Unguarded

by Lenny Wilkens

  This bothered me because Houbregs had never come to me with these concerns. When I saw the comments, I had to wonder if he had some deeper agenda that I hadn’t realized. I had a very close relationship with Sam Schulman, the team owner; Houbregs may have been upset by this. Also, he hadn’t hired me, and general managers usually like to hire their own coaches.

  When the season was over, Houbregs convinced Schulman that being a player/coach was too much for me. They wanted to hire Tom Nissalke as the coach and asked me to be strictly a point guard. I didn’t agree with that evaluation of my coaching, but I was willing to return to being a full-time player and help Tom Nissalke in any way that I could. I even met with Nissalke, and we seemed to be on the same page.

  Instead, I was handed a plane ticket out of town.

  CHAPTER TEN

  I’LL NEVER FORGET THE SIGN: THIS IS LENNY’S COUNTRY.

  That was what greeted me, along with a sellout crowd chanting my name, at the old Seattle Coliseum when I returned to play there as a member of the Cleveland Cavaliers.

  Yes, the Cleveland Cavaliers.

  I went from being player/coach of the Seattle Sonics to being a point guard with the Cavs. I went from a former expansion team on the rise to an even newer expansion team. I went from a team where I was the coach, a team that won a franchise-record 47 games, to a team that had won only 38 games total in its first two years of existence. I went to a team that some players called “Devil’s Island,” a team where some of my new teammates dubbed me a Prisoner of War.

  That’s because my new Cleveland teammates saw things much as I did. They couldn’t figure out why Seattle would fire me as coach, much less why the Sonics would trade me. The way the Sonics treated me was inexplicable: I was first assured that I would not be traded; then, when I heard I was headed to Chicago, another struggling franchise, I was told, “No way, we’d never trade you to a team like that.” If they were going to deal me, it would be to a contender. Told me that right to my face. They also said they’d keep me informed about any possible deals, so I wouldn’t be surprised by anything.

  Yet the first person to hear I was traded to Cleveland was my father-in-law. And he lived in New York. And he heard it on the radio!

  The next was Marilyn, who first received a call from her father, and she couldn’t believe the report was true. Then the Sonics called, saying they couldn’t find me and had to reach me as soon as possible. She told them that I was playing golf with Dr. Jack Nichols, the Sonics team dentist. It was a mess. The Sonics had to have been talking about this deal for several days. You don’t make a trade of this magnitude in five minutes. Barry Clemens and I were being sent to Cleveland for Butch Beard. I was an All-Star. Beard was considered the Cavs’ best young player. Then the Sonics insisted they still couldn’t find me even after Marilyn told them I was out playing golf; that was a joke, because Bob Houbregs knew where I usually played—since Houbregs and I played at the same country club.

  Finally, Marilyn tracked me down on the course and told me about the trade to Cleveland.

  I was stunned. I knew it was true, but I couldn’t believe it. I had been lied to. The Sonics knew that Seattle had become a real home to us. They knew that I wanted to play for a contender, or at least for a West Coast team so I could be closer to home.

  Instead, they traded me to Cleveland. I had nothing against Cleveland; I later coached the Cavs and loved the fans, the area, everything about it. But that was from 1986 to 1993.

  This was 1972. Cleveland was not near the West Coast. Cleveland had the worst record in the NBA over the previous two years. I was going to be thirty-five by the start of the season, and I knew I only had a few good years left as a player. I wanted to spend them with a team where I’d have a real chance to win an NBA title. Cleveland was not that team.

  The Sonics had just dumped me. They didn’t want me to play for a West Coast team, where I would come back several times a season and help beat them. They didn’t want me to play for a contender, because it would look bad for them if I ended up on a team that won a title the year after they traded me. They wanted me as far out of sight and off their radar screen as they could find in the NBA.

  That was Cleveland.

  And they didn’t inform me of the deal in advance because they were afraid that I’d call Bill Fitch from the Cavs and tell him that I really didn’t want to play for Cleveland, and that would kill the trade.

  To the Sonics, this was just business.

  To me, it was a lack of respect. It gave no consideration to what I had done for the franchise, and how the team had improved in the three years I was there. It didn’t matter to them that I was entrenched in Seattle, a part of the community. Nor did they take my word that I would help new coach Tom Nissalke any way I could, that I had no desire to undercut him. I’d be an All-Star point guard for him. My real desire was for the Sonics to win.

  Then I thought of something else: Toward the end of my final year with Seattle, the Sonics had a night for me, saying that I was a great guy, an asset to the community.

  A few months later, they traded me.

  That had also happened in St. Louis. Near the end of my final season with the Hawks, they had a night for me. Again, I was a wonderful guy, an asset to the town and the franchise.

  And a few months later, I was gone—and so was the team.

  I didn’t think I could survive too many more “nights.”

  The Sonics were right about one thing: At first, I didn’t want to play for Cleveland.

  It was nothing against the city, the franchise, or Bill Fitch. I was angry about how the trade had been handled. I felt betrayed because I heard that Golden State wanted to deal for me, and that would have been a good situation. The Warriors had a promising team with Nate Thurmond at center. They had a 51-31 record. I respected the coach, Al Attles. And San Francisco wasn’t nearly as far from Seattle as Cleveland.

  Yet the Sonics sent me to the Cavs.

  I considered not reporting to Cleveland. I hoped that they might trade me to a contender if they knew how upset I was about the deal. But Bill Fitch flew to Seattle to meet with me. Then owner Nick Mileti came to see me. Both made it clear the Cavs planned to keep me. They offered me a new contract.

  Marilyn and I talked about it, and then Marilyn said, “Are you ready to retire?”

  I’d had some nice offers to go into business in Seattle. But Marilyn went right to the heart of the matter. Even though I liked business and loved Seattle, was I ready to walk away from basketball? The year before, I averaged 18 points and led the league with nearly 10 assists per game.

  “I still I want to play,” I said.

  And we both knew that if I wanted to play, then I had to play in Cleveland.

  I always appreciated what Joe Tait said about me during my first stint in Cleveland.

  “Lenny was the first true professional basketball player we had,” said the man who also was the first radio voice of the Cavs and remains in that job to this day.

  The Cavs came into the NBA in 1970-71. They opened that season with 15 losses in a row, then finally won a game. They immediately went into a 12-game losing streak. They won again. Then they lost nine more in a row. That’s a 2-36 start. Their final record was 15-67. They had a guard named John Warren who scored a basket—for the other team! They had a player named Gary Suiter who was cut because he ate a hot dog right before a game. He might have gotten away with it if he hadn’t bought it at the concession stand, waiting in line wearing his warmups. Virtually all of the players were castoffs from other teams, and it didn’t take long to find out why they were available: They were either too old, too hurt, too young, or too something to be very effective.

  Fitch was new to the NBA. He had coached at Minnesota, Bowling Green, North Dakota, and Coe College. In his first press conference in Cleveland, he reminded the writers, “The name is Fitch, not Houdini.”

  Well, not even Moses could have led the Cavs to a winning season in those early years. Th
ey were coming off a 23-59 season when I arrived. They played at the old Cleveland Arena, which was on Euclid Avenue and East Thirtieth Street. As Joe Tait once said, “It wasn’t an arena, it was a cave. It was dark, damp, cold, and empty. The locker rooms were so bad the visiting teams would dress in their rooms at the Sheraton Hotel, then they’d walk across Euclid Avenue wearing their warmups.”

  For those Cavaliers, a good crowd was five thousand. Often there were fewer than twenty-five hundred fans in the seats. On some nights, you could dribble the ball and hear the bounce echoing all over the empty arena.

  “It was the black hole of the NBA,” said Tait.

  So I was traded to the worst team in the NBA that played in the worst arena with perhaps the worst fan support. I had a choice: I could pout and perhaps try to force a trade. Or I could make the best of what many would consider a bad situation. I thought of something Martin Luther King once said, “The measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands in times of challenge and controversy.”

  Another saying that always meant a lot to me was, “Failure is only the opportunity to begin again, only more intelligently.”

  I knew I didn’t fail in Seattle, but Cleveland was a chance to begin again. It also was a challenge, something completely out of my comfort zone. In a sense, it was a test: What kind of person would I be? How would I react to a coach whose playing experience was limited to little Coe College? A coach who was three years older than me, and a coach who had a worse record than I did? How would I handle playing for a losing team in a strange city in front of small crowds?

  Once I decided to report to the Cavs, I was determined to be a top-flight point guard and to help Bill Fitch any way I could. When I arrived in Cleveland, I spent my first week in town staying in Fitch’s home; he said he’d help me get settled and find a place to live. Actually, he wanted me to watch film of the team with him. We watched hour after hour, game after game, play after play.

  Over and over it went.

  I had used a little bit of film work with my team in Seattle. It was just in the infant stage as a coaching tool back then. But Fitch was obsessed with game films. I really liked and respected him, but after a while, there’s only so much film you can watch. It doesn’t hurt to shut off the projector and get a little sleep. I told Bill that, and we still laugh about it to this day. But this also shows how different the NBA of 1972 was from today. Now, a coach would never have a player spend a week in his home. Even if the coach wanted to, the player probably would decide it was best to stay elsewhere; certainly, with what the players are paid today, they can afford it. Or the teams would pay a player’s hotel bill. But in 1972, the Cavs didn’t have a lot of money. Fitch was a young coach who had enough confidence in himself to bring a veteran player into his home and pick his brain. And the player went along with it, because he thought it was best for the team.

  The Cavs were a young team with the likes of Bingo Smith, Austin Carr, Steve Patterson, Rick Roberson, and John Johnson. Three years later, the 1975-76 Cavs would reach the Eastern Conference Finals.

  But this team wasn’t ready to win. As Joe Tait once told me, “Fitch traded for you because he needed a veteran to show his young players how to act. You were a role model for that team, and Fitch also wanted to have you around to learn what he could from you.”

  Fitch would ask my opinion, and he really listened. He didn’t get upset or insecure when I said something that wasn’t exactly what he wanted to hear. One day, we had just returned from a road trip: We’d lost most of our games, and I missed one of those games with a bad knee. We came home on a commercial flight, and he had the bus waiting for us at the Cleveland airport. We went straight from the airport to the gym, because Fitch wanted to have practice. Everyone was tired from the grueling trip, in which we’d played in five cities in eight days, and from the cross-country flight that had worn us out. Now Fitch had us on the court, and he was really pushing us hard, lots of demanding drills and a tough scrimmage. He didn’t like how we were playing, but our legs were gone. When the tank is empty, the car doesn’t run, no matter how much you try to tune up the engine.

  Then Fitch stopped the practice and told us to run sprints.

  First, the centers ran from one end of the court to the other.

  Then he had the forwards do it.

  Finally, the guards. All of us were dragging. My sore knee was killing me, and I sort of limped through the sprint.

  Then, I just sat down.

  Understand that no one sat down during a Bill Fitch practice. His personality was such that you’d never even consider it. But with my knee, I could barely stand up. Besides, these sprints served no purpose.

  Yet Fitch was going for another round of running.

  The centers ran.

  The forwards ran.

  Then he looked at me. The guards were supposed to run. I didn’t stand up.

  “OK,” he said. “That’s it, practice is over.”

  We went downstairs to clean up and change clothes. All of the players were grumbling about the practice, complaining about Fitch. The locker room was ripe for a mutiny, and I knew if I said anything against the coach, the situation would become very ugly.

  I didn’t utter a word. I respected Fitch too much to do that, even though I didn’t agree with the practice. As I left the gym, Fitch was waiting for me.

  “Let’s have a cup of coffee,” he said.

  So we sat down for some coffee.

  “All right,” he said. “What’s on your mind?”

  “Well,” I said, “what did you teach us today?”

  He looked strangely at me, and I could tell he just didn’t get it.

  “What did you teach us?” I repeated.

  “What do you mean?” he asked.

  “You punished us today because we’re not a very good team,” I said. “But you didn’t teach us anything. I’ll run through a wall for you. So will the other guys, but you have to teach us something, not just punish us because we’re not very talented.”

  He kind of shook his head. At the time, I’m not sure he understood exactly what I meant. But in some practices later in the season, when he saw my knee was bothering me, he’d tell our trainer, Ron Culp, “Take Lenny and work on his knee a little bit.”

  Then he’d go back and make the rest of the team run. So all he learned at that point in his career was not to run me into the ground.

  But I learned a lot from Bill Fitch.

  His assistant was Jimmy Rodgers, and I was shocked to see the scouting reports that Jimmy assembled for us. They were so detailed about each key opposing player and his tendencies that I was impressed. None of my pro coaches had ever put together reports that even approached the ones used by the Cavs. As I read them, I was amazed by their accuracy. I knew the league and the players very well at that point in my career, so I could judge if the information in the reports was worthwhile. I began to make mental notes that I’d want these kinds of reports the next time I coached in the NBA—and I was sure that I would coach again.

  Fitch thought so, too. When we were on planes, Bill had me sit next to him. We went over the reports. We talked about the team. I give Bill credit for really wanting to know what I had on my mind. He’d constantly diagram plays and then ask me if I thought they’d work. Some of my teammates would say I was being held hostage by the coach, which went back to my being a POW in Cleveland.

  When Bill was ejected from a game, he’d have me take over the team. I thought Jimmy Rodgers should do it, because he was Bill’s assistant, but Bill insisted that I coach when he did something such as throw a chair at an official, which he did one night at the old Cleveland Arena. The official’s name was Bob Rakel. He’d called something against us. The next thing I knew, Bill had grabbed the folding chair that he had been sitting on and flung it across the floor. Thank God it didn’t hit anyone. Then Bill ran on the floor after Rakel. I suddenly realized that no one was going to stop him, so I sp
rinted over and grabbed Bill from behind, pinning his arms behind his back and telling him to calm down before he got in real trouble. I don’t think Bill wanted to hit Rakel with the chair, but seeing it bang off the floor and Fitch being ejected was another lesson to me: Don’t let your temper get so far out of control that you end up doing something you’d regret for the rest of your life. Bill understood that, too; he coached in the NBA for twenty-five years and never again did anything even remotely close to throwing a chair. By the way, he still has that chair—all dented up—in the study of his home outside Houston.

  While I have been ejected from games—far more often than most people realize—I’m proud that I’ve never done anything that embarrassed me or my family. I just don’t think it serves any purpose to lose control and act like a wild man. I don’t believe it really fires up your team, and it can hurt you with the officials. They’re human; if you’re acting like a complete maniac, they’re not going to cut your team any breaks on those key calls that can go either way.

  Which calls are those?

  Your player drives into the middle of the lane. At the last second, a defender steps in front of him. Your player flips up a shot that drops into the net. At the same moment, your player and the defender collide.

  Is it a charge on your player, or a foul on the defender?

  It all happened so fast, it’s hard to know. But in a tight game, a call like this is crucial. If you’ve been screaming at an official all night, arguing even the most obvious calls, then you could be in trouble when it comes to a critical decision like this. Not with every official, but some guys. As I said, they’re people. They have to make difficult, split-second decisions, calls that really can go either way. I like to keep everything in my favor when that happens.

  Something else I learned from Fitch was how to use game films with the players. Bill was obsessed with films; he’d watch them for four to six hours a night. He had long film sessions with the team. I remember one day, he had the film on for quite a while. This was in the days of the sixteen-millimeter films played on a movie projector, so you’d turn the lights out. Well, with the lights out and the same plays being shown over and over, it didn’t take long for some of the players to fall asleep. You can reach a point of diminishing returns.