On the floor of the San Diego Sports Arena in 1975, after Wooden had won his last NCAA title, a booster sought him out and said, “Great victory, John. It makes up for your letting us down last year.” The attitude implicit in that statement disgusted him. There would be no second thoughts, no regrets, about retiring. He didn’t want to step down. He had to. “Daddy’s job wasn’t fun for us,” says Nan. “It really wasn’t.”
Here is a lesson about learning. Back in the late ’60s, when he was in the midst of winning those seven straight titles and had little reason to question himself about anything, Wooden attended a press conference at which the Los Angeles Lakers announced that they had traded for Wilt Chamberlain. A reporter asked Wilt about his reputation for being hard to handle. Would the Laker coach have problems handling him? “I am not a thing,” Chamberlain said. “You handle things. You work with people.”
Upon returning home that day, Wooden opened a copy of Practical Modern Basketball. He turned to the section titled “Handling Your Players,” crossed out “Handling” and wrote in “Working With.” He phoned his publisher and asked that the change be made in all subsequent printings.
“John was a better coach at 55 than he was at 50,” says Pete Newell, the former coach at Cal and San Francisco, who has known Wooden for more than 40 years. “He was a better coach at 60 than at 55. He’s a true example of a man who learned from day one to day last.”
In the outer lobby of the old Martinsville High gym hangs a picture of the Artesians’ 1927 state championship team. “Gone,” says Wooden, pointing to the player in the top left-hand corner. “Gone, gone, gone, gone,” he continues, moving his finger from teammate to teammate. “Almost gone,” he says, his finger finally coming to rest on his likeness.
When speaking engagements take him east, he’ll route himself through Indianapolis, rent a car, drive the highway south and slip into the various graveyards around Martinsville, where his and Nell’s forebears are buried. At each one he’ll say a prayer. The neighboring gravestones are graced with names like Way and Byroad and Schoolcraft, names that sound as if they came from a novel about Puritans.
His preoccupation with death lifts only when Cori, 3, and her cousin, John, who’s pushing three, come by to visit. Cori is the philosophical one, and little John is the instigator. It was John who got Papa, as they call their great-grandfather, to turn off all the lights and play a flashlight game that the kids call Ghostbusters. Nell must have been cackling from behind the credenza.
Meanwhile, over the hill in Westwood, a variation of the same game goes on. “The problem we’re having is John Wooden,” a Bruin named Kenny Fields said a few years ago. “He won too much. Now our fans can’t accept anything less.”
Wooden has scrupulously avoided commenting on the performance of any of his many successors. Indeed, Harrick says he has to crowbar advice out of him. Watch Wooden watching the Bruins, from his second-row seat across from the UCLA bench, occasionally with Cori and John scrambling around him: He claps rhythmically to the pep band during timeouts, but otherwise he betrays little reaction to the basketball before him.
Wooden won’t say this explicitly, but the man UCLA should have hired back in 1975, the man the old coach praises whenever he has a chance, is Louisville’s Denny Crum. That single move might have forestalled all the Bruins’ recent travails. But Morgan refused to consider him as Wooden’s replacement simply because Crum, a former UCLA player and assistant coach, had been divorced. Such were the impossible standards of John and Nell’s legacy.
So we come to the lesson of the peaks and the valleys. If you should catch one of those Final Four historical shows on late-night cable, be sure to study Wooden’s Bruins in victory. They’re happy campers, storming the floor and cutting down the nets, but always they hold something back. “Of course, I will have reminded them in a timeout,” says Wooden, “for every artificial peak you create there is a valley. I don’t like valleys. Games can be lost in them.”
He had seen Phil Woolpert win back-to-back national championships at San Francisco in 1955 and ’56 and then struggle in the crucible of trying to keep winning. Then he saw Ed Jucker also win two in a row, at Cincinnati in ’61 and ’62, only to leave coaching because of similar pressure. That’s when he resolved never to exult unduly in victory or to languish in defeat. “One’s life,” he says, “should be the same.”
But with Nell’s death his very faith wavered. Never mind that a favorite plaque of theirs hangs in his study and reads GOD NEVER CLOSES ONE DOOR WITHOUT OPENING ANOTHER. “He did not want to live,” says Gary Cunningham, his old assistant. “A lot of us were worried, and disappointed, too. What he had instilled in our lives he wasn’t practicing in his own.” All that winning, and look what one loss did.
A few weeks ago Cori and Papa looked up as an airplane passed overhead. “See that airplane, Papa?” said Cori. “I’m going to take that airplane and fly all the way to heaven and get Mama and bring her back, so Papa won’t be lonely anymore.”
Gracious sakes, Cori, no. Stay right here with Papa. For later, there, he’ll have Mama. For now, here, he has you and John, two previous generations of Woodens, and—should he ever change that mind that’s so hard to change once it’s made up—a convention full of rudderless coaches of basketball, who desperately need to learn how to teach the game.
Before this extraordinary life gets played out, before the buzzer sounds, won’t someone please call timeout to remind him? He has taught so many of us such wonderful lessons. He has one more lesson, his own, to study up on.
Charles P. Pierce
A sports story by Charlie Pierce (b. 1953) will spill beyond the length and breadth of any playing surface. It ranges far afield, alighting here and burrowing there, with history, politics, and culture as its lodestars. Yet there’s always that distinctive voice, earnest in its curiosity, firm in its convictions, sometimes fired by indignation, usually leavened with compassion. Rare is the Pierce story that fails to betray his real-world pedigree: he studied under former LBJ press secretary George Reedy at Marquette and covered presidential campaigns for alt weeklies. Pierce served up some of his most memorable basketball profiles—on players like Magic Johnson and Shaquille O’Neal, and such coaches as Abe Lemons and Ben Jobe—in carefully set layers. This portrait of Larry Bird doubles as an explication of the Boston Celtics forward’s place in the Venn overlap of race and basketball in a city that has had intense engagements with both. Pierce made his bones in that town, at the Boston Phoenix and Boston Herald, before reaching a wider audience with the National Sports Daily, GQ, Esquire, Grantland, and Sports Illustrated, and as a regular on such NPR shows as Wait, Wait . . . Don’t Tell Me and Only a Game. Devoted fans who reach for a Pierce piece know he’ll pull at multiple threads and somehow tie them together—and won’t underestimate his readers along the way.
The Brother from Another Planet
THIS IS some pale stuff out there on the wing. All the other basketball players, Celtics and Pacers alike, have cleared the side, and they have left two of their own all alone. This is the isolation play, an offensive maneuver as simple as milk, yet responsible in large part for the wild and unruly success that has overtaken professional basketball in the past decade. It is out of this alignment that Michael Jordan is cleared for takeoff, and it was out of this alignment that Magic Johnson ground up the hapless on his way to the low post, and it is out of this alignment that Charles Barkley is freed to do both, often on the same play. It is a wonderful set piece—a scorer and a defender, alone with each other, the center of all focus. It is a prideful moment for both players—the Ur-matchup of the American game. One-on-one.
Anyway, this is some pale stuff out there. Larry Bird has the ball cocked high and waiting. He is guarded by an Indiana Pacer named Detlef Schrempf, a blond German with a brush cut who makes Larry Bird look like Sam Cooke. Bird has Schrempf on a string now, moving the ball just slightly, faking with his fingertips. Other Celtics heckle the Pacer forward from the
bench. More tiny fakes, and Schrempf is hearing imaginary cutters thundering behind him toward the hoop. His eyes cheat a bit over his shoulders. Finally, with Schrempf utterly discombobulated, Bird dips the ball all the way around his opponent’s hip. Schrempf half-turns to help defensively on the man to whom he’s sure Bird has just passed the ball. Bird pulls the ball back, looking very much like a dip who’s just plucked a rube’s gold watch from his vest pocket. He throws up that smooth hay-baler of a jump shot from just above his right ear, and it whispers through the net. The play draws cheers and laughter, and even Bird is smiling a little as the two teams head down the court again.
A few days earlier, Connie Hawkins was nominated for the Basketball Hall of Fame, the final vindication of what poet Jim Carroll has written about basketball, “a game where you can correct all your mistakes instantly, and in midair.” Hawkins was a glider and a soarer. A legend in Brooklyn long before he was twenty, he fits snugly between Elgin Baylor and Julius Erving on the path of the game that continues upward to (for the moment) Michael Jordan.
Hawkins’s best years were wasted in exile on the game’s fringes; his innocent involvement in the point-shaving investigation of 1961 truncated his college career and put him on an NBA blacklist until 1969. He will go into the Hall of Fame only because some people saw him do something wondrous and they told the tale. It is a triumph for the game’s oral history, for its living tradition. There is a transcendence about Connie Hawkins and about his legend. It resides out of time and place, floating sweetly there in the air above all convention and cavil.
In large part, of course, this living tradition is an African-American tradition. In reaction to it, basketball’s overwhelmingly white establishment assailed the skills of legends like Connie Hawkins, deriding their game as “playground basketball,” the result of some atavistic superiority that must be controlled by (predominantly white) coaches for the greater good. Black players were innately talented, of course, but they were lacking in the Fundamentals, which virtually always were defined in a way that brought the game back to earth and removed it from the largely black custodians of its living tradition.
Withal, both sides were talking past each other. The game’s white establishment was talking about strategy and tactics. Black players were talking about the psychology of defining oneself as a person by what one did on the court. From this emphasis on psyche came the concept of Face—a philosophy of glorious retribution by which you dunk unto others as they have already dunked unto you, only higher and harder. It’s this competitive attitude that makes the Fundamentals interesting. And it’s this guilty knowledge that made basketball’s white establishment so determined to minimize its obvious importance. Soon, these views ossified into the attitudes by which black players are praised for their “athletic ability”—code for the Super Negro not far removed from William Shockley’s laboratory—while white players are usually commended for their “intelligence” and their “work ethic.” Both sides internalized these notions, and they were irreconcilable.
By the late 1970s, the NBA, having expanded far too quickly and recklessly for its own good, was floundering. Competition had vanished. So had most of the fans. There were some drug busts, common enough in all sports. At the same time, the league was perceived as becoming blacker; by 1979, 70 percent of the players were African American. People made the usual foul connections. There were the nods and the winks in the executive suites. Disillusioned fans drifted away, and pretty soon the NBA found its championship series being broadcast on tape delay.
In 1979, Larry Bird and Magic Johnson began their careers with the Boston Celtics and the Los Angeles Lakers, respectively. There was a frisson of expectation as soon as they went around the league. By season’s end, Bird had been named the NBA Rookie of the Year, and Johnson had propelled the Lakers to the title, scoring forty-two points against the Philadelphia 76ers in the seventh game of the final series. Over the next decade, the two of them played so well and drew so many fans that they are now given undisputed credit for saving professional basketball. Neither one ever evinced eye-popping athletic skills; Bird may be the only great player in history more earthbound than Magic. Their importance lies in the fact that the two irreconcilable halves of the game found in them—and, especially, in Bird—a common ground.
The most fundamental of the traditional Fundamentals is that a great player must make his team greater. Thus does a whirling dunk count only the same two points as a simple layup. Both Bird and Magic pass this test easily. However, the game’s living tradition demands that this be accomplished in a way that ups the psychic ante, that forces the cycle of payback onto the opposition. Neither man has ever shrunk from this imperative. What Bird did to Schrempf, he did not do merely to score two points for the Celtics but to break his opponent’s will, just as once in a championship game, he looked down to see where the three-point line was, took a conspicuous step back behind it, and then sunk a coup de grace through the Houston Rockets.
In short, the NBA has succeeded because it has become the world’s premier athletic show. Playground ball has triumphed completely. It’s hard to imagine now that college basketball once thought it was a good idea to ban the dunk, or that former UCLA coach John Wooden still thinks it’s a good idea. Wooden, supreme guru of the Fundamentals, now sounds like a hopeless crank. What Bird and Magic did was difficult, and damned-near revolutionary—they made the Fundamentals part of the show. They did it by infusing the simple act of throwing a pass with the same splendid arrogance that so vividly illuminated Connie Hawkins midflight.
“What you’ve got to understand about Larry is that he plays a white game with a black head,” says Atlanta’s Dominique Wilkins. “If he could do a three-sixty dunk and laugh at you, he’d do it. Instead, he hits that three, and then he laughs at you.”
“There’s no doubt about it,” adds Indiana’s Chuck Person, who has enjoyed a spirited rivalry with Bird. “Larry’s a street kid.”
It comes from his life—a lost, lonely kid whose father was an amiable drunk who one day called Larry’s mother on the phone and, with her listening, blew his brains out. There was grinding poverty. There was hopelessness. Compared to this life, Magic Johnson had it easy, as did Michael Jordan. Compared to this life, Spike Lee, who uses Bird as a cartoon foil, was one of the Cleavers. Instinctively, Larry Bird understands the country’s most pernicious division as one of class and not of race—a distinction that a decade of public demagoguery has done its damnedest to obscure.
“The poorer person,” he muses, “the person who don’t have much will spend more time playing sports to get rid of the energy he has.” And anger and desperation? “Yeah, them too. Why go home when you got nothing to go home to?”
All his life, he has resisted the notion of being anyone’s great white hope, because it never seemed logical to him. “I’ve always thought of basketball as a black man’s game,” Bird says. “I just tried to do everything I could to fit in.”
Long ago, Indiana was a demographic fluke. Unlike the other midwestern states, it was settled from south to north rather than from east to west. It was flooded with refugees from Tennessee and the Carolinas. They brought with them so much of the Old South that, by 1922, the Ku Klux Klan was virtually running the state. An Indiana town called Martinsville is famous for being the home of two institutions—John Wooden and the modern Klan. When Jerry Sichting, a former NBA player and now the Celtics’ radio commentator, left Martinsville to go to Purdue, his black teammates shied away from him. “I said I was from Martinsville, and I got that look,” Sichting says. “It’s still out there, no question.” Larry Bird is from French Lick, which is thirty miles down Highway 37 from Martinsville. Thirty miles south.
Bird seems to have grown up remarkably free of prejudice. Throughout his career, he has managed to stay admirably clear of those who would make him a symbol through which to act out their own fears and bigotry. He has called Magic Johnson his role model, and he referred to former teammate Dennis
Johnson as “the greatest player I ever saw.” He even delighted in bringing NBA pal Quinn Buckner home to French Lick and into the worst redneck joints in town. “Yeah,” recalls Buckner. “He took me to some places that I might not have gotten out of in less than three pieces if I went in alone. But Larry truly doesn’t look at it that way. He doesn’t want any part of that great white hope stuff. He never did.”
“Just the other day,” Bird says, “a guy come up to me and says, ‘Here, sign this. Put on it that you’re the greatest white player to ever play the game.’ To me, that don’t mean nothing. The greatest player ever to play the game. That means a helluva lot more.”
Unfortunately, Bird has been a lightning rod. The Celtics, whose historical record on racial matters is positively revolutionary, have been forced to carry the weight of Boston’s abysmal history in the matter of race relations. They were criticized for lightening up their roster in the early Eighties, although it’s difficult to make the case that it’s immoral to draft Bird and Kevin McHale, or to concoct a roster that won the NBA title three times in the decade. However, on a larger scale, the Eighties were generally a decade of reaction in racial matters. Bird’s first season coincided with the ascendancy in culture and politics of the shibboleth of the Oppressed White Male. A society that could straight-facedly equate Allan Bakke with Rosa Parks evolved easily to one that could see no metaphorical distance between Clarence Thomas and the Scottsboro Boys.
Those comforted by the prevailing reactionary zeitgeist were looking for a hero, and Larry Bird and the Celtics qualified. Those revolted by it were looking for a villain, and Bird and the Celtics qualified there too. Thus, when it became fashionable to make Larry Bird into the greatest player of all time—certainly an arguable proposition, particularly up until about 1986—few people were objective about it anymore.
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