Basketball

by Alexander Wolff

  Being home again gave the Celtics an immense lift, and that evening, for all their bone-weariness, they outran and outhustled the fast Syracuse team and won handily, 134–117. They did this, moreover, without any help from Cousy. He had tried out his legs during the pre-game warmup, but after taking two shots concluded that he would run the risk of aggravating his injuries if he played. After the game, he spent an hour or so talking with reporters, giving autographs, and greeting old friends. He then joined his wife, who was waiting for him in the corridor outside the locker room, and they drove home to Worcester, taking me along. There was no game on Saturday, but Cousy was constantly on the go, handling problems that had accumulated during his two weeks’ absence. The telephone began ringing at breakfast, while he was reacquainting himself with his daughters—the first call was from a Worcester friend, a priest named Father Ganynor, about some local charity work Cousy is interested in—and continued to ring fairly regularly from that time on. Mrs. Cousy, a comely young woman, who grew up with her future husband in St. Albans, Queens, was soon busy providing coffee for a steady parade of visitors. Joe Sharry, a Worcester attorney, who is Cousy’s partner in the insurance business, stayed for five cups. The most important visitor, George Stavros, a Worcester restaurateur, stayed for three. Earlier that week, after several long-distance telephone talks with Cousy, Stavros had made an offer for a restaurant in Framingham called the Abner Wheeler House, and the two men, who had been collaborating on the deal for months, had many things to discuss. Cousy finally left home at noon, and I made the one-hour drive with him to the Celtics’ office in the Boston Garden. There he answered some of the mail that had piled up for him, dictated a telegram to an out-of-town sportswriter who had sent him a batch of questions, and tape-recorded an interview to be used to promote a magazine article he had written. The main reason for his trip into town, however, was to give his legs the benefit of the whirlpool bath in the Celtics’ dressing room, and he attended to that next. As we headed back to Worcester, he made one slight detour, driving up Beacon Street to a spot called Coolidge Corner, where he pointed out a new Chinese restaurant, called Anita Chue’s. “I’m not the only one on the team interested in the restaurant business,” he said, with a mischievous smile. “Wouldn’t you know Auerbach would own a piece of a Chinese joint?”

  On Sunday morning, Cousy picked up Heinsohn at his home shortly after eleven and they headed for the Garden and the afternoon game with the Chicago Zephyrs. It was a bright, crisp morning, and both men were in a merry, ragging mood. At one point, for example, when they were comparing their prowess in making speeches at banquets, Heinsohn remarked that he was having trouble with his favorite opening line: “I suppose all of you are wondering why I asked you here this evening.” He said, “It’s a great line and I hate to lose it, but some audiences don’t get it at all and then it takes me five minutes to make a comeback.”

  The restaurant for which Cousy and Stavros were bidding is on Route 9, the turnpike connecting Worcester and Boston, and when we passed it that morning, Heinsohn asked Cousy if he planned to change its name. “We’re still undecided,” Cousy told him. “My partner wants to call it ‘Bob Cousy’s Abner Wheeler House,’ but I’m sort of partial to ‘Abner Wheeler’s Bob Cousy House.’ More class.”

  “If you’re still thinking of taking up the piano next year, it might cut down your overhead,” Heinsohn said. “You could be featured in the lounge. Playing ‘Chopsticks.’ ”

  Cousy fished around for a rejoinder. “That’s good, clear thinking,” he said after a moment. “I’ll break the act in at Auerbach’s place.”

  At game time, Cousy was, as usual, implacably earnest. He had decided, after taking a heat treatment, to see how his legs stood up to a light workout. However, being constitutionally incapable of keeping himself down in first or second gear, he was soon roaring all over the court, driving the Celtics into one fast break after another, passing superlatively, and shooting well. When he came out, at the end of the first quarter, the Celtics had an eighteen-point lead, Auerbach’s cigar was already lit, and Cousy was no longer needed. Soon after the game, I left for New York. I was entirely worn out from the brief trip.

  Cousy had another day off on Monday, but on Tuesday, along with Russell and Heinsohn, he was off for Los Angeles and the All-Star Game. I watched the game on television with considerable apprehension, knowing that Cousy was still not back in top physical shape, and feeling that it would be historically wrong if he did not give an excellent account of himself in his final All-Star Game. My worries were needless. He acted like the youngest man on the floor, and it was his élan and generalship that broke the game open for the East.

  Some of Cousy’s admirers contend that he has never played quite as well as he has this year. Perhaps that is going a bit too far, but the main point is that he has made his farewell season a suitably triumphant one. This does not come to pass very often in sports. All great athletes fully intend to call it a career when they are still at or near the peak of their powers, but for one reason or another few of them actually do, and the last chapters can be pathetic. When Cousy leaves the game after the playoffs, it will not be the same for quite some time. Indeed, the prospect brings to mind the wonderful line that begins William Hazlitt’s tribute to John Cavanagh, the great nineteenth-century handball champion: “When a man dies who does any one thing better than anyone else in the world, which so many are trying to do well, it leaves a gap in society.”

  John McPhee

  Few writers’ beginnings argue more persuasively for the benefit of propinquity than those of John McPhee (b. 1931). He grew up in Princeton, New Jersey, the son of the physician for the sports teams at the local university, from which he graduated in 1953. By the early 1960s, having found a staff position at Time yet hoping to catch the eye of The New Yorker, McPhee accepted his father’s invitation to join him at a Princeton freshman game to check out a basketball prodigy from Missouri. That was his introduction to Bill Bradley, who became the subject of McPhee’s first long New Yorker profile and a good enough friend that the senior All-America would hide out in McPhee’s Prince­ton home so he could finish his thesis free from the harassment of reporters and agents. New Yorker editor William Shawn at first turned down McPhee’s proposal, believing the previous piece in this anthology, Herbert Warren Wind’s “Farewell to Cousy,” had filled his magazine’s biennial quota of basketball stories. We’re lucky that Shawn reconsidered, as was McPhee: during a half-century of turning out virtuoso nonfiction as a New Yorker staff writer, he would write canonically on such other sports as tennis and lacrosse, and on subjects as varied as canoe building, nuclear physics, and the cultivation of oranges. But he broke through with “A Sense of Where You Are,” which became a book of the same name after Bradley took Princeton on its unlikely run to the 1965 Final Four. This excerpt showcases McPhee’s ability to set a scene and deploy detail, two characteristic virtues of his work.

  from

  A Sense of Where You Are

  THOSE who have never seen him are likely to assume that he is seven and a half feet tall—the sort of elaborate weed that once all but choked off the game. With an average like his, it would be fair to imagine him spending his forty minutes of action merely stuffing the ball into the net. But the age of the goon is over. Bradley is six feet five inches tall—the third-tallest player on the Princeton team. He is perfectly coördinated, and he is unbelievably accurate at every kind of shot in the basketball repertory. He does much of his scoring from considerable distances, and when he sends the ball toward the basket, the odds are that it is going in, since he has made more than half the shots he has attempted as a college player. With three, or even four, opponents clawing at him, he will rise in the air, hang still for a moment, and release a high parabola jump shot that almost always seems to drop into the basket with an equal margin to the rim on all sides. Against Harvard last February, his ninth long shot from the floor nicked the rim slightly on its way into the net. The firs
t eight had gone cleanly through the center. He had missed none at all. He missed several as the evening continued, but when his coach finally took him out, he had scored fifty-one points. In a game twenty-four hours earlier, he had begun a thirty-nine point performance by hitting his first four straight. Then he missed a couple. Then he made ten consecutive shots, totally demoralizing Dartmouth.

  Bradley is one of the few basketball players who have ever been appreciatively cheered by a disinterested away-from-home crowd while warming up. This curious event occurred last March, just before Princeton eliminated the Virginia Military Institute, the year’s Southern Conference champion, from the N.C.A.A. championships. The game was played in Philadelphia and was the last of a tripleheader. The people there were worn out, because most of them were emotionally committed to either Villanova or Temple—two local teams that had just been involved in enervating battles with Providence and Connecticut, respectively, scrambling for a chance at the rest of the country. A group of Princeton boys shooting basketballs miscellaneously in preparation for still another game hardly promised to be a high point of the evening, but Bradley, whose routine in the warmup time is a gradual crescendo of activity, is more interesting to watch before a game than most players are in play. In Philadelphia that night, what he did was, for him, anything but unusual. As he does before all games, he began by shooting set shots close to the basket, gradually moving back until he was shooting long sets from twenty feet out, and nearly all of them dropped into the net with an almost mechanical rhythm of accuracy. Then he began a series of expandingly difficult jump shots, and one jumper after another went cleanly through the basket with so few exceptions that the crowd began to murmur. Then he started to perform whirling reverse moves before another cadence of almost steadily accurate jump shots, and the murmur increased. Then he began to sweep hook shots into the air. He moved in a semicircle around the court. First with his right hand, then with his left, he tried seven of these long, graceful shots—the most difficult ones in the orthodoxy of basketball—and ambidextrously made them all. The game had not even begun, but the presumably unimpressible Philadelphians were applauding like an audience at an opera.

  Bradley has a few unorthodox shots, too. He dislikes flamboyance, and, unlike some of basketball’s greatest stars, has apparently never made a move merely to attract attention. While some players are eccentric in their shooting, his shots, with only occasional exceptions, are straightforward and unexaggerated. Nonetheless, he does make something of a spectacle of himself when he moves in rapidly parallel to the baseline, glides through the air with his back to the basket, looks for a teammate he can pass to, and, finding none, tosses the ball into the basket over one shoulder, like a pinch of salt. Only when the ball is actually dropping through the net does he look around to see what has happened, on the chance that something might have gone wrong, in which case he would have to go for the rebound. That shot has the essential characteristics of a wild accident, which is what many people stubbornly think they have witnessed until they see him do it for the third time in a row. All shots in basketball are supposed to have names—the set, the hook, the layup, the jump shot, and so on—and one weekend last July, while Bradley was in Princeton working on his senior thesis and putting in some time in the Princeton gymnasium to keep himself in form for the Olympics, I asked him what he called his over-the-shoulder shot. He said that he had never heard a name for it, but that he had seen Oscar Robertson, of the Cincinnati Royals, and Jerry West, of the Los Angeles Lakers, do it, and had worked it out for himself. He went on to say that it is a much simpler shot than it appears to be, and, to illustrate, he tossed a ball over his shoulder and into the basket while he was talking and looking me in the eye. I retrieved the ball and handed it back to him. “When you have played basketball for a while, you don’t need to look at the basket when you are in close like this,” he said, throwing it over his shoulder again and right through the hoop. “You develop a sense of where you are.”

  Roy Blount, Jr.

  Roy Blount, Jr. (b. 1941) once described himself as a “humorist-novelist-journalist-dramatist-lyricist-lecturer-reviewer-performer-versifier-cruciverbalist-sportswriter-screenwriter-anthologist-columnist-philologist.” To which—after looking up cruciverbalist and discovering that it’s someone who constructs crossword puzzles—one might add radio personality, memoirist, and confirmed southerner. After growing up in Decatur, Georgia, Blount won a Grantland Rice Sportswriting Scholarship to attend Vanderbilt, where he edited the school newspaper, The Hustler. He broke in as a reporter and editorialist at the Atlanta Journal, then spent seven years at Sports Illustrated. There he staked out a remote position in the wide range of styles on staff during the late 1960s and early ’70s, combining a conversational voice marbled with erudition (he had picked up a master’s in English from Harvard) with the storytelling chops native to his home region. In 1970 SI sent Blount on just the kind of off-center assignment that more and more magazine editors would throw his way: a feature on the aging basketball showman Wilfred Hetzel. The trick-shot artist is basketball’s version of a humorist, the tag most often attached to Blount, as well as the word he chose to lead that freight train of self-description above. “Generally,” Blount wrote in his 1998 memoir Be Sweet, “you can find in the childhood of a significant humorist some event so absurdly traumatic that there’s no way to make straightforward sense of it.” Hetzel suffered through just such a trauma, which Blount confides in the reader here. His profile reminds us that pathos can be found in the life of an avowed entertainer, and that the story of someone who plays it for laughs is often best entrusted to a fellow funny man.

  47 Years A Shot-Freak

  WORLD’S GREATEST (and doubtless only) Freak Shot Expert Wilfred Hetzel, who was discharged from the Army in 1943 “for nervousness,” is nervous now. In the assembly program at Ladysmith (Va.) High School this morning, the kids were a little restless, and his performance a little ragged. True, he hit over 70% of his gallimaufry of shots—with eyes shut, with legs crossed, with legs downright entwined, on the bounce off the floor, from one foot, from one knee, from both knees, from behind the backboard (frontward and backward), from up on his toes, from back on his heels (toes in the air) and in various combinations of the above. The kids responded with a gleeful shout, as he says they almost always do, to his “goofy series,” in which he suddenly assumes a fey, exaggeratedly knock-kneed or bowlegged stance and then lets fly.

  But the days of his 60-foot and 70-foot peg shots, which he used to make off ceilings or over rafters or simply from one end of the court to the other, are gone. Now, 58 years old and weakened by an operation for TB, the man who bills himself as “Thrice Featured in Believe It or Not and Twice in Strange as It Seems” can shoot the ball only underhanded (except on his bounce shots) and seldom from farther out than the foul line. And in 14 tries at Ladysmith, his 18-foot dropkick, his most spectacular remaining shot, was in and out once but never quite swished. The kids cheered frequently and came up for autographs afterward but, as Hetzel says, “If I can’t impress them as the best—well, that’s the point.”

  Now, sitting in the boys’ dressing room of Louisa County High School in Mineral, Va., 30 miles from Ladysmith, he is shaking, and drinking his fifth cup of coffee to counteract “spots of fatigue.” He got only four hours of sleep last night because the pills he has been taking for his sciatica since 1949 keep him awake in spite of Sominex. The principal of this just-integrated 580-pupil school has consented to move Mr. Hetzel’s performance up from 2:30 to 1 o’clock so he won’t have to sit around getting tenser.

  “Nothing terrifies me more,” Hetzel says, “than for the ball to be falling just short by inches—because these students don’t know, they don’t realize the handicaps. And then maybe some of the students start laughing, and I try harder. What some people can’t understand is that I’m governed by averages, too.”

  With that he sheds his suit, revealing himself in the maroon shorts, the gold shirt lett
ered WILDRED HETZEL on the front and FREAK SHOT SPECIALIST on the back, the worn black-top shoes and the straggly strips of tape on his knees (kneepads shift too much when he kneels to shoot) that constitute his working uniform. He has worn this outfit underneath his clothes on the road since 1962; he had read that Esther Williams kept her bathing suit on underneath for quick changes during her appearance tours. Distractedly, Hetzel proceeds to the gym and takes a few practice shots as the kids file in. Then he presents himself and relates, in an absorbed, recitative voice, a brief history of his involvement in freak shooting.

  * * *

  Not the comprehensive history, because he hasn’t the time. If he were to include all the material he is more than happy to bring forth in conversation, he would go back to 1924, when, in Melrose, Minn., at the age of 12, he nailed a barrel hoop to the side of the family woodshed and took his first shot. If you start counting then, Hetzel has said, “and if you include all the times with a baseball, a kittenball, a soccer ball, a rag ball, some socks tied together in the form of a ball, a tennis ball, a football—I had to learn to shoot the football end over end so that it would nose down at just the right moment and pass through that small hoop”—if you count all those shots, along with the 30,000 hours he estimates he has spent shooting a regulation basketball through a real basket, says Hetzel—“I have probably shot more goals than any man in history.”