Wilt Chamberlain - "My Life in the Bush League" wrote:Oh, man, this is going to be better than psychiatry. In the first place, I am much too big to get comfortable on that crazy couch. In the second place, I am all fired up about speaking for myself this one time and have it come out the way I said it. I have a sort of special, savage reason for all this: there are a lot of people out there who will be surprised that I can write, because they are usually astounded that I can even talk.
I know this is true, because I get the old routine all the time. I stopped getting angry about it years and years ago, but it still drives all my friends crazy. Whenever we're standing around together—man, I mean any place—crowds of people come up and just stare at us. Then someone will nudge one of my pals slightly and say, "Hey, who duh big guy?" or, "So that's old Wilt the Stilt, huh? How tall is he, really?" they say. And then, "Will you ask him can I have his autograph for my kid?" And then my friends sort of sidle away from me—they want to stand clear to show everybody I'm not on a leash or anything like that—and they say. "Come on. Wilt can talk, you know. He's a real human, man. How come you don't ask him yourself?" Then, once they get over that hurdle, people are always a little disappointed I don't say, "duuuhhhhhh." And that, in part, is what this story is all about. This is life inside a giant, baby. I know that how I feel is not too important.
All right. What is important is what has happened to make me feel the way I do and all of the psychological hammering and tugging and pulling that got me into this frame of mind. This is more than life inside a giant. This is the story of my life inside professional basketball—the greatest game ever played, a game that suffers from being bush when it doesn't want to be bush, a game that may always be bush unless some basic changes are made. And when we get to the end of this chapter, the part where they say, "Tune in next week," or the end of the story, where they say, "Can this poor monster from Philadelphia really find happiness?" You'll know just how it feels to be Goliath. How it feels to be seven feet and 1.06 inches tall with no place to hide. After all, you remember in the Old Testament that David had all the best of it, right? Nobody even thought to say or even ask how Goliath must have felt just sort of standing around there. Goliath didn't get any of the good lines, you know?
The timing of my story is important for three reasons.
Reason No. 1: I'm at the top of this game and I'm thinking of retiring. I will be perfectly honest and say I'm thinking of not retiring, too. But I have now racked up all the all-time scoring and playing records—all the ones that count—and what else is there? Final standings at the end of this season: Chamberlain leads the scoring, with 2,534 points, for the sixth year in a row. Chamberlain shoots 2,081 and hits 1,063 for a .510 average. or 34.7 points a game. And that's in 73 games: I didn't play them all. See what I mean? Man, I have fulfilled everything I wanted in pro basket-ball except winning the NBA title. And I can't do that all by myself, right?
Money has nothing to do with the way I feel. I have been investing my money under smart counseling for years. And even though my accountant, Alan Levitt, calls me every single day from Philadelphia and says something like "Run for the hills, baby, we're broke." It is still not critical.
I also have a sore stomach. Because of my size it is more sore stomach than you ever heard of. My doctor, Stanley Lorber, is considered the best internist in Philadelphia, and he can't find out what's wrong with it. But he gets a real kick out of examining me, and he uses me as a subject for lecturing his students. I think pretty soon I am going to start charging him. Ike Richman, part owner of the Philadelphia 76ers, feels so bad about my stomachache that he got real desperate last week and said. "I know. Let's go to a hypnotist." Man, a hypnotist—who, me? I thought I'd put Ike off, so I said. "Man, how much will you pay me to go and get hypnotized? A hundred dollars an hour?" And Ike said he'd do it. Anything to get me feeling back in shape. That's the kind of guy he is. But no matter what we do it keeps getting worse instead of better, and my health is going to figure big in my future. This is my summer of decision.
Reason No. 2: I'm thinking of doing a lot of things other than playing basketball. I am thinking of living my own life, for one thing. I could take life easier and manage my apartment house properties and my nightclub in Harlem and the six corporations I'm tied up in—and be a business executive in a size-IS collar, button-down oxford-cloth shin and the biggest hotdamn gray flannel suit you ever saw in your whole life. I have all kinds of other offers, including a role in a civil rights movie based on the new book Look Away. I could go into boxing. And don't think for a minute I couldn't be heavyweight champion of the world. You hear me out there. Sonny Liston? You don't believe me? Look at that picture on the cover again, baby. I am also considering—but not too seriously—standing offers to enter professional baseball or football. But we've got to face it. I would fall with one hell of a crash on a football kid (even though it might take more than one guy to bring me down). And while I might be hot stuff catching high ones in the outfield, even the wildest pitcher in baseball would murder me at home plate because I have got such a big strike zone.
Reason No. 3: Finally. I am tired of being a villain. It is not the role I had in mind when I entered this sport. I don't feel like a villain, and I don't think like a villain. And there are girls out there who insist I don't exactly look mean, either, you know? Never mind the mustache and beard, man. My mother thinks it looks awful, but the overall vote is in favor of it. And I think I have spotted a trend away from that sort of thing. Villainy, I mean. In the old-time days there was no sympathy for the big guys. Remember Bluto, the big, fat one in the Popeye cartoons? And he would always grab old Olive Oyl and run off with her, and Popeye would eat all that crazy (ugh) spinach and then kick the hell out of Bluto? Well, Bluto is pretty much out of it now. And take the case of Frankenstein's monster. He used to be a real heller and now even he has been gentled up on TV.
Then, finally, there is a new kindly hero: the Jolly Green Giant. It's a trend, you see? Now, I don't exactly see myself as the Jolly Bronze Giant—I don't dig that leafy little costume, for one thing—but you get the theme. Boy, I don't know. How does a guy get to be a villain in the first place? Not all at once. I promise you. It is a cumulative series of little things—like little jabs from sportswriters—that have a way of adding up over the years to make the total picture of a bad guy. They have a way of slowly filling in an image that seems to stick in people's minds. I don't know of any athlete in the world who has had to prove himself so many times. Over and over again, fighting off the image. give you an example: "That Wilt. He just stands there and dunks the ball," says one writer. So I work hard and perfect a jump shot. "That Wilt. He shouldn't fade away from the basket when he's shooting the jumper." they say. So I try some other shots. And I concentrate on defense. "That Wilt," they say this time. "He just plays one end of the court."
So I dash around and hustle down to the other end of the court. "He's hogging all the action." So I try more team play, and I feed the ball off like mad. "That Wilt," they say, fresh out of criticism. "He's a fink." Man, how can I win? Look: I know I'm getting well paid for this sort of jazz, and everybody shrugs and says, "Well, old Wilt can laugh all the way while he's walking to the bank." Actually, it's better than that. I can laugh all the way while driving to the bank in my 527.000 baby-lavender Bentley Continental convertible. But that doesn't help the hurt piled up inside. Let me put it another way: I get paid big money for playing basketball, and I play it. But I do not get paid big money for being hounded and instigated and called a lot of things I am not, right? In a funny way, name-calling is one of the key things that makes professional basketball a bush-league affair when it doesn't have to—it shouldn't —be that way at all. You don't see that sort of thing in other sports. Does the owner of the New York Giants say bad things about Jimmy Brown because Jimmy plays for the Cleveland Browns? Never. Big-league owners know that inter-league sniping gives the whole game a bad name. And the fans expect better conduct. You won't hear Al Lopez calling Mickey Mantle a bum. Unfortunately, the fans don't always get such conduct in pro basketball.
I ask you: Where else but in professional basketball do you get 1) owners, 2) players and 3) coaches all knocking each other? How can Ned Irish of the New York Knicks say "I wouldn't have Wilt on my team?" Never mind Ned's personal feelings about me: how he might feel personally doesn't matter. But in sniping at me—or at anybody—can he be helping the NBA? He's knocking it down. It creates a strictly bush atmosphere. And when this sort of thing happens you start to wonder if the people involved really want to improve basketball or maybe just get their names in the papers. They have money and what they really want is fame. I guess. I think some NBA owners regard having their own basketball team as sort of like an executive yo-yo: you know, like a toy. They like the idea of really owning something in sports and maybe they can't afford a whole football team. (It's nice to have something to kick around at the country club. "Yeah, man, as I was telling my team the other day.. ..")
All of which is fine. Man, I don't care what these people spend their money on. But don't forget, they're trading in the lives of real people here. How about Franklin Mieuli, who owned about 10% of the San Francisco 49ers, and he had a hold of that little piece of action and then he got the Owners' hots. So when Eddie Gottlieb sold his share of the Warriors, Mieuli dashed right over and bought it all up, and now here he is, really able to get in there and mix it up. Frankly, I doubt if Mieuli knows very much about basketball. But he wants to speak up about it, and now that he is an owner, now he can. Oh, man! And what do you get in situations like this in the league? I'll tell you what you get: I was sitting in my apartment in San Francisco one night looking out at the view, and a newspaper reporter knocked at my door. He said something cheery like. "Hello. You have now been traded. Goodbye." And do you think the owner had the courtesy to even talk to me about it? Hah. (In this case, though, I figured something was coming up. Some time before, Gottlieb had talked to me and kind of asked how I'd like going back to Philadelphia to play. And I was honest and warned him that if they signed me it would have to be with the understanding that it might be my last season.
How about Barry Kramer coming in for practice one day, and about the time he gets down to his undershorts someone says something like: "By the way, man, don't bother undressing any further. You don't play for us anymore." Just like that. And Wayne Hightower. He walked into the locker room in New York: "Hightower? Oh. yeah. Hightower. You've been traded to Baltimore."
It's the old yo-yo. Like the owners have a little game of their own going that we don't know anything about. You know, a secret league where they say. "Look. I'll give you two forwards and a regulation basketball and a couple of rolls of tape for a big center and a pair of sneakers." And what about the image to the public? Oh man, never mind the image. And if that isn't bush, baby, I don't know what is.
Now. I don't want to sound like rhythm and blues. You don't have to set this story to music. But there is a reason this action has such a crazy impact in basketball that it does not have in other sports. Look, we all know there must be trades and player cuts and drafts. We all know there must be owner wheeling and dealing. Fine. All sports wheel and deal. And we don't even want to know all the owners' business. You follow me? But basketball is a kind of special case because the players get so close to each other playing this game. The game demands close, instinctive relationships. We're more sensitive about teammates than, say, linebackers, who are bought and sold by the pound like hamburger. Basketball players build strong friendships and respect on and off the court.
So we understand the owners have to deal. But it doesn't have to be this bush. They could call the players in and let them know what's cooking. I don't mean ask the players' opinion. But at least let them know, see? And then you wouldn't have those kids out there all jumpy and not playing 100 % basketball. In football and baseball also most of the trading is done in the off season, and by the time the regular season comes around the shock has worn off. The top players, all the ones I know who are serious about this game, are all trying to improve it, to get the bush image out of it. But, man, it's tough.
That's just the beginning. Let me take you inside a secret practice session of the Philadelphia 76ers and we'll see how this grabs you: We're divided up into two squads for scrimmaging. We're inside Convention Hall and it is big and dark and cold and empty, and when the ball slaps into your hands it makes a ringing, hollow sound up against the ceiling. We're wearing a sort of catch-me-come-kiss-me collection of bits and pieces of old uniforms, and we look like the orphans' picnic. Coach Dolph Schayes is trying to teach us basketball fundamentals (and I think we'll agree right here that it is a little late for shut sort of thing. If we don't know the fundamentals by now. we're all dead). Suddenly, on a fast break or a play under the basket. Dolph sees something none of us can see. He stops everything. "All right.- he will bark. "Yellow team take three laps around the court." And off we go—five big, hulking, grown-up men—loping around the basketball court like a bunch of junior high school kids. Our technical practice on play patterns has been interrupted for this punishment, and the pace of our game has been thrown off. This is Schayes's way of spanking us. Then we get back to work and get a furious scrimmage going and a nice sort of rhythm starts to take shape. "Wait! Hold it," says Schayes. "Blue team take three laps around the court.
There we go again. Everything stops. And the secret in all this is that the blue team hasn't done anything wrong. Dolph is just so soft-hearted that he's been thinking about it for a few minutes and has decided that they ought to do it, too. And any punishment value of the laps is nullified, right? It's almost the same thing in actual league play. Schayes is so tender-hearted that someone sitting on the bench can look over at him with those big wet eyes, and he'll put them into the game—even if the man replaced is having a big night. You see? In the dressing room one day a couple of weeks ago, Dolph came up with another idea. "We've got to fake those fouls more," he said. "Let's throw up our hands and stagger backwards and really make it look real to the referee." "But. Coach," said Dave Gambee, "This only works if you're a good actor. A lot of us can't pull it off. We just don't look innocent." "All right." says Schayes. "I guess we'd better play it straight. But fake them when you can, huh?"
Now. whatever you do, don't get me wrong, there is a hardcore moral hidden away in here, baby, and it goes right down to one of the really fundamental things that is wrong with professional basketball. The coaching system is right out of bushville. It's one of those things that went wrong with the system years ago. Here is a guy who has played long and well and faithfully. And he comes up with a bad knee or something like that and the owners say. "Well. we've got to do something nice for good old Whoever." So what do they do? They make a coach out of him, and next season he suddenly turns up coaching his old cronies, the guys he used to play with. And playing the game does not necessarily qualify a man to coach it, right? Take Dolph. Here is a genuinely good guy. He is tall, handsome: he dresses well, he is soft-spoken and he is nice to the wife and kids. And right now that makes him almost too nice a guy to coach a bunch of hardened basketball professionals. Schayes knows all the plays and strategies well—and if he had any legs left he could run them—but he has a tough time passing this information on to the players.
Meanwhile, here are the NBA owners, with diamond rings on their little fingers and cigars in their mouths, and they want winners. "Do what you have to do, coach, but boot me home a winner. Don't talk to me about personality problem", "Coach, just show me that big box score. Don't come to me with the song and dance about a tired team.", "I know the season is too long, but what the hell, baby, win, win, win." A gentle, soft-hearted coach against this kind of background is like a little old lamb in there with the hungry lions. Schayes, for one, has that woolly look, and there are plenty of others. We could have won at least seven or eight more games than we did this season with fierce eat'em-up coaching.
There are examples of this through the association. I'm not in a position to comment on the Detroit situation: man, I've got enough problems of my own. But here it is again: they take Dave DeBusschere, a second-year man in basketball, and they make him a coach. It's a waste of Dave's talents and worse than that: it's bush, baby. Pro basketball has created a lot of jumpy coaches. The poor guys, it's a wonder some of them don't sort of fall off the bench and maybe foam at the mouth a little. I promise you that some coaches in this association get word that they've lost one player and picked up two—or some combination like that—and they're absolutely dumbfounded. And very, very few of them can speak up or talk back.
The word was all around the league that when Paul Seymour was coach at St. Louis he protested about some owner moves and he got fired. And Seymour, baby, was a very very good coach. A real loss to the game. On the old Warriors. Neil Johnston came up late or something like that, and Gottlieb made him a coach. Another one of those things out of sympathy. In our first year together—it was 1960. I think-we had a good year and took second to Boston. And I don't think this was a reflection of Neil's coaching so much as that we just had a great team, you understand?
Then when the second year came along we lost to the Syracuse Nationals in the semifinals of the playoffs—and then Neil was dismissed, and he kind of lashed out and made some very unfair statements. He made out like Wilt Chamberlain was a prima donna and he couldn't talk to me. And as I remember the two years with Johnston we had one disagreement. Just one. But I guess he had to blame losing his job on somebody instead of his coaching. It all weaves into this image we've got. Since professional basketball began, owners have been hiring the wrong kind of coaches—then firing them for not winning. There are enough ex-coaches around to form their own Old Cats League or something.
Take Owner Ben Kerner of the St. Louis Hawks: he is known around the league for the ability to tire a coach before the coach can get the laces tied up on his sneakers. Cincinnati eased Charley Wolf out because he didn't produce a winner right away. In San Francisco, Bob Feerick decided he wasn't ready for coaching, and he got out of it gracefully by becoming general manager. But, you know, what do the owners expect—that maybe there will be nine winners in the season? And if not. what is the remedy: Firing eight coaches? Sometimes that seems to be the idea around here.
Good college coaches arc usually too smart to come into the professional ranks. They take one look at this snake pit, and they say. "Who me? Man, are you kidding me?" Happily, this system doesn't go flat across the board in the NBA. The owners who have a feeling for a coach will go out and buy him a good team and give him the chance to build it into a powerhouse, and they leave him alone. Know what I mean? I mean, look at the Boston Celtics and Auerbach. You know the real key reason why they are so good as a team? Man. those guys have been together for an average of nine years now. They're so close they're like Siamese sextuplets. How about me? Would I coach if they asked me? I happen to think I would make a pretty good coach. But don't ask me.
That Red Auerbach. Now, isn't he too much? With that cigar and the look like he would snap you in half. I mean mean. But what a guy. I can remember the first time we met—and maybe you don't know this, but he was my coach at one time. It was back in 1953 and I was a high school freshman then. Maybe about ... oh, 6 feet 10 1/2 or so ... I had been playing a lot of basketball already against some pretty tough older players, and I thought I was pretty hot stuff. And Haskell Cohen, the public relations guy for the NBA—man, he was really looking into the future—had spotted me down at Overbrook High in Philadelphia. And he got me a summer job bell-hopping at Kutsher's resort up in the Catskills. It was a sort of breeding ground for future professionals. Haskell was looking beyond high school and college, I guess. So I turned up on the circuit carrying suitcases and waiting on tables and sort of standing around all bones and eyeballs and teeth. Every summer resort up there had its own basketball team made up of college kids who needed jobs for the summer. They worked a little and played a little. And who was the coach at Kutsher's? The man with the cigar.
Looking back on it. I think maybe it was my attitude that first touched off Auerbach. You know, I wasn't exactly the most modest kid in town, and I had a lot of moves for a high school (rattle playing with the big boys. And when Red would call practice he would sort of talk to me in that voice that catches you right here, right between the ribs. He especially didn't like the way I played defense.
"Don't you think, Chamberlain," Red would growl. "that it might be sort of a good idea to defense your man from in from of him instead of behind him? What the hell are you doing back there?" But I went on defensing from behind the guys, reaching around with my arms to get the ball, waiting to fall on them when they wheeled around to shoot.
"We are going to play Shawanga Lodge next." said Red, looking through me. "And you are going to have to defense B. H. Born. I think it only fair to tell you, Chamberlain, that B. H. Born has just made All-America from the University of Kansas. And I think it only fair to tell you that B. H. Born is going to make chopped chicken liver out of you." So we played Shawanga.
At the half-time break I had scored 30-some points and Born had scored exactly two. And I came ambling back into the dressing room and flopped myself down on the training table and folded my arms behind my head. I was whistling. you know, doe de doo de doo, and sort of looking side-wise at old Red while he looked back at me with a steely stare. Finally he grinned a little trace of a grin at me. "Now about the second half." he said. Then, "Now, Mr Chamberlain, may I please have your attention for a moment?" Suddenly we understood each other. Red and I. And I learned to play defense on both sides; I play it a lot in front now. After that. Red would let me serve him drinks and cigars in his room when he was up all night playing poker, and he later got me aside to talk about future schooling. "Why don't you go to Harvard. kid?" he said. "And then I'll be able to pick you off in the territorial draft for the Celtics." But other forces were already at work, a bunch of things that would change my entire life. After that summer, life began to get tougher.
From that summer when I was a gangly kid I looked forward to playing professional basketball. I mean, hot dam, all that glamour. World travel and like that. Big money and cheering crowds and beautiful girls sort of jammed all around the dressing-room door. Now, there is a boyhood dream gone to pieces.
Pro basketball is traveling, all right. But not from country to country or even city to city. It is traveling from locker room to locker room. And dressing rooms all seem to have that same stale smell about them after a while. It is sweat and sneakers and soaking wet uniforms and wrinkled clothes, and there is the steady hiss of showers. Listen, you kids out there. Listen, Lew Alcindor, for one. Defeat and victory all smell exactly the same in a pro basketball dressing room alter a while. You get so you don't feel elation. You just feel beat. And there is no crowd of beautiful girls waiting outside a dressing room door- -nor much time for dating, anyway. Last week I was sitting all lonely in the Sheraton Hotel in Philadelphia—the rooms there arc like little bitty boxes —and pawing through the stuff in my bag. I came up with the phone number of this girl—I mean, she is a dish--and called her for a date. When the phone started ringing I suddenly remembered that I hadn't called her in like, four years. And what would I say if her husband answered the phone? (It turned out she wasn't married. Whew. But it also turned out that she had another date that night. See what I mean?)
What I'm telling you—you, Alcindor, and all you long-armed kids out there—is that basketball burns you out. And if you make it in the pros you had better save your money and be ready to retire at any hour. It can all end like snapping your fingers. Pro basketball burns you faster because you play a faster game than anybody else and pretty soon—zap! You start to lose your desire. It isn't always playing the game that gets to you —the real pros love the game and, man, they love to play it—it is some of the hush things that will finally nail you. They have nailed me. And sometimes I don't want to retire tomorrow: I want to retire yesterday. You follow me?
Let me put it this way: You can play baseball until you're 45 (if you can stand the lack of real action and that 162-game season) and you can play football until you're pretty well up there, too. But not basketball. The saddest thing about this is that there are some remedies close at hand for all this. Put them all together and they don't spell mother, baby. They spell money.
Pro basketball is still the most exciting thing going on. But it is sadly overexposed. Man, by the end of the season the public has got basketball up to here. Since it got going good, the game has been dominated by some owners who have got big money worries and little reserves. Know what I mean? They're forced to be competitive and too businesslike about this game, and they can't let up and relax for long enough to give it the help it needs. In the National Football League the owners can go first class all the way and not worry about the right-now revenue. Can the owners look for a long-term, five-year gain in basketball? Why in five years many of them won't be around.
I'm in my seventh year and I guess I'm lucky to have held all of me together this long. It's at the point now where I lose eight to 12 pounds during each game, and sometime my stomach hurls so bad out there under the basket that I sort of have to lean on the guy guarding me and gasp to catch my breath. I used to drink a half gallon of milk right alter every game and about seven other quarts of milk during the day. But now Dr. Lorber has got me cut down to one bottle of milk a day and has me on a diet so bland that it doesn't even have hot dogs on it.
Man, I have lived on hot dogs for years. So now I sit in the locker room after coming off the floor, and I start to polish out a quart of ginger ale or Seven-Up, and Ike Richman—Ike is a very dramatic small guy—comes in and sort or staggers backward and slaps his hand to his forehead. "That stuff will kill you!" Ike says. Will you for once stay on your diet?"' And he snatches the bottle away from me and splashes it on his hands and the floor and all over my bare feet. "Look here." he says rubbing his hands "This stuff is so strong it will clean my hands. No wonder you've got a sore stomach. What am I going to do with you?"
Well, honest, Ike, I don't know what you're going to do with me or what I am going to do with you. But whatever it is, you'll be the first to know.
First I am going to get well, I don't know, maybe I'll go to the Mayo Clinic - if they've got a bed out there big enough for me and get this stomach all fixed up. Then I will go back to my apartment and sit there and play my electric guitar (I don't play melodies too well, but I can chord like crazy!) until it drives the neighbors out of their minds. I will put on my Day-O! hat (you know "Day-O! Daylight come and me wanna go home") and my dark shades and take my conga drum and go over in Central Park and sit there and play it and figure out the future.
I've gotten psychologically punchy over the years I've played basketball. People have been snatching and pulling at me since I was little ... well, since I was a kid, not a little kid. I've been stared at, laughed at, insulted, investigated and generally turned inside out.
Man, the FBI grabbed me while I was still in Overbrook High School in Philadelphia, and word was getting around that I was getting some pretty fabulous offers from colleges around the country. Like tens of thousands of dollars under the table and hidden away in caves and secret funds. Offers of big cars and like that. There I was, still a young, impressionable boy who didn't want to do anything in the world but just plain play basketball. And they were on me like I was the biggest criminal in the country. From that day on, basketball got better, but my life got tougher.
