The Breaks of the Game

by David Halberstam

A college coach, Ramsay believed, was granted authority almost automatically by virtue of his position; a professional coach gained what authority he could by exercise of his intelligence, his subtlety, his very being.

The game, for all its troubles, remained in the minds of its most partisan fans the greatest athletic showcase for the rare combination

of athletic grace and power. The players, restless, outspoken, contentious, were, many sportswriters believed, the most interesting and often the most honest professional athletes in the country, and the pressures of dealing with such volatile and talented young men meant that the coaching was not just better, but that the coaches were more subtle than ever before. The season was long and difficult but it was not without its rewards, and its glory;

FOR RACE OF course touched everything. It was not that the NBA was a racist place—quite the contrary. In contrast with the rest of American life there was more real contact and friendship between blacks and whites than almost anywhere else, barring perhaps the armed forces. It was simply that the NBA was a showplace for American racial tension; no matter how successful the black athlete, and no matter well paid he now was, he brought to the game a complicated assortment of anxieties about growing up black in a white nation. For all of his success, he played in a league where the owner was always white, the coaches were usually white, the sportswriters were almost always white, the referees were almost always white, and the fans were almost always white.

There had been ugly scenes between Wicks and two of his coaches, first Rolland Todd then Jack McCloskey. The one with McCloskey, chosen as coach because he was said to be a strict disciplinarian and would bring order to a chaotic clubhouse, involved Wicks announcing to his coach: “I’ve checked you out and you’re nothing but a loser. You’ve been a loser every place you coached, and I’ve been a winner everywhere I played,” and McCloskey (soon, of course, to depart) answering in turn, “All-star? Sidney Wicks an all-star? The only all-star team you could make is the all-dog team.”

He held two Portland records, one for the most games played, 594, and the other for the most fouls, 1,779. On the second record, no one else was even close. With a little luck, and if his knees lasted, he might make 2,000. It was no small thing to accumulate 2,000 fouls in the NBA.

Kunnert did not exactly say “aw shucks,” but he looked like he should say “aw shucks” and that was good enough.

Cleveland, which was not known in those days for scouting particularly well,

There was a white Chicago standing there along the lake shore, in new glassed-in high-rises, but he had never dared enter it. It was a world apart.

McKinney was ebullient about his new job and his new owner, a high roller named Jerry Buss. “Jack, he’s never with the same girl twice,” McKinney was saying. “None of them over twenty-five. Hard to remember their names because they’re never back. You see one and try and figure out the name, and then she’s gone. Hard on my wife. She’s stopped trying to get the names right.”

Then, late in the game, at a crucial moment, the game hanging in the balance, the Lakers had made a run and Kareem had gone out for a shot and as he did, Walton had gone up too and he had blocked it, and even as Walton reached the apex of his jump, his hand outstretched, the entire Portland bench had been aware of an even more dramatic moment: Lloyd Neal rising up out of his seat, huge now, intimidating, a great dark-visaged figure pointing a massive and threatening finger in a massive threatening hand at the suddenly tiny Nicholson. The others had watched this tableau, it seemed frozen in time for them, as if to symbolize the team’s new invincibility, that they would not be beaten, not by Kareem, not by Los Angeles, not even by rich and celebrated actors, for there was Ice screaming at Nicholson, “Take that, mother-fucking cuckoo!”

Nor did the pressure come from the players alone. Much of it came from wives and girlfriends. Even when the players were reasonably casual about the differences, wives and girlfriends often were not. Their status was derivative and usually had no actual achievement to support it. In their own minds, they were stars as well, celebrities to their neighbors by virtue of their relationships with these heroes. It was, Pat Washington thought, as if the wives thought that they shot the fouls and got the rebounds and made the key baskets. They conceived their own pecking order: the wife of the superstar was the queen bee, and she set the tone; then there were the wives of the starters and, lower down, the wives of the substitutes. This was true on all teams. All general managers were made nervous by the wives, by the tensions they could create, knowing that they could easily hound their husbands to ask for more money, to push for greater statistics. Even on the Boston Celtics, the classic team in terms of sharing, it was believed by connoisseurs that some of the tensions which began to sap the strength of the team came not from the players but from the wives, most particularly because national television always seemed to fix its camera on Beth Havlicek, the wife of John, pert blonde, the cheerleader incarnate, with the kind of face that sports cameras loved (they would have picked her out of the crowd even if she had not been his wife), and there would be the voice of Brent Musbur...

Of the blacks on the team, he was by far the most political and also the most anxious to test authority, any authority. Some of the other blacks, Ron Brewer and T. R. Dunn, for example, had grown up in the South and had gone to southern schools; there was, some coaches thought, a lack of assertiveness to their play, something the coaches suspected could be traced back to their childhoods, to that region where, despite significant social change, authority still belonged to whites and blacks remained tentative about expressing their feelings openly, whether in politics or sports.

Jimmy Paxson, who was a rookie on this team, made roughly six times what Ron Culp did, and though Paxson had exceptionally good manners, he did not load or unload bags.