The Sweet Life of Ahmad Rashad

He has fame, a beautiful wife and a legendary best friend. Is that any reason to hate the guy?

On the Saturday eve of the last regular-season game between the New York Knicks and the Chicago Bulls at Madison Square Garden, Ahmad Rashad sat in his suite at New York's Plaza Hotel, smoking an expensive cigar, talking about how he knew it was time to get out of football. "I'd always felt in control out there," he said of his ten-year NFL career, "and as I got older I felt I was losing some of that." He spoke in the easygoing, offhand cadence that is his television trademark and that seems to put a half-smile into almost everything he says. "I'd made the Pro Bowl the year before, but I didn't want to stay around till the guys with the wrong numbers on their backs started running me down. I wanted people to tell me I quit too soon instead of hanging around till I wasn't any good anymore. A lot of athletes do that, and it's a shame."

"What about your friend Michael Jordan?" I asked him. "They're billing tomorrow night as maybe his last appearance at the Garden. Is he going to go out on top? Is this his final season?"

Rashad smiled, shook his head and took a puff. "Who knows?" he said, as if he gets his information about Jordan from the sports pages like the rest of us. And whether or not he and Michael have ever talked about the biggest pending question in professional sports, the depth of their friendship and the secrets it might hold are suggested by the ring Rashad wears on his left hand. It's nearly the size of a quarter, heavy gold with a field of small diamonds around the edges. A raised basketball net sits in the center, surrounded by five larger diamonds signifying the Bulls' NBA championships. The number 23 is engraved in the shank. Jordan gave it to him for Christmas.

"We had known each other casually for a while, and then we met at Magic Johnson's Midsummer's Night Classic," he said about the genesis of their eight-year friendship. "It was my first assignment for NBC. We exchanged telephone numbers and just hit it off from there."

Which is putting it mildly. The two of them are best friends and, for some reason, Rashad takes intense heat for it. I was about to ask him why many fans and almost all sports journalists resent the relationship, when there was a knock at the door. It was the night maids, asking if they could turn down the bed.

"I love that (continued on page 159)Ahmad Rashad(continued from page 83) program on Saturday," one of them told Rashad, referring to his weekly half-hour show for kids, NBA Inside Stuff. "And we love your wife on Cosby," said the second woman, referring to Phylicia Rashad, the female lead on the CBS sitcom. "When we're not watching you, we're watching her," she added, and the three of them laughed. When they were gone, he smiled and said, "I think Phylicia and I have a strong presence in black families."

In fact, the two of them are among America's best-known couples, black or white, partly because of the way Ahmad proposed to Phylicia. It was Thanksgiving Day, 1985. He was working for NBC as an NFL sideline commentator at a game in Pontiac, Michigan between the Lions and the Jets. Phylicia was appearing in the Macy's parade, which was also being televised by NBC. The two had been introduced by Bill Cosby and had dated quietly for a few months. Although the romance was serious, both of them had been married before, both were independent spirits and he wasn't sure what she would say. Nevertheless, as the pregame show began, he stood on the field, introduced a short taped feature, and when the camera cut back to him for the live tag, he asked her to marry him, and to answer the proposal by halftime.

"To this day I still don't know exactly what I said, I was so nervous," he says of the dicey moment broadcast coast to coast. "All I could think was, This girl could make me the most embarrassed man in America."

Instead, his wildly romantic gesture, and her televised answer, made him famous in ways he didn't expect. "I'm probably better known for that than I am for the 'miracle catch' I made against the Browns in the last seconds of the game that gave the Vikings the division title in 1980."

Actually, the tipped Hail Mary pass that fell into his hands was more about luck than the skill and laid-back tenacity that characterized Rashad's football career--and his life, all the way back to the days when his name was Bobby Moore.

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He grew up in the projects of Tacoma, Washington, the last of O.C. and Condola Moore's six children. O.C., a dapper, formal man who played no sports, was a barber at Fort Lewis. Rashad's mother worked as a cleaning woman and was a devout member of the fundamentalist Pentecostal church to which she took young Bobby several days a week.

"Seems like I spent more than half my life in church till I was about 16. I had faith healers praying over me to cure a skin condition--little bumps, like raisins--that showed up when I was about six years old. They pinned scraps of blessed cloth on my clothes, anointed me with foul-smelling elixir and olive oil, also blessed. There were days when I was made of rags and smelled like a barnyard covered with salad dressing. None of it worked, and neither did the stuff the doctors tried. Whatever it was went away by itself when I was about 12 years old."

Despite the stigma of his bumps, Bobby found friends at the South End Boys Club. He was fast and could outjump even the older boys with whom he played basketball and football. When it came time to choose a high school, he bused across town to Mt. Tahoma because it had a better football team. In his four years there he starred as a running back, played basketball and high-jumped 6'8" to win the state championship. He was known for the fluid grace that made it look as if he were going at something less than full tilt. "You're not giving it everything you have," his coaches told him. Even his father, after watching Bobby in a winning football game, told him he ought to try harder.

In his book, Rashad, written with Peter Bodo, Ahmad remembers the moment O.C. chided him: "Dad never believed I was going to make it as an athlete because I had this leisurely, slow way about me, especially when it came to getting up after being tackled. O.C. didn't like that much. He would tell me, 'Son, you've got to pop right up off the ground and run back to that huddle. You've got to really hustle out there if you want to make it.'"

The truth was Rashad was hustling even if it didn't look like it. He was an all-America at Oregon, was drafted in the first round by St. Louis in 1972, led the league in pass receptions for three years, was named MVP in his first Pro Bowl and played in three others after that. In the middle of the 1982 season, after playing for St. Louis, Buffalo, Seattle and the Vikings, he announced his retirement. A week later, he went up for a pass, took a savage hit and came down with four broken bones in his back.

"And that was it," he says without regret. "I was in the hospital reading the papers, hearing people say, 'We know him. They'll build a pad for his back and he'll be out there next week,' and I'm thinking, Bullshit. I'm done. I didn't want to just play football, I wanted to survive it." And he did. Even at 48 years old and despite a recent operation during which an arthritic knee was replaced with a piece of titanium, Rashad still moves his 6'2", 200-pound frame with an ease that hides the intensity he puts into everything he does. I saw it across a tennis net the day before we met in his hotel room.

The morning began in a television studio in Secaucus, New Jersey, where he was taping NBA Inside Stuff. The mood in the studio was nonchalant, almost sleepy. He and his co-host, former model Willow Bay, joked with each other and the crew during setups. When someone mentioned that Boston Celtic Kenny Anderson had recently given away 100 pairs of size-12 shoes, Rashad wondered, "Who's gonna go to Goodwill to buy crocodile shoes?"

"He gave them to a church," said one of the crew.

"What church is that?" asked Rashad. "The Church of What's Happening Now?"

NBA Inside Stuff is an upbeat half-hour show that focuses on everything good about professional basketball, a compilation of action shots, profiles and reportage celebrating the pure athletic fun of the game. There is no controversy here. No talk of money, drugs or violence. Two days before this taping, the sporting press had been in general outrage when Latrell Sprewell's punishment for attacking his coach was greatly reduced. It went unmentioned on this show, which instead featured a piece on John Starks' charity work.

Rashad read the introductions with his usual loose, ironic, it's-only-a-game good humor, a delivery honed during his start in local television in Minnesota while he was still playing for the Vikes. Beyond just reading his lines, Rashad has always been deeply involved in the details of the production. In fact, the morning I watched him, NBA Entertainment had just announced that he had been made executive producer.

"It's where I've always wanted to go," he said as we sat in his dressing room after the taping. He had jazz on a boom box, a cigar in his mouth and a life-size cutout of Michael Jordan behind him. "It's a natural progression. When I first got into TV, I wanted to be in it for the long run. Otherwise, if you're just an athlete commentator, you get old and they replace you. When I started this show, I knew I wanted to run it someday, to be more hands-on, to be able to name my successor. That's what this promotion amounts to."

We made our ride from Secaucus to clay courts in Connecticut in his black Mercedes 500S, one of eight cars he owns (including a Ferrari and his favorite, a 1958 Porsche Speedster).

"I love cars and I love to drive," he said as he switched on the radar detector and lit up his cigar.

When I asked about some of his famous friends, he said that meeting many of them had been one of the perks of being an athlete.

"I met Jack Nicholson when I was 19," he said. "He's a sports fanatic and he was filming in Oregon. We were introduced and just started to hang out. That's one of the great things about sports: It crosses all barriers, you run into all kinds of people. I met Bill Cosby the same way, around the same time."

One of his best friends, Bill Murray, lives up the street from the home Rashad shares with Phylicia in suburban New York. "Bill was really helpful when I started broadcasting," he said. "He critiqued my style and gave me advice."

I asked Rashad about his television style, especially his on-court spots for the NBC Game of the Week and his reputation as a soft interviewer.

"I get a lot of shit for that," he said, laughing. "But I look at these guys as entertainers. I like a good performance, and beyond that I don't need to know every last thing about the man. There's a time and a place for the hard questions, but it's not after a game, when the guy just scored 50 points. And I'll tell you something else: It doesn't matter what I do, they still give me that softball shit. Remember the controversy about Michael and his gambling problem? Well, I knew I had to ask him about it, even though I knew he didn't have one. So I asked our producer at NBC to write the questions, everything he wanted me to ask. They weren't my questions and they weren't softball and I asked Michael every single one of them. It didn't matter. The press killed me for about a year over my softball Jordan interview."

In many ways Rashad's reluctance to use his journalistic incisors seems to come from the fact that he is friends with many of the players and, as a former athlete, is sympathetic to the cruelties of professional sports.

"People do not see sports as a job," he said when we talked about salaries. "They think of it as a game. They don't complain when an actor makes $20 million for a movie, because they know he's earning a lot more than that for a lot of other people. It's no different for professional athletes. And sports are equal opportunity, remember. If you can do it, you get the millions."

Still, even as we talked about Latrell Sprewell, Rashad couldn't muster a straight-up condemnation without a vanilla chaser. "A bad act, a criminal act," he said. "But I hate to put it on Sprewell per se, because I think things like that happen in all sports. I don't want to judge him because I don't know him as a person. And it's a good thing if it gets people talking about the nature of sports and where you draw lines."

When I quoted NBA commissioner David Stern's notion that pro basketball is the only business in which you can attack your boss and still keep your job, Rashad moved closer to the hard line, without exactly toeing it. "David did the right thing. He was trying to send a signal when he suspended Sprewell for a year. He made his point, the player's association made its point, and they let an arbitrator decide. That's fair."

When I asked if Rashad thought anybody could have gotten away with jumping the coach back when he was playing football, the answer was unequivocal.

"Oh no," he said with a laugh. "You didn't jump the coach. You might have wanted to. I mean, there were coaches I couldn't stand, hated, would have loved to beat up. But you didn't do it."

Rashad didn't name anybody, but there was certainly no love lost between young Bobby Moore and Don Coryell, his coach in St. Louis the year he became a Muslim and changed his name to Ahmad Rashad.

"The team owners didn't want me to change my name, and none of the players would call me by it. Coryell kept calling me Ramada or Armada. Teammates let the air out of my tires. Fans booed me. It was not a happy time. But I can compartmentalize pretty well. I just tried to go out on the field and work on my stuff the best I could."

The next year he was traded to Buffalo, partly as a result of lobbying by a good friend, O.J. Simpson, who would 11 years later be best man at Ahmad and Phylicia's wedding. In Rashad's book, written before the murders, he talked about meeting Simpson at the Hula Bowl just after Rashad's senior year at Oregon, then, after he turned pro, spending the off-season partying with Simpson in Los Angeles. He described the superstar running back as a "genuine, giving person," a good friend who sought and reveled in the attention he got, but, at the same time, always gave credit to his teammates. Then Rashad quoted the way that his pal had once summed up his philosophy: "When I was a kid," Simpson had told him, "I wanted to be rich and famous. Now that I am, I'm not going to let any of it go by. I didn't realize my dreams to suddenly go all weird and sour on them. I'm going to live them to the limit, and make every minute of it count."

When I asked about the horror show Simpson has created, Rashad stumbled as he tried to describe his feelings, then as he tried to distance himself from his old friend. "I feel sad, I feel sorry for him. I feel, I mean, you know, I feel more sorry for Nicole and Ron and their families. As far as he's concerned, I don't think about him too often. I remember when it first happened, it was a big shock and then the whole thing was a travesty with the two trials. It's, I don't know, I don't think I've even formulated a complete thought about it yet."

Rashad said that their friendship had atrophied several years before the killings. "We were just on the outs," he said. "There was no real incident between the two of us. When I got married, all that shit we used to do together was gone, and we just went our separate ways.

"There's no explanation for what happened," he said finally. "I knew him, but I guess I didn't know him that well."

•

We played tennis for a couple of hours and we played hard. Rashad didn't take up the game till he was in his mid-20s, and from then on he has played passionately, sometimes taking on two-and three-hour matches after a Sunday game with the Vikings. He talks about the fun of hitting with his friend John McEnroe and his neighbor Mats Wilander. "It's great hitting with Mats," he says. "He's such a nice guy he hits the ball right back to you. Makes you feel great."

I tried my best not to hit the ball right back to him, but even on his tender knee, he got to everything and beat me good. In one close game I started a charge that looked like it might turn the tide. It didn't. He ran, stretched, lobbed and turned up the heat enough to keep me from the win.

Which reminded me of our conversation about Nykesha Sales, the injured University of Connecticut forward who, in her final game, hobbled onto the court while both teams stood idle so she could sink a basket to break the school's scoring record. It was a gift that was signed off on by both coaches and the Big East commissioner. Rashad, who had been sanguine about the Sprewell incident, was outraged by this one. "It was a travesty," he said, breaking out of his usual soft-shoe. "They messed with the integrity of sports, and you cannot do that. I don't care if it's men, women, dogs or cats. As a competitor you don't give anybody anything. You take it if you can. I have worked my entire life to play as well as I can, and if you can take it from me, I respect you. But I can't give it to you."

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"I see little potshots all the time," he said when I finally asked him about the nastiness his friendship with Jordan seems to provoke. "But the item in Sports Illustrated was a little much."

He was talking about a comment in the "Scorecard" section of the February 16 issue. Under the subhead "Wish List" it said: "That a proctological dream team extracts Ahmad Rashad from the spot he occupies as Michael Jordan's Boswell."

"I talked to the guy who wrote it and told him, 'That would be funny if you said it to me and you knew me and you knew Michael. I'd laugh at it then. But I'm not laughing now because it came out of the blue, in a national publication, and your portrayal of the situation is totally wrong.' I thought about writing a letter to the editor," he said in a rare display of anger. "Then I decided I didn't give a shit, I wasn't going to write a fucking letter. So I just told the guy I wanted him to know it pissed me off."

"So why do you think you get so much flak for the friendship?"

"I don't know," Rashad said. "I asked the Sports Illustrated writer where this shot came from and he said, 'Well, you have such access, and it just sort of goes with the territory.' And I asked, 'What territory?' I've never tried to advance my career off knowing Michael. Our friendship is just that. A friendship."

"So it's just jealousy?"

"Yeah, oh God, is it ever," he said.

•

In his hotel room the night before the Knicks-Bulls game, Rashad added a detail about his friendship with Jordan that seemed certain to incite further media resentment.

"Before every game, when we're together," he said, "the two of us spend about 20 minutes someplace in the stadium where nobody can find us, just laughing and talking and hanging out. I suppose the sports press would hate me even more than they already do if they knew that. They're a tough fraternity, and I'm not a member even yet."

"I smoke a lot of them," he said, laughing, when I asked him what brand his cigars were. "But I'd rather not say what they are because they're not exactly legal."

I started to tell him that it isn't illegal to smoke Cuban cigars, only to import them, when the phone rang. "No, no," he said to the caller. "Come on down. I've got a friend I want you to meet."

A minute later there was a knock on the door. Rashad opened it and Michael Jordan walked into the room dressed in tailored black, looking like a million bucks, smiling and carrying a cloth bag. "Got something for you," he said, pulling a sealed box of cigars from the bag. Rashad took the gift with something like a gasp.

"You got to be kidding," he said. "I don't believe it. Where did you get these? Nobody can get these. How did you get them?"

"Don't worry about it," Jordan said, laughing as if the box had materialized in his hotel room wrapped in presidential stationery postmarked Havana. Then he dug into the bag again and began pulling out loose cigars, one by one, reading the names on the bands. The two of them chuckled and whooped and passed them back and forth like kids rifling through a deck of impossible-to-get trading cards.

•

"You played tennis?" Jordan asked Rashad when our match came up. "You're not supposed to be running around on that knee yet. With the way you play, you're probably going to blow it out."

I asked Michael for some dirt on Rashad. It's like he has everybody I talk to on retainer, I said. Nobody has a bad word. Tell me something he's hoping nobody will.

"I can't do that," Jordan said with a smile that came on like a fluorescent light. "If I did, I'd implicate myself."

"Last game at the Garden tomorrow?" I asked him on the off chance that he'd made the monumental decision on the way from his suite to Rashad's and was bursting to tell the first journalist he saw.

He smiled and shrugged, a sincere shrug I thought.

"We'll see," he said.

•

Rashad and I arrived at the Garden a couple of hours before game time. I had a press pass, but walking with him up the ramp toward the players' parking zone, I didn't need to use it. Everyone we saw--guards, crew, paramedics--greeted him, and he called them by name in return. Then, behind us on the ramp, came furious honking from a big white Mercedes.

"Get out of the way, Rashad," yelled the Knicks' Patrick Ewing, shaking his bandaged wrist.

"You can't play," Rashad yelled back, "and you can't drive, either."

At the tunnel entrance to the floor, we met Bob Costas, NBC's Game of the Week anchor and a mentor of Rashad's with whom Rashad started his network career and whom he still calls "the best in the business." They greeted each other with mock formality, then joked about hanging out over the years.

Later, Costas told me, "A lot of people criticize Ahmad for what he's not, without realizing what he is. The guy is damn good on the air--he has a great sense of humor and nobody relates to athletes better, which translates to access. I'll tell you, if I were starting a network sports division, Ahmad would be among the first people I'd hire."

While Costas and Rashad prepared for the broadcast, Isiah Thomas, a new member of the NBC team, stood at center court talking with me about his decision to retire.

"Ahmad helped me a lot," he said. "He gave me great advice on how to prepare for the next step. And he's still helping. He's a confidant, a friend, a guy you can trust."

When I asked about the general anger over Rashad's friendship with Jordan, Thomas said, "I think it's jealousy. People are envious of a relationship they can't have. The thing is, the two of them understand each other, and when they get together they can laugh at the same things, and at themselves. The three of us were out to dinner last night and it was just fun." He paused, then laughed. "But those cigars--man! I don't smoke cigars, and they were just puffin' and puffin'. My eyes started going and I had to get out of there."

An hour before game time, I trailed Rashad into the Bulls' locker room while a clutch of reporters waited outside. Rashad said hello to the players in the dressing area, then we walked through an open portal into a back room. Phil Jackson and the other coaches sat on a bench against a wall; Jordan was tying his shoes at a desk in a corner. Rashad spoke to him, and while I stood waiting, Jackson looked at me and asked, "Are you with the press?" When I told him yes, he said, "This room is off-limits to the media."

Rashad caught up with me in the outer chamber a minute later. "Sorry," he said, "I forgot to tell you about that rule."

At that moment it hit me why sports journalists hate Rashad: He works the Game of the Week for NBC and is executive producer and star of a weekly television show, but he isn't a member of the lowly media. He's a friend of Michael's, and that amounts to a backstage pass the working schlubs can't pick up at the press office.

A few minutes later, Jordan and Rashad disappeared into the underground warren of offices and storerooms for their pregame palaver. And whatever laughing they did, at themselves or at others, whatever you-can't-get-'em cigars they might have smoked, seemed to have put Jordan in the mood to live up to a banner being waved in the stands: Superman is in the building.

I watched from the press box as Jordan put on the kind of show that will leave basketball when he goes, the kind of show that makes you wonder why he would even think of quitting.

Rashad sat in a baseline seat and rose during time-outs for his on-court spots. The Knicks played hard and well, but with barely a minute left, the game was out of reach. With a minute and a half to go, Jordan sat down and the hard-assed Garden crowd gave him an ovation, then began heading for the exits.

Just behind me half a dozen young guys who had been rooting hard and rowdy for the Knicks went silent during a final time-out, then turned their raucous energy on Rashad.

"Look at him," one of them said. "He can't wait to do his interview with Michael. Hey, Ahmad, only 19 seconds left," he yelled. "You better hurry." "Kiss him," shouted another, which broke the group into big laughter and set them into a new rondo of nasty suggestion.

"Lick him, Ahmad--and don't forget behind the ears....." As they filed out of their seats, the last in line made a remark that made me think perhaps some of the anger at Rashad is deflected resentment, a way of shooting at a target that is otherwise impossible to hit given that he is faster than a speeding bullet, able to leap tall buildings in a single bound and, at 35 years old, still in a league entirely his own.

"Goddamn," the kid said, glancing at the scoreboard, which read Bulls 102, Knicks 89, "I've had it with Michael fucking jordan."

"I've never tried to advance my career off knowing michael. Our friendship is just that--A friendship"

"There were coaches I hated and would have loved to beat up. But you didn't do it"

Teammates let the air out of my tires. The fans booed me. It was not a happy time.