The Best American Sports Writing 2018

by Glenn Stout

  Six-foot-seven, with long arms so corded with muscle they resembled giant licorice ropes, Brooks played as if the 40 minutes of competition consumed him, as if nothing else in his life mattered—a melding of abandon and earnestness, freedom and obligation. “When the ball went up, he did not smile,” teammate Greg Webster said. “He was almost brooding.” At practice, he sprinted throughout every line drill. During games, he dunked the ball at every opportunity, regardless of the situation. The sooner he got out on a fast break, the higher he leaped, the harder he jackhammered the ball through the basket, the better. “If we were playing Hofstra and there were five minutes left in a tight game,” said Bradshaw, who in his first stint as La Salle’s athletic director at the time, “Michael was going to take a lob and throw it down.” In a 108–106 triple-overtime loss to BYU at the Marriott Center in Provo, Utah, in his senior season, Brooks scored 51 points, including all 28 of La Salle’s points during one 16-minute stretch. “We tried one, two, and even three men on him,” BYU coach Frank Arnold said afterward. “He went over, through, and around them.” At the game’s conclusion, the 22,791 spectators gave Brooks a standing ovation. Touched by the gesture and exhausted after having played all 55 minutes, he wept.

  His ferocity on the court struck a stark contrast with his affability and accessibility off it. “He had a great sense of humor,” said Dave Davis, a freshman guard for La Salle when Brooks was a senior. “He was nice to all his teammates, whether you started or sat on the bench. I never remember him getting angry for any reason.” Filling out a publicity questionnaire upon entering La Salle, Brooks listed his major as sociology, his hobbies as “listening to music, watching girls,” and his postcollege goals as “pro basketball, own[ing] a chain of hotels.” He finished his La Salle career with 2,628 points—he remains among the NCAA’s top 30 scorers—won the Kodak National Player of the Year award after averaging 24.1 points and 11.5 rebounds as a senior, then played intramural water polo, just for fun. “He was,” Bradshaw said, “the most visible and charismatic figure on campus.” When Aleta’s friends, just beginning their teenage years, happened to encounter her brother on the street, they’d stop to stare and giggle, and Aleta could only shake her head, knowing that all those hours Michael had spent in front of the mirror, practicing his moves, were paying off. “To me,” she said, “he was just my goofy big brother. To the girls . . . not so much.”

  Aleta and her family were just beginning to get a greater, truer sense of Michael’s celebrity, of his place in the basketball firmament. In July 1979, he starred for the United States’ gold-medal team at the Pan-American Games in San Juan, so impressing coach Bob Knight that Knight reaffirmed in an interview last year what he said of Brooks then: that he was “one of the five best kids I ever coached.” In an essay in the August 16, 1979, edition of the Catholic Standard and Times, RiRi described the family room in the Brookses’ Chew Avenue home: “We have a handsome portrait of Michael, surrounded by his many awards. We have named it ‘The Shrine.’” But his performance in Puerto Rico and Knight’s subsequent praise had elevated his profile well beyond the boundaries of the local press. In January 1980, Sports Illustrated profiled him, comparing him to another La Salle legend: Tom Gola. In May—less than three weeks before the San Diego Clippers selected Brooks with the ninth pick in the NBA draft—Dave Gavitt, the head coach of the 1980 U.S. Olympic men’s basketball team, announced that Brooks would be the team’s captain. The likelihood that President Jimmy Carter would have the U.S. boycott the Moscow Games, to protest the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan, had dissuaded other well-known college players from trying out, but Brooks was enthusiastic about the prospect of representing his country. He felt a sense of relief and happiness upon making the team, he said at the time, and had been honored that Gavitt had thought enough of him to invite him to the Olympic trials. “The least I could do,” he said, “was return that respect.”

  Brooks was one of just two seniors Gavitt kept on the roster; Notre Dame’s Bill Hanzlik was the other. Instead of competing in Moscow, the team played a six-game “Gold Medal” series against five NBA all-star teams and the 1976 U.S. Olympic team, a barnstorming-style tour that started in Los Angeles and ended in Greensboro, North Carolina. The Olympians went 5-1, with Brooks leading them in scoring at 13.2 points a game, with Aleta donning a gleaming red-white-and-blue sweat suit for the series’ two games at Madison Square Garden and savoring the spectacle almost as much as her brother did. Almost. Hanzlik recalled that the White House, in an attempt to appease the athletes in the wake of boycott, invited them to Washington, D.C., in late July, presenting them with Congressional Gold Medals and putting them up in a posh hotel with an outdoor swimming pool at its center.

  “Guys were having a pretty good time, and these female weightlifters and gymnasts and volleyball players were in the pool with the guys,” Hanzlik said. “It was pretty crazy. The cops ended up having to come and say, ‘You guys have to quiet down.’ I was not involved, but I do remember Michael being in the pool.”

  This was the life that Brooks grew accustomed to, that his family grew accustomed to, as his career advanced into the NBA. He was 3,000 miles away on the West Coast, on the road often, returning to Philadelphia when he could, but it was a life he enjoyed, and as a younger man, he involved his family members in it as much as possible, covering their finances, sharing his newfound wealth.

  He would take his mother and sisters out to a late-night dinner at a Morton’s, marvel over the lavish spread of his relatives and friends socializing together, and laugh at Rita’s objections. Michael, I am not having ribeye at 11 o’clock at night . . . Aww, come on, Mom! This is when I eat! He owned a sports coupe, a 280ZX, and when Aleta visited with her daughter Kristin, Brooks frequently took the baby out for an afternoon drive. “She was his chick magnet,” Aleta said, “and he just fell in love with her.” Once, the Brookses joined one of Michael’s teammates and idols, Joe Bryant, for a day with their families at the San Diego Zoo. As Aleta walked the grounds, she pushed a stroller. Strapped into the carriage was the youngest of Joe and Pamela Bryant’s three children, a two-year-old toddler named Kobe. Everyone was along for the ride.

  “It was like he got shot”

  Over his first three seasons with the Clippers, Brooks played in all 246 of the team’s games, averaging 14.1 points and 6.5 rebounds, earning his coaches’ and peers’ respect with his work ethic. “He ran in the streets, ran for conditioning,” former Clippers guard and NBA coach Lionel Hollins said. “He was always in the gym, practicing. He wanted to be out there.” One day after the 1982–1983 season, when the two players were scheduled to become restricted free agents, Hollins called Brooks to recommend a negotiating ploy: both of them had to consider holding out into the following season. If Brooks re-signed for less than market value, Hollins feared that the Clippers would try to lowball him too. But Brooks’s consecutive-games streak meant so much to him, according to Hollins, that he refused to go along with the strategy and agreed to a new contract with the Clippers anyway.

  “I wasn’t going to stop him,” Hollins said, “from doing what he wanted to do.”

  In San Diego, he was not the superstar he had been at La Salle, the higher level of competition exposing weaknesses in his game for which his diligence and natural talent could no longer compensate. At 220 pounds, Brooks wasn’t bulky enough, relatively speaking, to be an elite power forward, and he didn’t shoot well enough from the outside to excel as a pure small forward. In 1982, the Clippers drafted Terry Cummings, who replaced him in the starting lineup. But there was no doubt that Brooks was a solid professional, reliable, coachable—“He was a delight,” said Jim Lynam, a West Catholic alumnus and the Clippers’ head coach from 1983 to 1985—and that he was on track for a long NBA career.

  Then, on February 4, 1984, in a game at Richfield Coliseum near Cleveland, Brooks stole the ball from the Cavaliers’ Paul Thompson, passed it to teammate Billy McKinney, and took a couple of strides before, h
e said later, he felt the sensation of walking down a flight of stairs and missing one. He fell to the floor and grabbed his right knee. “It was like he got shot,” Lynam said. “Absolutely no contact. Boom.” He had torn his anterior cruciate ligament—an injury that, without the more-advanced treatment available to athletes today, put his career in jeopardy.

  For the next two and a half years, to everyone except his family, it seemed as if Brooks had vanished. Inducted into the Big Five Hall of Fame in 1986, he didn’t attend the ceremony. The Clippers relocated to Los Angeles, but he neither used their training facilities nor showed up at any of their games, choosing to carry out his postsurgery rehabilitation near San Diego. “As a young player in the NBA, you think you’re invincible,” he said last year. “Everything is basically there for you. When you get hurt, if you don’t have a good support group, you can really fall into a hole quickly because you feel, ‘Where are all these people who were here when everything was going right?’ As soon as you get hurt, nobody wants to be around you.”

  His mother, a devout Catholic, gripped her holy card every morning and prayed that he would walk normally again. The assistance that Aleta lent him was more hands-on; she moved to San Diego to be his caretaker.

  “He was trying to get back to where he was with an injury that, at that time, most people didn’t even come back from,” she said. “Michael was a guy who believed you don’t let your slip show. Nobody’s going to know he’s struggling with something. All they’re going to know is, ‘I got hurt, and I’ll be back.’ What happens in that middle is none of anyone else’s business.”

  In early October 1986, he worked out, alone, for the Clippers’ coaches and front-office members in the gym at Cal-Poly Pomona, shooting, driving, cutting, shuffling laterally. He began to hyperventilate as he carried out the drills. The Clippers did not sign him. He spent brief stints with the Indiana Pacers and Denver Nuggets, was named the Continental Basketball Association’s most valuable player in 1987–1988 while with the Albany Patroons, and returned home in the summer of 1988, joining the Philadelphia Aces of the United States Basketball League.

  Brooks played his final basketball game in Philadelphia at St. Joseph’s Fieldhouse, scoring 38 points in the Aces’ 122–118 loss to the New Haven Skyhawks in the semifinals of the USBL playoffs. Afterward, he met his old West Catholic classmate and teammate Bill McDevitt for beers at a pub near campus; the two had stayed in touch since their freshman year. A month earlier, the Charlotte Hornets had selected Brooks with the 14th overall pick in the NBA expansion draft, but they had angered him by making a more lucrative contract offer to former Lakers forward Kurt Rambis. A professional team in France, Limoges CSP, in turn had offered Brooks a one-year deal worth a reported $170,000. I’m going to Europe, Brooks told McDevitt. More, he was leaving the next day.

  “I never heard from him again after that night,” McDevitt said.

  That night was July 27, 1988. Thirty-four days later, on August 30, a baby boy was born at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania: 7 pounds, 15 ounces, 22 inches long. His mother’s name was Jacklynn Johnson. His first name was his father’s.

  A Son’s Burden

  Yo, you’re Michael Brooks’s son. We’re picking you first.

  Mount Airy Playground, at the intersection of West Sedgwick Street and Germantown Avenue. A full court and a half-court. Three baskets, three unforgiving double rims. A flock of kids in T-shirts and mesh tank tops and shorts. Michael Johnson-Brooks was 11 years old, in fifth grade, and at his first Jr. NBA camp. Already there was a presumption that he was the chosen one in the crowd, that basketball had been woven into the double helix at the center of every cell in his body. He played that day because he liked the sport, but he was all right, just all right, and he sensed that the kids and the counselors had expectations for him and that he did not meet them, and it hit him like a thunderbolt: I don’t want to do this. I don’t want to play basketball. Only later could he articulate the realization that charged his mind and heart at that moment: Basketball defined my father. I don’t know my father. I will find something else to define me. Screw my father.

  How would you have felt? His parents had met when Brooks was playing in the Sonny Hill and Baker Leagues, and they dated on and off while they were at La Salle together and again after college. But the relationship never could last, and even though Brooks knew he was to be a father before he left to play overseas, he left anyway, his relationship with his firstborn the greatest casualty of his choice.

  “That move is what detached them completely,” Aleta said. “It really is—Michael not being in the United States and not being accessible to as many people as he should have been.”

  While Brooks became a legend in France, helping Limoges win two Pro A championships, earning MVP honors each of those years, moving on to play in Levallois and Strasbourg, coaching in France and Switzerland, getting married and divorced and having four more children, his oldest son grew up asking himself that question every son whose father isn’t home asks himself: Is it my fault he’s not here? Jacklynn balanced her parental duties between providing for Michael Jr. and rearing him, opening an accounting practice and insisting that he focus on his studies first. “She’s very stern,” he said. Though Brooks was not involved in Michael Jr.’s early life, Jacklynn made sure that two male role models were: his grandfather, Jack Johnson, who died when Johnson-Brooks was 12; and his uncle Bill Johnson. Still, Michael Jr. was mindful at all times that neither of them was his father. Neither of them possessed veto power over his actions, the authority to discipline him when he would talk back to his mother or mess up at school or do any of the silly things that a kid does. Neither of them was there every day, as a dad would be, as a dad should be, and his dad wasn’t there any day. Back then, he said, he never got a concrete explanation for why Brooks wasn’t around, why he didn’t write, why he didn’t pick up the phone. Wouldn’t a letter or two, an occasional long-distance call, have let him know that at least his father was thinking of him?

  “Yeah,” he said, “I probably would have felt better if I knew my dad wanted to hop on a plane and come see me, if my dad was going to bat for his son—you know what I mean? At the end of the day, my mom can have all the control she wants to, but I’m his son. I know he has his own life, but I’m his son. He could have put out the effort. He didn’t.”

  Brooks said last year that he had found a new life in Europe with his fiancée, Jacqueline Uberti. His four youngest children—Athena, 27; twins Julien and Jasper, 24; and Sasha, 10—were in France, not far from him. He lived on the western edge of Switzerland in Etoy, a village of lush vineyards and Modern architecture 30 miles north of Geneva, and was coaching Blonay Basket, a men’s team in the country’s First League. Blonay won the league championship last year, and Brooks—weakened by the aplastic anemia, receiving three blood transfusions a week, pocks dotting his legs and the inside of his mouth—rose out of a hospital bed each morning to drive three hours to coach the team in the semifinals. “He was full of passion for the game,” said Yuval Keren, who befriended Brooks while he was coaching Blonay. “He created the motivation for the players and gave them confidence to take chances, to believe in themselves.”

  His life in the United States? “There are always going to be memories,” Brooks said, but he didn’t share them often. Keren never heard him talk about the past. He treasured his privacy, the clean start that Europe had afforded him. He considered himself to be on a quest, in search of a culture and an environment that suited him, and he acknowledged that people might resent him for letting them fade from his journey, like jetsam on the sea. “But sometimes,” he said, “you have to do that.” This was his choice, and he was happy. His achievements, his knee injury, so many friends: amid the seclusion of a Swiss countryside and his contentment there, it was as if they had never happened or no longer existed.

  “Regrets are for losers,” Brooks said.

  What about Michael Jr.? he was asked. Do you have any
regrets about your relationship with him? He’s your son, after all.

  “As far as I know, this is a situation where we never really decided if he was or not,” he said. “I would prefer not to speak about that.”

  Those words stung Michael Jr. He had never had a doubt about his father’s identity—no one had—and he knew Brooks had known the truth too. One night while he was a student at Montgomery County Community College, Michael Jr. sat down at his computer and said to himself, Why the hell not? Through an online French directory, he found Brooks’s home number and dialed, only to hang up when the groggy, slurred male voice on the line made it clear that, forgetting about the difference in time zones, Michael Jr. had probably woken his father from a deep sleep. Never really decided? Aleta had kept baby pictures of Michael Jr. for years, then searched for him on Facebook in 2008, found him, and arranged for them to meet at Penn, where Aleta manages meetings and special programs for the university’s library system. The two of them embraced on the quad, and Aleta ushered him right up to her office, where she got her brother on the phone, put him on speaker, and let the two Michaels talk to each other for the first time in their lives. And now, Brooks was going to deny that connection? Aleta didn’t believe it. Something else had to be at work.