Glory Days: A Basketball Memoir

Prologue

Iremember exactly when I first realized that basketball was no longer the simple game I had played as a kid.

It was February of 1968. I was playing basketball at Brown and we had just been annihilated by Princeton, then one of the country’s top college teams. The five-hour bus ride back to Providence, Rhode Island, was as bleak as winter. While the bus crept along through the dreary Jersey meadows, I sat in a window seat feigning sleep. All around me in the darkened bus were teammates slumped in their seats, some sleeping, some just sitting there quietly. The air smelled of failure. If we had had any illusions about ourselves as a team, a 58-point drubbing had shattered them.

As it had shattered any illusions about myself as an athlete. The game had been a defining moment, when I first came face-to-face with my own athletic mortality, the painful realization that I wasn’t as good as I hoped, and I never would be.

What was I going to do with this realization? I didn’t have a clue.

For I had been brought up to believe in that most American of beliefs: if you worked hard enough, desired something enough, sacrificed enough, your dreams could come true. I had heard it at basketball camps from a succession of speakers. I had read it in the biographies of great athletes. I had absorbed it from coaches. Do more windsprints. Practice more jumpers. Work harder. That belief had been taped on the walls of every locker room. When the going gets tough, the tough get going…. It’s not the size of the dog in the fight, but the size of the fight in the dog…. Winners never quit, and quitters never win…. Inspirational clichés, the mantras of my childhood. Simplistic slogans that had begun seducing me at an early age, slogans deeply imbedded in the culture, slogans essentially unquestioned, unchallenged.

Until that night, I had clung to the naive belief I could somehow be a professional basketball player, if not in the NBA, then in the new upstart ABA, a league full of players that no one had ever heard about in college. Hadn’t I gotten better every year? Hadn’t I been one of the leading scorers in the Ivy League the year before? Hadn’t my picture been in several national basketball magazines? Wasn’t I due to end my career as one of the top ten scorers in Brown University history? Hadn’t I somehow managed to be successful throughout my career, even as the competition had gotten better?

That night, though, I had played against a Princeton sophomore named Geoff Pétrie, about whom I had known little. Back then freshmen were ineligible for the varsity, so I hadn’t played against Pétrie the year before, had only read about him in basketball magazines. Three years later Pétrie would be the co-rookie of the year in the NBA, yet I didn’t have to be a visionary to know that he already was bigger, stronger, quicker than I was, such a better player that I knew it was folly to consider myself as anything more than what I was: a decent college player on a mediocre-at-best team. That was what all the practice and all the hours and all the bus rides had made me: a decent player, nothing more. A decent player in a college world full of them. A player whose career was going to end in a month.

So I sat by the window running the past through my mind as if it were a newsreel, my despair increasing with each passing mile. Eventually, as if crossing some emotional line, the despair turned to disgust. And I thought about how sick I was of basketball. Sick of playing. Sick of practicing. Sick of even thinking about it.

Which might have been the most unsettling realization of all. For basketball always had been more than just a game to me. It had been a way of life. It had determined who my friends were, where I went to school, what I studied once I got there. For nearly a decade there hadn’t been a day when I didn’t think about it. Without it, I certainly wouldn’t have been at Brown, probably wouldn’t have been at any school. Without basketball my life undoubtedly would have been very different. Now I suddenly wondered what it had all been for.

I was a college senior, two courses short of graduating with my class that spring, without any idea of what I wanted to do in the future. It was 1968, three-quarters through the most turbulent decade in American history, when it often seemed as if the nation was undergoing a nervous breakdown. It also was a time of dizzying social change, of the civil rights movement, the antiwar movement, the rise of the counterculture: tremors through a society, shock waves that would change it forever. Here it was going on all around me, yet I knew little of it.

Why?

Why didn’t I know anything about theater? About art? About literature? Why had I only read a handful of books in the past decade? Why was my life so one-dimensional? Why was my life both defined and shaped by a childhood obsession with a game? My past was a mélange of empty gyms, taped ankles, prégame pep talks, echoes of muted cheers. My life revolved around whether my jump shot went in or not.

Was there life after basketball?

I didn’t know. Nor did I know then that this childhood obsession with basketball would forever shape my life in ways I couldn’t possibly comprehend at the time. I also didn’t understand then that my obsession, what I saw as little more than my own personal story, was much more universal than I ever could have envisioned; was, in fact, one of the great unwritten stories, one of the reasons that we as a society are not only obsessed with sports, but treat great athletes as if they are somehow descended from kings.

Was there life after basketball?

At twenty-two, on a cold night in the winter of 1968, sitting on that bus watching the future unfold ahead of me like headlights illuminating the darkened highway, I wasn’t sure.

Sports were the glue that held my family together.

Eventually they wouldn’t be strong enough to continue to bind us, but I didn’t know that back in the tail end of the sleepy Eisenhower 1950s, coming of age in a suburban Rhode Island town. In retrospect, I knew almost nothing of my parents’ lives then. I would be an adult before I knew my father had spent two years of his adolescence unable to see his mother, even though she lived in the same city. But I knew that my father once had played freshman football and baseball in college, knew that my mother once had been a high-school basketball star on Cape Cod, had spent winter nights taking a boat to away games on Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket. I knew that they played golf together on Sunday afternoons, and that my mother played golf on many summer mornings, would practice hitting shots in the backyard with plastic golf balls. I knew that with the exception of visiting relatives the only trips we ever took together as a family were day trips to New York and New Haven to see college football games.

So it’s not surprising that sports became a way of life early, changing sports with the seasons. I was one of the youngest kids in town to make Little League, and brought to baseball a passion that bordered on fanaticism. I pored over baseball magazines, lined my bookcase with baseball cards, played whiffle ball against the side of the house, went searching for pickup games. On winter nights, I threw a ball across the room, aiming for my pillow. I played endless games of catch in the backyard, sandlot games in the neighborhood, listened to Red Sox games through the static. I cherished my first Little League uniform, treating it as if it were some family heirloom. By age ten, I was a starter on a Little League team named after a local factory that made lace, one of the few industries in the town. The next year I made the All-Star team and at twelve was named the Most Valuable Player in the entire league. For this I was given a small black trophy with a statue of a baseball player on the top of it. I put it on my desk in that autumn of my first year of junior high school and stared at it endlessly while supposedly doing homework.

Playing sports was fun, certainly more fun than anything else. I didn’t have any other interests. No fishing, or camping out, like some kids in the neighborhood. No woodworking, or fascination with cars and the mysterious engines under the hoods that made them go. No stamp collecting or other hobbies. Nothing. Just sports.

In my little corner of the universe, sports were the way masculinity was defined. Being good in sports made you accepted in ways that being good in other things did not. It got you approval from parents and other adults. It got you approval from other kids in the neighborhood. Kids who were not good at sports got picked on; kids who were, did not.

This realization started very early, as soon as you started playing neighborhood games. The strongest kids, the fastest kids, the kids who were the best at games were the ones looked up to. Not the smartest. Or the ones who did the best in school. It was a lesson I learned as early as the second grade, when I used my baseball ability to be accepted by a group of cliquish kids from another neighborhood, kids who had little to do with me before. Later, in Little League, it was even more apparent. Adults went to the games, circled the field on playoff nights, patted you on the back when you did something well.

And everyone looked up to the local coaches. They were role models before we knew what the word meant. Their rules were absolute, unquestioned; if they told us to jump we asked how high. Even as young kids, we all knew the names of the high-school coaches, knew that Mr. Ainsworth, the longtime high-school gym teacher, called everyone clobberheads, and made you scrub parts of the gym floor with a toothbrush if he caught anyone walking on it with street shoes on. Coaches had a certain status teachers did not have.

This was all taking place in Barrington, a sleepy little town about ten miles south of Providence on the road to Newport, a town in the midst of a transformation from small town to suburb.

It’s a town that lies on a peninsula that juts out into Narragansett Bay. It’s bordered by water on virtually three sides and by East Providence to the north, a low-lying area of marshes, estuaries, two rivers, and big shady trees. Barrington was incorporated in the early eighteenth century, first belonging to Massachusetts before becoming part of Rhode Island in the mid-1700s.

And where once Barrington had been a half hour away from Providence on a country road, now a new highway brought Providence closer, making Barrington an attractive bedroom community, a little hideaway of about 13,000 people on the bay with clean air and good schools, a place where in the late fifties you could go to bed at night and leave your doors unlocked, a place where trouble was some kid hot-rodding down a tree-lined street. A place where people came to forget their small beginnings and dream of larger futures.

Certainly my parents had begun that way. They had married in Idaho where my father was stationed during the war and had come back to Providence’s leafy East Side to one upstairs room in my paternal grandfather’s house, before moving to the suburbs and the American Dream, an old wooden brown house with a front porch one block from Narragansett Bay to the south. It was about a mile from the center of town where there were two gas stations, two drugstores, a church, and a small shopping center. No one ever called it downtown. It was the Center, had been built in the late 1940s, and at night the older high-school kids would park their cars there and wait for something to happen, a party, some excitement, something, anything, a suburban version of waiting for Godot.

It was an era of Sadie Hawkins dances and homecoming queens, of poodle skirts and penny loafers. Of men who came home from working in Providence to water their lawns in the soft twilight, and women who always seemed to be home baking cookies from Betty Crocker recipes. No one had ever heard of cholesterol. No one’s parents were divorced Whatever social problems there were were kept hidden behind the manicured lawns and the doors of the well-lighted homes.

I didn’t know about Beatniks, or the House Un-American Activities Committee, or the red scare in Hollywood, or any of the fissures running underneath the placid surface of American life. Occasionally, there would be something on the television news or in the newspaper about sit-ins in the segregated South, but in a town without any blacks, all of this might have been happening on the far side of the moon as far as I was concerned. And if somewhere there were people in Barrington starting to question the values that ran through the town like sedimented rock, not only was I unaware of them, I never saw any evidence of it.

The times they are a-changin’?

Not in Barrington.

Not then.

Instead, there was a sense of optimism, the feeling that you could grow up to be anything you wanted to be, an unquestioned belief that the future always was going to be a beautiful summer morning. When I was a young child, my mother would take me down to the beach at the end of the street, point across the bay to Warwick, and tell me, I could swim to the other side with you on my back if I had to.

I never doubted her.

She also thought of herself as an athlete. She wasn’t someone who stayed at home baking brownies or took any great delight in being a homemaker. In high school she had wanted to go to college in Boston to become a physical-education teacher, but her parents had sent her to secretarial school in Providence instead, where she eventually became player-coach of the girls’ basketball team. She was in her thirties before she ever started playing golf, but once she started she was serious about it. She always was tinkering with her swing, hitting plastic golf balls in the backyard or going to the driving range to hit buckets of balls.

It wasn’t until years afterward that I came to realize how unusual it was to have a mother who thought of herself as an athlete, especially in an era when women athletes were rare. She had been the club champion at the country club for three years straight when I was a kid, and I used to caddy for her a lot in those days. The caddying started when I was eleven, and lasted six years. Eventually, I came to know her swing better than she did, could tell her what club to hit, how far to the left a putt was going to break. At an age when many other kids began to feel alienated from their mothers, unable to relate, I was her biggest fan.

We lived in an old neighborhood in an area dominated by many summer houses that traditionally had been rented by Jewish people from Providence. It was between the two points that jutted out into Narragansett Bay, the two most prestigious addresses in town. To get to elementary school I walked past the woods across the street from my house, past the cemetery, down a hill, and past more woods. The next year, the bulldozers came and cleared out the woods across the street. Soon the houses came: big, new, pastel Colonials, houses different from the rest of the neighborhood. This was happening all over town. Barrington was growing up with me. It’s conjecture who turned out better.

Running west of the Center was Maple Avenue, an inappropriately named street about a mile long. This was Barrington’s Italian section, a little sliver of working class tucked into the middle of a burgeoning suburban town. Many of the families living on Maple Avenue had been there for generations, their ancestors once coming to work in the now-defunct brickyards at the turn of the century. Tightly knit, ethnic, many of the families interrelated, the Italians viewed themselves as separate from the rest of the town, resented the Americans, as they called them, for moving in and taking over their town. They ran the shops, built the houses, performed the services for a community that was becoming more and more commuter-oriented. They were the kids I caddied with at the local Rhode Island Country Club, which looked majestically out over Narragansett Bay to the south, a private club that excluded Italians.

Sports were the only thing that bridged these two separate cultures, the only common denominator. Which is how I met Mike Raffa when I was eleven years old. He was the catcher on a rival Little League team, small, wiry, dark-haired, one of those scrappy little kids who always seem to make up in hustle what they lack in natural ability. Even at eleven there was a hunger about him, some burning need to use sports as a vehicle for social acceptance in a town where Italians were the niggers, discriminated against, looked down upon.

We met one summer morning while caddying together and became instant friends, a bond formed by the respect we had for each other as Little League players. Raffa lived on Middle Highway, the main road perpendicular to Maple Avenue, in a one-story white frame house.

The first time I visited, it was like being in a foreign country. There were religious statues on the walls. The center of the house was the kitchen, dominated by a large table in the middle of the room. The living room was off one side. There were three small bedrooms off the other.

Eventually, his cramped house would become like a second home to me, his mother forever giving me plates of macaroni. In the insular world of the Italian community I had achieved a certain acceptance: I was Raffa’s friend.

His mother had grown up in Barrington, one of nine children, the daughter of a dairy farmer who had been born in Italy. Mike’s father had grown up in Providence, also first-generation Italian. Both of his parents had quit school to go to work—his father in the sixth grade after his own father had died—and both viewed work as being important, not education. So Raffa had started caddying at Rhode Island Country Club while in the third grade, caddying being a rite of passage for virtually every Italian kid in Barrington. They would sit on benches under a big Copper Beech tree in front of the white stucco clubhouse, the designated caddy area. They weren’t allowed in the clubhouse, save for the hallway that went by the pro shop. They weren’t allowed on the veranda in back of the clubhouse that looked majestically out over Narragansett Bay. They weren’t allowed in the pool area where the snack bar was. In a club where there were no Italian members, and only a couple of Catholic ones, the message was that they were socially inferior, second-class.

It also was a message Raffa got at home. He was forever being told he wasn’t like the American kids: didn’t have as much money, didn’t live in the kind of houses they did, was different in some fundamental way. His father didn’t want him playing sports; to Raffa’s father, sports were a waste of time, a road that headed nowhere.

To Raffa, though, sports were the only thing that made him feel he had value. It was a lesson he’d first learned in Little League, and then in the sixth grade when he’d been bused to a school outside of the Italian section. Sports had been his validation, the passport to acceptance, and he played them with a burning intensity, as though his whole being hung in the balance. I needed basketball for an identity. He needed it for everything.

He started playing pickup games with a bunch of us over off Rumstick Road, a long street under a canopy of elms that led from the Center to the monied homes at the end of Rumstick Point. It was there, in Jay Sarles’s backyard, that we established our own unofficial pecking order.

Sarles was lean and quick, wore glasses that gave him a sort of bookish appearance, a curious mix of athlete and academic. He always got all A’s in school, and one of us would invariably say, shaking his head heavenward at the apparent incongruity of it all, that Sarles was the only one anyone knew who, when faced with the choice, would rather read the book than see the movie.

By the ninth grade Raffa, Sarles, and I were the three best players in our grade, and I had quit playing baseball and football to concentrate on basketball. Which was a big decision, one that my father tried to talk me out of. It was still the age of the three-sport star, the high-school athlete who moved through the different sports with the changing of the seasons. No one at the high school seemed to play only one sport then. The best athletes seemed to play everything, the same kids in different uniforms. It was expected.

But basketball had a built-in advantage: you could play it by yourself. And I did. Hour after hour. Day after day. Sometimes it seems as if my entire childhood was spent in the driveway behind my house