In those early years, our meal money was $8 a day. We used to look for places like Tad’s Steakhouse, where they sold you a steak for $1.50. It wasn’t a great steak, but it was a steak and it was only $1.50. Once, a few us went out to a place called Al Cooper’s Steak-house in New York. The steak was great. This was no Tad’s. But neither was the price. It was $25, which meant we spent three days of meal money for one steak dinner. Today, the NBA meal money is $84 a day. You can eat very well on that, and sometimes you don’t even have to pay for any food since those wonderful meals on the plane are free.
When we had back-to-back games on the road, the team didn’t even provide a simple service like washing our uniforms. I’d take the uniform with me right into the shower after the game and wash the stupid thing by hand. I’d roll it up in a towel, take it back with me to the hotel, wring the soggy thing out in the sink, then spread it on the radiator to dry. That’s right, a radiator, which was how most hotels were heated back in the 1960s, or at least the hotels where we stayed. I had to wash my underwear in the hotel sink and hang that on the radiator, too. In the morning, the clothes on the radiator would be dry, but a little stiff—but then again, so were we when it came time to play.
In the early 1960s, the best thing about basketball was playing the game. That sounds obvious, but I wonder if you’d get the same answer today. A lot of players say the best thing about being in the NBA is the money, the first-class travel and hotels, the attention from the public, the parties, limos, women, and other perks. Yes, they like the game, but they love what the game brings them.
I love the game. Always did, always will.
Even as a coach in the year 2000, my favorite thing about the NBA is the games. The winning and losing. The action. The feeling that comes when the lights are on, the music is turned up, and the game is ready to begin. As a player, I loved being across from the other guy, looking into his eyes as he was trying to guard me, and knowing I could beat him to the basket and make something good happen for my team. I just knew it. He may have thought he could guard me. He may have thought that I always dribbled to the left, and all he had to do was “sit on his left hand,” as they tell a defender of a player who is lefthanded. I didn’t care who was guarding me, I knew I could penetrate to the basket. I could force someone else to leave his man and try to stop me, then I could find an open team-mate for a pass. Or I could throw in a little lefthanded hook from seven feet away, doing it while moving directly off the dribble. Or perhaps I could get all the way to the basket and flip in a nice fingerroll layup. And what I was absolutely, positively sure about was this: Not only could I beat you off the dribble, I’d keep myself under control. I would never be moving so fast that I ended up forcing a bad shot at the basket, or a wild pass to my teammate. I don’t think about my playing days very often, usually only when someone asks me about it or when I happen to see an old tape of a game I played in. Then I remember the feeling I had, where the ball felt like it was part of my hand. I knew that the whole offense started with me, and that I could set up my teammates so they could take shots from the spots on the floor where they were the most comfortable.
When I came into the NBA, I had to be the dumbest guy in the league when it came to knowing the other players, the history of the teams, the basics of pro basketball. I’d hear my teammates talk about great players of the past, and the names meant nothing to me because I’d never followed the game. I was too embarrassed to say, “Hey, I never heard of that guy.” I just kept my mouth shut and listened. If you’re quiet and listen, you learn, which is what I did. Then I was blessed to play against greats such as Bill Russell, Wilt Chamberlain, Oscar Robertson, Jerry West, Bob Cousy, and Elgin Baylor. I came into the NBA in 1960, the same year as West and Robertson. My St. Louis Hawks teams had two of the best forwards in NBA history, Bob Pettit and Cliff Hagan. They also were two of the first players to accept me, for the obvious reason that I could get them the ball. They were scorers. I was a point guard who looked first to pass. I could score, and I averaged 20 points in some of my seasons later in my career, but in my first years with the Hawks I scored about 12 a game. I sacrificed my offense, and the players respected that—and they respected me for it.
In the early 1960s, the NBA was not as quick, or as integrated, as it is today. A lot of teams ran set plays to get their stars shots. When I joined the Hawks, we must have had twenty plays to get the ball to Pettit and Hagan. As I played, I short-cutted those plays. In other words, I saved us a pass or two and found a way to get the ball directly to Hagan and Pettit, exactly where they wanted it. Together, we improvised; rather than pass the ball left, run right and set a pick, then run back and catch another pass and throw it to Hagan… well, I’d just beat my man off the dribble, head to the spot to create the proper passing angle, then throw the ball to Hagan. This saved time on the shot clock, and created fewer chances for turnovers because the ball didn’t go through as many hands.
During the 1960s, the game became faster. There were more guys dribbling behind their back, more guys dunking, more guys making flashy passes. It was still a big deal to be on TV. I think it was in 1964, and we were playing the Cincinnati Royals on TV. There was a loose ball, and I dove for it along with a Cincinnati player named Arlen Bockhorn. In fact, Bockhorn sort of tackled me as the ball went out of bounds. They called a foul on him, and he smiled and told me, “Bet that looked great on TV!” Now, virtually every game is televised somewhere. Most of the players have been performing on TV since college, some even in high school, as cable TV now carries all kinds of games. But back then, it was special to play in a game your family and friends might see on TV.
Our games were pretty physical. Guys handchecked, meaning they’d put their hands on your back and try to push you a bit, knock you off balance as you dribbled the ball and keep you from going where you wanted to on the court. But that never bothered me, because of my quickness: If a guy was close enough to put his hand on my back, then I could just drive past him. He was too close to keep up with me.
There were a lot of fights in those games, primarily because there were only eight or nine teams. With an eighty-two-game schedule, that meant you played most teams about ten times each year. That created rivalries, and it also caused players to build up grudges. A guy stuck you in the gut with an elbow then shoved you to the floor last week, and a week later you’d play him again. You were just waiting for something, anything, to happen; he’d just stare at you the wrong way, and bam, there’d be a fight. I rarely got into fights, but the bigger players did because there was so much contact under the basket. We had excellent officials back then, men such as Earl Strom and Mendy Rudolph, and they knew the players and their personalities. They knew if they let some guys just fight for a few minutes and get it out of their systems, there’d be no more trouble for the rest of the game. With other players, they knew to step in quick, or these guys were really going to hurt each other. Now, if a player throws a punch, it’s an automatic ejection, a big fine, and probably a suspension. Back then, they might throw you out—or not—depending upon how the officials felt about you. The officials would ask themselves, “Is this guy going to give me any more trouble, or is he just blowing off steam?” If they thought you’d calmed down, they’d call a technical foul on you but let you stay in the game. Rarely was a player ejected for fighting, and we had some real brawls back then.
The NBA was a smaller place, a community of one hundred athletes and nine teams during some of those years. That made it easier for the officials to know us, and for us to learn to trust them. There was a sense that we were all in this together, all trying to make sure that the league survived. Because the money wasn’t that big and there was no such thing as free agency, players stayed with teams longer. The stars of the team didn’t seem that much different from the guys on the bench, at least in the dressing room and when we traveled. Most of us even had summer jobs, because we needed the money. In my early years with the Hawks, I earned between $15,000 and $20,00
0. My final season in St. Louis was 1967-68; I was a five-time All-Star, and I was making only $35,000.
When I came into the NBA, we didn’t have a pension plan. Bob Cousy was the president of the Players Association, which was our fledgling union. Bob Pettit and Bill Russell were vice-presidents. In my third year in the NBA, I made the All-Star team. Pettit and I flew from St. Louis to Los Angeles for the game. As we walked into the hotel lobby, we saw Tom Heinsohn, Russell, and a guy in a suit who I knew was an attorney named Larry Fleischer. They stopped Pettit and said, “We’re starting a meeting right now. It’s about our pension plan. They won’t give us one, and we have to do something!”
The pension plan was crucial; with salaries so low, it was easy for ex-players to wind up destitute. I don’t think anybody could have ever imagined a world of free agency or million-dollar contracts. But we knew that the baseball players had fought for a pretty good pension plan, funded in part by proceeds from their All-Star game. So our All-Star game seemed like a good place to make a stand.
I went along with Pettit up to the suite where NBA Commissioner Walter Kennedy was staying. The 1963 All-Star game was going to be the first carried under the new TV contract signed by the league. I never said a word, but I watched as our union told Kennedy that if we didn’t receive some sort of pension plan, we were going to strike and not play the All-Star game. Kennedy was shocked. Heck, I was shocked. Here I was in my first All-Star game, and I was supposed to strike?
Kennedy looks right at me, the youngest guy in the room and the one who he sensed was the most likely to buckle under pressure.
“Lenny,” he said.” You mean to tell me that you’re really going to strike this game?”
I gave a little nod and my voice was barely above a whisper, but I managed to say, “Yeah.”
Kennedy shook his head again and said he’d take our demand to the owners’ committee.
That night, we all got ready for the game and waited to hear something from the league. There was no word. At 8:00 P.M., ABCTV went on with its pregame show. The game was supposed to start at 8:30. We said we weren’t going to play. At 8:15, ABC told the league that if the players weren’t out there at 8:30 for the game, they were going to cancel the TV contract for the entire season. In the meantime, Lakers owner Bob Short sent a message to the dressing room that Elgin Baylor and Jerry West would never play in L.A. again if they boycotted the game. Other threats were made. But about ten minutes before the game, Kennedy came into the room and said we’d have a pension plan in place by June 1. So we went out and played.
Players now can’t believe how little we made, or how we had to work in the summers. They’re surprised to hear that we had to worry about a pension plan at all. But that was all a part of the almost blue-collar world of the NBA back then.
When I say most of us worked in the off-season, I mean a job, not working out with a personal trainer, as players do today. We sure weren’t hanging out in L.A. and singing on someone’s rap video, or appearing in a movie. I worked just as a teacher or anyone else would who had the summer off and needed to pick up some extra cash.
My first few summers in St. Louis, I worked for the Jewish Employment and Vocational Services. The organization had a government grant to work with high-school dropouts. My job was to interview the kids, give them a test, and try to determine where they fit into the world of work. We offered courses in such areas as electronic assembly, nursing, and clerical work.
A man named Dr. Wolf started the program. He approached me because I was a pro athlete with a college degree, and he thought the kids would relate to me. In essence, I was a counselor. I’d meet with some of the kids who were already in the program, and I’d listen to their problems and try to keep them from getting sidetracked. Many of them were like the kids I grew up with in Brooklyn. They had messy family situations, they came from poverty, and they had few skills and little hope, because no one in their family had an idea what it took to succeed in the world. I grew up without a father, and so did a lot of these kids; I could understand what they were feeling, and I also could speak to them from my own experience. Yes, I’m a pro basketball player, but my father died when I was five, and I’d worked at menial jobs for much of my childhood and adolescence. I told them that how you looked and how you spoke were very important in finding and keeping a job. I taught them the basics of grooming, of manners, how to fill out employment applications, what to wear to a job interview. There was one young woman whom we worked with who was a natural typist. She just breezed through our clerical training program, but still had trouble getting a job. She had no clue how to dress, so we went back to the basics. We got her hair cut and styled so that it looked nice but nonthreatening to the middle-aged people who were doing the hiring. We helped her pick out the right kind of dress, showed her how to do the little things that tell an employer you know how to function in the working world. The day she got a job remains one of the best days of my life, and she did extremely well, moving up in that company. I learned that even a little success goes a long way toward helping people believe in themselves and change their lives.
I spent three years at this summer job working with people who were at the bottom of the social and economic scale back in the early 1960s, most of whom were black. I’d like to think a program like this could do as much good today, but the truth is that there’s a huge difference between people’s desire to remake themselves now compared to back then. In the early 1960s, there wasn’t as much despair and hopelessness. Drugs just weren’t the plague they are today. A “bad” kid back then smoked cigarettes, stole hubcaps, and maybe carried a knife. He didn’t like authority, but he wouldn’t shoot you down in cold blood because he thought you’d looked at him the wrong way. And to be honest, people had lower expectations; they just wanted a decent job, an apartment, and a car that would get them around town. Naturally, I’m speaking in generalities, but these were my impressions. Today, those same people tend to come in with massive drug and family problems. There have always been gangs, but the gangs of forty years ago were nothing more than social clubs compared to the drug-lord gangs you see today. We have an insane society where a thirteen-year-old kid can make $1,000 a week working for a drug lord. How can you tell this kid, “What you really need to do is clean up, get some manners, learn how to read and write, and then you can get a job at McDonald’s or a factory.” The kid couldn’t care less.
The influence of TV on society is enormous. Most of the kids I worked with at the Jewish Employment Services didn’t have a TV in their homes. Their expectations weren’t that high, because what they saw was what was around them in their own neighborhoods. TV today makes everybody believe they’re entitled to nice cars, big houses, and all kinds of other things, and that’s had a devastating effect on society. We’re told of all the things we deserve to have—and that we should have them right now! In that environment, it is much harder for someone working in a program like I did to convince people to wait their turn, work hard, pay their dues, and that in the end it will pay off. I have a lot of respect for those who work in social services and try to help the poor because I remember how difficult it was when I did it—and it’s far more demanding today.
My other summer job while I was in St. Louis was with the Monsanto Corporation. A Providence College graduate headed the packaging division, and he offered me a chance to work in their marketing and sales department. They made packages for many products, such as Tide detergent and Dove soap. Most people remember Monsanto as a chemical company, the inventors of Astroturf. Their organic division made the pills for Excedrin, and our packaging division made the bottle and the box for the product. They were such a huge corporation back in the 1960s that they built a plant in Cincinnati right next to a Procter & Gamble plant, just so they could service P&G’s packaging needs. They also did all the packaging for Avon products.
I went through their sales training program, then went out with some salesmen to learn the trade from guys on the front lines.
We’d call on companies that didn’t use Monsanto for its packaging, or we’d go to companies that were clients and make sure they were happy with our service and to see if they wanted to change or expand their packaging. I learned a lot. For example, for a while we tried to sell a clear plastic tray for meat packaging, but if the meat bled a little and the temperature wasn’t just right, condensation would form, and suddenly you couldn’t even see the meat. That was a fiasco. The best packaging for meat is a white styrofoam tray, because the color of the meat stands out.
None of this may sound particularly exciting compared to basketball, but I enjoyed working for that company. I had a degree in economics, and it was a great experience for me to see how a major corporation operated. I didn’t mind the selling because we had a good product with excellent service. Maybe because I knew it wasn’t my full-time job, I never had bad vibes about selling. I didn’t take rejection personally. I guess it comes from sports, from winning and losing. You know you don’t win every game. And you soon learn you don’t make every sale. To me, it was a challenge. I prepared to go out and sell those products just as I would prepare to face an opponent today while coaching in the NBA. I studied the scouting reports. I considered the strengths and weaknesses. I put together a game plan. The details were different, but the approach was the same.
I felt very comfortable with Monsanto. In fact, when the team moved from St. Louis to Atlanta, they offered me a full-time job. For a moment I considered it, because my final season with the Hawks was probably my hardest in all of pro basketball.
CHAPTER EIGHT
BIG PROBLEMS START WITH LITTLE THINGS. They happen when feelings are hurt, when basic communication breaks down.
That’s how I came to be a malcontent.
It was 1967-68, my last year in St. Louis. I had been with the Hawks for seven years, an All-Star four times. I was captain of the team, popular with the fans. I had fought with the front office for more money, but virtually every good player in the 1960s found himself doing that. That wasn’t the problem.
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