Basketball

by Alexander Wolff

  In 1987, after losing to the Celtics in a conference playoff series, Isiah Thomas blurted out the problem. Defending statements made by rookie Dennis Rodman, he said, “If Bird were black, he’d be just another good guy.” The comment was graceless and ill-timed, but it was also the truth. Had Bird been black, his physical abilities would’ve been emphasized at the expense of his intelligence and his diligence at practice. Thomas’s statement was excoriated for being racist, which it certainly was not. To identify a racial problem is not racist. One might as well call a black man racist who points out that white people are rather heavily involved in redlining his neighborhood.

  By downplaying the comments and refusing to respond, Bird got Thomas out of the situation so deftly that Thomas later credited Bird with saving his public career. Bird would not have been able to do that had he not effectively defused the issue among his peers by connecting with the game’s psychology. While he passed and rebounded and got praised for his mastery of the Fundamentals, he exhibited such cutthroat competitive flair that the dunkers sensed a kindred spirit.

  “I always said that Larry was one of the most creative players I ever saw,” says Celtic center Robert Parish. “That same kind of thing that makes people do a dunk makes Larry throw that touch pass over his shoulder.”

  Neither was Bird blind to what was happening elsewhere. Just last fall, Celtic rookie Dee Brown was thrown to the ground by police in the chichi suburb of Wellesley because some clerk thought Brown “looked like” the man who had recently robbed the bank.

  “It’s still a scar,” Bird says. “You hear that Boston is a tough town for blacks. I don’t know. I can’t speak for them because I’m not black. I’ve seen some incidents, though. Dee Brown. Robert Parish got stopped a couple of times. Just for being black, you know.”

  Joe Bird’s son never talked about him. It was part of a past buried so deeply that when a writer from Sports Illustrated mentioned Joe’s suicide in an article, some of the boys from French Lick were said to have gone looking for him. But the son talked about Joe Bird this year. Talked freely, if not easily. Talked because a black man, a friend in L.A., was threatened by a fatal disease, and suddenly there was a connection between an amiable and self-destructive white man in a hard little town in Indiana and an amiable and doomed black man in the fastest lane of all. The son of the first saw the connection there between his father and his friend, and he saw it clearly, far beyond the cold balm of convenient banality.

  “I thought about when my Dad passed away,” said Larry Bird on the night after Magic Johnson announced that he had tested positive for HIV. “I thought about how I wandered around for a week, just numb. That’s what this is like.”

  He said it in that light little twang, the one that the people in southern Indiana brought with them from Tennessee, the one that made even Elvis sound modest in conversation. In truth, Bird has grown up remarkably unmarked by the benefits of his celebrity. “Larry doesn’t care about being a famous white player,” says Dave Gavitt, the Celtics CEO, “because Larry doesn’t care about being famous, period.” Indeed, as far as commercial endorsements are concerned, he falls well behind Johnson and Jordan. He has, however, consciously worked to change the racial debate in a way not easily done. He has proven himself in his way on someone else’s terms.

  It would have been easy for him to grow up hard in the native bigotry of his place. Once grown, he could have easily sensed in his bones that that bigotry is general throughout the land and exploited it shamelessly. If there are people who would make him the best player ever simply because he is white, then that’s their problem. If the Celtics became white America’s team, then that’s white America’s fault. Larry Bird, as an individual basketball player, has defined his enormous abilities in an African-American context, and he has triumphed within it.

  In his play—and, therefore, in his life, because the two are inextricably bound—he has declined to profit from the advantages that spring from the worst in our common culture. There are politicians, men infinitely more powerful than Larry Bird, who have proven unable to resist this same impulse. One of them plays horseshoes in the White House now.

  They say that basketball’s greatness is in its ability to bring people together, but that’s a lie. Glib and facile people say that about every sport, and yet sports are as riven by class and race as any other major institution of this culture. Those people are closer to being right in basketball, though, than they are in any other sport. Basketball, much more than baseball or football, unites and makes whole two cultures, and it obliterates the artificial divisions created by faceless, fearful men who cling to their own pathetic advantages. Those who would turn Larry Bird into a symbol useful to that vicious endeavor—and those who would use him as a straw man against whom they could fight back—are all blind to his true genius. They are frightened of the best possibilities of America.

  On this night, before he talked about his father and Magic, Larry Bird began the game by throwing a floor-length, behind-the-back pass that nobody could recall having seen Bird ever throw. But everyone on the floor knew it for what it was—an homage, extended in high style and in the game’s truest and most precious currency. Everyone who ever had dunked on a man, or had defied both aerodynamics and orthopedics to drop a shot full of life and music, identified it immediately. Dominique Wilkins, trailing the play, saw it for what it was—an entertainer’s play, but a bounce pass sure enough, with the arm extended right through to the fingertips, following through just the way that Clair Bee and Nat Holman and all those other guys wrote it down years ago, before the game moved into the air for good. The Fundamentals, but Showtime, too, beyond all measure.

  “Larry,” said one of his coaches, “was just saying goodbye.”

  Darcy Frey

  When he showed up on Brooklyn’s Coney Island in the fall of 1991 to follow the fortunes of the Lincoln High School team, Darcy Frey (b. 1961) was a freelancer with a rattletrap Toyota and enough time on his hands to simply hang around. He thought he’d be telling the story of young men who use talent and pluck to bootstrap their way out of a bleak environment. Instead, after a nine-month gestation, Frey realized he had a larger and darker story to tell—about a system where kids with dreams of stardom are set up to lose, and quickly learn, as he puts it at the end of The Last Shot (the title of the magazine article and the book that grew out of it), “that in this particular game failure is commonplace, like a shrug, and heartbreak the order of the day.” The New York Times hailed the book on its publication in 1994 for “elegance, economy and just the right amount of outrage.” For the article, published in Harper’s the year before, Frey won both a National Magazine Award and a Livingston Award. Before he landed at Harvard as a lecturer in English, Frey filed stories for The New York Times Magazine that would find their way into other media: a piece about airtraffic controllers led to the movie Pushing Tin, and the National Theatre of Great Britain adapted his profile of environmental scientist George Divoky into the stage production Greenland. The Last Shot could easily be repurposed for a theatre audience too, with its cinematic ensemble of compassionately drawn characters. The book opens with this excerpt, set at “the Garden,” the outdoor court in the middle of Coney Island’s largest housing project. There’s an early glimpse of fourteen-year-old Stephon Marbury, who went on to become an NBA All-Star and New York Knick in the big-time Garden. But the other Lincoln Railsplitters encountered disappointment, or worse. Tchaka Shipp met the NCAA’s standardized test score requirement and found his way to the Big East, only to watch his career spiral downward after an auto accident. Corey Johnson’s back-up plan to become a writer was scuttled in classrooms where learning isn’t taken seriously. As for Russell Thomas, Frey’s pseudonym for Darryle Flicking, his life ended at age twenty-six in California where, homeless, he was struck and killed by an Amtrak train.

  from

  The Last Shot

  RUSSELL THOMAS places the toe of his right sneaker one inch behind the thre
e-point line. Inspecting the basket with a level gaze, he bends twice at the knees, raises the ball to shoot, then suddenly looks around. What is it? Has he spotted me, watching from the opposite end of the playground? No, something else is up. He’s lifting his nose to the wind like a spaniel; he appears to be gauging air currents. Russell waits until the wind settles, bits of trash feathering lightly to the ground. Then he sends a twenty-five-foot jump shot arcing through the soft summer twilight. It drops without a sound through the dead center of the bare iron rim. So does the next one. So does the one after that. Alone in the gathering dusk, Russell begins to work the perimeter against imaginary defenders, unspooling jump shots from all points.

  It’s the summer of 1991, and Russell has just finished his junior year at Abraham Lincoln High School in Coney Island, New York. Eighteen years old, he stands six feet two, weighs a hundred and eighty pounds, and is the proud owner of a newly shaved scalp and a small goatee. When he practices at this court, everything between his shiny bald top and his jutting, bearded chin goes blank, and he moves over the asphalt as if in a trance—silent, monklike, in a galaxy of his own. Most summer evenings I come by this court to watch Russell and his friends play ball, and I have found few sights quite as stirring as that of Russell’s jumper, tracing a meteor curve in the still, expectant air. But the shot, I realize tonight, is merely the final gesture, the public flourish of a private regimen that brings Russell to this court day and night. Avoiding pickup games, he gets down to work: an hour of three-point shooting, then wind sprints up the fourteen flights in his project stairwell, then back to this court where, much to his friends’ amusement, he shoots one-handers ten feet from the basket while sitting in a chair.

  At this hour Russell usually has the court to himself. Lately New York City has been slogging through one of its enervating heat waves, a string of 95-degree days, and most of Coney Island’s other players won’t come out until after dark, when the thick, humid air begins to stir with night breezes and the court lights come on. But tonight is turning out to be a fine one—cool and foggy. The low, slanting sun sheds a pink light over the silvery Atlantic just a block away, and milky sheets of fog roll off the ocean and drift in tatters along the project walkways. The air smells of sewage and salt water. At the far end of the court, where someone has torn a hole in the chain-link fence, other players climb in and begin warming up.

  “Just do it, right?” I glance to my left, and there is Corey Johnson, smiling mischievously, eyes alight. He nods toward the court—Russell at one end, a group of players stretching out and taking lay-ups at the other—and it does, in fact, resemble a sneaker commercial. “Work hard, play hard, buy yourself a pair of Nikes, young man,” Corey intones. Corey, who is known throughout Coney Island for a variety of talents, practices some deft mimicry, and his rendition of a white, stentorian-voiced TV announcer is easily among his best. “They get you where you want to go, which is out of the ghet-to!” He laughs, we shake hands, and he takes up an observation post by my side.

  I am always pleased, though somewhat surprised, when Corey comes by this court. Corey is Russell’s best friend and one of Lincoln High’s other star juniors. But he specializes in ironic detachment and normally shows up courtside, carrying his Walkman, merely to watch for girls with his handsome, hooded eyes. That may be his intention yet. Tonight he is wearing a fresh white T-shirt, expertly ripped along the back and sleeves to reveal glimpses of his sculpted physique, denim shorts that reach to his knees, and a pair of orange sneakers that go splendidly with his lid—a tan baseball cap with orange piping, which he wears with the bill pointing skyward. From his headphones come the sounds of Color Me Badd, and Corey sings along: I-wanna-sex-you-up . . . He loops his fingers around the chain-link fence and says, “I tell you, Coney Island is like a disease—of the mind. It makes you lazy. You relax too much. ’Cause all you ever see is other guys relaxing.”

  There was a time, of course, when Coney Island inspired among its residents more sanguine remarks—when the neighborhood was home to three world-renowned amusement parks, and its streets were lined with three-story homes, filled to the eaves with Jewish, Irish, and Italian families who proclaimed Coney Island the most welcoming place in America for a newly arrived immigrant—a latter-day Plymouth Rock. Now, however, all but a few scattered rides have been dismantled; most of the cottages and triple-deckers have succumbed to the bulldozers of urban renewal; and in their place the city has erected a vast tract of housing projects, home to Coney Island’s newest arrivals—African-Americans—and packed so densely along a twenty-block stretch that a new skyline has risen at land’s end by the beach and the boardwalk.

  The experiment of public housing, which has worked throughout the country to isolate its impoverished and predominantly black tenants from the hearts of their cities, may have succeeded here with even greater efficiency because of Coney Island’s utter remoteness. On this peninsula, at the southern tip of Brooklyn, there are almost no stores, no trees, no police; nothing, in fact, but block after block of gray-cement projects—hulking, prisonlike, and jutting straight into the sea. Most summer nights now, an amorphous unease settles over Coney Island, as apartments become stifling and the streets fall prey to the gangs and drug dealers. Options are limited: to the south is the stiff gray meringue of the Atlantic; to the north, more than ten miles away, one can just make out the Statue of Liberty and the glass-and-steel spires of Manhattan’s financial district. Officially, Coney Island is part of the endless phantasmagoria that is New York City. But on a night like this, as the dealers set up their drug marts in the streets and alleyways, and the sounds of sirens and gunfire keep pace with the darkening sky, it feels like the end of the world.

  Yet even in Coney Island there is a use to which a young man’s talent, ambition, and desire to stay out of harm’s way may be put: there is basketball. Hidden behind the projects are dozens of courts, and every night they fill with restless teenagers, who remain there for hours until exhaustion or the hoodlums take over. The high school dropouts and the aging players who never made it to college usually show up for a physical game at a barren strip of courts by the water known as Chop-Chop Land, where bruises and minutes played are accrued at a one-to-one ratio. The younger kids congregate for rowdy games at Run-and-Gun Land. The court there is short and the rims are low, so everyone can dunk, and the only pass ever made is the one inbounding the ball. At Run-and-Gun, players stay on the move for another reason: the court sits just below one of the most dreaded projects, where Coney Island’s worst hoodlums sometimes pass a summer evening “getting hectic,” as they say—shooting at each other or tossing batteries and beer bottles onto the court from apartment windows fifteen stories above.

  The neighborhood’s best players—Russell, Corey, and their brethren on the Lincoln varsity—practice a disciplined, team-driven style of basketball at the court where I am standing tonight, which has been dubbed the Garden, after the New York Knicks’ arena. In a neighborhood ravaged by the commerce of drugs, the Garden offers a cherished sanctuary. A few years ago community activists petitioned the housing authority to install night lights. And the players themselves resurfaced the court and put up regulation-height rims that snap back after a player dunks. Russell may be the only kid at the Garden who shoots one-handers from a chair or practices his defensive footwork with a ten-pound brick in each hand, but no one here treats the game as child’s play. Even the dealers and hoodlums refrain from vandalizing the Garden, because in Coney Island the possibility of transcendence through basketball—in this case, an athletic scholarship to a four-year Division I college—is an article of faith.

  Although a pickup game has begun at the basket nearest Corey and me, Russell still commands the other. As the last light drains from the summer sky, he finishes with three-pointers and moves on to baby hooks: fifteen with the left hand, fifteen with the right; miss one and start all over again. It is not too much to say that basketball has saved Russell. The Thomases—Russell, his mother, a
nd his two younger sisters—live in one of the neighborhood’s toughest projects, just a block from this court; and in earlier days Russell often caused his family considerable grief, sometimes leaving home for long stretches to hang out on the streets with his friends. Every teenager does this to some extent, but the custom posed a greater threat in Russell’s case since certain of his friends back then liked to wander over to neighboring Brighton Beach in order to hold up pensioners at gunpoint. But having watched so many of his contemporaries fall into gangs or prison or an early grave, Russell has developed new ambitions for himself. A few months ago, he led the team at Lincoln High to the New York City public school championship, which was played at Madison Square Garden and broadcast citywide on cable TV. For most of his teammates, it was a moment to savor; Russell hardly broke stride to celebrate. Until he wins his college scholarship, sometime in the months ahead, all else in his life seems to dwindle to the vanishing point—everything besides the ball, this basket, and his conviction that, by practicing each day and playing by all the rules, he has set himself on a path that will change his life. “Man, I hate Coney Island,” Russell has told me several times. “Maybe after I finish college I’ll come back to get my mom. But that’s it. I’m leaving. And I’m never coming back.”

  Soon the orange court lights at the Garden come on, displacing the encroaching darkness, and two players on either end of the court climb the fence and sit atop the backboards, hanging nets—a sign that a serious game is about to begin. A few minutes later, a uniformed referee actually shows up to officiate. Suddenly a ferocious grinding noise fills the air. It gets louder and louder, and then a teenage kid riding a Big Wheel careers onto the court. He darts through the playground crowd, leaving a wake of pissed-off players, hops off his ride, and watches it crash kamikaze-style into the fence. “Ah, yes, Stephon Marbury,” Corey remarks dryly. “Future of the neighborhood.”