The First Presidential Debate

Comments at Steve Sailer:

* Trump aimed his performance at the low-information, low-IQ, working-class voter. He went after the truck driver sitting in a bar drinking beer with his buddies. He tried to come across as an alpha male, tried to show his vigor. (If nothing else, he looked and acted a lot younger than his age. No one can accuse him of behaving like a doddering old man.) He was as feisty as ever.

And he was completely unapologetic. “Never apologize for anything; your enemies will take it as a sign of weakness.”

This entire debate was The Donald Trump Show. Whether you liked it or not – and I’m fairly ambivalent myself – Trump was the man in the driver’s seat. At times, he swerved all over the road, even crossing the median into the opposite lanes. But he was the one setting the (erratic) course.

Biden was just along for the ride. He was on the defensive the entire time. And he didn’t fight back. He also stammered quite a bit toward the end.

One amusing fact: Biden rarely, if ever, mentioned Obama’s name tonight. “I did this; I did that.”

Trump knew going in that the media wouldn’t approve of anything he said or did tonight. He figured that he might as well go for broke and flash a huge middle finger at the media and the entire political establishment. He didn’t “lose control”; it was a calculated strategy. Was it the correct one? Hard to say, but I suspect that, in his own mind, he accomplished what he set out to do.

He’ll tone it down next time, to be sure.

* Very good start to the debates. One huge point for Trump was when Biden began ramping himself up for his, “my son was in the military and he’s not a loser…” and Trump just shut it down before Biden could get going with “you mean the one who accepted $3.5 million for some guy’s wife?” Also, when he demanded Biden name a police union that supported him. Cue the crickets.

Well played, sir.

Towards the end, Biden was clearly exhausted, trying not to blow his stack was clearly draining him. By the end, he looked ashen, and very very tired. Trump looked like he could dance for another two hours. Maybe Biden should play more golf.

Trump was a Boss as usual, and didn’t let us down.

* I thought it was very considerate and genteel of the President to refrain from mentioning how Hunter Biden reacted to his brother’s death by fucking Beau’s widow.

Posted in America | Comments Off on The First Presidential Debate

Sweetness: The Enigmatic Life of Walter Payton

Jeff Pearlman writes in this 2012 book:

* In the year 1975, a significant racial divide still existed in professional sports. White teammates hung with white teammates and black teammates hung with black teammates. There was a lingering mistrust and a pronounced lack of understanding. Locker room card games were split among racial lines. The tension over music was palpable—country and rock vs. R&B. To many of the black Bears, their white teammates seemed stiff and judgmental. How could they possibly trust the Southerners from schools like Alabama and Auburn and Ole Miss—the ones who seemed perpetually uncomfortable in their presence?

A good number of the white Bears, meanwhile, didn’t like what they perceived to be the never-ending crowing and strutting of the blacks. They found the players to be lazy, selfish, and heartless. All skill, no drive. “When I got there we had a bunch of niggers,” said Rives, a white linebacker from 1973 to 1978. “Great ability, but no work ethic. They were selfish twits, and they wanted to blame everyone but themselves.”

Just as he had done at Columbia High School five years earlier, Payton somehow bridged the gap.

* Reporters hated dealing with him. None stated any dislike for Payton. They simply could not pin the man down.

* Payton was prone to making inappropriate comments about teammates’ sexuality that some found funny and others found disturbing.
There were whispers around Chicago that he, himself, was gay—understandable scuttlebutt considering his off-putting behavior. “His nickname was Sweetness,” said Arland Thompson, the team’s fourth-round draft pick in 1980. “He pinched my ass so often I thought he was sweet on me.”
“We were taking handoffs in a drill,” said Dennis Runck, a free agent running back in 1982. “He slaps me on the ass and says, ‘So, I hear you’re gay.’”

“Were Walter alive today, he’d almost certainly have some sexual harassment suits thrown his way,” said Duke Fergerson, a free agent wide receiver in camp with the team in 1982. “It’s one thing to be playful and juvenile about discovering your sexuality. But Walter would almost be sexually intimidating to these rookies. He’d make passes at guys. He may have been kidding, but coming from someone of that status, it was very intimidating. It got to the point where I didn’t want to dress around him. It was too uncomfortable.”

* “He had a big hole inside of him. He did it dishonorably. He used women—and especially younger women—for something he needed. And I’m not saying something merely physical. There was an emptiness in him. He sought out women to fill that hole. It was devilish.”

* Payton loved women. But—and this includes Connie—they were disposable. Athletes often say that excelling at the highest level of sport takes an uncommon level of focus. If one finds a woman willing to accept certain conditions (as was the case with Connie), a relationship can work. It’ll be one-sided and emotionally unfulfilling. But it will, in a strictly mechanical sense, work.

* When Holmes negotiated a new contract with the Bears in 1981, one of the stipulations was that, on the road, Payton be granted his own suite. The reason was simple: He wanted a place to bring back his conquests. Although Payton continued to avoid regularly socializing with teammates, that didn’t mean he failed to go out. From San Diego to Seattle, Detroit to Denver, Boston to Buffalo, Payton could often be found at the hot dance clubs, working the moves perfected on 24 Karat Black Gold a decade earlier. Before long, Payton’s personal black book featured a bevy of women in every city. Wherever the Chicago Bears traveled, Payton had females waiting for the signal to discreetly knock on his door at the Hyatt or Hilton or Marriott.
As Connie remained in Illinois caring for Jarrett, her husband was on the road, living the life. Those who knew him best say one of Payton’s great gifts/ills was the ability to compartmentalize. When he was home in Arlington Heights, he could be the prototypical family man.

* When the television camera lights were on and the reporter notepads were out, Payton did his best to only talk team-team-team. All he wanted was for the Bears to win. If he ran for zero yards but the other fellas did well, he was happy. Whether he surpassed Brown or not was insignificant. Blah, blah, blah. It was utter nonsense…

* In the fifth game of the ’83 season, the Bears were leading Denver by seventeen points with less than two minutes remaining—yet there was Payton, struggling with a nagging knee injury (he would have arthroscopic surgery on both knees after the season), still slamming into the line. When a reader wrote the Tribune a letter that called Payton’s usage “idiotic,” Don Pierson, the Bears beat writer, responded with a piece titled “Jim Brown the Reason Payton Ran.” “He is in pursuit of Jim Brown’s all-time rushing record,” Pierson explained—as if that were enough…

Nobody grasped Payton better than the Tribune’s Pierson, one of the sport’s great beat writers/B.S. detectors. In the aftermath of the Bears’ 21–14 loss to the Los Angeles Rams on November 6, Payton— who cleared eleven thousand career yards that day—told the scribe that, “I’d rather turn back the eleven thousand for a win today.” Pierson ran the quote, but only with the addendum, “Payton remarked typically but not convincingly” (emphasis added).

“Despite what Walter said, it was clearly obvious that surpassing Brown meant everything to him,” said Pierson. “He liked to make no big deal of it, but it was enormous. “He wanted that record.”

* Brown, on the other hand, was someone Payton wanted little to do with. While he spoke glowingly of the Hall of Famer in public, Payton failed to understand the bitterness that seemed to accompany Brown’s words. He was the one, after all, who chose to retire in the prime of his career, at age twenty-nine; the one who walked away to become a movie star…

Brown had mostly kind words for Payton, referring to him as a “gladiator.” But Payton, to his credit, wasn’t swayed. He found Brown to be an arrogant, dismissive, rude old man crying for a breadcrumb of attention. Were he to eventually own the mark, Payton promised himself he would never behave as Brown had.

* Unlike Payton, who rarely voted and never talked politics,16 Brown dove headfirst into social causes.

* The 49ers were talented and experienced and widely believed to be chemically enhanced. “They beat the shit out of us,” said Fred Caito, the Bears trainer. “And our offensive and defensive linemen said, ‘These guys are ’roided up, and they’re destroying us in the trenches. We can’t compete with that.’ I assure you many of our linemen started using after that game.”

* The $265,000 contract disparity between McMahon and Payton made the running back’s blood boil. So, for that matter, did the mounting dismissiveness he perceived to be coming from the press, the fans, and the Bears organization. “This is my eleventh year, and nobody takes me seriously,” he moaned to Sports Illustrated… Entering the 1985 season Payton was, for the first time, not the team’s sole focal point. There was McMahon, the hard-living, attentionseeking quarterback who talked smack and wore sunglasses indoors. There was Willie Gault, the speedy wide receiver who longed for a career in movies. There was Mike Singletary, the Butkus-esque middle linebacker, and his two high-flying cohorts, Wilber Marshall and Otis Wilson. And, of course, there was Ditka, the snarling head coach, and Buddy Ryan, the defensive coordinator who hated him. So loaded was the team that, shortly after reporting to training camp and soaking in all the talent, Butler called Cathy, his fiancée, and told her their wedding had to be moved from January 25, 1985—the day before the next Super Bowl. “We had so many weapons, and Walter wasn’t the center of it anymore, even though he was so valuable,” said Covert. “And while I’m sure he really enjoyed being part of all the winning, the other side of the coin was that it wasn’t all about him. I think that was sometimes a little bit difficult for him. The other personalities came into play, and it wasn’t that he was ever overshadowed, but he had competition.”

* What irked Payton most was the emergence of a rookie defensive lineman named William Perry. …When asked, Payton said all the right things about Perry. But inside, he hurt. The kid had been with Chicago for half a year, and he was already earning pitchman deals Payton could only dream of.

* Blessed with the NFL’s best offensive line, Payton no longer had to create his own holes and hope for random openings.

* It was a strange time to be Walter Payton. His out-of-wedlock son, Nigel, and in-wedlock daughter, Brittney, were born months apart. His team was hot and his Q-rating on the wane. He was piling up Pro Bowl–worthy numbers (he finished the season with 1,551 yards, the fourth-highest total of his career), yet wasn’t the same back he once had been. He put on the happiest face possible, but came across to teammates as moodier and crankier than ever. “Walter was the personality of the team,” said Butler, the kicker. “If Walter was loud and rambunctious that day, the pace of practice took off. But if things weren’t going well, Walter would wear it on his forehead.” When he was the only story in town, it was easy to say, “I don’t want the attention.” Now that the attention didn’t exist, he wanted it.

* “At his core, Walter was incredibly insecure,” said Holmes. “He would do things to draw attention, but only if it looked like he wasn’t trying to draw attention. He might go to a banquet and if they were bringing out steak he’d say, ‘I don’t eat red meat.’ And they’d ask what they could bring him and he’d ask for fish—then complain it wasn’t cooked right. An hour later, he’d be sneaking to McDonald’s for a Big Mac, begging me, ‘Don’t tell anybody! Don’t tell!’

“We would go to Chicago Bulls games and he’d know exactly where the cameras were. You’d see him go up to the kids in the wheelchairs, and he’d go up, shake their hands, knowing the camera was on. Does that mean he didn’t care? No. But he was aware of how it would be perceived, and that mattered immensely to him. On more than one occasion, Walter went to the airport without a ticket or reservation or nothing. He’d walk up to the American Airlines counter and say, ‘I need a ticket to Las Vegas.’ They’d be oversold, but they’d kick people off the plane and place him in first class. Walter loved that, even as he played humble.”

* In pileups, Chicago’s defenders twisted Dickerson’s ankles and clawed at his eyes. When referees were looking elsewhere, they made his knees prime targets. It was, by far, the most vicious beating he would take in what became an eleven-year Hall of Fame career.

* Payton steadfastly pursued other women. It was around this time that he was diagnosed with genital herpes, a sexually transmitted disease that causes recurrent painful sores. Payton was initially shocked and dismayed by the diagnosis, but rarely—if ever—found it necessary to inform future sexual partners of the viral infection.

* Devoutly Christian and unafraid to show it, Singletary watched with great disappointment as Payton regularly cheated on his wife. He obviously knew athletes did such things, but expected more from someone of Payton’s character and esteem. “Mike finds out that despite Walter’s stellar career and reputation, he’s catting around on the road,” said a friend of Payton. “He had a devoted wife, precious children, and yet he’s being unfaithful.” One afternoon during the 1985 season, while taking a team bus to the airport, Singletary slid into the vacant seat alongside Payton. “Man, you’ve got to clean up your act,” he said. “You’ve got a beautiful family and you claim to be a Christian. You know better.”
This was the first time someone had confronted him on his womanizing, and Payton was shocked. He turned toward the window, away from Singletary, and pretended not to listen. In the reflection, Singletary saw tears streaming down Payton’s face.
Singletary had no idea what his friend was thinking. Through the end of Payton’s career, the two never spoke again.

* Payton was a nonfactor. The man who overcame prejudice and smallschool bias and injury and shoddy offensive lines couldn’t get the fumble out of his head. The mishap plagued him. Haunted him. He moped along the sideline, and though he was handed the ball twenty-two times, he ran for a meager sixty-one yards while failing to catch a single pass. Afterward, Chicago’s players
and coaches rationalized his poor performance by insisting New England obsessed over him, and that Payton’s mere presence allowed McMahon to throw for 256 yards and run for two touchdowns. “The Patriots,” said Gault, “were dead-set on holding Walter down.”

* “Those last two minutes of the game were agony for Walter,” said Covert. “You could see it on his face— he just wanted out of there.” When the final whistle sounded and the Chicago Bears were officially Super Bowl champions, Payton headed directly to the locker room. He entered, tore off his jersey, and slammed his shoulder pads to the floor.

“If you looked at Walter,” said Ken Valdiserri, the team’s director of media relations, “you would have thought we’d lost.”

“For the ten years I had played with him, Walter claimed it didn’t matter how many yards he got, how many touchdowns he scored—it was about winning,” said Brian Baschnagel, the veteran receiver who, because of a seasonending knee injury, watched the game from above in the coaches’ box. “That was the attitude I took, too. I didn’t care how many passes I caught, as long as the Bears won. And I always felt Walter felt the exact same way. But when he reacted the way he did . . . it was the exact opposite of what he had claimed to be as an athlete.”

* Without a football career, without a racing career, without the potential ownership of an NFL franchise, Walter Payton often found himself suffocated by darkness. Oh, he wouldn’t let on as such. He smiled and laughed and told jokes and pinched rear ends and tried his absolute best to come across as the life of the party. Inside, however, happiness eluded Payton in the same manner he had once eluded opposing linebackers.

* “I always wondered whether I did Walter a favor by helping him get so big,” said Bud Holmes. “It’s a fine line whether
he would have been happier as a larger-than-life celebrity, or as a man back in Columbia, Mississippi, fathering ten or twelve illegitimate children, getting thrown in jail once a month, working some blue-collar job. If Elvis had it to do all over again, would he rather just drive a truck in Tupelo?”

* Payton was the clichéd celebrity—surrounded by admirers, yet alone. “He called me many times at two, three in the morning, just wanting to talk,” said Holmes. “There’s a Norman Rockwell quote—‘Pity the poor genius.’ I pitied Walter.”

* Quirk and Tucker came to expect Payton’s manic mood swings—giddy one second, despondent the next. He kept a tub of painkillers inside a desk drawer and popped them regularly. He ate greasy fast foods and gorged on fettuccine carbonara (his favorite dish) and dumped ten sugar packs into each cup of coffee and dunked pork rinds into hot sauce. Though a fast metabolism prevented Payton from gaining excessive weight, they worried how it all impacted his psyche. “He ate junk,” said Conley. “Fettuccine Alfredo with
crumbled bacon. Chili dogs. Corn dogs. And fried pork chops, and I mean fried hard.” Never an imbiber as a player, Payton now drank his fair share of beer. He behaved erratically and was prone to strange and confounding moments. Holmes vividly recalled visiting the office for a meeting. “Walter came in and he was bouncing off the walls,” he said. “He was totally incoherent, all hopped up on these painkillers. I remember he turned on his computer and he wanted to show some old porn crap. His eyes were all weird. I said, ‘Walter, what the hell?’ He drank a couple of beers and I couldn’t believe it. Who was this person?”

* Once, during a particularly down period, he entered the house at 34 Mudhank with his gun drawn, telephoned a friend, and crying, uttered, “I’m going to end it now.”
“Walter would call me all the time, saying he was about to kill himself,” said Holmes. “He was tired. He was angry. Nobody loved him. He wanted to be dead.” The first time such a threat was made, Holmes dropped what he was doing and flew from Mississippi to Illinois to console his client. By the time he arrived, Payton’s mood had swung positive. Holmes never again took his threats seriously.
Despite the urging of those around him, Payton refused to see a psychologist or social worker. What would that say about his strength and fortitude? He was supposed to be a hero. Heroes didn’t do therapy.

* Payton probably isn’t the greatest pure running back in NFL history. Jim Brown was more skilled. Emmitt Smith gained more yards (he broke Payton’s record in 2002). Earl Campbell was stronger, Gale Sayers was faster, Barry Sanders was more elusive. Throughout his career, Payton was routinely overshadowed by his peers in the same position. He never matched the splendor of O.J. Simpson or the grace of Eric Dickerson. Marcus Allen boasted a regalness Payton lacked. Billy Sims entered the league with greater hype.

* Nigel Smythe, Walter’s second son, had never looked especially hard into this part of his life. He understood that his biological father was one of the most famous sports figures in the United States. But he also knew the same man—one adored by millions of people—had made no effort to be a dad. From the day Nigel was born in 1985 until Walter’s death in 1999, the two never lived more than thirty miles apart from one another. Despite that, Walter Payton—the onetime Illinois Fatherhood Initiative Chicago Father of the Year—wanted nothing to do with the boy.

Posted in Football | Comments Off on Sweetness: The Enigmatic Life of Walter Payton

Gunslinger: The Remarkable, Improbable, Iconic Life of Brett Favre

Jeff Pearlman wrote in this 2016 book:

* “The 8,000-pound gorilla in the room was Brett’s philandering and Brett’s drinking,” said Bill Michaels, host of the Packers’ postgame show. “We all knew it’s there. But most of us chose to ignore it.” Favre went out when he wanted to go out; he had sex with whomever he wanted, whenever he wanted. There was a Milwaukee bar, Taylor’s, with couches and a spare room designated for Packers players. Favre, Winters, and Chmura became frequent Tuesday-night attendees—Deanna and Brittany be damned. “It was widely known that Favre, Chmura, and Winters would come to Taylor’s, and they could do whatever they desired,” said Tom Silverstein. “You’d hear all types of stories.”

There was a Madison bar, Buck’s, overflowing with drunk, bubbly coeds from the University of Wisconsin. “I saw Brett and his guys there a lot,” said one Madison native who later, as a journalist, wrote extensively about the Packers. “They’d be down on State Street, drunk, surrounded. All the stories ended with Brett with this woman, Brett with that woman. I think half of Wisconsin has some Favre-drinking-woman story. An amazingly high percentage of this state saw Brett doing something, somewhere.”

Favre was trapped between being what he was supposed to be (a loyal partner and devoted father) and what he was (a 20-something football player with money to spend and women to please). Perhaps in other locations (New York, Los Angeles, Miami), the media would catch wind and investigate the titillating world of a superstar gone wild. But not Green Bay; not Wisconsin. Dating back to May 29, 1848, the day it gained statehood, Wisconsin’s predominant non-Indian ethnicity was German—“and Germans are not ones to look down upon drinking,” said Tom Oates, the veteran sports columnist for the Wisconsin State Journal. “When towns in Wisconsin were founded, they’d build a church, a mill, and a brewery. It’s the odd state where drinking is celebrated.” Hence, while many saw Favre and his friends stumbling from bars, or chugging pints, the behavior was never deemed problematic, even with football games to win.

The local press, meanwhile, covered the Packers with the hometown friendliness of a 500-circulation rural weekly. Most of the beat writers and columnists knew of their quarterback’s off-the-field wildness, but in Green Bay such information was not to be divulged. Unless there was a direct link between Favre’s partying and Favre’s Sunday performances, his late-night whereabouts mattered not. “I remember struggling, asking the editors, ‘How far do we take this? Do we find out details?’” said Silverstein. “We talked about sending an intern to the bars, but never did. And a lot of the stuff was exaggerated. You’d hear, ‘Someone saw Brett snorting coke off the bar,’ and you’d sort of sigh, assume it’s not true, and move on.”

“He was protected,” said Kyle Cousineau, a longtime Packers blogger. “You could write about Brett Favre’s play. But him drunk with some girl? Never. It wasn’t allowed.”

Multiple journalists who covered the Packers agree that, during Favre’s heyday, the team made it clear that reporting on his hard-living ways would result in restricted access and, ultimately, no access. This wasn’t New York, where the Post and Daily News would sneer at such an order, then blast the team in an editorial. No, this was Green Bay—where the townspeople owned the team, and victories trumped journalistic integrity, and being a Packer meant wide-ranging protections. “Green Bay isn’t a city,” said Jeff Ash of the Green Bay Press Gazette. “It’s a Packer city.”

Every now and then, a member of the team would get in trouble with the law. But it took something especially big for that to happen. A Packer who raped someone might wind up behind bars. Armed robbery? Also not a great decision. Otherwise, all was good. “If you’re a player here and you get arrested, it has to be by a cop who doesn’t want to be a cop for long,” said Jerry Watson, owner of the Stadium View, a bar near Lambeau. “Because they’ll fire him, and switch him to doggy patrol. Will the cops admit that? No. Is it the truth? You bet. If you’re a Packer and you get picked up for drunk driving, they’re gonna call the team and handle it quietly. The G on that building doesn’t really stand for ‘Green Bay.’ No, it’s for ‘God’—because that’s what the team is here.”

As far as the franchise was concerned, Brett Favre was not to be touched—unless “touching” meant supplying him with pills to numb the pain. Which the training staff and teammates did. As Favre’s play morphed from good to great to legendary, few people noticed that anything was awry. In the Packers locker room, he was the same guy he’d always been—snapping towels, pulling down shorts, spitting out rap lyrics like a hip-hop guru. LeRoy Butler, the star safety, calls him “the best teammate in the history of sports.”

* [1999] Now, however, Green Bay was 4-5 and sinking quickly. Sports Illustrated even featured the team on the cover of its September 27 issue with an accompanying headline, BOTTOMS UP. Wolf, the man who considered [Ray] Rhodes the solution to the franchise’s fortunes, was bewildered by his coach. Where was the emotion? The passion? Mostly, where was the discipline? Many of the team’s practice rituals reminded Wolf of the dreaded Lindy Infante era. Jerry Parins, the team’s longtime chief of security, was hearing more and more weird things about Rhodes’s behavior, so he did some investigating. “Ray was going out to the casino, and he’d stay there until 3, 4 in the morning,” Parins said. “Then people would call me and say, ‘Your head coach is in the casino.’ Everything that year turned relaxed, and the players knew what they could get away with. I love Ray, but he lost control.”

It was an awkward and uncomfortable thing—firing the first African American coach after a sliver of a chance, with a marred quarterback and an aged roster—but Wolf felt he had little choice.

* Though Irv was never diagnosed as an alcoholic, he was an unrepentant drinker whose dependence on alcohol went far beyond the occasional beer. Stories abound of an intoxicated Irv Favre falling asleep with his head slumped atop a wood bar; of him saying inappropriate things, doing inappropriate things….

A waitress at one of the more popular Green Bay bars recalled the evening Irv [Brett’s dad] offered her $100 for sex. When she declined, he upped the ante to $200. “He tried to pay me off, right there,” she said. “I said, ‘Do I have w-h-o-r-e written across my forehead?’”

One time, when the Packers played in San Francisco, Irv was in Brett’s hotel room when the phone rang. His son had stepped out, so Irv answered. A young woman was on the line, searching for the quarterback. “This is his daddy,” Irv said. “I taught him everything he knows. You bring that sweet little pussy over to the apartment and I’ll fuck it real good.”

She showed up later, clad in leather—looking for Brett.

“I think Irv hit on women because he was aging a bit and looking for acceptance,” Kelly said. “We’d drive, and Irv would say, ‘When women get older they don’t want it anymore.’ That was a disappointment to him, and it probably led him to straying.”

Irv’s father, Alvin Favre, hadn’t been faithful to his wife, and his father’s father probably hadn’t been faithful to his wife. Infidelity seemed to come naturally to Favre men. Brett’s came accompanied by guilt. Irv’s generally did not. “Love was a complicated thing with Irv,” said Kelly. “He never received affection from his dad, and he didn’t give much affection to his kids.”

Posted in Football | Comments Off on Gunslinger: The Remarkable, Improbable, Iconic Life of Brett Favre

Showtime: Magic, Kareem, Riley, and the Los Angeles Lakers Dynasty of the 1980s

Jeff Pearlman writes in this 2014 book:

* Kareem Abdul-Jabbar hated white people.

Read that sentence again.

And again.

And again.

Kareem Abdul-Jabbar hated white people and, quite frankly, why wouldn’t he have? Born on April 16, 1947, in New York City, he was named Ferdinand Lewis Alcindor Jr. by his parents—Cora Lillian, a department store price checker, and Ferdinand Lewis Alcindor Sr., a transit police officer and jazz trombonist who graduated from the Juilliard School of music and later played with Art Blakey and Yusef Lateef. Lewis entered the world weighing twelve pounds, ten ounces and measuring twenty-two and a half inches long—signs that America had received its latest future beanstalk.

Growing up in Harlem’s Dyckman housing complex, Lewis became increasingly aware that life for black Americans was painfully confounding. In his autobiography, Giant Steps, he recalled a boyhood trip with his mother to Associated, the neighborhood grocery store. “The store manager decided we were dangerous customers, or maybe he just felt like wielding a little power that day,” he wrote. “He intercepted my mother and told her to check her bag up front. The store was full of people with all sorts of baggage, but he was going to make us the example. My mother took this for what it was, another in a lifetime of petty harassments, and told the man that if he had to satisfy himself that she was no thief, he could inspect the package when she left.”

Lew Alcindor was not merely black. He was tall and black and painfully aware of the stares and the glares and the suspicious looks and the inevitable sight of store employees tracking his whereabouts. His first best friend was a white child named John. They were classmates at St. Jude’s parish elementary school who bonded over model airplanes and funny jokes. By seventh grade, however, an unspoken racial tension divided the two. One day, during lunch, John and Lew wound up in the principal’s office after a scuffle. As Alcindor left, he heard someone yelling at him. “Hey, nigger! Hey, jungle bunny! You big jungle nigger!”

It was John. “Fuck you, you . . . milk bottle,” Alcindor responded.

“It was the only white thing I could think of,” he later wrote. “It really pissed him off, but he didn’t come anywhere near me. We never spoke again.”

* Alcindor graduated junior high in the summer of 1961, and found himself growing apart from white friends. “They made it extremely clear . . . that I wasn’t at home in their crowd,” he wrote. He arrived at Power Memorial that fall, uninspired by the heavy-handed Catholic doctrine. Inside his new school, Jesus was white and Pope John XXIII was infallible and masturbation could result in an eternity of blindness alongside the devil. There was one lecture after another, mostly warning the students that they were sinners who needed to repent.

For a young man who absorbed books (he was addicted to Greek tragedies) and questioned doctrine, it was torturous.

Until basketball started.

* If Alcindor arrived in Los Angeles with particular misgivings about Caucasians, they were only magnified through increased study. Wooden, as open-minded a white man as Alcindor had ever met, embraced his young future star—but with certain limitations. “There was warm, mutual respect,” Abdul-Jabbar later said. “But because I was black, there was never this father-son thing. He couldn’t put his arm around my waist and introduce me as his boy.”

Alcindor began forgoing standard collegiate attire for caftans, dashikis and djellabas—Afrocentric garb ordered from Ashanti Fashions, located in the center of Harlem. An article with the headline FIENDISH IN THE VALLEY WITH LEW ALCINDOR AT THE LATTER’S SMALL BUNGALOW IN ENCINO appeared in West Magazine (a Los Angeles Times supplement), and portrayed him as an America-loathing racist bent on separatism. Asked to assess backup center Steve Patterson, Alcindor snapped, “A white boy from Santa Maria. That’s all.”

* As he dominated on the court, Alcindor turned increasingly divisive off of it. This was hardly the case of a man seeking out trouble. But with media scrutiny came exposure. With exposure came truth. With truth came scorn. Alcindor emerged as a symbol—along with the likes of Muhammad Ali, Jim Brown, Tommie Smith and Juan Carlos—of the black athlete no longer merely willing to go along just to get along. He would play your sport and dribble your ball and accept your cheers. But he refused to be a pawn. On November 23, 1967, Alcindor was one of 120 attendees (and 65 collegiate athletes) at the Western Black Youth Conference, a meeting held inside the Second Baptist Church on the east side of Los Angeles. The matter at hand: Determine whether black athletes would compete in the upcoming Mexico City Olympic Games.

White media members tagged the gathering “radical,” and they were correct. Harry Edwards, a twenty-four-year-old professor at San Jose State and the movement’s leader, stood before the room and spoke his mind. “We’ve been put in the position of asking the whites for everything,” he said to an ocean of nodding heads. “We’re not asking anymore, we’re demanding. We’re fanatical about our rights. We’ve been put in the position of taking our case to the criminal. The U.S. government is the criminal.”

Midway through the session, Alcindor reportedly rose. “I was born in a racist country,” he said. “I laid my life on the line when I was born. I don’t have anything to lose.”

Alcindor boycotted, as did UCLA teammates Mike Warren and Lucius Allen. When they declined to participate in tryouts for the U.S. Olympic basketball team, J. D. Morgan, UCLA’s athletic director, told Sports Illustrated the decision was based upon academics—a lie. The real reason was Alcindor’s discontentment with the racial situation in America. “Kareem gets along OK with white guys, but you have to be a brother to get next to him,” said Sidney Wicks, a UCLA teammate. “He still resents the white hypocrites more than ever—the people who say one thing to your face and quite another behind your back.”

It was in August of 1968 that Alcindor made a bold shift, leaving Catholicism (which, to the dismay of his churchgoing parents, he believed to be racist in dogma) and making a confession of faith toward the orthodox Hanafi sect of Islam. He shaved all the hair from his body, took his Shahadah (a declaration of faith—La illaha ila Allah wa Muhammadun rasoolollah—that must be pronounced before a witness for one to be initiated as a Muslim) and, in his mind, began life anew. The move hardly surprised Alcindor’s friends, who knew of his interest in the writings and philosophies of the late Malcolm X. What did surprise them, however, was when he received a new name—Kareem Abdul-Jabbar (meaning noble, powerful servant).*

So yes, at this point in his life, he hated white people. Hated them. But with a catch—not individually. Though he rarely befriended whites, he was open to discussions. His spiritual guide, a former Malcolm X disciple named Hamaas Abdul-Khaalis, asked Abdul-Jabbar to look beyond skin color and understand that there were plenty of black sinners, too. Abdul-Khaalis referred to Malcolm X’s famous pilgrimage to Mecca, when a militant, anti-white religious leader came to see that race—while important—wasn’t the sole factor in understanding another human being.

“I had a very firm grasp of the concepts I didn’t like—white authority, unbending rules, false-faced people—but was much less certain where to draw the line in real life,” Abdul-Jabbar wrote. “I was wary, and angry, that I had to examine everybody I came in contact with—sort of an emotional frisking—because every touch could be a slap. All my whites for everything,” he said to an ocean of nodding heads. “We’re not asking anymore, we’re demanding. We’re fanatical about our rights. We’ve been put in the position of taking our case to the criminal. The U.S. government is the criminal.”

Midway through the session, Alcindor reportedly rose. “I was born in a racist country,” he said. “I laid my life on the line when I was born. I don’t have anything to lose.”

Alcindor boycotted, as did UCLA teammates Mike Warren and Lucius Allen. When they declined to participate in tryouts for the U.S. Olympic basketball team, J. D. Morgan, UCLA’s athletic director, told Sports Illustrated the decision was based upon academics—a lie. The real reason was Alcindor’s discontentment with the racial situation in America. “Kareem gets along OK with white guys, but you have to be a brother to get next to him,” said Sidney Wicks, a UCLA teammate. “He still resents the white hypocrites more than ever—the people who say one thing to your face and quite another behind your back.”

It was in August of 1968 that Alcindor made a bold shift, leaving Catholicism (which, to the dismay of his churchgoing parents, he believed to be racist in dogma) and making a confession of faith toward the orthodox Hanafi sect of Islam. He shaved all the hair from his body, took his Shahadah (a declaration of faith—La illaha ila Allah wa Muhammadun rasoolollah—that must be pronounced before a witness for one to be initiated as a Muslim) and, in his mind, began life anew. The move hardly surprised Alcindor’s friends, who knew of his interest in the writings and philosophies of the late Malcolm X. What did surprise them, however, was when he received a new name—Kareem Abdul-Jabbar (meaning noble, powerful servant).*

So yes, at this point in his life, he hated white people. Hated them. But with a catch—not individually. Though he rarely befriended whites, he was open to discussions. His spiritual guide, a former Malcolm X disciple named Hamaas Abdul-Khaalis, asked Abdul-Jabbar to look beyond skin color and understand that there were plenty of black sinners, too. Abdul-Khaalis referred to Malcolm X’s famous pilgrimage to Mecca, when a militant, anti-white religious leader came to see that race—while important—wasn’t the sole factor in understanding another human being.

“I had a very firm grasp of the concepts I didn’t like—white authority, unbending rules, false-faced people—but was much less certain where to draw the line in real life,” Abdul-Jabbar wrote. “I was wary, and angry, that I had to examine everybody I came in contact with—sort of an emotional frisking—because every touch could be a slap. All my reservations became conscious, each chance meeting with a stranger and every introduction by a friend became a potential source of pain. I read all gestures intensively, and terribly often found them racially hurtful, therefore personally unacceptable. People who tried too hard to be friendly were being patronizing racists; people who didn’t try hard enough were blatant racists. People I didn’t know weren’t worth knowing; people I did know had to watch their step.”

* “The truth is, the friction between Earvin and Norm went way beyond basketball,” said Cooper, who was close with both guards. “That situation went to the party life. They were fucking the same girls. That was a problem. Dr. Buss was best friends with Hugh Hefner, and that door was open to Magic. And Norm being known, until then, as the number one available bachelor in Los Angeles, as the swinging guy who liked everything, it was awkward.

“This was his team before, but he hadn’t won anything until Magic came along. So they’re bumping heads with girls, they’re fucking the same girls. They didn’t argue about it, but you could hear them talking about it—‘Well, man, you need to stay away from Peggy,’ and such and such. They were friends. Good friends. But then it became competitive with them over basketball and women. We used to call ourselves the Three Musketeers, because we did everything together, and now it was as if I was torn between two lovers.”

Added Ron Carter: “Norm was my friend, but he was cocky as all hell. He has zero lack of confidence, ever. On or off the court. He saw everything Magic did as a competition. For the ball. For playing time. For women. Who’s the coolest? Who’s the smartest? Me and Coop would sit back and just watch. They certainly respected each other. But there was this weird tension.”

* Everything started at the top, where Buss—fifty years old, but with the libido of a rabbit—paraded around town with women barely of age to drive. “Jerry loved the excitement of it,” said Rothman. “And the little nymphettes thought he could get them movie careers.” It was, to the uninformed, a disconcerting sight. Though Buss was certainly a handsome enough man, he looked downright grandfatherly alongside many of his women. Buss seemed to date a different person every week, and—before moving on to the next bubbly beauty—would snap a photograph and place the image in one of his dozens of scrapbooks. Every so often, upon request, he would break out an album and talk about the experiences. Many names he remembered. Many, he forgot. “Jerry once told me something I’ve often thought of,” said Lance Davis, Buss’s longtime friend. “He said, ‘Lance, people try and give me shit over the women I go out with. Why would I want to go out with an older woman when I can go out with one with a fresher, hotter body? Why wouldn’t I go out with a twenty-six-year-old Playmate with a hot body?’ Jerry said it kept him young and alive—and it clearly did. He was the king, and the Forum was his palace.”

Posted in Basketball | Comments Off on Showtime: Magic, Kareem, Riley, and the Los Angeles Lakers Dynasty of the 1980s

Three-Ring Circus: Kobe, Shaq, Phil, and the Crazy Years of the Lakers Dynasty

Here are some highlights from this new book by Jeff Pearlman:

* To Walker, it’s all a joke. He and Bryant entered the league together, and the majority of players on the roster view Kobe’s latest efforts not unlike MC Hammer’s forever lampooned 1994 attempt at gangsta rap. * Bryant is a “Thank you” and “You’re very welcome” type of guy—polite, suburban, cultured, well-heeled. Truth be told, he’s always been a clumsy fit for this league of superstars with well-earned street cred—the Allen Iversons and Stephon Marburys. The cursing is the latest addition to Bryant’s paint-by-numbers approach to sounding hardened, and it’s as authentic as $5 mink.
“It was his Beanie Sigel phase,” says McCoy. “Really fake.”
Now, if one looks closely enough, he can see the steam rising from Bry ant’s ears. The four-time All-Star leans past Fox, draws back his right fist, lunges across Walker’s head, and— pop! —punches him in the right eye.
For a moment, everyone on the bus freezes. Just for a moment.
Walker, 28 pounds heavier than Bryant, gazes toward McCoy, his closest friend on the roster. “Did this fucker just hit me?” he says. “Did he just hit me ?”
McCoy nods.

* Magic Johnson saying, “Because of the HIV virus that I have attained, I will have to retire from the Lakers.”
Gasp.
Yes, many other celebrities had died before our eyes from AIDS, but this was different. Freddie Mercury, Liberace, Anthony Perkins, Gia Carangi—they were people who shared our dimensions and gravitational limitations. Plus, we had our own built-in excuses. They were gay. They were drug addicts. They screwed around. They lived lives of ill repute. They asked for it.
The idea of bearing witness to a superhero like Magic Johnson devel oping lesions, losing most of his weight, needing a walker, fading to dust before our eyes . . . well, it was too much to handle. Wrote Gary Nuhn of the Dayton Daily News, “I guess we’re going to watch Magic Johnson die just as my father’s generation watched Lou Gehrig and Babe Ruth die. Slowly. Painfully. Irreversibly.”
So when Magic Johnson didn’t develop lesions and lose most of his weight, when he didn’t need a walker or fade to dust before our eyes—it felt almost biblical. And as the years passed and Johnson opened movie theaters and coffee shops and shook 10 million hands and hugged 10 million babies and smiled that 10-million-megawatt smile, there was this growing idea that if anyone could accomplish the unaccomplishable, it was Magic.
Especially on the basketball court.

* Over the next few minutes, Bryant offered his version of the story. Which was pretty much [Jessica] Mathison’s version of the story. They met. They flirted. They flirted some more. They kissed. When the narrative turned specifically to the intricacies of sex, however, things became uncomfortable. Bryant admitted that he had a hand around Mathison’s neck, and when Loya asked about the firmness of the grip, Bryant said, “My hands are strong. I don’t know.”
It turned worse.
There was this:
LOYA: Did she, did you get any blood on you or anything like that?
BRYANT: She didn’t bleed, did she?
LOYA: Yeah, she had, she had a lot of bleeding.
BRYANT: What, you got to be kidding. From where?
LOYA: From her vaginal area.
BRYANT: Did she cut herself or something? There’s no blood on me whatsoever, man. Matter of fact, I still have the boxers. They’re all white, they’re all white, there’s nothing on them.
And this:
LOYA: Did you ever ask her if you wanted, if you could cum in her face?
BRYANT: Yes. That’s when she said no. That’s when she said no. That’s when she said no.
LOYA: So what did, what did you say?
WINTERS: What did you say, how did that, how did that come about?
BRYANT: Um, you know, that’s when I asked if I could cum in her face. She said no.
LOYA: So you like to cum in your partner’s face?
BRYANT: That’s my thing. Not always. I mean, so I stopped. Jesus Christ, man.
And this:
WINTERS: Um, did she give you oral sex or anything like that?
BRYANT: Yes, she did.
WINTERS: She did?
BRYANT: She did.
WINTERS: For how . . . when did that happen?
BRYANT: For like five seconds. I said, um, give me a blow job, um, and then kiss it. She gave me a blow job.
LOYA: So the blowjob lasted about five seconds?
BRYANT: Yeah, it was quick.
LOYA: Then what happened?
BRYANT: Wait, not . . . I mean like she was, kept on doing, I just told her to get up. She didn’t know what she was doing.
And this:
BRYANT: She must be trying to get money or something.
LOYA: Are you willing to pay that if she is?
BRYANT: I got to. I got to. I got to. I’m in the worst fucking situation.
And this:
LOYA: So when you penetrated her, was it a simple penetration? Was there difficulty there?
BRYANT: No, it was . . . it was easy. It just slid in there.

* In the minutes that followed, Bryant (who, it can be said again, would have been wise to keep quiet and call an attorney ASAP) told Winters that (a) Mathison “wasn’t that attractive”; (b) he masturbated after she left; (c) he had repeatedly cheated on his wife with a woman named Michelle; and (d) he liked grabbing Michelle by the neck from behind, and she had the neck bruises to prove it.
He consented to allowing the detectives to call in a colleague who’d collect evidence from his room in a series of plastic bags as part of a sexual assault examination kit. At approximately 2:30 a.m., Bryant was driven 52 miles in a sheriff’s patrol car to Glenwood Springs and Valley View Hospital. Once there, he provided DNA samples, then checked into the nearby Hotel Colorado. He flew back to Southern California that evening, hoping the worst of it all had passed.
It was naive thinking.
“I knew he was guilty,” Winters said years later. “And I still know it.”

* Kupchak’s familiar first six words (“You’re not going to believe this”) were simply untrue. Though Jackson had never literally thought of his star guard as a rapist, he knew him to be immature, emotionally stunted, and fueled by an unhealthy rage. For Christ’s sake, he was in Colorado undergoing a procedure without the organization’s consent. Phil Jackson did believe this. “Kobe can be consumed with surprising anger,” Jackson recalled, “which he’s displayed toward me and toward his teammates.”

* Wrote Winters in a sealed file: “Bryant made a comment to us about what another teammate does in situations like these. Bryant stated he should have done what Shaq (Shaquille O’Neal) does. Bryant stated that Shaq would pay his women not to say anything. He stated Shaq has paid up to a million dollars already for situations like this. He stated he, Bryant, treats a woman with respect, therefore they shouldn’t say anything.”

* There was an unspoken code among NBA teammates, and it read (inexactly): What happens with the club stays with the club. Whether or not O’Neal had paid women up to a million dollars was beside the point.

* Along with a play-by-play of the night, Winters and Crittenden presented as evidence a T-shirt found in Bryant’s hotel room that was stained with Mathison’s blood.

* Bryant listened as his defenders argued why they needed to tell the jury all about Mathison’s sexual history, as well as her past psychiatric records (highlighted by antipsychotic drug treatment) and two suicide attempts. Mackey argued that the alleged victim had brought the charges against Bryant as a way of “creating drama in her life to get attention.”

* Nearly 15 years later, both Mark Hurlbert, the Eagle County district attorney, and Doug Winters, the lead detective, remained convinced that Kobe Bryant had raped Jessica Mathison. They didn’t think it might have happened, or it perhaps happened. There was no misunderstanding. “There’s zero doubt in my mind,” Winters said. “He raped her.”
“I’m 100 percent certain,” said the DA. “He did it.”
That’s why Hurlbert was so furious when, on August 10, Mathison ignored his advice, hired an outside attorney, John Clune, and filed a civil suit against Bryant, seeking unspecified damages. It was a crippling move for the criminal case, in that it allowed people to wonder whether, in fact, Mathison was all about the money. “When her attorney called me I said, ‘You need to hold off on this!’ ” Hurlbert recalled. “ ‘It’s just giving them one more avenue of cross-examination that she’s only in it for material gain.’ ” Around this same time, Mathison penned a letter to Gerry Sandberg, a state investigator, admitting that some of the initial details she’d provided to Winters might have been a tad off.

Posted in Basketball | Comments Off on Three-Ring Circus: Kobe, Shaq, Phil, and the Crazy Years of the Lakers Dynasty