Dumb & Dumber Don't Even Begin to Describe It--My Years with the Philadelphia
76ers (Following a Brief Detour in the Desert)
The only thing I knew about Phoenix when I came out of college was it was hot and it
had a lot of pickup trucks. So when the Suns drafted me out of St. John's in 1990, and
when the guy at the podium said, "Going to the Suns is Jayson Williams," I said, "Oh,
no, I'm not. No, I'm not." Actually I didn't just say it. I yelled it.
Unfortunately, the TV cameras happened to be focusing on me at that moment,
scowling and waving my arms, yelling, "Oh, no, I'm not." I don't think that helped me
with the Phoenix fans.
I waited two months before going out there. The night before the trip, I went to a party at
Tunnel, a New York City nightclub. I had my last drink at 5:30 a.m. The plane left a little
after 6:00 a.m. Then I was drinking on the plane, and when I got to Phoenix, I had some
drinks from the minibar in the hotel room. Then I passed out. And you know how
sometimes when you wake up in a hotel room, you don't know where you're at? That
was what it was like, but worse. I look outside and there's nothing but desert. And as far
as I knew I was still in New York. I had forgotten all about the plane ride. So I look
outside and there was nothing but desert, and the heat just smacked me. It was 122
degrees that day. And the heat just knocked me down. I get up and there's the desert
again. I think I'm still in New York and all I see is desert.
"Holy smokes," I say, "they dropped the bomb."
Now I'm all bug-eyed, trying to call the front desk, ask what the emergency evacuation
plans are, who bombed the city, are the phone lines down, can I get in touch with my
parents? And I hear a loud knock on the door. I answer it in my underwear. It's Jerry
Colangelo, owner of the Phoenix Suns. I'm sweating--stinking, I'm sure, like a distillery. I
can feel the alcohol coming out of my pores.
Jerry looks at me.
"Jayson?" he says.
But I'm still in New York. At least I think I'm in New York.
"What happened?" I yell. "They dropped the bomb on us. Where am I? I need to get in
touch with my parents to make sure they didn't get hit by the bomb. Can you get me a
phone line?"
Jerry's still looking at me.
"Oh, my," he says. "We've got a problem."
When Big Daddy Lost His Voice
A few weeks later they call me to the office, Jerry Colangelo and his boys. I'm
overweight, out of shape, and I hadn't played basketball in a while, because I had a
broken foot my senior year of college. Also, I'm continuing to hate Phoenix. Jerry tells
me I have an attitude problem. Then he insults St. John's, my alma mater. I think Jerry's
trying to piss me off.
"Screw you!" I say. Then I knock everything off Jerry's desk. Tell him I'm going home.
He says he'll meet me at the hotel, we can work things out, we have to work things out.
But I don't even go to the hotel. I just go straight to the airport, then fly home, to my
father.
I figure he'll be happy to see me, so when I knock on his door and he opens it, I'm all
smiles.
"Dad," I say, "I'm home!"
"What the hell are you doing here?" he says. "You're supposed to be in Phoenix."
"Dad, they were treating me real bad out there. They're calling me 'boy.'"
Now I'm crying.
"They're talking down to me, yelling at me, criticizing me, saying I'm the worst player in
camp."
My dad puts his hand on my shoulder.
"Jay," he says, "let me tell you something. You're my son, and I don't care what, you
ain't never got to do something you don't want to do. You don't want to go out to
Phoenix, you ain't got to go."
As soon as he says that, briiing! briiing!
I pick up the phone and it's Jerry Colangelo.
My dad's asking who it is, and I'm telling him don't worry, I'll handle it. And Jerry's yelling
at me. He's saying, "Son, you don't come to Phoenix, we're going to give you the
minimum, a hundred and fifty thousand. And you're never going to make more than that
in this league."
My father sees my face and he says, "Let me speak to him. Let me have him."
"Dad," I say, "don't worry about it, man. I got him."
But my dad says, "Boy, I told you. You ain't gotta do nothing you don't want to do. Now,
let me talk to him."
So I give my father the phone.
"Yeah, this is Big Daddy," he says, all belligerent. That's my father's nickname, Big
Daddy. "What do you want?"
Then there's quiet.
"Oh, yeah?" he says again, but not so belligerent.
More quiet.
"Oh, yeah?" Real quiet now. "Ohh. Oh, man. Okay. Okay, thank you."
My dad hangs up the phone. Then he says, "Son, you've got to get your butt on the next
plane back to Phoenix."
Car Trouble
When I'm back in Phoenix, because I'm the team's first-round draft pick, the team gives
me a Pontiac Grand Prix. The second-round pick gets a Cadillac. I'm pissed off about
that. So I take that Grand Prix and I drive into the parking lot and crash into every pole I
can see, then I gave the car back to them.
So the owners tell me--they're being real cute--"You know, that car we gave you might
have been too little. So we're gonna give you a big ol' Grand Marquis."
But I crash that one up, too. So finally they give me an LTD. Real Barnaby Jones model.
The day I get the car I have to go to the airport to pick up my brother Victor. I get there
early, so I have a few drinks. For some reason I get drunker drinking at airports and
Yankee games than anywhere else in the world. So when Vic finally arrives, I'm a little
drunk, but we get in the LTD anyway, and I drive him back to the hotel.
CHAPTER 1
LOVE AND DISCIPLINE
I grew up in the kind of black family that people today worry is disappearing. Even
though there were nine of us, we had what we needed—two great parents, food on the
table, and time for the whole family to be together. To provide for us, my parents worked
terribly hard. My father had two full-time jobs, and Mom worked just as hard to keep the
household going. Seven kids kept her busy, but she also had jobs outside the home.
This was in Lansing, Michigan, an hour and a half from Detroit. Our family lived in a
modest yellow frame house at 814 Middle Street, on the west side of town. It was a
stable neighborhood of working people. It wasn’t the suburbs, but it wasn’t the ghetto,
either.
Besides being the state capital, Lansing is also a big factory town. General Motors was
really cooking during the 1950s, so there were plenty of jobs. Wages were good, which
is why so many blacks, including my parents, moved up to Lansing from the rural South.
Most of the fathers I knew, including mine, worked for GM or one of its subsidiaries.
Lansing was a great place to grow up. There was a real small-town atmosphere; people
waved to one another and said hello on the street. We knew the whole neighborhood,
and the families I grew up with did almost everything together—church, school, Boys’
Club, ice skating, and going to basketball games at Sexton, the local high school.
Whatever I did, or whatever small trouble I got into, my parents always knew about it—
sometimes even before I got home.
You can’t get away with much in a community like that. The men would get to the shop
and say, “Hey, I saw your boy today.” You knew that if you acted up, you would catch
hell from whatever adult was around. But that didn’t stop your parents from disciplining
you again when you got home.
I was born on August 14, 1959, the middle of seven children. Quincy, Larry, and Pearl
were older, and Kim and the twins—Evelyn and Yvonne—came along afterward. My
mother says I was a jolly baby who smiled a lot, and that I let just about anybody pick
me up and play with me. That sounds about right.
Our family was squeezed into three small bedrooms on the second floor: one room for
our parents, one for my four sisters, and one for the three boys. The place turned into a
real madhouse before school every morning, when we all lined up to use the one
bathroom. You learned to be quick.
In addition to the seven of us, my parents had three other kids from before they were
married. Michael, Lois, and Mary lived in the South, but they often came to stay with us.
And we always considered them part of our family.
I was chubby before I grew tall, and when I was young people called me June Bug.
Grown-ups in the neighborhood would be going off to work, and when they passed me
with my basketball, I’d hear them say, “There goes that crazy June Bug, hoopin’ all
day.” My parents called me Junior, but to my friends I was E.J., or sometimes just E.
People from Lansing still call me that.
My original nickname disappeared a long time ago, which is fine with me. Man, I’m glad
I didn’t have to go through my professional career with that name: “And now, ladies and
gentlemen, playing guard for the world-champion Los Angeles Lakers, June Bug
Johnson!”
We were a close-knit family, and we had fun together. Just about every Saturday night
we had a pizza party. Mom would cook up a batch of homemade pies with onions,
peppers, mushrooms, and hamburger. After supper, we’d all move into the living room
with big bowls of popcorn to watch TV.
We watched a lot of television when I was a kid, shows like Barnaby Jones, Mannix,
Columbo, and The Man from U.N.C.L.E. There weren’t many black shows on in those
days, but we did watch Sanford and Son, The Flip Wilson Show, and Julia, with
Diahann Carroll. On Sunday nights Ed Sullivan was our man, partly because he
featured so many black entertainers.
But when I think back on how television influenced me, what comes to mind isn’t a
program, but a commercial for Camay soap. It showed a tall, elegant lady who seemed
to live in a castle. She was about to step into a huge, sunken bathtub. For some reason,
that tub just called out to me. That’s it, I decided. When I grow up, I’m going to live in a
big mansion with a gigantic bathtub just like that one.
The next time that commercial came on, I turned to my sister Pearl, who’s a year ahead
of me. “See that bathtub?” I said. “Someday I’m gonna have one just like that in my
house.”
“Yeah, right,” said Pearl, and I never mentioned it again. But today I have a big house
with a huge bathtub that reminds me of the one in that commercial. And Pearl has even
been in it.
My other notion of what it meant to be rich came from one of my part-time jobs. There
were two successful black businessmen in Lansing, Joel Ferguson and Gregory Eaton,
who owned nice homes and drove nice cars, and everybody admired them. I used to
clean their offices. Whenever I went over there, I’d sit in those big leather chairs and put
my feet up on those wide desks. I’d pretend I owned the place, and I’d start giving
orders to my staff: “Do this. Take care of that.” I’d imagine that everybody in the whole
building worked for me, and that I had the respect of the entire town.
Unlike Detroit, Lansing was mostly white. Just about every black family in town lived on
either the west side or the east side. But these two men owned large, beautiful homes,
and they could afford to live anywhere they wanted.
In those days, I never dreamed that someday I would play basketball for a living. My
goal was to be a rich businessman, just like Mr. Ferguson and Mr. Eaton.
With so many kids to take care of, my parents didn’t have much money left over for
luxuries. We always had enough to eat, but there were plenty of things I wanted and just
couldn’t have, like a ten-speed bike or blue jeans. Clothes were a special problem for
me because I grew into a new size every two weeks. (My brothers and sisters were all
taller than average, but nothing like me.) The fanciest thing I owned was a suit with a
reversible jacket that I wore to church. One week it was black, and the next Sunday I
turned it around and it was checkered.
My parents believed in work—not only for themselves, but for their children, too. They
expected all of us to help out around the house. Like my brothers and sisters, I washed
the dishes, took out the trash, vacuumed, cooked, and took care of the twins—although
I was only two years older than they were.
Dad didn’t believe in handouts. So as a kid, the only way I could get my hands on any
spending money was to go out and earn it. By the time I was ten I had my own little
neighborhood business. I raked leaves, cleaned yards, and shoveled snow. With the
money I earned, I could go to the movies and buy an occasional record.
Dad was my idol, so I paid close attention to the way he handled his money. As a way
of forcing himself to save, he always kept two or three uncashed checks in his wallet.
There were times when I thought he was a little too careful, especially when he wouldn’t
buy me something I thought I needed. But then I’d hear, “You want five dollars, Junior?
Here, take the lawn mower. There’s a lot of grass in this town, and I bet you could earn
that money real quick.”
He hated to borrow, and he often warned us about the dangers of going into debt. One
of the happiest days of his life was when he made the final mortgage payment on our
house. But he was generous, too. When his friends needed a few bucks, he was always
willing to help.
Through basketball and my business interests, I’ve been blessed with a great income,
far more than my father ever dreamed of. A couple of years before Cookie and I got
married, I bought a big new house in Beverly Hills that cost me $7.2 million. But I’m still
my father’s son, and some things just don’t change.
When I bought the house, my accountant advised me not to make too large a down
payment. For tax purposes, he explained, it was better to pay off the mortgage over
many years. I knew he was right, but I just couldn’t do it that way. Instead, I put down
$6.2 million, which was more than 85 percent of the total price. But I still didn’t feel right,
and a few months later, I wrote out a check for that last million. I just hated the idea of
that mortgage—or any debt—hanging over my head.
I rarely saw my father with a drink in his hand, and nobody was allowed to smoke in our
house. But my parents had lots of friends, and Dad enjoyed dressing up for parties. I
used to look forward to the day I could dress like him. When GQ put me on their cover a
few years ago, I was so proud that I sent it to him right away.
He loved the old blues singers like B. B. King and Muddy Waters. He had their 45’s—
the albums were too expensive—and every three minutes, when the record was over, it
was my job to go over to the record player and start it again. We’d sit together on the
living-room couch on weekend afternoons, and I’d wait for him to doze off. As soon as
he was sleeping, I’d take off his record and put on one of mine—the Jackson Five, the
Commodores, or the Temptations.
What's Really on My Mind
I May Be Wrong but I Doubt It isn't a basketball book. It's not really even a sports
book, although basketball and sports are the vehicles I'm using to generate a much
broader discussion, and are the things I am most intimately familiar with. There's been
increased criticism of athletes, sometimes by people in the news media and sometimes
by activists, that we run away from dealing with serious social issues, like poverty,
racism, politics and education.
Not only am I not running away from these discussions, at this point of my lifeapproaching forty years old and two years into retirement after a sixteen-year career in
the NBA-I usually prefer them. I'm tired of talking about stuff that doesn't matter. I'm
tired of "Charles, tell me which coaches you hated during your career," or "Charles, let's
talk about which players in the league you don't like," or "Let's talk about groupies."
Most reporters, I can't even convince them to talk about any serious topics, which I'm
happy to have the chance to do now. If the topic is groupies, guys will blow my phone
up. That's easy. If I want to say something bad about anybody, reporters will hang on
every word. That's easy. So don't turn the page thinking you're going to read about that,
because that's not what this is. I've done enough of that for the last twenty years. What
I've come to realize is that I can have some control over this process. I can talk about
whatever the hell I want to talk about.
At this point in my life I'm trying to transition from sports into something broader, with
wider social implications. I don't know if you can do it when you're playing. Guys get
criticized for not being more socially conscious, for not spending more time talking about
social issues, and that criticism may sound legitimate. But if you actually take on some
social issues, particularly if you take some unpopular positions, you're going to get
hammered.
People say all the time they want you to talk about social issues. But if you do, and if
you take a position that doesn't go down easy, you're "militant." My favorite one is,
"When is the last time Charles Barkley struggled? What does Barkley know about
growing up poor?" Well, I do know. Damn, I was poor. I grew up in the projects in
Leeds, Alabama.
If I was still poor, I wouldn't have the platform to speak up about the stuff we ought to be
confront-ing. Some years ago, in a Nike commercial most people consider controversial,
I suggested that athletes should not be primary role models. I told people to listen to
their parents, not to athletes or celebrities, and I got killed for it. Is that bad advice, to
say, "Listen to your parents, or your teachers, and not some damn celebrities"?
But that's okay. I'm not overly concerned about people disagreeing with me. I'm
concerned with the response in that I want to get people talking, get the discussion
started. I'm going to say what's on my mind. Dan Patrick of ESPN, who I like very much,
introduced me once as "Charles Barkley, who makes you think, makes you mad, but
sometimes doesn't think before he talks." And I said, "Hey, wait a minute. I know exactly
what I'm saying. I may say something some people consider controversial or
outrageous, but I've thought about it before I said it." I always know what I'm saying, and
I'm always prepared for the reaction.
I may ask a dozen people about something, especially when it's a sensitive topic or
something that's likely to be explosive. And I like getting input from smart people and
people who've experienced things I'll never experience or haven't yet experienced. But
ultimately I'm going to make up my mind and say what I really feel. Saying something
just for the hell of it isn't worth anything because unless you provoke some
conversation, what you're saying is irrelevant. Just because I say something and get a
strong reaction or a negative reaction from somebody doesn't mean I didn't anticipate it.
I don't like getting caught off guard. Hell, a lot of times I know exactly what's coming and
I say it anyway because I feel it needs to be said, or I need to be confrontational on a
certain issue. But I've thought about it, trust me.
And I also know people think, "Charles is just saying that to get attention." And, yes,
there are times I'll say something crazy or silly because I'm not going to be serious all
the damn time. And other times the way to make an important point is by using humor.
But when you read my comments in interviews it's not like I was seeking attention.
Somebody asked me to sit and talk about something. I didn't go to some publication or
network and say, "Hey, I've got some shit to say." They called and asked me to talk
about a number of issues. I've started telling people, "Don't ask me if you don't want to
hear what's really on my mind, or what I feel is the truth about a subject." Is it okay to
express myself only as long as I say what somebody hopes I'll say? Do you think I'm
going to say something I don't feel, or just tell people something they want to hear?
In March of 2002 I did a piece for Sports Illustrated with the magazine's longtime
basketball writer Jack McCallum, and immediately after it ran I must have had two
hundred people come up to me and start to tell me their opinions, what they liked and
didn't like. Some people who said they didn't even subscribe to Sports Illustrated said
they picked up the issue and read the piece. Most of the media reaction to it had to do
with my opinions about Augusta National changing the course, and why I thought they
were targeting Tiger Woods. A lot of people come up and say they disagreed with what I
said about Augusta National, but I haven't had anybody say to me they disliked the
things I discussed in the piece. I would say to almost all of them, "Okay, you disagree
with my view on Tiger and Augusta, that's cool. But what did you think of the entire
article?" See, it wasn't as important for them to agree with me as to get whoever read it
engaged in some sort of discussion or debate about the bigger picture.
I've been criticized for expressing certain views for nearly twenty years. And even
though I never minded getting hammered, toward the end of my career I was thinking,
"Let me finish my playing career before I start seriously discussing all the social issues
of the day. I'll still be in the public spotlight because I'm probably going to be in TV to
some extent. Then I'll be better able to handle it." The more serious the subject matter,
the more time you need to spend thinking about it and the harder people come at you if
they disagree. As I said, I don't have any problem with people who disagree with me
because the real reason you take on serious issues is to get some dialogue started on
difficult and sensitive topics. But disagreement and ridicule are not the same thing.
Another reason I'm looking at a transition is I don't know that you can give full attention
to subjects as serious and as sensitive as race and the economy and education, then
just shift into doing all sports. I don't know if the two go together. I've always contended
that sports don't help black people. . . . We don't own any of the franchises, don't run
any leagues, barely run any teams. You talk to these kids and all they want to talk about
is sports, and I guess they don't realize how little other than playing sports black people
have to do with the industry. But they all want to play sports. Playing sports is fine, but
too often it's all they want to do.
In "Back From the Dead," Bill Walton writes about his life, his career and his challenges,
which have included stuttering and severe pain.
My spine will no longer hold me. After spending more than forty years on the road - half
as a player, half as a broadcaster, all as a proud Dead Head, logging two hundred
nights and often six hundred thousand air miles each and every year - I can't go
anymore. I can't get up off the floor.
The pain I'm feeling now is worse than anything I could have ever imagined.
Unrelenting, debilitating, and excruciating - the pain has destroyed me. Imagine being
submerged in a vat of scalding acid with an electric current running constantly through
it. A burning, stinging, pulsating, punishing pain that you can never escape. Ever.
There are times when I'm lying here - with nothing. Lori, the most beautiful and
wonderful of angels, as fine as anything's fine, comes to me. As she gets ever closer, it
is just too much. And I cry out, in whimpering pain, "STOP. Don't come any closer.
YOU'RE PUSHING THE AIR ONTO ME! It's too much. STOP!!"
My life is over. I can do nothing. I eat my meals stretched out prone on the floor. I have
to crawl like a snake to the bathroom, and use all my strength to climb up to the toilet. I
don't think I am going to make it. I tell Lori that it's time for her to go, to get out while the
getting is good.
Not wanting to leave her with a big mess, we've put our longtime family home - the
dream of a lifetime for the past thirty-six years - up for sale and moved into the small
cottage next door. I can't think. I can't sleep, except when my neighbor Danny comes
over and starts explaining his insurance company workers' comp legal defense work,
which puts me straight out, but only for a moment.
One day I am on the floor, as always, and Lori has just put some food down in front of
me, so that I can slurp something in. I hear the front door open at the other end of the
house and know it's our youngest son, Chris, dropping in for a visit with his new dog,
Cortez, a huge, rambunctious bullmastiff that must weigh three or four hundred pounds,
and is still just a puppy. I can hear Chris release Cortez, and the giant, panting beast
begins to roam. On the prowl, Cortez comes around a corner and wanders over to
where I am lying facedown on the floor and stares at me, transfixed, as I try to nibble or
slurp some food off the plate, just inches in front of my mouth. The giant dog looks at
the meal in front of my face, marches right up to it, and wolfs down every morsel in a
single bite - and there is nothing I can do about it.
Cortez turns to leave, and as he rounds the corner, he belches and passes gas, never
looking back. It is the lowest point imaginable.
I've run the gamut from thinking I am going to die to wanting to die to the worst of all
possible places - being afraid that I am going to live - and this is what I am going to be
stuck with. I have given up. I am standing on the edge of a bridge, measuring, knowing
full well that it would be better to jump than to go back to what is left of my life. It is time
to go.
Knocked down - it gets to wearing thin,
They just won't let you be.
Two and a half years I have spent on the floor. When I was at my lowest, I was fired
from my broadcasting job - right in the middle of Lori's birthday party. I didn't have the
heart to tell her for several days. There went our income, our health insurance, my
dignity, my self-worth. We would lose our home.
Johnny Cash and Merle Haggard could have written a song.
I no longer have the strength to fight back. The mind-numbing, spirit-sapping, lifedraining drugs they tell me are supposed to help eventually just become more of what I
desperately need to get away from. If only this were a game and I could look to Maurice
Lucas, my greatest teammate, the strongest, gentlest, and toughest friend anybody
could ever ask for, who, anytime anything needed to be done - move somebody out of
the way, punch someone in the face - would stand tall and convincingly say, "I'll take
care of this." But Maurice can't help here - he's dying of cancer himself. Where is Larry
Bird to shoot us out of trouble, now that the game is really on the line? What can Coach
Wooden tell me now?
Sense of Where You Are
1. Incentive
My father, for fourteen years or so, has served as physician to United States Olympic
teams. And for more than forty years, before his retirement in June of 1964, he was a
physician to college athletes, almost all of that time at Princeton. I know that he greatly
admires excellence in athletes, and that he would regularly become quite caught up in
the evolution of a Princeton team's season, its hopes for a championship, and the kind
of performance an individual might be sustaining; but these things were discernible only
in highly indirect ways. He has a taciturnity celebrated in his circle, and he can watch,
say, a Princeton halfback go ninety-eight yards for a touchdown without even faintly
showing on the surface the excitementhe feels within him. In fact, from the late thirties,
which is as far back as I can remember, until the winter of 1962, I had never heard him
actually make a direct statement of praise about any athlete, let alone make high
claims, proud or otherwise, for an athlete's abilities. Then the phone rang one day in my
apartment in New York, where I had been living for some years, and my father was on
the other end, saying, "There's a freshman basketball player down here who is the best
basketball player who has ever been near here and may be one of the best ever. You
ought to come down and see him."
I remember being so surprised that I felt more worried about my father than interested in
the basketball player. Finally, I said, "What's his name?"
"What difference does that make? They're playing Penn tomorrow night at six-thirty."
Freshman basketball, in my own time, a dozen years earlier, had not been a spectator
sport at Princeton. A player's roommates might turn up, or his parents, if they lived
nearby, but the grandstands were empty and the sound of the dribbling used to echo
while the freshmen played. On the night of the gamewith Pennsylvania, I showed up at
about six-twenty-five. There was a large crowd outside the gym and, inside, the stands
were already filled. My father was holding a seat for me, and by the time I got to it the
game had already begun. I sat down and purposely didn't ask which player I was
supposed to watch, because that would have diminished the pleasure of discovery, and
it was, in fact, something like this that my father had in mind when he had cut me off so
abruptly on the phone. I watched the general flow on the court for a while, and it was
soon clear enough who had drawn the crowd, and that he was the most graceful and
classical basketball player who had ever been near Princeton, to say the very least.
Every motion developed in its simplest form. Every motion repeated itself precisely
when he used it again. He was remarkably fast, but he ran easily. His passes were so
good that they were difficult to follow. Every so often, and not often enough, I thought,
he stopped and went high into the air with the ball, his arms rising until his hands were
at right angles to one another and high above him, and a long jump shot would go into
the net. My father, once a collegebasketball player himself, was so moved by this that
he nudged me with his elbow. It was not the two points, obviously enough--it was the
form and the manner with which they had been scored. I looked from the boy's number
down to the mimeographed sheet in my hand. His name was Bill Bradley. He was six
feet, five inches tall. And he came from Crystal City, Missouri.
I learned later that the general manager of the St. Louis Hawks had declared Bradley to
be of professional calibre when he was still in high school, and that is how Bradley
always seemed at Princeton, at home on the court and under control even when his
own game was cold, which it sometimes was. To me, Bradley's appeal was grounded in
the fact that he was a pleasure to watch no matter what was happening on the
scoreboard. My own feeling for basketball had faded almost to nothing over the years
because the game seemed to me to have lost its balance, as players became taller and
more powerful, and scores increased until it was rare when a professional team hit less
than a hundred points, win or lose; it impressed me as a glut of scoring, with few
patterns of attack and almost no defense any more. The players, in a sense, had gotten
better than the game, and the game had become uninteresting. Moreover, it attracted
exhibitionists who seemed to be more intent on amazing a crowd with aimless
prestidigitation than with advancing their team by giving a sound performance.
Basketball had once consumed about ninetytwo percent of my time, and I had played
on high school and prep school teams, only as a freshman in college, and later,
curiously enough, on the team of Cambridge University, in England; but, despite all this
obvious affection for the game, what had happened to me in later years as a spectator
was not really a disillusionment so much as a death of interest. That, at any rate, is how
I felt until 1962. After watching Bradley play several times, even when he was eighteen,
it seemed to me that I had been watching all the possibilities of the game that I had ever
imagined, and then some. His play was integral. There was nothing missing. He not
only worked hard on defense, for example, he worked hard on defense when the other
team was hopelessly beaten. He did all kinds of things he didn't have to do
simplybecause those were the dimensions of the game.
I decided to write about him after the Princeton-St. Joseph's game in the national
tournament in 1963, in which, at the end of his first college season, he showed how few
players there had ever been like him. But that was not incentive enough. In the course
of the year since I had first heard of him, I had learned that--as one of his classmates
later put it--basketball was more a part of him than he a part of basketball. The most
interesting thing about Bill Bradley was not just that he was a great basketball player,
but that he succeeded so amply in other things that he was doing at the same time,
reached a more promising level of attainment, and, in the end, put basketball aside
because he had something better to do.
A year went by before I actually got started. In the early summer of 1964, he was
working in Washington and he appeared in Princeton almost every weekend, beginning
the research for his senior thesis. As frequently as he could, he came out to my home,
which by then was no longer in New York but in the countryside near Princeton, and
talked for hours on end. I told him that the eventual story would dependheavily on what
he could contribute, and that I wanted to try to build a sense of the game itself around
him rather than merely say how good he was at playing it, and that he would have to be
an articulate teacher if the project were to succeed at all, since the difference between
basketball as he understood it and basketball as I understood it was obviously large.
It took him a while to become enthusiastic, but when he did, he spent hours inventing
game situations, then pacing his way through them, taking perhaps fifteen minutes to
describe what would occur in a single two-second sequence, then stringing the
sequences together. He was putting in two hours a day at the time in preparation for the
Olympic games in the autumn, so he went on talking in the afternoons in the gyms at
Princeton and at the Lawrenceville School five miles away. When I visited him in August
in Crystal City, he would stay up until three and four in the morning doing reverse pivots,
making back door plays with chairs as opponents, and shooting imaginary basketballs
at imaginary baskets on wallpapered walls--the one situation in which all basketball
players never miss a shot. His contribution,then, was everything that any writer could
have hoped for. He added to it when he came home from Tokyo. Breaching an
ordinarily sensible custom, I showed him the manuscript before I turned it in, because I
was anxious for the technical detail to be checked over by an outstanding basketball
player and he was the nearest one. He did the job quickly. He ran one finger down the
middle of each page, reading, I would guess, ten or eleven pages a minute, completely
ignoring all the passages about his personality and all the other things that ordinarily
make it a poor idea to show an unpublished story to its subject. Picking out eight or ten
technical flaws along the way, he caught all that there apparently were. Handing back
the manuscript, he said he looked forward to reading it.