There was one other upshot of the game. In the past, even though there were certain school-district lines that ran throughout the city, blacks, no matter where they lived, were allowed to go to Attucks. After that championship the various coaches had stopped the blacks in their areas from going to Attucks. Robertson, in more ways than he had realized, had helped integrate Indianapolis.
This season, though, for the first time in years, going into the regional finals there was the chance of another tiny rural school winning the championship. A small consolidated school named L&M, or officially Lyons and Marco, with a total enrollment of 132 students in the top four grades and seventy-two boys, fielded a very good team (not lightly put together, either—a good deal of political engineering went into it). Lyons, which is listed on the road map of Indiana (population: 782), is larger than Marco, which is not listed at all and now has a population of about three hundred.
On this night in December, Bobby Knight is driving down to Elnora to recruit Jeff Oliphant, a top player for the L&M team, which is coached by his father, Tom. Actually, the recruitment is more or less completed. Knight absolutely dominates this territory, and there are very few kids whom he wants who do not want to go to Indiana (he lost a young black center from an Indiana parochial school to Notre Dame a few years ago, in part because, as one friend said later, he failed to understand that in conflicts in modern America between church and state, state does not always win). They are playing at a neutral gym in Elnora, partially to accommodate the overflow crowd and partially because the L&M coach wants to get his team ready for bigger tournament games and hostile crowds; this gym is said to seat 4,200, while the L&M gym seats only 1,250. L&M is playing Terre Haute North, which in the glory days used to be known as Terre Haute Gerstmeyer.
Bobby is here scouting. His team is playing better, he has won a couple of close games, but it has been a hard season. He is exhausted from the Olympic Games, embittered by the recruiting violations he feels exist in the Big Ten, and his team is almost always less athletically skilled than its opponents. We enter at Elnora. He looks around the gym and nudges me. “Harley and Arley are here,” he says. He is exultant. I have not seen him so pleased since he won the battle of restaurant prices several days ago. “Who are Arley and Harley?” I ask. He points to two middle-aged men sitting together on the other side of the court. He is delighted: Indiana basketball history is with us tonight, and he is about to give me a further indoctrination into schoolboy legends. Harley and Arley Andrews are identical twins, and in the early Fifties, rural families being larger than most city ones, they played on the same Gerstmeyer team as their uncle Harold Andrews. The team was known, naturally enough, as “Harley, Arley, and Uncle Harold.” In order to confuse referees further as to which Andrews had committed a foul, Howard Sharpe, their coach, made one wear “43” and the other “34.” People claimed that at half time, Sharpe would have them trade jerseys if one of them was in foul trouble. (Often they’d switch jerseys from game to game to confuse other teams’ scouts as well.) If that worked for Sharpe most of the time, it went against him in the championship game in 1953. “They called a foul that Harley committed and marked it against Arley,” says Bobby. “The coach protested, but they wouldn’t change it. Arley was their best shooter, and he fouled out in the fourth quarter. Terre Haute lost.” He looks at me with slight condescension because I need a fill-in on something so basic as this. “Everyone in Indiana knows that,” he says. Someone adds that Harley and Arley turned fifty the day before. People in Indiana know things like this; they can mark their own ages and their own expanding waistlines by those of the Andrews twins.
The L&M team is deftly put together. Lyons, undergoing something of a revitalization, may now have as many as one thousand people, although it was down to five hundred fifteen years ago. It is hardly an affluent area; there was some marginal coal mining, some small farming, and a little bit of local commerce. Then Dr. Bill Powers, a hometown boy, and a few friends decided to start a clinic. Powers is what is called an activist in big cities, and a doer in small towns. Gradually the clinic has grown, and so has the town: the clinic has three doctors, two dentists, an optometrist, an audiologist, and several other professionals, plus a nursing staff. It serves not just the town but a region with a radius of fifty miles. In a way, its presence is like having a small industry in a town largely neglected by the industrial revolution. Because of the clinic, other stores opened.
Dr. Powers also cares about the identity of Lyons, and about basketball. In a town this size, he says, the priorities are different from those elsewhere. A crisis is someone getting sick with a lingering illness such as lung cancer; it is hard on the community, because everyone here knows everyone else. Powers played at Lyons years ago, and though the teams were all right back then, they were nothing special. Powers was also the family doctor to both the Oliphant and the Patterson families. The Oliphant family is headed by Tom Oliphant, a Lyons boy who ended up coaching at nearby Worthington. Jeff, in the American tradition of coaches’ sons, is a very good prospect, albeit most likely for the dread Worthington High. Meanwhile, Tony Patterson, also an excellent prospect, attended L&M. Patterson was as good a player as the town had boasted in years. Mrs. Oliphant, by even greater chance, worked as a receptionist at Powers’s clinic. Gradually Powers began to talk up the idea that Tom might want to come over to coach at L&M and bring Jeff with him. Jeff could play for L&M in his junior and senior years. That meant the Oliphant boy could play with the Patterson boy. Jeff knew about Tony Patterson and Patterson knew of Jeff; the idea of playing together was a powerful magnet.
By coincidence, one of the nurses in Powers’s clinic was on the Lyons school board and was amenable to a change in coaches; it was not hard to find others who were sympathetic to the idea, including Robert Patterson, Tony’s father, who was also on the board. It was well within the established priority of small Indiana towns, where the requirements were first for a good doctor and second (though the order could be reversed) for a good high school basketball coach. Soon the deal was done; the old coach was let go, and Tom was hired to replace him. Someone said, however, that the Oliphants were having trouble finding a house in Lyons. “Hell, in that case we’ll build them one,” a local banker was reported to have said.
On this night it is like going back in time. Every seat in the Elnora gym is taken. Terre Haute is the much-feared big city to these fans. The crowd is certifiably rural. It is a surprisingly old crowd, not just high school kids. Terre Haute is bigger and faster. There are three black starters, and the center looks a good six feet nine. L&M is much shorter—Oliphant is six six and a half, Patterson six five and a half. But slowly L&M pulls away, more by not making mistakes than by anything else. Bobby is studying Oliphant, who moves nicely around the basket and always seems to be in position.
We leave early. Knight always leaves a game early, because he wants to beat the traffic. He is pleased with what he’s seen of Oliphant. Good passer, good hands, already well coached and disciplined, will fit nicely into the Indiana program. An agreement with both coach and son has already been worked out that will work to everyone’s benefit: because IU is short of scholarships this year, Oliphant will come as a walk-on in his first year, probably red shirt, and then get a scholarship for four years. As a five-year student, he can pick up a master’s degree if he so chooses.
“What do you project him as?” I ask Knight. “Small forward?”
But Knight insists he doesn’t project such particulars. “I may be ten years behind the times,” he says.
We drive through the night, a few friends of his, two assistant coaches, and two writers. They are talking basketball and I am thinking that with the exception of a rare team like L&M, Indiana high school basketball has changed because the state has changed. Rural communities were losing their identity anyway; small farmers were finally giving up and moving to the city, and as farms were being consolidated so were schools. Besides, the lives of the people who stayed behi
nd have changed. They know what goes on not just in the next town but in Washington and in foreign countries. There are more stimuli now, more alternatives in life, more things to occupy their time. Even people in the smallest hamlets have color television sets, and that means that they are no longer alone, they are able to bring the world into their living rooms, whether it is news, sports, movies, or even wars.
High school basketball is simply less important. The state tournament still matters, but there is less magic to it. There are other distractions: one can watch the NFL and major-league baseball and the Olympics. There is a professional football team in Indianapolis. Mostly there is Bobby Knight’s team in Bloomington, which is carried on a statewide network and has become the focal point of the fever. The state, because of television, has replaced the village as the operative community. The nature of the culture has not changed; the size of the community has. The new village is now the state of Indiana. Ohio State and Illinois have replaced the neighboring village as the community to war against. But sports here and elsewhere still mean as much, probably too much. It was, I thought, easy to measure the popularity of the sport in the old days as a safeguard against an unrelenting loneliness. Now it’s different; people live in modern instant subdivisions and have neighbors only a few feet away, and they have their television sets connecting them to the world. In some ways they care as much or more about sports than ever. The hardest thing to measure here or anywhere else is the new loneliness.
THE STUFF DREAMS ARE MADE OF
From Sports Illustrated, June 29, 1987
Great NBA Finals are supposed to last seven games, of which at least six should be close; this year’s series lasted only six, of which 3½ were close. Even so, because of the nature of the matchups—the difference in the styles of the two teams—this series was in no way disappointing. The good games were so very good, and even the runaway games so resembled a clinic, that it was nothing less than the best against the best. A fan can ask no more.
Using only five men to any significant extent, exhausted and physically worn down as the series began, the Celtics had to play almost perfect basketball in every area to win, and they did that twice and almost a third time. For the younger, deeper, faster Lakers, the challenge was comparable: The Celtics are so tough and resilient that if the Lakers lapsed even a small degree, particularly on defense, the Celtics might capitalize and win. The Lakers were the better team, but only if they played their absolute best. Any lowering of their level and the Celtics would break through and win.
It was the kind of playoff series that showcases great athletes at the top of their game.
The Lakers were and are that good. They are a team of such speed and power that when they are playing their game, it seems almost not to matter who their opponents are. With the Lakers at their best, one has a sense of watching basketball as it will be played in the next century.
During one stretch of Game 1, Larry Bird hit 11 shots in a row. Normally that kind of shooting from an established superstar can crush the opposition; in this case it did not even dent the Lakers.
They have become one of the most exciting teams in NBA history, one that can take control of a game in a matter of minutes. In the past it was the hallmark of the Celtics to drive through the opposition when it began to wilt and break a game open. In this series the Lakers returned the favor.
In the eight years since Magic Johnson joined them, the Lakers have won four championships and have been a powerful if somewhat schizophrenic team. They were, in most matters of critical importance, a Kareem team, bringing the ball upcourt at a steady pace and then setting Abdul-Jabbar up for a skyhook (a style perilously close to one which, were they the Celtics, would be called white basketball). But they were also a Magic team, one that showcased the latest in American athletic advancement, the 6 ft. 9 in. point guard who grabs the rebound himself and pushes it relentlessly upcourt, on occasion sacrificing control for tempo. Until this year that conflict between the two faces of the Lakers had never been entirely reconciled. It cost one coach, Paul Westhead (who had too clearly sided with Kareem), his job, and it reflected Pat Riley’s skill as a coach that he was able to balance the two forces, paying homage to the Kareem team, while expediting the emergence of the Magic team.
This year the Lakers finally were Magic’s team: Speed is power, power is speed. Slowly the cast had changed. Michael Cooper had emerged; A. C. Green and James Worthy had been added. Even Mychal Thompson, the most important pickup by either team this year, once was strong enough to play center yet was fast enough to play small forward at times. One had, at certain moments, a sense of watching a prototype of a different breed of athlete—strong, fast, disciplined—playing at a level of stunning intensity, with surprisingly few turnovers. If the Knicks of the late ’60s could be described as four guards and one forward (Willis Reed), then this was often a team of four forwards led by a point guard who could, in a very recent era, have played power forward.
What made the series so special was the sharp contrast in the styles of Los Angeles and Boston and the knowledge that these two teams, with cameo appearances by Philadelphia and Houston, have essentially dominated the championships since Bird and Johnson entered the league in 1979. That and, of course, the fact that both teams have gradually been shaped to the styles and contours of their superstars, one white and one black.
The Celtics, this year’s defending champions, play half-court basketball, and they play it better than any team in the league. That they had even made it to the finals was remarkable, given the death of Len Bias, the infirmities of Bill Walton and the fact that Kevin McHale and Robert Parish were both playing with injuries. But Boston finally lacked the bench mandatory for a tough playoff final and the speed to stay with L.A. in a running game. The Celtic front line, after all, was composed of three exceptional basketball players, while the first seven players for the Lakers seemed to be both exceptional basketball players and exceptional athletes.
One had to look no further than the contrast between McHale and Worthy to understand the classic matchup displayed in this series. If the Lakers controlled the tempo, it would mean that Worthy—possibly the fastest big man going to the basket in the league—would be a dominant player; if the Celtics controlled the pace, it meant they would be able to get the ball to McHale, surprisingly nimble and deft, uncommonly skilled at using his body and arms for maximum leverage. Each was an extension of the best of his team. For Worthy to be Worthy, Magic had to be Magic; for McHale to get the ball where he wanted it, Larry Bird and the Celtic offense had to move in proper mesh. If one was having a good game, the other probably was not.
Because the styles and the racial composition of each team were so strikingly different, race was very much at issue during the series (and indeed was covertly at issue even when it was not overtly so).
It was always there, as race is always there in American life, even when it seemingly is not.
One enters the subject of race and basketball as one enters a minefield: American blacks are clearly faster than American whites; in addition, they are now generally perceived as better natural athletes; and Los Angeles is a significantly blacker team than Boston. The first seven Los Angeles players are black; Boston, which was the first integrated team and the first team to start five blacks, has been for almost a decade one of the whitest teams in the league, and it starts three whites and often plays four at a time.
Even before the finals started, Dennis Rodman and Isiah Thomas of the Pistons had raised the question of race, both suggesting that Larry Bird was overrated and had become a superstar not so much because of the excellence of his game as because he was white and because white fans and media seized on and magnified his value. At the same time, the Boston Globe ran a story quoting some local black youths at a playground saying they favored the Lakers because the Celtics were so white. That story reverberated throughout the paper for the next few days.
Racism is about stereotypes on both sides, and like most s
tereotypes, racial ones can be both true and untrue. One can imagine, for example, the young and still healthy Walton as an ideal center for the current Laker team. Comparably, one can easily imagine the mid-career Abdul-Jabbar playing for the Celtics and fitting in perfectly well with their style. Yet, as the current Laker offense springs from Magic, so the current Celtic team is an extension of Bird. The Boston offense is built around a forward with great vision and great hands who moves well without the ball and who will, against an exceptional defense, come off a series of picks, ready to shoot or pass. It is critical on this team that everyone be able to shoot well from within a specified range. This is, for better or worse, defined as white basketball. That Bird would be an equally wonderful forward on the current Laker team does not change the stereotype (in part because Johnson would have difficulty on the Celtics as currently constituted; he would probably be too fast for them, and it is possible that an adjustment in his game might cost him what is best in his game).
Everything They Had Page 19
