Unguarded

by Lenny Wilkens

  The front office started a whispering campaign against me. They said I wouldn’t report to Atlanta because it was a southern city, and I considered it to be prejudiced.

  That was untrue.

  Then they said I was jealous of Guerin and some of the players.

  That wasn’t true, either.

  Then former owner Ben Kerner said I was just plain selfish.

  That was an utter lie.

  Kerner was ripping me, even though he no longer owned the team, and even though I was his favorite guard only a few months earlier. The new Hawks ownership wanted to meet with me, so Marilyn and I flew to Atlanta and checked into the Marriott Hotel. Then something strange happened: Marilyn was reading a book in our room and I was looking at the newspaper when we heard someone rattling around the door with a key. The person entered our room, looked up, apologized, and slinked away.

  A few hours later, I was at the Hawks’ office and I saw the same guy who had come into my room! He worked for the team. He offered a lame apology about the room. He offered no explanation of how he ended up with a key to my room. The Hawks had set up a black real-estate agent to show us around town, and he led us to one area. Silas and Beaty had already bought homes there. The agent made it clear that this was the best part of town for us, meaning black people.

  That didn’t thrill us, but our real problem wasn’t with the city of Atlanta, it was with Marty Blake and his approach to the negotiations. He didn’t want to pay me anything near my market value, and I’m sure Marty had orders limiting how much he could offer. But the Hawks floated rumors that I didn’t want to play in Atlanta because of the “racial situation,” and that began to appear in the local newspapers. That was really poor strategy, because what if I had decided to sign with the Hawks? Why trash your own player to the press? But it continued, as stories were written about my being jealous of Richie Guerin, and then a rehash of the old Tour controversy.

  I requested a meeting with Tom Cousins, the new Hawks owner. I told him that I wanted to play for the Hawks, but my contract was important to me.

  “If you really want to know my worth, call some other NBA general managers,” I said.

  He said he’d do that.

  A few weeks later, Cousins called back and said what I was asking for was fair. So he offered me $75,000 on something stipulated as an “attitude contract.” My base pay would be $50,000, and I’d receive another $25,000 at the end of the year if Guerin decided I had been a good soldier and was worth it. I was insulted. After eight years with the franchise, suddenly I was a headcase who needed to be held in line by the threat of losing $25,000? Then I met with Guerin, who sat in a dark room at O’Hare Airport wearing sunglasses the entire time and swearing it wasn’t he who wanted the attitude clause, it was ownership.

  That led to my turning everything over to Larry Fleischer, who had been general counsel for the Players Association. I’d never had an agent until that moment, although Larry had advised me about the kind of salary I should expect. This only hardened feelings on both sides: Fleischer believed that the Hawks’ contract offer as structured was ridiculous. And the Hawks were angry that I had hired Fleischer to represent me, because this was 1968 and few players had agents or lawyers.

  Then I received a call from Dick Vertlieb, the general manager of the Seattle Supersonics. He wanted to know if I was interested in playing for his team. The Sonics were an expansion team; they’d had a 23-59 record in their first year, and now they wanted to trade Walt Hazzard for me. I had them talk to Fleischer, and they agreed to pay me $75,000 annually for two years. I approved the contract, and the deal was made. This happened at the end of training camp. I hadn’t signed and wasn’t playing. I had been to Seattle only a few times, and it had always rained. Marilyn couldn’t picture Seattle: She had never been there and thought it was up near Alaska with the Eskimos. I would have preferred to be traded to the Celtics or to another contender, but Seattle really did want me—and at this stage that was truly a refreshing feeling. The move proved to be one of the best things that ever happened to me.

  CHAPTER NINE

  THE CONVERSATION THAT CHANGED MY LIFE took place during the 1968-69 season, my first in Seattle. We were a second-year team, and not a very good one, but I was reasonably happy: I found Seattle to be a great place to live, and I was relieved to be out of the emotional quagmire that the Hawks had become. Even though the Sonics weren’t a contender, their front office was much better to me than the one in St. Louis.

  About midseason, Sonics general manager Dick Vertlieb asked me if I’d ever be interested in coaching. To me, it was one of those hypothetical things, something to think about while passing time.

  “Some day, I’d like to try it,” I said, not really believing it would ever happen.

  He wanted to know if I’d always wanted to coach. “Three years ago, I’d have said never,” I said. “But once in a while now, I think about it.”

  And that was the end of it. It never occurred to me that I might be coaching within a year, and certainly not as a player-coach. Among other things, the only black coach in the NBA was Bill Russell, who was the player/coach of the Celtics, so it wasn’t as if the door was open and the welcome mat was out for minorities to become head coaches. Russell had become the Celtics coach when Red Auerbach, emotionally spent from being both general manager and coach, realized he had to give up one of the jobs. He liked running the Celtics front office, and it dawned on him that no one could get as much out of Russell the player as Russell himself. It was a unique situation, hardly an indication that minorities were about to suddenly receive serious consideration for other coaching jobs.

  Right after my first season in Seattle, Al Bianchi resigned as our coach. I didn’t apply for the job. I didn’t even think about applying for the job. I was like all the other players; I just wondered whom they’d hire next. One day, Vertlieb called and said he wanted to have dinner with Marilyn and me. We went to his house, had a nice meal, and talked some basketball, but nothing serious; I don’t remember him saying anything about the next coach.

  After we ate, Vertlieb asked if I wanted to play some pool. We went into another room, Marilyn staying with Joanna, Vertlieb’s wife.

  I took a couple of shots, and so did he.

  Then he said, “I want you to be the player/coach.”

  “You have got to be crazy!” I said.

  Then I laughed.

  It had never crossed my mind that I might be the next Sonics coach. I was still in my prime as a player, and I figured they’d find another full-time coach.

  “I’m serious about this,” Vertlieb said.

  “And you’re still crazy,” I said. “No way.”

  But Vertlieb persisted. He said he liked my maturity. He said he trusted my talent judgment. He said I had the respect of other players. He said I knew the league. It was an incredible sales job, and he was laying it on very thick—but in a way that made me believe it.

  “Lenny,” he said. “When you play, it’s like you’re coaching on the floor anyway. So why not just go ahead and be the coach?”

  Then I started to think about some of the coaches I had played for in the NBA. To say the least, not all of them were the second coming of Red Auerbach. I had played in the same backcourt with Richie Guerin while he coached the Hawks; Richie did a decent job, but frankly, I didn’t see anything that made me believe that the job of being a player/coach was beyond me. We won a lot of games in St. Louis with Richie as our coach.

  My college coach, Joe Mullaney, used to tell stories about Fuzzy Levane when Levane coached the Knicks. During timeouts, Levane, who often stuttered, allowed Carl Braun—one of his players—to do most of the talking. After a while, Braun did all the talking during every timeout.

  One time, Levane said, “C-C-Carl, wait a min-min-ute. I-I-I’m the c-c-coach here.”

  Braun said, “OK, go ahead.”

  Then Levane looked into the eyes of his players and said, “C-C-Carl, you t-t-tell them what
to do.”

  Another time, Levane tried to give the players a pep talk by showing them pictures of his family. “If we d-d-don’t win, then I-II’ll be outta work,” he said. “And-and-and my wife and fa-fa-family will starve.”

  Later, I played for Fuzzy Levane. And I played for Paul Seymour. And I played for Harry “The Horse” Gallatin. And finally, Richie Guerin and Al Bianchi. I liked some of them better than others, but none of those guys made me think, “I could never do this.”

  Most of these coaches were former players themselves; their idea of practice was to scrimmage, then shoot some free throws. A scouting report was saying, “Hey, you’ve got Oscar Robertson tonight. He’s a really good player, so you better be heads up.” Players weren’t taught, they were supposed to learn the game on their own.

  When I played for Gallatin, he gave me a stack of forty different plays. I looked at them once, and that was it. Virtually all of them were to get the ball to Cliff Hagan and Bob Pettit. I already knew how and where on the court they wanted the ball; I knew the basic plays that worked best for our Hawks team. There was nothing new in Gallatin’s strategy.

  As for his approach to handling the team, when Harry was upset with us, he’d say, “If you don’t like it, we’ll go behind the barn and settle this.”

  That was pretty silly. What player would want to fight the coach, behind the barn or anywhere else? What would that prove? And why would the coach even say that, because suppose a player actually took him up on it? Then what? Gallatin was like most coaches of that era: When things went bad, they just screamed at you, challenging your manhood. They believed that was the only way to get you to play harder and better. Gallatin was a nut about physical fitness; during training camp, he made us run up and down stairs—on our toes! He had us do all these isometric exercises. Then we’d scrimmage—and scrimmage hard—for ninety minutes. By the end of training camp, we were exhausted. He nearly killed our star, Bob Pettit, who was coming to the end of his career, still playing forty-two minutes a night, and didn’t need to be run into complete exhaustion during training camp. From Gallatin, I learned that you have to treat your players as individuals, even in training camp. Veterans with bad knees or other physical problems have a good idea of what it takes to get into shape. They don’t have to take part in every drill and every practice. The idea is to get the most out of them during the season, not to wear them out as they try to keep up with the younger players.

  Gallatin also worried about guys being out too late. He installed a curfew and then sat in the hotel lobby making sure that everyone arrived back in their rooms on time. Of course, guys found ways to sneak back out of the hotel to continue their nocturnal activities while Gallatin thought they were asleep. He also had some substitution patterns that made no sense, leaving some of our best players on the bench for long stretches in critical parts of the game. His idea of motivation was to write on the blackboard before a big game: IT’S NOT THE DOG IN THE FIGHT THAT COUNTS, IT’S THE FIGHT IN THE DOG.

  I’m not trying just to be critical of Gallatin, but to give an idea of what coaching in the 1960s was like on most NBA teams. Guerin replaced Gallatin and eased up on some of the Mickey Mouse stuff such as curfews. But when he didn’t know what to do, he just screamed at us. We were stupid. We were gutless. We were an embarrassment. We should be ashamed to cash our paychecks. Cowards, that’s what we were. We were lucky that we weren’t sweeping the street somewhere, because that’s the only job we could do right. On and on, bellowing and insulting us just like his coaches had done to him—and doing it in some of the ugliest language you can imagine. He’d cuss a player out in front of the whole team, and do it while getting so red in the face, the veins in his neck bulging, you’d have sworn he was about to have a stroke right in front of you. While Guerin avoided some of the pitfalls of Gallatin, he eventually lost control of the team by playing favorites.

  As I considered Vertlieb’s offer, I thought about these coaches and asked myself, “Why can’t I do the job?”

  No one had taught me how to think like a coach, but I continually heard I was “the coach on the floor.” Besides, no one had ever taught me how to play the pro game; I figured it out for myself, and I did pretty well. Strategy was very basic back then: I never even played for a coach who double-teamed on defense until my last year with the Hawks. Back then, you were told, “Jerry West is your man,” and you covered Jerry West. You didn’t expect anyone to help you defend Jerry West, and you didn’t help anyone else defend his man.

  The offense was simple: Keep moving. Keep moving without the ball. Keep moving the ball by passing it. Know your teammates. Know who likes the ball on the left side of the basket, who likes it on the right. Know who pouts if he doesn’t touch the ball for a few possessions, and know who is unselfish and is willing to sacrifice his scoring to set picks and rebounds.

  The more I thought about it, the more it made sense.

  As I’ve said, Seattle was a recent expansion team, and not a very good one. Some of the players were Tommy Kron, whom we called Krash Kron because he really hustled; Rod Thorn, Plummer Lott, Dorie Murrey, Bob Kauffman, Art Harris, Bob Rule, and an aging Tom Meschery. There wasn’t a lot of talent on the roster. Al Bianchi coached the team for the first two years. He was a study in patience. He kept our spirits up. He treated us as men. As the Sonics coach, he never even fined a single player. I averaged 22.4 points, 8.2 assists, and 6.2 rebounds for him, playing in every game and on the floor for forty-three minutes a night.

  I later discovered that Vertlieb traded for me over the objections of Sonics owner Sam Schulman, who loved Walt Hazzard. But Vertlieb insisted I’d mean more to the franchise than Hazzard, and Schulman finally agreed to the deal.

  And now, a year later, Vertlieb wanted to make me player/coach.

  I was only thirty-two, the star of the team. I was in my prime as a player. It wasn’t as if I’d demanded to coach: They came to me. It didn’t take me long to realize that this wasn’t just another job offer, it was an opportunity not only for myself, but for all the minorities in the future who would aspire to coaching. I didn’t know all the problems I’d face as a player/coach, but I was sure I had to take the job. I had a moral obligation. Who knew when the chance would come for me—or any black man—to be a head coach again?

  I met with Schulman, who had gone from hating the trade that brought me to Seattle to becoming my biggest fan. It was obvious that he wanted me to take the job. He asked me about different players in the league, about what the Sonics needed to become a contender and how I’d handle certain situations. I asked him if I’d be allowed to make a trade or draft a player, even if he didn’t agree with it. He said if the coach and general manager wanted to make a certain move and he could afford it, then he’d give the OK. That made sense. He was the owner. He was paying the bills, so he must have the final say on business matters. But I also knew he respected his basketball people, as was evident when he allowed Vertlieb to trade Hazzard for me.

  We agreed on a one-year contract for me to be the player/ coach.

  Think about this: Seattle wanted to give me a two-year deal, but I insisted on one year. The raise to be a coach was a small one, about $15,000. I figured if I did a good job in my first year as a player/coach, I’d have more leverage to negotiate a longer contract. Of course, if I flopped, it would be easy for them to fire or trade me because the contract was for only one year. I didn’t think about that. I just assumed I’d perform well, and they’d want to keep me.

  Today, it’s standard for a coach to have at least a three-year contract, to protect you from an owner or general manager who might panic during a slow start and fire you in your first year. Having to pay a guy a lot of money over three years for not coaching at least makes them pause before dropping the axe.

  But I wandered out on that precarious coaching limb with a one-year contract, and I didn’t think twice. I was taking a one-year contract to coach a team that was only in its third year of existence, a tea
m that had yet to make the playoffs and wasn’t likely to do it in the near future.

  Only now do I see the risk I was taking. But back then, I was sure it would work out. Either I was confident or I just didn’t know any better, but I took the job with no fear.

  At the press conference to announce my appointment, the Sonics praised my leadership, talked about how I’d been a coach on the floor, so why not just go ahead and make me the coach?

  When I spoke, I said, “I’ve seen the player/coach role work. Bill Russell did a good job in Boston. I learned a lot from Richie Guerin, and he was successful, too. The big thing Russell did as player/coach was to give 100 percent as a player. The coach who can give a good effort on the floor can demand more from his players. My team-mates know I give up the ball. If they’re open, I’ll pass it to them. I’ll handle my players with respect and treat them as men.”

  My hiring was greeted with varying degrees of enthusiasm. Sportswriters thought it was a good idea, at least worth a try. I received a telegram of congratulations from NBA commissioner Walter Kennedy. Other players and coaches sent their regards, expressing confidence in me.

  Marilyn was very excited and proud, but she was worried, too. She’d been around the NBA long enough to know that my life was about to change. I’d no longer just have myself and my own game to worry about; I was responsible for all the players, for the team. She knew that some players would test me. Some players were lazy, some weren’t very tough, and some wouldn’t like anything I did because some players just don’t like coaches, period. She knew it was easier for a player to shake off a hard loss than a coach, and now I’d feel it two ways—as a player, and as a coach. A player often has a wife or friends who tell him, “It wasn’t your fault your team lost, the coach screwed up.” But no one can say that to the coach.