The Stakes of the Game

In the days remaining before the first practice, they began checking into the small motel near the base of Mount Hood in the small suburban community of Gresham, Oregon. They were rookies and free agents, and the odds were already against them. Their motel rooms were paid for, and there was daily meal money, but in a profession where more and more things were guaranteed, they were still at a point in their careers where the only guarantee was an airplane ticket back home in the likely event they were cut.

The veterans, the young princes of the sport, who all owned homes in the swank upper-middle-class sections of Portland, were not required to arrive until later, as befit their superior status. In contrast to that of the rookies and the free agents, the anxiety level of the veterans was relatively low; they had made the club before, many had even played on a championship team, and, most important of all, the money in their contracts was guaranteed. For the rookies and the free agents, it was something else again. They were at the very brink of their dream, which was to play under contract in the National Basketball Association.

They were an odd and unlikely collection. Steve Hayes was white and very tall, 6'11?. He also shot well, and once upon a time in this game, that had been enough, to be tall and have a light shooting touch; but the game had now become one of speed and muscle, and in both categories, Hayes was lacking. He knew the coaches thought he was slow (intelligent but very slow was, in fact, their precise definition of him) and that in contrast to many of the young blacks with whom he would be competing, he lacked muscle tone.

Hayes had been through all this once before, in 1977, at a preseason camp run by the New York Knicks. Arriving as a fourth-round draft choice, he had been judged too slow and had gone on to play for two years in Italy. He believed he had now spent enough time in the minor leagues. He also knew just how many players there were ahead of him on the Portland roster and which of them had guaranteed contracts; he understood, too, that the odds against him were already immense. Coaches who had once coveted bodies like his no longer did, all of which made him feel slightly less than sturdy just then.

Hayes's feelings were a good deal more tranquil, however, than those of another free agent, named Greg Bunch. Bunch, who was black and quick where Hayes was white and slow, was at the moment still in a rage over what had been done to him earlier in the day. He had undergone the same battery of psychological exams that all rookies and free agents were subjected to but, by mistake, had been required to undergo them a second time. That had convinced Bunch, who mistrusted professional basketball management anyway, that someone was trying to mess with his head. He had exploded and started screaming at the team trainer, who was administering the test, to leave his head alone. Bunch had some basis for grievance in his professional career; a year earlier, as a second-round draft choice with the Knicks, he had played well in the pre-season camp, had made the team, had even played in 12 regular-season games before being released in what was widely regarded as a racial decision--an apparent effort to keep the tail end of the Knicks' bench a little whiter. Bruised many times in his brief pro career, Bunch was sensitive and duly wary of the great white they who controlled his athletic destiny.

Bunch s roommate at camp was a young black man from Racine, Wisconsin, named Abdul Jeelani (nee Gary Cole), or, more particularly, Abdul Qadir Jeelani, the All Powerful Servant of Allah Who by His Own Example Expands the Muslim Flock, the son of sharecroppers from west Tennessee, 6'8?. Jeelani, a gentle young man, was a god to the young white children who had gathered around him this afternoon for autographs.

In truth, Jeelani was at that moment a very nervous god, for although he wore the warm-up clothes of the Trail Blazers, and although he had signed a contract, he was by no means a member of the team. Last year he had been the highest scorer in the Italian league at $45,000 for the season (the king, one teammate had said, of spaghetti basketball), and the Blazers had paid his way out here. But he was a forward, and Portland was at that moment said to be very deep in forwards. His status was thus by no means clear. He knew his was not a household name, knew that in competition with another player of comparable ability he might be at a disadvantage simply because he had tried and failed before. Still, Allah had given him a fresh spiritual confidence, and he believed that what he was doing was right.

The coaches were pleased that Jeelani and Bunch and the others had all arrived on schedule and that no one had missed his flight to Portland. Worn out by the increasing volatility of the league, coaches felt as little affection for rookies who missed planes as for rookies who missed jump shots, possibly less. They were exhausted from dealing with talented players of rare skills who were tied up in their own emotional problems; head cases, these players were called. Big talent, the coaches often said of an athlete like this, bad head.

That night, awaiting the start of a new season (though with the recent industrialization of American sports, the season never really stopped but ran from camp in September to play-off games in June, and on into the rookie camps and summer leagues), the coaches were at once excited and anxious. The rookies and the free agents looked on the coaches as secure and powerful, men who held the keys to the league in their hands and made the final decisions on their careers. But the coaches and the scouts had their own anxieties and vulnerabilities. This was no longer a profession to breed confidence in anyone, be he owner, player or coach.

That first night, as the rookies and the free agents straggled into the restaurant next to the motel, they were still somewhat wary of one another. For the moment, at least, there was too much tension and rivalry among them to allow much room for friendship.

Jeelani believed, in fact, that he had never seen anyone so tight as Bunch. They were competing for the same job, that of small forward on a team that already had two small forwards, both of whom were white; and it had been a mistake, Jeelani thought, for the club to make them roommates. Jeelani had been at rookie camp earlier in the summer with Bunch and Bunch had refused to talk to him; then they had both been in the Los Angeles summer league for a month and, again, Bunch had made a point of not speaking to Jeelani. Jeelani, in a sense, wanted to befriend Bunch, but he was aware, in the most primitive way possible, that everything good that happened to Bunch was bad for him. It was terrible to think that way. So he kept his distance. At the same time, he couldn't help realizing that the fear and tension on the face of his roommate was the same fear and tension he had worn on his own face during his three previous N.B.A. tryouts (in Detroit, Cleveland and New Orleans) when he had looked around him and become convinced that everyone there--rookies, veterans, coaches, scouts--wanted him to fail. At this camp, Jeelani felt more confident, more mature. He had three years of European ball behind him and he knew that only one player--a guard and thus not a competitor--had guaranteed money.

While the players ate singly, the coaches went out in a group to a fancier restaurant a few miles away. They were all middle-class men, all white, all devoted fathers, but suddenly they had left their civilian incarnations behind. Now they were professionals, among their own kind once again, in a world without women, talking their own special shoptalk.

The conversations among coaches, here in Portland and elsewhere, often possessed a certain melancholy tone these days. Basketball was their lives. They were men still doing what they had done as boys, and for that other men envied them; but there was a consensus among them that their game was in trouble. Money now clouded not only the relationships between management and player but also those among the players themselves.

Stu Inman, the Portland vice-president and personnel manager, was sure that one player obsessed with his contract inevitably caused all his teammates to be obsessed with theirs. Inman was depressed by the changes money had wrought, worried about what they meant to his team. His highest enthusiasm was reserved for young, still-innocent college players, preferably from small schools that had never been visited by professional scouts; his greatest disdain was for almost any agent or lawyer. He talked a lot these days in an almost mystical way about what was good and what was bad for basketball; and when he explained why he so greatly admired his colleague Pete Newell (once a pre-eminent coach and now a Golden State scout, and a senior statesman of the profession), he used an odd and slightly sad phrase: "Because the game has never ground him down." Inman spoke as a man who knew and loved basketball but whose pleasant and private and somewhat sheltered world had been invaded and corrupted by alien beings who were richer and more powerful than he.

Jack Ramsay, the Portland coach, was more accepting of the changes that had taken place, more accepting of the fact that a coach now dealt primarily with spoiled, almost delicate athletes protected by no-cut clauses in their contracts. It was not a state of affairs he wanted or sought, but Ramsay had learned to accept it. After all, as the rewards had become so much larger for the players, so, too, had they become larger for the coach; the television eye during play-offs caught not just the big man in the middle rebounding but also Ramsay kneeling, intense, talking to the players during time-outs.

As a professional coach, possibly the best in the country, he had been able to rationalize his own conversion from a successful college coach working in (continued on page 150)Stakes of the Game(continued from page 126) a world governed by old-fashioned loyalties to a big-league coach whose world was, by his own description, utterly without such loyalty. 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. He was on his own and, Ramsay believed, no loyalty could be expected, either from those above who employed you or from those below who played for you. An owner would always fire a coach if he were perceived to be slipping; the players, if it served their purpose, would just as willingly withhold part of their game from him. Therefore, a coach must learn that loyalty was worthless and might even work against him (as, for example, when it encouraged him to keep an older player of diminishing skills whose past heroics he was still grateful for, instead of coldly replacing him with a younger player with potential for the future).

For that reason, Ramsay rationed his emotions in his personal relations with players. Although they might produce this year, he might still have to let them go next. So Ramsay devoted his most intense emotion to winning, and his connection to the players seemed to end at the locker-room door each night. Professional basketball was, he thought, a very tough world, which by its nature allowed for few illusions. The question remained whether or not it was possible to survive and triumph in such a world and still exist outside it. "When you are discussing a successful coach," sports psychologist Bruce Ogilvie once said, not of Ramsay but of the entire profession, "you are not necessarily drawing the profile of an entirely healthy person." And, indeed, Ramsay seemed to be a man within whom the needs of his job and the needs of his humanity were constantly wrestling.

Larry Weinberg, the owner of the Portland Trail Blazers, was not with his coaches at dinner that night. But their eye was as much on him as on the players. Weinberg's friends believed that he, too, now regarded his basketball enterprise with a good deal more skepticism than he had ten years earlier. His player payroll, which in the first season had been some $500,000, was now $2,200,000, fifth highest in the N.B.A. It was the equivalent of running a factory with 7000 workers, each of whom made $300 a week. Yet no one in his basketball operation seemed very happy.

Certainly, the coming of the big money had not made the players a great deal happier. Like all Americans, they welcomed the chance to be paid more rather than less, but in many cases, given their backgrounds of extreme poverty, the instant riches were a burden they could not handle; in other cases, the money simply heightened the anxiety that went with any kind of stardom. Now, inevitably, management would eye each player more closely, and veterans wanting to eke out one last season could no longer expect to get the benefit of the doubt.

This made all the players more cynical about their future. The increasing preoccupation with money loomed large on a team. No matter how much a player made, and no matter how much more it was than he once expected, there was always going to be someone else, of lesser ability, playing somewhere and making more. Experienced professionals believed that too much of a player's identity was now tied up in his salary. It touched not only the exterior world of basketball, the world the sportswriters chronicled and fans worried about; but more and more it touched the interior world as well, the secret world that only the players knew. The big salaries, older players believed, had gradually altered the athletes' self-perception and had made what they did less joyous and less of a sport. Rather than diminish their grievances, they had in many ways made them worse. For whereas 15 or 20 years ago grievance had been obviously justified--by the lack of a pension plan, for instance--and had unified players by pitting them against management, now it was the grievance of small slights, sometimes real and sometimes imagined, and it often pitted player against teammate. It was now an article of faith among thoughtful former players that the new breed was by far more talented but that they desperately lacked one key element--a feeling for each other, a sense of community, a loyalty to something besides careers and pay checks.

The current condition of Weinberg's basketball team made all of that hard to deny. Weinberg's favorite and most valuable player, Bill Walton, had just left the Trail Blazers in a flurry of charges and countercharges about medical mistreatment, and that had been painful to the owner. His second most valuable player, Maurice Lucas, was making $300,000 a year and wanted out unless he got more. (In addition, Lucas' attacks on Weinberg himself were becoming increasingly personal.) His third most valuable player, Lionel Hollins, was showing signs of growing disaffection and probably would be gone next year. And his fourth most valuable player, Bobby Gross, had signed for so much money that his second most valuable player was angrier than ever. Weinberg had entered professional basketball thinking it would be fun, and, instead, it had become, in his own sardonic word, interesting.

•

What was happening to basketball was similar to what was happening to a great many products in America. Because, originally, the impulse behind basketball had been genuine on the part of everyone concerned, the product had been good. And because it was good, a lot of people wanted a piece of it, making the value of the product skyrocket. But as had so often been the case in modern America, with so many other good things, basketball had been bought into and bought up by those wishing to improve their tax position and their rating on Wall Street.

A family in the Midwest might, for example, have run a small ma-and-pa concern making potato chips. Because they loved making potato chips, as their parents had before them, they did it very well. The potato chips were good and they sold briskly and they satisfied a fairly large potato-chip audience. Moreover, the company was well run and it made handsome profits. Then a large company that earned millions of dollars selling tires decided to buy a piece of the action in order to avoid paying huge taxes and to make its portfolio more attractive to investors. The new owner promptly dispatched the potato-chip king and his wife to Florida for well-deserved retirement and turned the management of the company over to a team of accountants. None of them knew anything about making potato chips, of course, and cared less, but they were skilled at expanding sales while cutting costs. To that end, they promoted an expensive and highly successful television advertising campaign, and soon many more potato chips of a severely reduced quality were being sold. So much for good potato chips.

The phenomenon was not very different in basketball, except that it was more noticeable there. And there, of (continued on page 196)Stakes of the Game(continued from page 150) course, the product was human beings.

In sports, the crucial change had been caused by the coming of television. Of the major American sports, basketball was perhaps the most interesting in that regard, because in comparison with football and baseball, it had a shorter history and was less rooted in the national myth. Since its norms were less rigid, basketball was far more vulnerable to the new pressures created by television. As those pressures grew, the guardians of the sport were both less able and less willing to make distinctions between what was good for the sport and what was good for them personally. Many of the new owners came in only because the sport was now on national television. Overnight, basketball was not just a game but a show, and overnight it was competing not just with other sports but with other television fare, often in prime time.

Thus, it was only logical that when players thought about their salaries and compared them with those of other Americans, they thought not of athletic salaries past and present but of the salaries paid to other entertainers. Very quickly, the commercial norms had reached the players themselves and the norms were always bigger and bigger. In the evolution of modern sport, a league's success was no longer defined only by the quality of its play, nor by the size of its live attendance, but by how the networks--or, more accurately, the great national advertisers--saw it. For in American sport in the Eighties, there was no God but Madison Avenue. And A. C. Nielsen was His prophet.

The first of the great commercial marriages in America in the postwar years had been between advertising and television, as the networks offered national advertisers an extraordinarily attentive national audience; the second great marriage had come in the late Fifties and early Sixties as Madison Avenue, seeking ways to reach the American male, discovered live sports as a premier vehicle. Professional football had been the first triumph, with results so exceptional that advertisers immediately began casting about for other sports. Eventually, handsome TV contracts reached even the fledgling National Basketball Association.

That connection gradually changed the nature of N.B.A. ownership and the structure of its economics. The old owners had been men of limited income, promoters and arena proprietors who stayed one step ahead of the bill collector. Their revenues were what they could draw from live fans. These new owners were primarily young self-made millionaires, for whom ego gratification was often more important than making money. Under those circumstances, the economics of basketball had become more and more artificial. Television had changed the nature of the audience, too, from a tiny handful of passionate fans who went to games, paid for their tickets and insisted on real performances to millions of watchers, loosely connected to the game, who sat in their homes and accepted what a given network offered because it happened at that moment to be somewhat more pleasing (or less displeasing) than what the other networks were offering. The money no longer came directly from the pockets of fans, it came from the projections and expectations of auto companies and breweries.

What happened when Madison Avenue perceived basketball as a "hot" sport at the end of the Sixties is a fable for our time--a story of instant success and destructive cupidity. For as the ratings went up, revenues went up, and advertisers wanted in; and as television made the sport not just successful but glamorous, more owners wanted in, too. This made it possible for the existing owners to charge a premium for membership in this most exclusive club, giving up in return only a few reject players. In the pretelevision age, the price of the club was minimal, something that people won or lost in relatively low-stake poker games; now it began to rise, and this increase became a means by which older owners not only recouped their original investments but wiped out their ongoing debts as well. In the early Sixties, a franchise was worth perhaps $200,000; in 1980, Dallas bought in for $12,000,000. Every time the buy-in price went up, every other owner could claim that his franchise was worth at least that much, because he, of course, had a few years of tradition behind him and a couple of valuable players.

It was a dangerous and deceptive time. No one could lose. If professional basketball moved into a city that was not ready for it--New Orleans, for example--there were so many other suckers waiting to get in that the present owners, having taken their tax deductions, could always sell at a much higher price to newer owners in another city. In 1967, when television and the league discovered each other, there were ten teams. In that year, San Diego (later Houston) and Seattle bought in for $1,750,000 apiece, with each existing team picking up a neat $350,000 share of it. That made 12 teams. By the time Dallas entered the league only 13 years later, those ten early franchises had made roughly $3,000,000 apiece from expansion payments alone.

At its best, in the early television years, pro basketball was a sport with relatively shallow roots but exceptional action and intensity and, above all, genuine rivalries. But each new team, and each consequent shift in players, diluted the mix and destroyed team character and identity. The game itself was becoming vulnerable. The problem was not just in the new cities to which basketball had been transplanted, often without much forethought; it was in the old franchises, too, whose teams had now begun to age and who could not replenish themselves, because the draft necessarily spread each year's new stock of players thinner.

Madison Avenue, watching the decline of the traditional powerhouse teams in the early Seventies--teams that were located, of course, in the big national markets--became nervous. Because there were more teams, there was now more travel. The players, locked into an endless schedule of 82 regular-season games that guaranteed a kind of constant fatigue and almost certain minor (if not major) injuries, now faced even greater travel burdens and still more fatigue. Where once it had been only Madison Avenue that had seen the commercial possibilities of the game, and the owners who had seen the chance for a bigger payoff, now the new money had seeped down to the level of the players, who, as they became aware of what everyone else in the league was making, proved to be greedy as well.

Most damaging to the intensity of the game was the arrival of the no-cut contract. Given such contracts, too many games and a schedule designed to exhaust even the most physically fit young men in America, many players responded by functioning on automatic pilot, coming alive only in post-season play-off games. Even worse, this had happened as basketball became the blackest of America's major sports. In the late Sixties, there had been some racial balance, but the league in the Seventies was three quarters black. Just as the camera had caught and transmitted the true intensity of the old-fashioned rivalries in the earlier days of the league, so it now caught and transmitted with equal fidelity the increasing lethargy and indifference of many players in regular-season games, a lethargy and indifference now seen by a largely white audience as at least partially racial in origin. Those who knew the sport best learned to concentrate on the play-offs, ignoring most of the rest. CBS, frustrated by low ratings in the regular season, proceeded to further frustrate genuine fans. With the proliferation of teams, regular-season coverage declined to the point where the network was ignoring fully two thirds of them; there were, in effect, two leagues--one consisting of the 22 N.B.A. teams, the other a six- or seven-team league covered by CBS, its version of the N.B.A.

All this took place in less than a decade--sudden growth, the shift in values from those of pure sports to those of entertainment and advertising. What had happened to basketball was typical of altogether too much happening in the new American scheme of things: There was more, but it was less.

•

A week into the fall camp, the coaches went out to dinner together again. They were discussing how new contracts would affect the veteran players' game, wondering what the incentive would be, now that so much money was guaranteed. Even when a player was a quality person, they thought, it was simply harder for him to be eager when his future was guaranteed.

The coaches' jobs, on the other hand, were anything but secure. What went up in this league went up very fast and often came down just as quickly. Power was for the coaches an illusory thing; the only players to whom they appeared powerful were, in fact, the marginal ones they could, indeed, control, but to little purpose. The players they would like to control--that is, the talented ones flawed either by attitude or by a specific major weakness in their game--more likely than not were protected by no-cut contracts far larger than those of the coaches themselves. It was those players who could, if they listened and obeyed, make the coaches seem more effective; yet they were the very ones over whom it was impossible to exercise authority directly. Instead, unlike players of the past, they had to be stroked and cajoled into doing what coaches wanted.

The current crop of rookies and free agents, though still eager and coachable, was as yet of uncertain value. Members of the Portland staff all liked Steve Hayes; he was a nice kid, with a light shooting touch. True, he was slow and awkward, and it would be hard for faster teammates to work with him on offense; but he was a lovely young man. The problem was that body. By contemporary basketball standards, it was soft. It meant, they decided, that Hayes had never spent much time in the weight room. Was that a lack of commitment? It was clear that Hayes, nice young man though he was, would eventually have to go.

The question of Greg Bunch or Abdul Jeelani was more intriguing. Bunch was a better player technically--more fluid, more graceful and able to fit more naturally into the patterned Ramsay offense. But something was missing with him; he was playing below his expected level and he was tentative, not getting the tough rebounds, the ones that came down into a crowd. He did not, in Stu Inman's phrase, "stick his nose into the ball." Jeelani, by contrast, was a constant surprise. He was not a graceful player, he had a great deal of trouble with the patterned offense, but there was something exuberant about him; he was always around the ball, always scoring when it seemed he shouldn't. He seemed hungrier than the others and he had an instinct for scoring, if not for the game. Although the Portland squad, rookies and veterans alike, all seemed to be playing tight, Jeelani more than anyone else contributed an extra joyous energy. Every time the coaches watched him, they saw a little more and were a little more impressed. They decided that night, to their surprise, that he had a real chance of making the team.

Inman was particularly pleased that Jeelani was handling himself so well. Although he'd had doubts about Jeelani's ability to make the club, Inman had signed him to a contract--albeit the kind of contract that could evaporate the moment Portland wanted it to. He had dealt with Jeelani on the basis of a recommendation from an old friend named Jim McGregor, who was coaching and doing some scouting on the side in Italy. Inman liked McGregor, but he also believed that free-lance scouts were always trying to sell themselves as well as their products, hoping, perhaps, for a full-time job in the N.B.A. Jeelani had arrived along with a considerable dose of McGregor's hyperbole.

As Inman ate dinner, he turned to the coaches. "This kid is killing people here," he said, as if quoting McGregor's letter. "He's too big for Italy, too big for Rome. No one can stop him. Forty points a game, 17 blocked shots a game." Inman imitated McGregor's style of trying to attract attention: "Four hundred and thirty-eight rebounds a game. Sign him now, Stu!" So Portland signed him and sent him to play in a summer league. Inman considered Jeelani a good pure shooter, but he also felt that he was a prisoner of his past, a small school with limited coaching, followed by a few seasons with a similar lack of direction in Italy; he was thus four or five years behind other players his age who were already in the N.B.A. In truth, Inman thought, if Jeelani made Ramsay's team, one of the most disciplined and structured squads in the league, then it would be a sign that the Blazers were in trouble and vulnerable.

Inman's thoughts left Jeelani and fastened for a moment on Bunch. Bunch was two inches shorter than Jeelani and 20 pounds lighter. Inman would describe him in scout talk as exceptionally fast, sound fundamentals, good leaper, slim body but long arms, with a good concept of the game. But there was something troubling about him. He was a young man who, Inman suspected, was fighting himself, not just in basketball but in other ways as well, though it showed most clearly on the court.

Finally, it was Bunch's personal problems, like Hayes's physical limitations, that proved to be decisive. Within the week, both would be gone to colder climes--Hayes to join the Continental league in Alaska, Bunch to play in Helsinki.

As for Abdul Jeelani, he would make the Trail Blazers team. Although he never seemed quite comfortable with the disciplined Ramsay system, he could come off the bench to score flurries of points when the system broke down, and that ability kept him in the league.

Jeelani thought he had earned a regular spot on the Portland roster, so he was shocked at the end of the season when he was shipped off to Dallas in the expansion draft. At the first practice session there, the coach calmly told the assembled players not to buy houses in the area--a not-so-subtle reminder of their vulnerability. Some 20 players came and went on the new Dallas team that year, and Jeelani was one of only four who lasted the entire season. During that time, he probably came to know what the older players already understood--that the game of basketball, though more lucrative now, had been a lot more fun in the past.

"Big salaries, older players believed, had made what they did less joyous and less of a sport."

"In American sport, there was no God but Madison Avenue. And A. C. Nielsen was His prophet."