Bases Were Loaded (and so Was I) Up Close and Personal With the Greatest Names in Sports

LARRY AND OSCAR Like a praying mantis trying to get comfortable on a lawn chair, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar stretched out as best he could over a hotel couch in Houston that couldn't come close to containing all of his haunches, hinges, and high-tension wires. "At first," he said, "basketball was something I did when the lights were on in the playground, just because I liked it." He was Lew Alcindor then, a bookish Harlem Catholic who developed a hopping hook shot out of necessity, because most of his straightforward attempts were being blocked. "I saw a movie, Go, Man, Go!, about the Harlem Globetrotters. In one scene, Marques Haynes dribbles past Abe Saperstein in a hotel corridor. After that, I worked at handling the ball. I didn't want to be just a good big man. I wanted to be a good little man, too." He had to come to terms with his size, estimated at seven foot two. "In school," he said, "I was ashamed that my head was so high over the rest of the class. I searched for positive role models so I could be proud of myself. For a long time, I couldn't find any." "But you eventually did?" I asked him. "Yes." "Who were they?" "I'm not sure I want to say." "Wilt [Chamberlain]?" "Are you crazy?" We laughed together, but Kareem stopped first. "The Empire State Building," he said softly. "The redwood trees." Of all the caravans in sports, basketball's were the most intimate. Because of their numbers, baseball and football teams always traveled on chartered planes and customarily filled out the cabins with lawyers, advertising men, and other supernumeraries. But a basketball troupe typically consisted of a dozen players, a coach or two, a writer or three, a radio broadcaster who was his own engineer, and a combination trainer-travel secretary who taped the ankles and organized the plane tickets. We waited with everyone else for undependable commercial departures, inevitably the first flight out in the morning, the only defense against a huge fine for blowing a winter game. So the band was up every day around 5 a.m., bleary-eyed vaudevillians playing one-night stands. On a hotel van to the airport, the topic among the Celtics who weren't still comatose was rock-and-roll music. "Who's Bruce Springsteen?" Larry Bird wanted to know. The first one to get his breath back, the Boston Globe's Dan Shaughnessy, answered perfectly. "Larry, he's the you of rock 'n' roll." Bird sighed. "Where have I been?" On a basketball court, of course. With a very good eye and a pretty good mind, Bird grew up in the southern Indiana town of French Lick. He sharpened his eye in endless games of schoolyard "horse," and wasted his mind in the process. "Wasted" may be too strong. "Neglected" is better. It isn't precisely true that he thought only of basketball, but he thought of everything else only in terms of basketball. He perfunctorily went to class and mechanically did his homework only because he noticed that the kids who skipped class and ditched homework were the same ones who missed the foul shot in the end. His best friend was that way. In high school, when the other players practiced free throws at 6:30 in the morning, his friend slept in. At the regional finals their senior year, the friend missed the front half of three one-and-ones and the team lost in overtime. Nothing was said afterward. But when their eyes met in the locker room, they both felt a collision of parting. The one going on to college was filled with unbelievable loneliness. Bird lasted exactly twenty-four days at Indiana University. In years to come, the common assumption would be that he was intimidated by coach Bobby Knight, an undisciplined dCallahan, Tom is the author of 'Bases Were Loaded (and so Was I) Up Close and Personal With the Greatest Names in Sports', published 2004 under ISBN 9780609609422 and ISBN 0609609424.