your legs were lead, your head had a dull ache, you’d been eating lousy airplane food that felt like a roll of socks sitting in your gut, and you felt as if you hadn’t slept for a week. Even into the 1980s, we still flew commercial flights. Some of my players would stagger bleary-eyed into the airport at 6:00 A.M. and head to the snack bar for something—anything—to eat. I can still see big Melvin Turpin, who played center for me in my first year coaching the Cavs, ordering a couple of those hot dogs from the snack bar, the kind that had been rolling over and over and over on those grills for hours and hours, maybe even days and days. Turpin wasn’t the only one chowing down those things at 7:00 A.M. Guys guzzled gallons of coffee, shoved down stale jelly doughnuts, and called it breakfast. It was amazing we all didn’t suffer from severe stomach cramps when it came time to play. That was part of the reason NBA teams often won 70 percent of their home games in the old days: The visitors simply were in no shape to perform.
Most athletes work what amounts to a night shift. For games, they get to the arena around 5:00 P.M. and they leave around midnight. That’s why it makes sense to fly immediately after games whenever possible. So what if you don’t get to your room in Boston until 2:00 A.M.? You can sleep until ten in the morning and catch up. Your sleeping schedule is almost the same as it is at home. The improvement in travel, especially private or chartered planes for teams, is the biggest reason NBA teams have better road records than they did twenty years ago. It’s still hard to win on the road, where the crowd is against you, the floor is foreign, and the other team is in its comfort zone. Let’s face it, when you were a kid and in a pickup game, you’d rather play on the hoop in your driveway or at your favorite playground than at your buddy’s house. But just imagine having to go to your friend’s place and play a big game when you haven’t slept for more than three hours a night for the last four days: That was what it was like to play on the road in the old NBA.
In my early years in the league, there just wasn’t a lot of glamour to pro basketball. We felt more like third-rate traveling salesmen than the men who supposedly were “the greatest athletes in the world,” according to the NBA publicity machine. I roomed with Zelmo Beaty—yes, we all had roommates back then, not like today where most players have their own rooms. And tall guys like the six-nine Zelmo slept in normal beds, which meant their feet hung over the end. There weren’t the king-sized beds like today’s, which are standard in every player’s room as requested by the team.
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