Life on the Run Read online

  Backstage, behind the end seats were hockey goals, ice-show scenery, an old circus cage, and a pulpit from a Billy Graham crusade. In 1962 Marilyn Monroe sang Happy Birthday to JFK at the Eighth Avenue end of the arena. During the thirties the German-American bund held giant rallies there to support Hitler’s Germany. In 1924 the Democratic party nominated John W. Davies there for President on the one hundred and third ballot. The old Garden was a social history of America. And, always, the smell of popcorn and burnt cooking oil filled the air.

  The new Madison Square Garden opened in February 1968, three months after I joined the team. It occupies air space over the New York terminals of the Penn Central and Long Island railroads. It was privately financed and designed to be the ultimate indoor arena. Seats were cushioned and escalators assured quick exit. The design provided a powerful ventilating system and plenty of light. The promotional message encouraged the men of Wall Street and Madison Avenue to join the die-hard basketball fans from the garment center in the new Garden. The accommodating new atmosphere and the success of the Knicks increased attendance—particularly of women. Then, in an effort to attract more families and at the same time allow businessmen to see a game before catching the commuter train home to New Jersey or Long Island, the starting time was moved up to 7:30.

  As I get out of the cab and head for the employees’ entrance, Burt says hello. He is an avid fan who wishes me good luck before every game. He has a season ticket high up in the Garden’s yellow section. Sometimes I give him better seats, and occasionally we have lunch. He knows the game well and likes to gossip about players and tactics. The Knicks make his life special, he says, and give him something to look forward to after a day at work in the post office. I am his favorite player. He is similar to other fans over the years who have identified with the team and me. They suffer with us when we lose and they are ecstatic when we win. They might criticize us when we play badly but they are never disloyal. They are the bedrock of our experience as professional players.

  I get out of the elevator on the Garden’s fifth floor, the arena level. Making my way through the back halls, I greet the carpenters, electricians, and guards of the building’s staff.

  “Go get ’em, Bill!”

  “How you gonna do? Is Dave okay?”

  I walk down a long hall past the twelve dressing rooms; I say hello to a man who stands with his son. Before almost every home game for four years, he has offered to get cut-rate diamonds for me. When he first made the offer his son was a small boy. Now he stands a head taller than his father. Another man nods hello—a wealthy bachelor who gives theater tickets to his favorite players. I shift my bag to my left hand and open the door.

  The Knicks’ locker room is small. The floor is covered with blue carpeting. At one end is a green blackboard and a bench where sportswriters or trainer’s assistants usually sit. A roll-up movie screen is attached to the blackboard. At the opposite end of the room is a built-in storage cabinet and a closet. Inside the cabinet are towels, hundreds of towels. The Knicks will use sixty towels in one night, for showering, for applying liniment to muscles, for wiping perspiration, for drying hands and for providing a cushioning layer against the various therapies of hot sand packs, diathermy, and ultrasound. The closet holds all the equipment needed for the team: liniments, sprays, tape, pills, and wraps. There are uniforms, basketballs, socks (wool and cotton), jocks, and shoes. Each player maintains his year’s supply of equipment in the closet. The only key belongs to Danny Whelan, who attends to the physical and mental whims of the team. Part of his job is to make sure every player is properly supplied, but not overly so. Some years ago, Whelan suspected a player of taking more than his share of equipment. He opened the player’s private locker to discover a plentiful cache. Whelan returned the supply to the closet and left it to the player to wonder who had intervened. The player got the message and thereafter his equipment requests lessened considerably.

  Whelan has to know who wears Puma shoes or Adidas or Converse or Keds. He has to know which players want wool socks and which need special support in their shoes. He has to know which players use Vitamin C, which need nasal spray, which want B-12 shots and which will need and can have sleeping pills on the road. In his job, Whelan is assisted by eight ball boys who look after the players’ immediate needs: band-aids, muscle wraps, gum, coffee, tickets, and messages. They are supervised by a special helper who runs the movie before each game while the players are dressing—always a film of the team we’re playing that night—and fulfills any player’s special request. When a player leaves his allotted tickets at home, it is the special helper who sees to it that the guests get to the proper seats. The special helper also arranges for the selling of any tickets on a player’s behalf.

  Locker stalls about three feet wide line opposite sides of the room. On the floor of each stall sits a big black trunk in which the player can store his personal items. At the top of the stall is a shelf, under which is a clothes hanger pole and a plastic name tag identifying the occupant. Dick Barnett has an advertisement pasted on the side of his stall—“WLIB, GROWN-UP BLACK RADIO.” Under the ad is a picture of Barnett looking particularly dapper in a tweed suit, white turtleneck, and tilted hat. Walt Frazier and Willis Reed have boxes of unopened mail and extra copies of their books, Rockin’ Steady and The Comeback Year, lying on their shelves. Dave DeBusschere has old, framed Sports Illustrated photos of himself stacked against the back of the locker, and a rosary dangles loosely from his shoes. On the outside of my locker, in clear view of everyone entering the room, is a poster about the horror of heroin addiction. I expropriated it from the locker of a player who was traded. On the edge of my shelf Whelan’s special helper, who knows of my liking for the Canadian north, has attached a plastic strip with the lyric, “There’s a town in North Ontario,” from a Neil Young song. Taped to the side of Phil Jackson’s stall are two letters from the same writer. They say: “You’re one of the worst players ever. I challenge you one-on-one for any amount of dollars,” and “Last year I hoped you’d get hurt and you sprained your ankle. This year I hope you die.”

  Between stalls on one side of the room, a door leads to the showers and to the trainer’s room, which is shared by the New York Knicks and New York Rangers. Inside there are two rubbing tables, two refrigerators, scales, a whirlpool bath, therapy machines, a medicine cabinet, a cushioned platform for knee weight exercises, and a 5,000 pound iron safe. Players sit one at a time on the left rubbing table where Whelan tapes ankles and tells stories that keep everyone laughing. When the Ranger hockey trainer of 24 years comes in during the pregame preparations—he moonlights as a Garden usher at basketball games—Whelan usually reminds him of the hockey team’s latest loss.

  After taking off my coat and hanging it up, I look around and see a ten dollar bill on the floor. I ignore it. Dick Barnett walks in and sees the bill; in one quick swoop, as if reaching to brush his shoe, he picks it up and puts it in his pocket. The room erupts in shouts, for the bill is counterfeit and was planted on the floor for amusement. The old lost-bill trick works again. Phil Jackson says he knew Barnett would go for it. Everyone laughs, including Barnett, who now argues that he was “hip” to the trick from the beginning.

  Barnett, one of the greatest jump shooters in basketball history and a starter on the Knicks’ first championship team, has only recently become Red Holzman’s Assistant Coach. The Knicks’ acquisition of Earl “the Pearl” Monroe from Baltimore hastened Barnett’s retirement. He remained a regular for the rest of that year but the next season he became a reserve guard seeing little action. After a brief comeback in the fall of 1973, he retired to the sidelines.

  Red Holzman realized Barnett’s value to a team and kept him on. He travels with us often and always comes to practices and home games. His voice should belong to the best drill sergeant in the world. It is as if the air from his lungs passes through uniquely built passages and comes out in sounds heard only from a tuba of the highest quality. People list
en when he speaks in his deliberate manner, stretching words apart by the syllables. His sense of the locker-room situation is unsurpassed. He dominates it with a combination of candor, seriousness, and humor. What may seem a personal matter—beyond the probes of anyone but intimate friends—becomes fair game to Barnett’s needling wit and frank observation: the differences between blacks and whites, the contrast between old players and young, the idiosyncrasies of sex, the sophistications of the well-schooled man.

  Dick Barnett was born in Gary, Indiana, in 1936, the youngest of three children. His father was a skilled laborer in the steel mills. When his supervisors ordered him to perform menial jobs as well, he quit rather than bow to their authority. He took a job with the Gary Parks Department. To make ends meet, he sold scrap iron and made deliveries for merchants. His greatest satisfaction according to Dick was that all his children finished high school and none went to jail—obedient to his fervent admonition, “Don’t bring the police to my door.” Mrs. Barnett was a loving, protective mother faced with economic hardship. “When I was hungry,” Dick recalls, “she always came up with a piece of bread I didn’t know was there, or she gave me twenty-five cents to go to a basketball game. When I was sick she was there to rub Vick’s salve on my chest.”

  The neighborhood Barnett grew up in was a slum, ringed by more prosperous white areas. The air smelled from factories. Homes, including Dick’s, were plagued by rats. Pollution was part of the living condition and the critical skill was survival. Dick’s parents told him to stand up and be a man, not to rely on anyone but himself. And they said that he would have to be twice as good as any white man to make it.

  “I lived a very secluded childhood,” Barnett recalls. “I was self-conscious and shy. I probably had an inferiority complex about other kids’ clothes and their new shoes. I just had one old pair of brogans. I wanted to be away from people. To play cowboys and Indians, you needed other kids, but I could play basketball by myself. I didn’t need anybody else. All I needed was a ball and a basket, or at the beginning, when I was 10, only a ping-pong ball and a tin can.”

  By the time Dick was a sophomore in high school, basketball had become his consuming passion. He spent more time on the Roosevelt High School playground than anywhere else. A big concrete tennis court, long since abandoned, served as his gym. It had no lights but a basket stood at each end. That was all he needed. Dick played basketball every day during his sophomore, junior, and senior years, one thousand ninety-five straight days of basketball. Some days, he played from 9 A.M. until midnight, with an hour or two at home for meals of grits, lunchmeat, maple syrup, bread, and water. Other days, when the temperature shot up close to 100°, he played from six to ten in the morning and then came back at three and continued until midnight. One summer he got a job in the steel mills cleaning oil spills, coal bins, and lathes for seventy dollars a week. After working eight hours a day in the mills, he went to the playground for another four. When school was in session, he would get into the high school gym where he practiced from five until ten every evening. When the gym was closed and he couldn’t break in, he would shovel the snow off the playground and return to his familiar concrete. At first, he stole a ball from the school. Later, the high school coach gave him one. He says that he did not imitate anyone, but just started playing. His imagination provided the opponent and the game situation. He dribbled, faked, and took his jumper. He hooked and practiced twisting lay-ups. Occasionally, there would be a one-on-one game, but that wouldn’t last long. Dick was easily the best player in Gary. Still, he never relaxed his regimen. Even on the night of his senior prom, he was shooting. From the court, he watched his classmates in their tuxedos enter the prom. “I saw them, but they couldn’t see me because it was dark,” he says. “After a while, you’d adjust to the darkness and could play. You had a comfortable feeling about where you were…. Even when they couldn’t see me, they could hear the ball and they knew that it was me, Barnett, alone, shooting on Roosevelt playground.”

  In his senior year, Dick’s high school team lost in the Indiana State final to Indianapolis’ Crispus Attucks, whose best player was Oscar Robertson. College scouts recognized Dick’s ability and offered him scholarships. Dick chose Tennessee State, an all-black school in Nashville. High school had not prepared him for the academic side of college and when he got there he devoted little time to study.

  His college years—1955–1959—were turbulent ones for race relations in the South. Barnett experienced outright segregation for the first time in his life when he sat in the first row of a bus during his freshman year. Everybody stared at him and then he saw the sign, “Whites Only,” in the front of the bus. He experienced racial protest for the first time when he accompanied a group of students to a lunch counter sit-in. A white man spat in the face of one of his friends and the friend remained motionless. Such incidents had a lasting effect on Barnett’s view of whites and fused with his parents’ advice about self-reliance and the need to be better than a white man in order to succeed. Suspicion and distrust existed in him alongside great determination, pride, and good humor. Still, he was not a campus leader in the protest movement or the politics of race. He was first a basketball player; he didn’t have the time or interest for much else. Besides, being a star gave him a special status with most people at the school.

  After four years at Tennessee State, during which his team won three NAIA small college championships, Dick joined the Syracuse Nationals of the National Basketball Association. For two years, he suffered Syracuse winters and sparse soul cooking. After a few swings around the league he realized that he really was as good as most of the white stars he had read about. He also knew that he was not equally paid. During those years, a quota system for black players operated on each team in the NBA as an unwritten rule. It limited the number of black players on a team, and even the number that could be on the floor at the same time.

  When the American Basketball League was formed in 1961, Barnett left the NBA for the ABL’s Cleveland franchise, which was coached by his old Tennessee State coach John McClendon, the first black professional coach in any sport. The Cleveland franchise went bankrupt within a year, and Dick Barnett returned to the NBA, this time to play for the Los Angeles Lakers. During six years there, as third guard behind Jerry West and several (as Barnett put it) “white hopes,” he remained underpaid, under-publicized, and unappreciated.

  The day businessman Robert Short sold the Lakers to businessman Jack Kent Cooke for four million dollars, Short told the Laker players how much he appreciated their loyalty and hard work. To show his gratitude he said that everyone could have a steak at the hotel and charge it to him. Barnett went back to the hotel and ordered twenty steak dinners from room service. He stacked them up in the hallway and left them there. “Man just made four million dollars and he’s going to buy me a steak dinner—shit,” he says.

  In 1966, Barnett was traded to the New York Knicks, where he became less a shooter and more a complete ball player. He promptly became a star—too late to be known as a superstar. He had already spent his best years as a substitute in Los Angeles. When the Knicks won the title by beating Los Angeles in 1970, Barnett’s wife told me, “They never would understand. Jerry [West] and Elgin [Baylor] always had to be the stars. That’s why they never won and that’s why I’m glad we beat ’em tonight.” Once during those same play-offs, a referee called a foul on Walt Frazier, giving Jerry West two free throws. Barnett, who was on the bench for a brief rest, and who very, very rarely yelled at players or officials, shouted, “He doesn’t deserve it. He doesn’t deserve it. That sucker doesn’t deserve it.”

  Barnett, still making excuses for his lack of discretion with the ten dollar bill, walks to his locker carrying a plastic suit bag. He is wearing boots, blue jeans, a black turtleneck, a tan outer shirt with yellow and black suspenders, and a Dutch boat captain’s hat. He asks Danny for a jock and changes to a practice outfit. He goes out for some exercise, one-on-one, with a chosen rookie, b
efore the game.

  DeBusschere reads his mail, much of which arrives in yellow and red envelopes with flowers around the edges. Walt Frazier tapes his ankle as if he were a master mason building a wall. Willis sits in street clothes talking to reporters. I undress, spray adherent on my leg, tape my ankle, put my uniform on, get a leg massage from Whelan, wash my hands, and sit waiting for Red Holzman’s pregame talk, wiping my hands with a towel and biting my fingers. A few minutes before Holzman starts talking, Barnett walks in with the rookies who have been working out before the game. Perspiration rolls down his face and arms and legs. His face is wrinkled and he looks drawn, worn, old. “Chump, rookie,” he says.

  “Mothahfuckin’ old man don’t guard nobody,” the rookie says after losing the one-on-one game. “He holds you—anywhere closer to the basket than 20 feet and he’s got his arms pushing your hips, knocking you off balance.”

  “Hey, Barnett,” says Frazier, “that belt’s gettin’ bigger and bigger. All that running isn’t gonna do no good unless you stop eatin’ all those chocolate bars and nuts.”

  Barnett looks dissatisfied with the comment. He walks over to his locker. One by one, pieces of his equipment come off: his shorts, jock, shoes. He sits, staring at his socks after he taken them off and lays them on top of his shoes. He gets up and walks into the shower, the roll of fat around his hips jiggling with each step. As Holzman finishes his pregame talk, Barnett opens the suit bag which hangs in his locker and takes out a tie, a clean shirt, new shoes, and a gray pin-stripe suit. With meticulous care he transforms himself into a model suitable for the pages of Gentlemen’s Quarterly. As we leave the locker room Assistant Coach Barnett knots his tie and prepares to meet the public as a new part of the Madison Square Garden management. His blue jeans hang on a nail.