Sins of My Father: Growing Up with America’s Most Dangerous White Supremacist

Posted on October 8, 2020 by Luke Ford

William Pierce’s son Kelvin writes in his 2020 biography:

* He would fly into sudden violent, volcanic rages, to the point that he even killed the only two living things he truly loved, our sweet Siamese cats. The only time he was truly happy was when he could lock himself in his study with his books and Nazi paraphernalia, to write about the race wars to come that he hoped to organize and orchestrate. When he wasn’t writing or addressing fund-raising rallies for his neo-Nazi organization, the National Alliance, he liked to experiment with chemicals and explosives in the basement of our home or in the woods behind it. He had me help him produce nitroglycerine and showed me how to make bombs. To my mother’s terror, he hid weapons and other dangerous stuff in the crawl space of our house until a few days before the FBI came sniffing around. Sometimes he used me as a guinea-pig, once knocking me flat on my rear from a powerful electric shock. While I was frightened I was happy, too, because I was spending time with him…

* I would have done anything for a word of praise, a hug, or a kiss from him, but in the end, I always failed him. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t become the little Aryan he wanted and so he abandoned his attempt to mold me. As for my brother, Erik, he didn’t even try with him. The only time I saw him display any affection toward either of us was after his death, when I found among his belongings a photograph of us as babies, sitting on his lap. He was smiling. It wasn’t until I left for college and met the outside world that I realized what a monster he was. When he left my mother, he wrote her a letter saying he was going because he loved his political party more. He went on to marry four other women, mostly mail-order brides. He died at his secluded compound on a West Virginia mountaintop before he had the chance to wed a sixth woman that he had squirreled away out of sight of his fifth wife. He spent his last days restructuring the National Alliance to make sure it survived him and gave no thought to us at all – his Nazi acolytes didn’t even know our names or that we existed, although they did try to recruit me a few days after his death, like some sort of prized trophy to hang on the wall.

* I had spent most of my life hating Dad, and he surely hated me. He hadn’t spoken to me in seven years and never acknowledged the adoption of my two baby girls from Eastern Europe six years earlier. I had sent him pictures and letters about them, but he never bothered to reply. I strongly suspected that he didn’t approve of them because they weren’t white enough for his tastes. When I finally stopped blubbing, I realized why I was so upset. I had wanted him to love me and be proud of me, and for us to be able to talk and enjoy each other and have a normal relationship.

* After I got myself together I called my twin brother, Erik, and told him the news. “He evidently died from cancer but I don’t know much more than that,” I said. Erik said he didn’t really care — Dad was a complete jerk and he didn’t give a damn about any memorial service. I suggested that it might give us closure to attend and we’d be able to see Uncle Sandy, too, but he was adamant. “That bastard didn’t give a damn about me or my kids, and there is no damn way I’m going to his service,” Erik said. “He was a horrible father and nothing will change that!”

* “Well, your father had cancer,” said Charles. “It was adenocarcinoma, a cancer of the adrenal glands. Several months ago he began losing weight and had lost quite a bit before his secretary finally insisted he go see a doctor. He resisted because he didn’t trust the doctors, but eventually made an appointment. He said he didn’t feel particularly sick but had lost about 30 pounds and wasn’t sure why.” After a series of tests, Dad was diagnosed with Stage 4 cancer. He was admitted to the hospital and started treatments. After about two weeks, he was told that the treatments were helping and his progress was so promising that he could go home and continue on an outpatient basis. But he quickly got worse and within a few weeks was back in the hospital. This time they told him the prognosis was dire and that he needed to stay in the hospital. “That’s when I went to see him,” Charles said. “He phoned and said he didn’t trust the doctors. I spoke to them and decided that he did, indeed, have Stage 4 cancer. After discussing his options with me he decided to go home and discontinue further treatment.” Once home, Dad declined rapidly, to the point where he couldn’t get out of bed any more. Soon, he refused to eat or drink anything at all. “I suspected he knew the end was near and did not want to prolong it any longer than necessary,” said Charles. “Without taking in any fluids he became very weak and for his last few days he was so weak that he couldn’t speak. He passed a few days later. Your father was a very strong man and he went out on his own terms.”

* Charles put his hand on my shoulder. “Your father and I spoke several times before his death and he told me near the end that one of his only regrets in life was in regards to you and your brother. He said he sincerely regretted not having a better relationship with you two,” Charles said.

* I remember as a kid Dad devouring history books, particularly tomes on European history, culture and morals, and he knew that a movement built around a single person would not survive once that person died. The clearest example of that was his former boss George Lincoln Rockwell and his American Nazi Party, which tore itself to shreds within three years of his assassination in 1967. Dad witnessed it all, yet when it came to his own demise 35 years later he totally ignored the principle that he had believed in for so long. When he learned that he was dying, he gave no thought to Mom, my brother or me, or our future, which makes me angry to this day. Instead, he set about trying to organize the Alliance’s affairs to ensure a smooth transfer of power. He had refused further treatment at the hospital and returned home to meet with each staff member to discuss their work and outline a plan for when he would no longer be there. Six days after his death, the Alliance’s 17-strong professional staff announced they had chosen Erich to be their new leader, in accordance with his wishes.

* At the time of his death, Dad presided over a racist empire that produced revenue of about $1 million a year, which I suppose should be considered quite a success for a man who lived almost entirely off my mother’s earnings for 20 years. He ruled his empire from his roost on a 346-acre hilltop compound near Hillsboro, W. Va. He is said to have purchased the land with money donated by “The Order,” a gang of mostly Alliance members and supporters who stole $4 million by robbing armored cars, and shot dead Alan Berg, a liberal Jewish talk-show host, on the streets of Denver. The Order was led by Robert Mathews, a young West Coast Alliance member who Dad had been grooming for great things. Mathews died, aged 31, in an explosion at a house on Whidbey Island, Wash., in 1984 after a three-day standoff with the FBI. Dad liked to portray the Alliance as a group dedicated to the welfare and salvation of the white race, and not the lucrative hate business that it became. He had various streams of income, apart from membership fees and donations from deluded donors. There was a high-brow glossy magazine called National Vanguard, which was meant to rouse intellectuals and professionals to join his cause. In addition, he had a crude monthly publication, the members-only National Alliance Bulletin, filled with venom and calls for action against the Jews and others whom he believed were undermining the white race and secretly controlling the government. He also operated National Vanguard Books, a mail-order firm offering racist and anti-Semitic literature, along with tapes of his weekly half-hour radio show, “American Dissident Voices,” which broadcast over shortwave stations that could be heard in New England, Florida, California and several states in the South. Later, it could also reach some places in Europe.

Then, there were the sales of his book “The Turner Diaries,” which inspired Timothy McVeigh to bomb the Alfred P. Murrah federal building in Oklahoma City in 1995. The Turner Diaries, and his subsequent offering, “Hunter,” were designed to appeal to poor, grievance-nursing whites and became the how-to manual for The Order and subsequent rightwing spin-offs. Both books featured protagonists who work to halt what Dad called the “degeneration” of the white race and allowed him to ‘kill’ all the people he hated —in no particular order, Jews and rabbis, blacks and interracial couples, Communists, intellectuals and academics, gays, reporters and feminists, of course, Hollywood actors, talk show hosts, state governors, congressmen, a cardinal and a couple of bishops. They all died in gory attacks: there were exploding skulls, flying brain tissue, slit throats, knifings, shotgun blasts, hangings and bombings. Dad wrote other books, non-fiction treatises, but it was his crude fiction that earned him the big bucks and the infamy he so richly deserved. I don’t know how many copies have been sold, but in 2000, Britain’s The Guardian newspaper put the number at more than 500,000 just for The Turner Diaries.

* Dad was born in September, 1933, to an alcoholic father and a domineering mother who had trouble showing affection. When he was a young boy, his mother would pay him a small fee to find the bottles of booze his father had hidden around the house. His father died when Dad was still a youngster. Drunk, he was struck by a car…

* He spent the last two years of high school in a military-style boarding school after his mother embarked on a disastrous love affair that left her heart-broken. Dad never really experienced the warmth and emotional support that comes from having a loving home. He would entertain himself for hours, reading reams of science fiction, and play around with model rockets and chemistry sets, for which he had an extraordinary aptitude.

* While Dad earned his Ph.D at Colorado in the summer of 1962 and Mom earned her B.A. in mathematics, I continued to rock on my horse. At bedtime, I would rock with my pillow. I was about two years old when Dad started to change. From being a fun, care-free man he slowly turned into a monster. Mom says it was like a psychological switch had been thrown.

* According to Dad, he had been “an ideological virgin” until he was 30…. He said he’d hadn’t thought much about non-whites and had very little experience of them as he was growing up. “If anything, I was inclined toward the liberal position on the race question.” He recalled during a dormitory bull session as an undergraduate how he had supported the right of a person to marry or cohabit with anyone who would have him, black of white.

* He was bored with his life. He feared he was destined to work every day at something that had no real meaning and, at the same time, was fast-formulating the belief that Jews were having a massive and negative influence on America. He was convinced that they were the masterminds behind the Civil Rights Movement, and were plotting to mix blacks with whites as part of a plan to dilute the white race and create a society of half-breeds because they feared the idea of a strong white race.

* Rockwell’s views about Jews and how they were encouraging whites and non-whites to mix particularly resonated with Dad and he decided then and there that he had to help save his people from this Jewish scheme. It was more important to him than anything else — even us. He had finally found the meaning of life that he had been searching for. Rockwell’s views solidified the conclusions Dad had reached through all his hours of reading and his hatred of Jews mushroomed until he came to believe that Hitler’s final solution, the mass extermination of the Jews, was the only answer. He used to fantasize about slaughtering Jews and anyone else who supported them and their secret mission to destroy us all. It was an all-consuming malignancy that took root in his psyche and he would spend every hour from that moment until his death waging war on the Jewish people, and the blacks and left-wing students that he believed the Jews were manipulating.

* His inner rage at events in the outside world would explode into our home in the form of regular beatings that left us bruised and scarred, and in a lot of pain — he’d use a wire coat hanger, an electric razor cord, a belt, or a 2-by-4, or whatever was closest to hand. As he became more violent, I became more detached, hiding inside my head in an imaginary world where I felt safe. Sometimes, I’d reach out into the uncomfortable outer universe, looking for a sign that I was loved and lovable, but I’d always be reminded of my unworthiness and would retreat again.

* Rockwell told Dad that he had tried appealing to what he called “the winners” — the teachers and professors, doctors, lawyers and engineers, to the writers and artists, businessmen and craftsmen, and to his fellow military officers, to everyone that he considered to be “careful, responsible men and women with steady employment and stable families.” While he found that many agreed with him in principle, “almost none had the moral courage to stand up and be counted among the righteous.” In short, while they shook his hand after his speeches, Rockwell said, they would scurry away in fright when he talked about taking America back from the Jews.

* I knew beyond all doubt that there was something seriously wrong with me. I was simply bad to the core, and nothing could save me, which is why my Dad never loved me.

* One summer’s day, while Dad was out of town, I was playing down by the stream behind our house. I’d found a book of matches from somewhere and decided to entertain myself by setting individual leaves on fire and then blowing them out. It was grand fun and I did it several times until suddenly a couple of adjacent leaves caught fire and I could no longer blow them out. In a few moments the fire spread to the point that it was out of control. I got up and ran back to my house and shortly after one of our neighbors noticed the blaze and called the fire department. There was quite a large blaze raging behind the house by the time the fire truck arrived. I just stood there, watching all the commotion, in rapt fascination.

* Rockwell called publicity the “lifeblood of any political movement.” He knew that without it, no one would know that he and his Nazis existed. His publicity stunts included sending Stormtroopers dressed in ape costumes to the National Zoo in Washington, D.C., carrying placards demanding “Free our Brothers” and “We Equals Want Civil rights.”

* He pulled a similar stunt at a gay rights’ convention, pretending to be a delivery man and rushing on stage with a box labeled as an emergency shipment of 24 quarts of Vaseline.

* Mom told me later that she considered leaving him many times but he threatened to go to the dean at Mary Washington and say that she was heavily involved with his work with Rockwell, although that was a lie.

* To my delight as a kid, Dad actually did sleep with a gun under his pillow. I used to creep into his room to play with it when he was away.

* Our neighbors saw the stories and soon Erik and I were being harassed and beaten up by local kids. We became known as the “Neighborhood Nazis” and people told their children not to mix with us. Some of the papers also printed our address.

* Dad took over the operation [of the National Youth Alliance]. It was to consume the rest of his life, stealing all that he had left to give and leaving not a shred for his wife and kids. Even when he died, the only reference to us was a line in his will acknowledging that he had had two sons.

* I remember being puzzled by the two men in Dad’s office because they didn’t seem to be all that intelligent. Over the years, I would see similar people at Dad’s gatherings. It was as if he were surrounded by weirdos, mostly young men who had nothing better to do than hang out with other small-minded thugs, making themselves feel better by putting down other people.

* Dad married five times in all, but there was only one woman he truly cared about and to whom he was loyal to the end: his mother, Marguerite Pierce. She wasn’t terribly affectionate in return, which perhaps is one reason why he was never able to show love to Erik and myself. My mother was terrified of her but, to her credit, Grandma did urge Dad to think again when he told her he was dumping us for his new, all-consuming love — National Socialism.

* Alcohol played a prominent and tragic role throughout Grandma’s life. For some reason, she seemed strangely attracted to heavy drinkers — her father and stepfather were both alcoholics, and so was her first husband and her last…

* Grandma never liked Mom. When Mom and Dad were courting, she advised him to bed my mother if he must, but, for God’s sake, don’t marry her. For once, Dad didn’t listen to her. She was hard on Mom all the years I knew her. She would sweep in and immediately start criticizing Mom’s housekeeping, her personal appearance, her weight, and how the house wasn’t up to her standards of cleanliness, always upsetting Mom…

* Dad should be writing a book telling the story of “Jewish conniving from beginning to end — or present,” she said. “Tell it in an interesting, readable style. Don’t be too intellectual for the general public, but, principally, DON’T ADOPT THE STYLE OF ROCKWELL by haranguing and trying to arouse the ignorant….”

* She became interested in creative writing while in Texas and spent two years as a student at the University of Texas in Austin. In 1964, she moved to Odessa, 30 miles west of Midland, and founded a monthly social magazine called “Odessan.” I was in high school and had gone to visit her but she had nothing planned for me to do when I got there, so I ended up helping her as she chronicled the social life of influential people in and around Odessa. She would go around and visit small businesses, attend social affairs and take pictures, documenting the happenings around town and selling advertising for the magazine as a way to fund it. She edited and published the magazine for 14 years. She also managed to write two novels and a number of short stories, but she was never able to get them published.

* Dad sharing stories with me and laughing like that was the closest I ever felt to him and, in all honesty, it is the only memory I have up to that point when he interacted with me in this way. I really admired him but was also very afraid of him. He still never touched me unless it was to hurt me and never said how he felt about me, except to explain to me why he was going to hit me. The only other thing he would talk about were the racist facts of life.

* I remember another neat experience with Dad when he decided to teach me how to make a bomb.

* I think in his own way Dad wanted to have a relationship with me but just didn’t know how.

* In the summer of 1971, he had embarked on an extraordinary series of articles that delivered detailed diagrams and instructions on how to make weapons that could kill and maim, explaining patiently in a professorial tone how to use each one efficiently. The articles, under the title “Revolutionary Notes” and “Patriot’s Notebook,” appeared in “Attack!” his publication aimed at high school and college students. He wrote that they were part of a new phase in the development of the Alliance that would involve “intensive organizing using the most radical and aggressive methods we can devise.”

* Dad had been stockpiling explosives in the crawl space of our house, in readiness for the race war he hoped would start soon. Mom knew about the cache and wanted it gone. She begged him time and again to get rid of it but, as usual, he ignored her. Then something happened, I don’t know what, but suddenly Dad gathered up all the explosives and dumped them in the Potomac River. Less than a week later, while he was at work, the doorbell rang. It was the FBI with a search warrant. Luckily for Dad, there was nothing to be found.

* Dad carried a terrible rage inside him and it didn’t take much to light his fuse. He would cuss like crazy when things went wrong, which was often. The smallest thing set him off, even having to replace a light bulb would spark a blue cuss-storm. But when he was discussing his beliefs, he never raised his voice. He was thoughtful with his choice of words, articulate and persuasive. When he explained things to me I was certain that he was right because he always seemed to make perfect sense.

* His favorite tipple was Black Label beer and he would buy it in quart-sized bottles. I guess his habit was becoming pretty expensive because I remember him trying his hand at brewing his own beer at home. He had saved at least 100 empty Black Label bottles and filled them with his homemade hooch. That didn’t last long, though, because one night he came home terribly drunk and threw up all over their bed. Not surprisingly, Mom was furious and perhaps he felt some shame, because after that night, he never had another drink, at least as far as we could tell.

* Dad’s political principles waxed and waned, depending on his needs at the time… When it suited his pocket, he portrayed himself as a revolutionary who would lead the White Race to the promised land and wouldn’t hesitate to use violence to wipe his enemies from the earth.

* Dad was flexible when it came to the media, too. Like an early Donald Trump, he reviled every journalist who ever drew breath, but courted their coverage at every turn. He would eagerly take calls from print reporters, play his part in documentaries and sit for interviews — especially if there were TV cameras present. It was as if he needed the attention, like some kind of validation of his value and his views. At the same time, he’d claim that the media was controlled by Jews bent on destroying the White Race and its culture, and fulminated mightily on the matter every chance he got.

* If there is one person who could readily believe Dad’s “seeker of truth” fantasy, it was Robert S. Griffin, a tenured professor of education at the University of Vermont. He wrote a hugely controversial book on Dad, which I have cited several times in this book, and quoted verbatim large tracts of my father’s venomous views. He was rebuked by the Southern Poverty Law Center for his “tedious regurgitation” of Dad’s words, and for being nothing more than a “fawning admirer” who let my father to get away with asserting that the Alliance was not a hate group, but simply “dedicated to the welfare and progress of our people.” I found the book almost impossible to finish, although it was amusing in parts to hear Dad spin his version of events and try to justify his behavior and beliefs. However, I cannot allow Griffin get away with his portrayal of my father as some benign, absent-minded professor with a fascinating insight into how the world really is…

Griffin contacted Dad in 1997, saying he wanted to write a book exploring where “culture and society” were headed and the role my father and his views played in it. Dad let Griffin stay with him at the compound for six weeks in the summer of 1998 while Griffin asked him softball questions for 30 hours and taped his answers for posterity. The result was a book titled “The Fame of a Dead Man’s Deeds,” taken from a line in an old Norse poem, which Griffin self-published in May, 2001. It was all a matter of ego for my father, but Griffin thought Dad saw him as a fellow academic who understood his views. For a while, Griffin claimed to be “simply a conduit” for Dad’s views and dismissed the idea that he was a racist himself. He said he was only an objective observer painting a portrait of my father and called his approach “cultural anthropology,” but as time has passed, his racist colors came shining through. Or, as Griffin calls it, his “ethnic pride.” Griffin has a website on which he promotes his articles, books and random thoughts. On watching white supremacists and neo-Nazis march in Charlottesville, Va., in August 2017 to chants of “the Jews will not replace us” and the old Nazi slogan of “Blood and Soil,” Griffin said his first reaction was “elation and gratitude” at how white people had organized, “standing up for their heritage and race, standing up for people like me, standing up for me.” It didn’t seem to matter to him that the marchers wore khaki uniforms and carried flaming torches and Nazi flags. He lauded their leadership, and their “remarkable dedication and courage,” and for putting themselves in “physical peril” where “they could have been shot,” he said…

But even in his adulation of Dad, he spotted “a menacing quality” about him. “There seems to be a pressure inside him, something brewing just beneath the surface, an anger perhaps,” Griffin wrote. “There is a hardness, a coldness, a potential for violence that I feel in him, and it makes me uneasy and uncomfortable.” His discomfort clearly didn’t last long. Two months before Dad died, Griffin spoke glowingly of his attributes. “He’s the most fascinating human being I’ve ever been around — ever,” he said. “Whatever you think of him, I found him to be a man of integrity and courage and dedication. And in his eyes he is doing the most important thing he can think of with his life. Those have become standards that I’ve applied to my own life.” (4) The SPLC called on the University of Vermont to condemn his writings and investigate his classroom activities. The university declined to do so. It said it had an obligation to protect “our faculty’s right to academic freedom and freedom of speech.” Griffin sees himself in a favorable light. Anyone who says he is a neo-Nazi is merely “name calling.” He describes himself as “curious and perceptive and thoughtful…an honorable person, persevering and courageous.” His tenured position at the university, he wrote on his website, “gives me more protection from attack than anybody I can think of.”

* My first real interaction with a black person came in 4th grade. I was sitting in my seat in Mrs. Carden’s class when she told us to go to the back of the room to retrieve our mid-morning snacks and then stepped out for a minute. I had just gotten my snack when I felt a staggering blow to my right jaw. I saw stars and my knees buckled. Clarence, a much bigger and older black boy in my class, threw the punch. I was terrified. I just stood there crying, my jaw throbbing, trying to process what had happened. Clarence was a trouble-maker and had been held back a couple of times but I’d never had a run-in with him and had done nothing to incite him…

It turned out that Clarence lived in “the ghetto” and I started seeing him a lot as I explored our neighborhood. I was scared to death of him and was always on the lookout for him, wherever I went. But sometimes that wasn’t enough. I would run into him while I was alone and far from home, then he would chase me and beat me up. He seemed to delight in terrorizing me. I started to hate blacks, just like Dad, but I kept my mouth shut.

* Another data point in my view on blacks was added when my bike was stolen after I ran home one day to get a snack during my paper route. Mom said she thought she knew where it was. We got into the car and she drove straight to “the ghetto.” She drove around slowly for a few minutes and then I saw a small black kid riding my bike on the sidewalk… Afterwards, I was amazed at how Mom just knew where my bike would be and how easy it was to get it back. Maybe Dad was right? Perhaps blacks were to be feared because of how they behaved?

* Dad was always coming up with new rules. One day he decided we couldn’t have Christmas anymore because he wasn’t going to have us worshipping some Jew. Mom pitched a fit.

* He also banned sports. Mom knew we were both terribly shy and sheltered and decided it would be good for us to be involved in a team sport, to expose us to other kids our age outside of our school activities.

* Dad was still beating me in seventh grade. I hated him for it and regularly fantasized about his death. By now, I knew many people loathed and despised him because of his beliefs and activities and I often prayed that someone would murder him, but no-one ever obliged me.

* Lying was my only way of dealing with him, despite the fact that it never worked.

* For a long time, Mom had been a reluctant participant in Dad’s work. She did all of his accounting and all of his typing. He wrote a lot and it was all hand-written. Whenever he needed anything typed, he would bring it home and ask her to do it for him, and she did it straight away, despite being exhausted from her full-time teaching job and being completely responsible for keeping the house clean and handling all family affairs.

* She put on the last bandage, then said quietly, “Never again!” Mom confronted Dad and said simply that he had beaten us for the last time. He said if he ever laid a finger on either of us again, she would leave and he would never see us again.

* Dad somehow derived strength from beating us up. He was like all the bullies at school, I realized. And, just like a bully, when Mom finally stood up to him, it sapped him of his strength, much as I had found out for myself at school… It was as if he no longer felt responsible for making us into what he was not, the perfect Aryan male. We were no longer his hunk of clay for molding, and he was no longer the creator.

* Dad was down in the dumps. It seemed no matter what he wrote or how he wrote it, he couldn’t stir the masses to revolt, he moaned over lunch with Revilo P. Oliver. It was 1974 and they were sitting in a restaurant in Washington, D.C. Oliver was a controversial classics professor at the University of Illinois, a leading white supremacist, and a founder of the John Birch Society, until he was expelled for his racist views.

* After listening to Dad complain, Oliver asked if he had ever tried writing fiction. Dad admitted that it had never occurred to him. Oliver opined that Dad would never be able to get his message across to the masses because most of the people he was trying to reach occupied “the lower rungs of society” and simply did not read non-fiction. But they might well read light, action-packed fiction, he said, and promised to send Dad an example of what he was talking about. (1) A little later, Dad received by mail a book called “The John Franklin Letters,” which Oliver is believed to have penned under a pseudonym years before. It was published in 1959 by the Birch Society and detailed the bloody deeds of one John Franklin, who forms an underground military group called the Rangers dedicated to killing bureaucrats, whom he called “Buros.” (Oliver shot himself in 1994, at age 86, suffering from leukemia and emphysema).

Skimming through Oliver’s book, Dad realized how easy it would be for him to write something similar.

* The two books were products of my father’s feverish mind, his sick, secret fantasies laid bare upon the page, but he didn’t have the courage to use his real name, instead writing under the pseudonym Andrew McDonald. He dreamed that his writings would spark a race war and he often fantasized about walking the streets at night, quietly, efficiently dispatching mixed-race couples, Jews, gays, and anyone else who didn’t fit his Aryan mold, mentally mapping out the route he would take each night.

* Strangely, I never picked up Dad’s loathing of Jews. They didn’t spark fear inside me, though I’m not sure why, given Dad’s all-consuming hatred of them. Perhaps it was because I’d had no personal interaction with Jewish people up to this point. While I was certainly brimming with hate, I chose to focus it on blacks, gays, and any type of authority figure who tried to exercise control over me.

* [FBI] Agents had watched Dad for years, but in February 1985 they got approval for a pen register that allowed them to log, but not record, all calls made from and received by a specific phone number — my father’s. With the trove of numbers they collected, agents fanned out to look into the lives of scores of people who had been in contact with the Alliance. Some couldn’t be traced but others were watched and questioned, their vehicle descriptions and license plate numbers noted, and their records scoured for any trace of criminal or suspicious activity. Enquiries expanded to Seattle, Birmingham, Charlotte, Dallas, Denver, Detroit, Little Rock, Philadelphia, San Diego and San Francisco and Tulsa and scores of other cities and, at one point, agents from several field offices attended a meeting in Denver to set their investigative targets, priorities and goals.

* Dad was scouring magazines, looking for a new mountain mate. He could not live without a woman for long. She didn’t need to love him, and he certainly didn’t need to love her. His requirements were simple: sexual services, cook, clean and do whatever he needed to keep his writing flowing and the Alliance operation moving forward.

* He cited as an example one of Gliebe’s more memorable merchandise purchases — $50,000-plus on boots made in China with swastikas imprinted on their soles. Gliebe called them “a great investment.” (3). He also commissioned a calendar that was supposed to highlight Aryan female beauty but actually featured strippers from a club he patronized. Alliance members were further scandalized upon learning that he had married a former stripper. Another of my father’s favorites was Kevin Strom, the sound-engineer who recorded Dad’s white separatist broadcasts. Strom supervised the building of the compound’s sound and video studios and the installation of its phone and alarm system, which was buried underground to keep it safe from government attack. Dad trusted Strom and Strom liked Dad — his own father had hanged himself when Strom was in his 20s…

* Things started to unravel for Strom when he was arrested in 2007. Police had found images of child porn on his computer, with hundreds of photos of naked girls in “sexually suggestive positions.” He was charged with possessing child pornography. Two other charges of enticing a minor to perform sex acts and intimidating a witness were dismissed at trial.

* Now I know that we are more a product of our environment than the product of our genes.

From the Southern Poverty Law Center February 6, 2014:

Recent revelations from the current NA chairman, Erich Gliebe, and his former wife paint a more deviant portrait of William Pierce as a sex-starved, manipulative sociopath. Pierce, they say, ran naked around his compound, was obsessed with pornography (an industry he routinely blamed Jews for creating) and used his membership list as a dating service, trolling for twenty-something females foolish enough to apply for a “staff position” at the NA headquarters in rural West Virginia.

In a 3,800 word essay published online and on Facebook, Gliebe’s ex-wife, Erika, alleged Pierce once tricked a young woman into a sexual relationship with him on the false promise of having a family with her. The woman eventually learned Pierce had a vasectomy more than 30 years prior.

To a handful of insiders in the racist movement, this is old news. Erich Gliebe is known to have privately made most of the disclosures found in his ex-wife’s essay for years. And many of the charges seem to have been previously substantiated.

One of the women allegedly lured into a sexual relationship with Pierce, Suzanne Flynn, outlined Pierce’s betrayal in a post on the Instauration Yahoo Group message forum in February 2003. “I had been involved with Bill [William Pierce] for almost a year before I started worrying about why I wasn’t getting pregnant, whereupon he revealed that he had had a vasectomy over 30 years ago, right after his twin sons were born,” Flynn wrote.

Pierce, at the time of his relationship with Flynn, was still married to his fifth wife, Sevdi, who lived with him in a trailer on the NA property. Flynn was ostensibly hired as Pierce’s “assistant.” The two of them took up residence in a small cabin down the road from the NA compound. “He brought me to live with him in our own house in West Virginia while his last wife was leaving him,” Flynn wrote.

In the same post, Flynn threatened to release pornographic images and videos of her and William Pierce if Erich Gliebe did not return her vehicle and other property she left at the NA compound. “If [Gliebe] would return my car and my stuff to me, then I would happily not publish anything detrimental to the NA, i.e. nude interactive pictures, videos, etc., on my website, “http://www.nsrus.com,” Flynn wrote.

Erich Gliebe has also made disturbing disclosures about Pierce’s sexual appetites over the years. In a recorded conversation with Kevin Strom in April 2005, Gliebe claimed Pierce used to walk naked around the NA property and after his death, Gliebe said he discovered Pierce’s computers were “loaded with porn.”

Posted in William Pierce | Comments Off on Sins of My Father: Growing Up with America’s Most Dangerous White Supremacist

The Man Who Ran Washington: The Life and Times of James A. Baker III

Posted on October 7, 2020 by Luke Ford

James Baker had a life that worked. Success leaves clues. Baker valued family, relationships, community, religion, preparation, organization, and care. He played by the rules.

Here are some choice selections from this new book:

* Voting against Trump should have been an easy call for Baker. Trump, after all, was “a guy who’s his own worst enemy,” as Baker reminded us. “He can’t keep his mouth shut.” But Baker also was not quite ready to walk away from the party to which he had devoted so many years. He knew what it felt like when political power shifted and he knew that it was much better to be on the winning side. He had fought against the Reagan Revolution inside the Republican Party on behalf of Gerald Ford and George Bush, then became the revolution’s most capable executor as Reagan’s White House chief of staff. As Bush’s secretary of state, he had watched the unraveling of the Soviet Union and its empire in Eastern Europe, another revolution that Baker did not start but figured out how to channel. The lesson he had taken from these events was simple and it was clear: When the tectonic plates of history move, move with them.

When it came to Trump and the nationalist-populist backlash that he represented, however, Baker just could not decide. It was only days before the election, and he went back and forth. At the end of our long conversation, after touching on Middle East peacemaking and the inner machinations of the Bush White House and the bipartisan prayer group he used to attend on Capitol Hill, we circled back to the subject at hand.

Could Jim Baker, the very definition of the establishment, really vote for Donald Trump?

* DELEGATE HUNTER, campaign manager, White House chief of staff, treasury secretary, and secretary of state, James Addison Baker III played a leading role in some of the most critical junctures in modern American history. For a quarter century, every Republican president relied on Baker to manage his campaign, his White House, his world. Baker brought them to power or helped them stay there, then steered them through the momentous events that followed. He was Washington’s indispensable man.

Any chronicle of the modern presidency would find Baker at the heart of virtually every chapter, for his was an unmatched case study in the acquisition, exercise, and preservation of power in late-twentieth-century America and into the first decade of the twenty-first. He was the campaign operative who secured the Republican nomination for Gerald Ford against a relentless challenge from the right by Ronald Reagan in 1976, then four years later managed George Bush’s first presidential campaign, which proved successful enough to earn Bush the vice presidency and Baker a spot by the new president’s side. He set up and ran Reagan’s White House as chief of staff for four years, securing many of the achievements that shaped the legacy of the fortieth president. In Reagan’s second term, with nothing more than an undergraduate course in economics, he took over as secretary of the treasury and rewrote the American tax code from top to bottom in collaboration with leading Democrats. He returned to the campaign trail in 1988 to win the presidency for Bush in a harshly negative election that foreshadowed some of the political nastiness of races to come, then switched back into statesman mode as America’s top diplomat, from which perch he effectively managed the most tumultuous period in international politics since World War II.

Over the following few years, as Washington presided over the end of the Cold War, Baker shaped a new American approach to a reordered world. Through it all, he was the archetype of a style of American politics and governance that today seems lost, an approach focused on compromise over confrontation, deal-making over disagreement and pragmatism over purity. He negotiated with Democrats at home and Soviets abroad, assembled the coalition that won the Gulf War and brokered the reunification of Germany in the heart of Europe. He was the “gold standard” among White House chiefs of staff, as virtually everyone put it, and went on to become the most consequential secretary of state since Henry Kissinger. In short, he was the un-Trump.

* “WASHINGTON LOVES the ones who grease its gears. But history only remembers the ones who shift them,” the late Washington Post writer Marjorie Williams wrote of Baker. The man she profiled in the Post’s Style section upon his ascension to secretary of state in January 1989 was confident in his stature in the imperial capital at its twilight-of-the-Cold-War apogee, yet insecure enough to wake up each morning ready for battle to prove it. He represented the city’s ideal of itself, a relentless but nonetheless patrician competitor willing to drink a Scotch with his rivals after hours, an Ivy League country-clubber equally at home in tennis whites or toting a shotgun to a duck blind in predawn Texas. This Baker was a master of Washington at the end of almost a decade at its heights; he was smooth and smart and disciplined, “a man in whom drive is more important than destination,” as Williams wrote, but also a gentleman for whom recklessness was as inconceivable as incivility. Baker was a “player,” the capital’s ultimate accolade, and no matter what the game, he figured out a way to come out on top. As Haley Barbour, who worked in the Reagan White House with Baker and went on to become chairman of the Republican National Committee and governor of Mississippi, observed to us, “In the two-party system, purity is the enemy of victory, and Jim Baker was a winner.”

* He excelled not just in the Washington arts of self-promotion, palace intrigue, and blame-shifting (although he was world-class at all of them), but also in putting them into service for the real art of the deal, whether it was saving Social Security with congressional Democrats or persuading Soviet leaders to allow two Germanys to become one again or jaw-boning Arab sheikhs into contributing so much money for the liberation of Kuwait that the Gulf War against Iraq became the first American conflict to nearly turn a profit.

He divided problems into three categories, according to David Gergen, a former adviser from his White House days: easy; hard but doable; and impossible. The first category he left to others, the last he wrote off, and the middle is where he focused his energies. As inconceivable as it seems amid our state of endless partisan warfare, getting things done was in fact the currency of the realm in the Washington of Baker’s era and this is what drove him with a ruthless focus and confidence that infuriated others who were ideologically purer and far less effective. Washington has and always will be a town that struggles between outcomes and principles; it is a place where compromise is both necessary and invariably suspect. Did Baker actually stand for anything other than his own advancement? Was it just power for power’s sake? What would he be willing to give up to cut a deal? His critics were not the only ones to wonder. But what was remarkable about Baker was the extent to which his deals stuck.

At the end of his run, when the Berlin Wall had fallen and the Soviet Union was no more, when colleagues from the Reagan White House were out of the power game entirely or writing bitter memoirs about the Iran-contra scandal, Baker had somehow escaped the humbling comedown that is usually a part of the Washington narrative. Instead, Baker’s reputation only grew in the years of gridlock and dysfunction that followed, and he has more recently become a figure of surprisingly bipartisan nostalgia for a different time and a different sort of leadership. “He was the most important unelected official since World War II,” the former national security adviser Tom Donilon, a Democrat, told us.

* “Baker somehow understood the billiards of politics, understood the ricochets,” said Hedrick Smith, who followed him in the 1980s for The New York Times. “He understood how balls careened off each other.” Baker knew when not to exercise power, too, whether it was letting his outmaneuvered White House rival Ed Meese save face with a symbolic but meaningless title or avoiding the temptation to gloat to the Soviets about their geopolitical humiliation.

* Baker did not come to American politics animated by a desire to save the world or even much of a worldview at all, and most of what the law had taught him before he entered public life was about the perils of risk-taking. He was profoundly careful—“Mr. Caution,” his close adviser, Margaret Tutwiler, dubbed him. “A shrink would have a field day with Jim Baker,” Tutwiler observed. “The man is so realistic, without emotion, that even though he’s an emotional, sensitive guy, sometimes it’s so clinical. But he lives in the real, real world. He does not delude himself over fairy tales.” Dispassionate and ever to the point, Baker brought discipline and endless handwritten lists to the challenge of running the world. He was “somebody who likes making order out of chaos,” as his son Will Winston put it. He defined himself as the opposite of an ideologue. “I didn’t have any overarching paradigm for politics,” Baker told us as he reflected on his career years later. “My view was you try to get things done.”

It was in the doing, then, that Baker excelled, in his genius ability to read what others required in a situation and find a way to give some version of that to them while still walking away from the table with whatever prize he sought. Baker was a compulsive winner, but he also had a way of making rivals feel like they had not entirely been defeated. “The Velvet Hammer,” his cousin Preston Moore called him, and Baker was much more pleased when Time used that phrase to headline another cover story about him, this time referring to him not as The Handler but as “a gentleman who hates to lose.” Anyone who had ever tangled with him knew that was true. Baker was that way because of who he was and where he came from, and it was his strange luck, and the country’s, that he happened to be ready to leave his hometown and legal career behind at just the moment when the entire Republican elite had been decimated by Richard Nixon’s Watergate disaster.

And here the story was rich, complex, and surprising in ways we did not expect. The man who would dominate Washington turned out to be an accidental political savant. He did not spend his childhood obsessing over electoral votes or memorizing congressional district boundaries. His Texas clan had viewed politics as a dirty business ever since the Civil War, when the family patriarch, a slave-holding Alabama émigré, had been booted out of a Texas judgeship after the Confederacy’s defeat. “This is not a man who sat back and read Machiavelli or read the great books about influence and power,” noted David Gergen. “It just came naturally to him.”

* Baker had simply never developed the touch of a candidate. “He was the worst retail politician I’ve ever seen,” Jim Barlow, who covered the campaign for the Houston Chronicle, reflected years later. “It’s not that he was a snob. He didn’t feel right in forcing himself on people.” Baker was so uncomfortable with small talk that when the two of them were alone on long flights around the state in a tiny campaign airplane, Barlow taught him gin rummy to avoid awkward silences.

* Baker had missed the moment. He was right that Texas was changing—1978 would be the year that Texas really began transforming from a solid Democratic state into a solid Republican one.

* The discussion was to be held at 10:45 a.m. on a Sunday in 1979. The subject: If George Bush ran for president, what were his chances?

In keeping with his father’s preparation mantra, Baker had a six-page paper drawn up by aides to guide the conversation, a brutally honest assessment of the prospective candidate’s strengths and weaknesses. His plan was to distribute it among the Bush advisers who would attend the meeting, then collect copies back after it was over to prevent leaks.

* Baker was nothing if not organized. Tapped by his friend to put together a national campaign, he set about the task with typically painstaking preparation—assembling a staff, drafting a budget, developing a fundraising plan, crafting a message.

* If handling the family were not awkward enough, there was also the matter of the candidate’s longtime personal assistant, Jennifer Fitzgerald, who was quickly making enemies on the campaign staff. Fitzgerald, an attractive young divorcée, first met Bush while working at the Republican National Committee a few years earlier. Neither spoke of it publicly but it was clear a personal relationship of some closeness developed. Bush even called Fitzgerald regularly one summer at the beach house in North Carolina she was sharing, according to a housemate later contacted by the reporter Susan Page. He brought her to China as his personal secretary and then to the CIA. Many who worked for him over the years wondered about their relationship. Bush, a flirt with a habit of bottom-squeezing attractive women he encountered, repeatedly sought out Fitzgerald despite the questions it raised and any pain it caused Barbara. Colleagues often interpreted Fitzgerald’s airs as a sign that she was the boss’s secret girlfriend. Whether they actually had an affair was never clear; one person in Bush’s inner circle told Page that they had a romantic relationship for a dozen years. Both denied it to Bush’s biographer, Jon Meacham. Baker always professed not to know—but did not rule it out.

* Managing a candidate with a shaky command of facts and a disconcerting penchant for confusing movie tales with real life, Reagan’s team feared putting him onstage without a script for an hour or more, unsure if he would be nimble enough to parry a sitting president far better schooled in the nuances of policy. Nancy Reagan, among others, totally opposed debates. But as the fall wore on, Baker pressed Reagan to take on the president and the California advisers increasingly came to the conclusion that they had to accept at least one or two forums, if only because polls suggested that Reagan still needed to close the deal with the public. “We can’t run out the clock when we don’t have the football,” said Drew Lewis, who ran Reagan’s campaign in Pennsylvania.

* Michael Deaver later credited Baker with convincing Reagan to debate Anderson. Either way, Baker thought the visual would work to Reagan’s benefit—Carter would look afraid by not showing up. And he counted on Reagan’s winning personality to shine against Anderson’s dour persona. On the night of the debate in Baltimore on September 21, Baker gave Reagan a card just before he went onstage with one word of advice: “Chuckle.” As it turned out, Anderson proved a good sparring partner for Reagan to warm up against. “It sort of wiped Anderson out,” Baker said. “He was, after all, a Republican, and he was a terrible debater and he was a colorless guy.”

* Reagan’s team wanted a date as late as possible, figuring that the closer to the election, the better. Baker went so far as to propose that the debate be held on the night before the election. Carter rejected that, assuming that Reagan would make a blunder and wanting more time for any gaffe to sink in with the public. They settled on October 28 at the Cleveland Convention Center—still late enough in the campaign that it played in Reagan’s favor. “We were outfoxed by Jim Baker in agreeing to it so close to the election,” Stuart Eizenstat, a top Carter adviser, later concluded. More importantly, in Eizenstat’s view, Baker’s ability to convince Reagan to debate in the first place proved decisive. “His confidence in his candidate may have assured his election,” he said. Carter also came to believe that Baker had gotten the better of him. “He out-traded the people who were representing me at the time,” he said years later.

* Trump is many things, one of which has been an extraordinary X-ray into the soul of others as they react to him and the challenges he poses to the American political system. In Baker’s case, Trump had revealed the limits of the mythology that had grown up around the man. Democrats might embrace Baker’s pragmatic approach to the world. Democrats might embrace Baker’s pragmatic approach to the world. But in the end, he was a Republican and that, he told us, was how he wanted to be remembered. His struggle reflected the larger one by the party he had helped build. Once anathema to its leaders, Trump effectively captured the party, forcing it to toe the line, with dissidents crushed or exiled. Much more than in Baker’s time, Washington had become a place of tribes, with a permanent war of us against them.

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Trump Leaves Hospital

Posted on October 5, 2020 by Luke Ford

Comments at Steve Sailer:

* There’s an endearing quality about Trump.

He doesn’t give a damn. He just says f*** it, I’m going for a joyride.

Meanwhile, everyone in the media’s head is exploding in flames.

The absurdity, bizarreness, and sheer hilariousness of the whole thing is surreal.

I, for one, am so grateful that I have an opportunity to be alive in this era. The entertainment value cannot be overstated.

* Did the left just now take losing their minds to a new dimension?

The doctor’s and other personnel at a military hospital of this stature, would never cover for a dishonest political trick even if the president requested it. And given the MSM’s deep dislike of Trump, they would never cover for him.either.

To think that this is some kind of hoax is beyond absurd.

* The media, of course, is already spinning this video as “Trump selfishly endangers health of Secret Service drivers.” For normal humans, however, it’s a great piece of theater, as well as (hopefully) a sign that the President is on the mend.

* Trump recorded that video at around 7pm Saturday 10/3. That was roughly Day 2 of the Wuhan Death Cooties which is essentially a version of the flu. The last time I had the flu, on Day 2 I was lying in bed, sweating like a pig, struggling to get a breath, not moving other than to take care of the necessary bodily functions.

The idea of getting out of bed on Day 2, putting on a suit and tie and recording a video regardless of the necessity of doing so would have been completely unthinkable.

And now the doctors are saying he might be discharged tomorrow, Day 4 of the Cooties.

Trump demonstrated once again what a stud he is.

* This morning I was watching the Sunday Morning show on CBS and Ted Koppel was interviewing a guy who was bemoaning the influence of “right wing” commentators like Ben Shapiro, who are now getting many more Facebook hits that “reputable” news providers like the NY Times. My son, who is not particularly Trumpian, happened to be in the room and he said something like, “I would have a lot more sympathy if the MSM hadn’t thrown away its own credibility and neutrality.” And to prove his point, he clicked over to the CNN web page and sure enough the lede was some sort of hysterical anti-Trump headline.

* After spending months denying the dangers of COVID-19, Trump is expressing an emotion aides have rarely seen: fear. On Friday, Trump grew visibly anxious as his fever spiked to 103 fahrenheit and he was administered oxygen at the White House, according to three Republicans close to the White House. Two sources told me Trump experienced heart palpitations on Friday night—possible side effects of the experimental antibody treatment he received. Trump has wondered aloud if he could defeat the disease. “Am I going out like Stan Chera?” Trump has asked aides, referring to his friend, New York real-estate developer Stan Chera, who died of COVID in April.

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Football for a Buck: The Crazy Rise and Crazier Demise of the USFL

Posted on October 5, 2020 by Luke Ford

Jeff Pearlman writes in this 2018 book:

* During camp the Invaders stayed at a Red Lion Inn, and one night one of the leaders of the team’s regular Bible-study group was caught having anal sex with a prostitute against the railing outside his room. “We were a beautiful mess,” said Plummer. “We’d be on that church bus, mooning people out the back windows. We had guys like Ray and Cedrick who were actually listed as player-coaches. What they’d do is, if they got too drunk the night before practice, they wouldn’t practice the next day and say, ‘Hell, I’m just a coach today.’ That was a saying for ‘I’m hung over, man.’”

* Throughout his storied coaching career, [George] Allen was infamous for seeking out every possible advantage—legality and morality nonfactors. In his days leading the Redskins, he became a PhD-level practitioner of football espionage. Among other things, Allen wiretapped visiting locker rooms. He installed tinted one-way glass in the facility so he could look in on opposing coaches unobserved. He ordered his defensive and offensive linemen to lather the front of their uniforms with Vaseline, thereby making them impossible to grip. He messed with the temperature controls of the visiting locker rooms—on a hot day, the furnaces blasted; on icy afternoons, the heat magically failed to operate. All USFL teams were required to submit player contracts to the league. The Blitz had two sets of contracts for most of their veteran standouts—the ones with lower figures that were presented to league offices to appease the USFL’s financial concerns, and the real contracts, with eye-popping bonuses. “George Allen did what he felt he had to do,” said George Heddleston, future general manager of the Pittsburgh Maulers. “And no one would dare stop him.”

* “It was strange, because I’ve run into softer walls than Herschel . . . the guy was all muscle,” said Danny Rich, an Express linebacker. “There was one play I remember most. The Generals handed the ball to Herschel, and I reached in and grabbed his crotch and twisted it as hard as I could. And he puts this kind of kung fu grip on my wrist. I’m grabbing his wiener, he’s grabbing my wrist. I’m now trying to yank my hand away, and he stands up and just points at me. Doesn’t say a word. He was a baaaad man. They needed to use him.”

* The USFL was exceeding its rival league’s expectations, and the increasingly concerned NFL knew it. The new rules—in particular the two-point conversion—were well received, and the bright uniforms and fresh nicknames felt invigorating and lively. If the 1980s was the era of blissful, colorful, dynamic excess, the USFL was the football league of blissful, colorful, dynamic excess. Unlike the NFL, the USFL refused to penalize for excessive celebrations. If a player wanted to moonwalk in the end zone, he would be allowed—no, encouraged—to do so. Balls were spiked over the goalposts. Pretend grenades were tossed into a circle of pantomiming linemen. Funkadelic handshakes, head bobs, butt shakes—all embraced by a league in love with televised highlights. “At the time the NFL was the no-fun league,” said Charley Steiner, the Generals’ broadcaster. “The USFL saw that and flipped it on its head. I’d get calls on occasion from the league office—‘Why don’t you come on over?’ And we would sit around in Chet’s office. And one day they’d say, ‘What do you think about two-point conversion?’ and ‘What do you think about a replay and a red flag?’ It was always the same—‘Sure, why the hell not?’ It was so cool. We were just shooting the shit. ‘What do you think about wide receivers not wearing numbers in the 80s, but single digits?’—and that’s the way these things evolved. Everything was on the table.”

* Early on during training camp, [John] Corker—nicknamed Sack Man—gathered the team in a circle and guided the Panthers in prayer. “He started praying like a Baptist black preacher,” said Dave Tipton, a defensive tackle, “and I thought, Wow, Corker must walk with the Lord.” Not quite. Blessed with the world’s largest penis, Corker never shied away from showing it off to fellow Panthers. “The biggest johnson in the USFL,” said Matt Braswell, the team’s center. “We had women reporters come into the locker room, and Corker would position himself so he was in full view of any females. He had this vat of Nivea skin cream, and he would just make sure to completely rub it and moisturize it.” Corker operated on a clock that required only two to three hours of sleep per night, and was powered by the dual fuels of alcohol and cocaine.

* “After games ended a couple of us would do a sweep of the room to make sure no one forgot anything,” said D. J. Mackovets, the team’s media relations director. “So there’s this one time I’m walking out of the locker room with Jack and I hear this player yell, ‘Oh, no! Here comes coach!’ Well, there were a group of players beneath the stands with a hooker, and she was giving all of them blow jobs before they got on the bus.”

* Trump knew little about football but everything about headlines and eyeballs. During the 1984 season, for example, he dressed the Brig-a-Dears, New Jersey’s cheerleading squad, in the USFL’s skimpiest outfits, making them look, in one member’s words, “like hookers. The outfits fitted poorly in the back and exposed too much.” By most accounts, the uniforms were tasteless and prone to vaginal/breast exposure—and Trump loved it. “He was an attention whore,” said Jerry Argovitz, owner of the Gamblers. “No spotlight was too bright.”

* In the end, the USFL was like a really fun, good-looking college girlfriend. You dig her at the time, don’t cry when it’s over, and forever look back fondly. —Tom Vasich, Los Angeles Express season-ticket holder

* All told, the NFL featured 158 ex-USFL players in 1986, and their arrivals brought forth unprecedented levels of both excitement and awkwardness… The USFL produced 60 Pro Bowlers and two Super Bowl MVPs, as well as four Hall of Famers (Young, White, Kelly, and Gary Zimmerman, the Express offensive lineman). Dozens of NFL head and assistant coaches got their starts in the USFL, and Steve Spurrier went from guiding the Tampa Bay Bandits to becoming one of the great coaches in college-football history. The Buffalo Bills reached four straight Super Bowls in the 1990s behind the personnel genius of general manager Bill Polian (Chicago Blitz), the coaching of Marv Levy (Chicago Blitz), the quarterbacking of Kelly (Houston Gamblers), the blocking of center Kent Hull (New Jersey Generals), and the tackling of linebacker Ray Bentley (Michigan Panthers and Oakland Invaders). Halfback Emmitt Smith of the three-time-champion Dallas Cowboys regularly found himself finding daylight behind left guard Nate Newton (Tampa Bay Bandits). Though Doug Flutie’s NFL career was somewhat spotty, he is a three-time Grey Cup champion and widely regarded as one of the finest players in Canadian Football League history.

* The NFL adopted both the two-point conversion and the coach’s challenge from the USFL, and when the league expanded into Jacksonville and Tennessee (first Memphis, then Nashville), USFL veterans took enormous pride.

* What often gets lost in the aftermath of success stories, however, is the $1 smothering of dreams. For every Jim Kelly and Herschel Walker, there are hundreds of professional football players and coaches (and administrators and cheerleaders and popcorn vendors) whose careers ended the moment the USFL ceased to exist. What ever became of Nat Hudson and Ronnie Estay? How about Todd Dillon and Johnnie Dirden? Ken Bungarda, anyone? Sylvester Moy? Sel Drain? “It was a sickening feeling,” said Marcus Bonner, a Gunslingers halfback. “Like someone was punching you in the stomach and stealing your joy.” “I have a team photo that I’ve looked at every day for thirty years,” said Bruce Miller, a Breakers defensive back who never reached the NFL. “It still hurts. There were so many of us who moved their families, who enrolled their kids in school—and then it died. I’ve never seen more grown men cry.”

Posted in Football | Comments Off on Football for a Buck: The Crazy Rise and Crazier Demise of the USFL

Trump Tests Positive

Posted on October 2, 2020 by Luke Ford

Comments at Steve Sailer:

* What’s the angle to play here? If Trump sails through with few or no ill effects it shows the public that the virus isn’t really all that bad and/or that Trump is in better shape than Biden and/or that hydroxychloroquine works, just like he’s always said.

And how the hell is Biden going to survive an exposure to the virus? I would imagine that eventually every major politician is going to get COVID, just because meeting with lots and lots of people is part of the job description.

OTOH, if the virus takes Trump I’m not sure that having Mike Pence at the top of the ticket would be a bad thing…

* Weird that the market is dropping. Did the marker think Trump was going to be peacefully re-elected?

* Remember when Dan Savage went around licking doorknobs to infect Gary Bauer with the flu?

This has the Left’s fingerprints all over this.

* Chances are good that Trump will beat Covid. He will get the best treatment available. Plus, he is very healthy. He has unbelievable stamina. But if he dies MAGA will go nuts. For sure they will believe their god-emperor was murdered.

* How is Boris Johnson doing?

Last December he was said to be a political genius who’d finally solved Brexit. I don’t hear that kind of talk about him anymore.

* Masks do both. Especially if you are wearing a real N95 mask and not a rag over your face. They may not be 100% effective in stopping all incoming (or outgoing) droplets but they reduce the viral load.

The way a mask works is not like a spaghetti sieve. Rather on a microscopic level it looks like a forest of trees and the droplets are like skiers going down a ski slope. If it is a dense forest, most of the skiers are going to go splat on one of the trees before they make it to the bottom of the slope. Air can flow in between the spaces of the trees.

How seriously you become infected depends in part on how big of a whiff of virus you got in the first place. This is why some otherwise young and healthy doctors died in the early stages of the pandemic, before it was widely understood what was going on – they received massive doses of the virus from people in a highly infectious phase and it overwhelmed their immune system.

Once the virus is inside of you it becomes a race between the virus reproducing exponentially and your immune system kicking in. Getting a big dose gives the virus a head start in the race – instead of 1, 2, 4, 8 it becomes 1024, 2048, 4096, 8192 – you get to big numbers much faster. Masks reduce the # of particles that you inhale – not 100% but up to 95% and this makes a big difference in how sick you get. A small # of virus particles may even be caught by your innate immune system (mucus membranes, etc.) and you don’t get infected at all.

* Trump’s BP is given as 121/79.

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Love Me, Hate Me: Barry Bonds and the Making of an Antihero

Posted on October 1, 2020 by Luke Ford

Jeff Pearlman writes in this 2007 book:

* IN THE INSULAR WORLD of Major League Baseball, there is no greater sin than disrespect. Most players can tolerate inflated egos. They can tolerate boredom (a job requirement). They can tolerate pain, indifference, softness, absentmindedness, excessive brutality, disregard for the rules, large men dressed as sausages, 12-minute renditions of the national anthem. Disrespect, however, is the ultimate no-no. You don’t show up the opposing pitcher. You don’t spit on an umpire. You never act the coward.

* On March 22, the Arizona Republic reported that Dr. James Gough, a psychiatric consultant for the university’s sports program, had prescribed Nardil, an antidepressant, to two unnamed baseball players and had recommended it to six others. Manufactured by Parke-Davis Co., the drug Nardil was for those suffering from severe neurotic depression, and could result in potentially fatal blood pressure elevation. Dr. Robert Voy, chief medical offi cer of the
U.S. Olympic Committee, said Nardil should be used only as a last resort in cases of severe depression. But Gough believed that Nardil would combat the kind of tension resulting in batting slumps. “Coach Brock had the whole team seeing [Gough],” says Wakamatsu. “He’d talk about mental imagery and positive thinking. Most of us thought it was kind of silly, but harmless. But when you start talking medication, that’s a whole diff erent level.”
Brock himself was a regular Nardil user. He was so enamored of its power to induce tranquillity that he strongly urged his players to take the drug—even though a member of the coaching staff had suff ered a seizure while using it. One player Brock encouraged was George Lopez, a third baseman who had fathered his first child during his sophomore season.
“Coach wanted me to play without all the pressure on top of me,” says Lopez, who refused the drug. Two others, Rector and infielder Drew Siler, also said no to Nardil and found their on-field time drastically reduced. Siler wound up transferring to UNLV. “When Brock took it, he became a a lot more mechanical and mellow in the way he talked,” says Lopez. “When the story about Nardil broke, it made a lot of sense to us because Brock was damn near falling asleep on the bench.”
Nardil wasn’t merely intended for average players. Among those urged to utilize the drug were a handful of standouts, including Barry Bonds. In many ways, Brock considered Barry an ideal Nardil recipient. If he was this good without Nardil, imagine how potent he would become with the enormous chip removed from his shoulder. There was just one problem: When Bobby Bonds learned that his son had taken an antidepressant he immediately telephoned Brock. “If you give my son anything medical again without checking with me first,” he said, “I will come down there and snap your neck.” That put a stop to Barry’s use of Nardil.
“That whole situation was just too weird,” says Royal Clayton, an ASU pitcher. “Brock was taking it. Barry was taking it. I was like, ‘What’s everyone taking pills for?’ I was in college, running around, feeling great. What was there to be depressed about?”

* Few players respected Bobby as a hitting guru, and Corrales wanted him fired (Cleveland management refused, insisting they needed a minority on the staff ).

* Roone Arledge once said of Howard Cosell—‘He wanted the adulation, but he hated the people who gave it to him.’

* Barry had learned from his father that mystique was vital to success. Never get too close to teammates, never fall for a groupie, and never, ever let a member of the press get into your head.

* THEY MET IN A strip club. That’s the first thing one should know about the relationship between Barry Bonds and Sun Branco. Some couples meet at church. Others over cocktails. Bonds and his first wife met at a strip club—where she worked.

* When Bonds later mentioned the woman’s name to teammates, they erupted in laughter. Sun Branco? The infamous Montreal Sun? “She was known as the chick to call when you were in Montreal,” says one former Bonds teammate, echoing a familiar refrain. “She was a fun girl.”

* “I’ve always felt that Barry had to distance himself from Bobby in order to become the player he is,” says Scott Ostler, a columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle. “At some point Barry said, ‘I’m not gonna fuck up like my dad did. I’ve got the same tools that he did and I’m not going to piss them away. I’m not gonna smoke, I’m not gonna drink, I’m not gonna take it for granted.’ When he made that decision, it turned him into a truly unique ballplayer.”

* As he entered Three Rivers Stadium before a game against the Mets in June 1988, Barry told a group of young autograph seekers to “Fuck off ! Fuck off ! Fuck off ! Fuck off !” The scene was repeated often, once resulting in Reynolds lambasting his teammate in front of a group of onlookers. “Be a fuckin’ man, Barry!” he said. “Treat people with dignity!” Barry’s intolerance puzzled many Pirates. They couldn’t understand why he openly complained of having to sign for “these pathetic losers,” but then placed himself in accessible positions. On the road most players would wait for the bus to the stadium inside the hotel lobby. Yet Barry stood on the sidewalk, all but begging people to approach so he could ream them out. “He wanted the attention without anyone knowing it,” says Reynolds. “That was the warped side of Barry.”
Years later, when Barry was playing for the Giants, he once stormed into manager Dusty Baker’s office dressed head to toe in a black leather outfi t and motorcycle helmet. “When are people gonna leave me the fuck alone?” he griped. “Look at this. I’m dressed so nobody could recognize me with my visor down, but people still approach me and ask for shit. Why can’t a person live a private life?”
“Barry,” Baker said, “walk with me for a minute.” The two strolled to the players’ parking lot, where Bonds’s motorcycle rested. On the side of the vehicle bonds 25: three-time mvp was painted in large letters.
“Sorry dude,” said Baker, “but you can’t have it both ways.”

* Barry Bonds was a happy man in the winter months of 1988–89. At his home in the Pittsburgh suburbs, Barry found Sun to be exactly what he desired in a spouse—attractive and seemingly understanding of the idea that, on the road, men will be men. Even when Sun accidentally drove their Porsche into the living room, Barry kept his cool. He knew what he had in his wife. “Sun has more patience than toilet paper,” Barry once said. “Toilet paper just sits there and waits. . . . She knew exactly what she was getting when she married me. It’s a package deal; she married public property.” To Barry, Sun was the quintessential baseball bride—well dressed, big breasted, and contented to be seen and not heard.

* Sun had told police that following a dispute about birth control pills and the quality of the family housekeeper’s work, Barry grabbed her around the neck, kicked her, and threw her partially down the stairs.

* The apparent breaking point in an already tenuous marriage came in early 1994, when Bonds was introduced to Jennifer Peace, a 23-year-old pornographic film star from Pinelawn, Kentucky. Brown-haired, brown-eyed, and large-breasted, Peace had starred in more than 100 films under the moniker
“Devon Shire,” including such classics as Buttsizer: King of Rears and Switch Hitters 6. According to a lawsuit filed by Peace in Los Angeles Superior Court, Bonds not only slept with her, he impregnated her. “She’s carrying a child, a baby boy, and she believes the father is Barry Bonds,” said Peace’s attorney, Elliot Abelson. “When offered the opportunity to terminate the pregnancy, she refused because she wants to have the baby since she knows who the father is.” In a statement Bonds’s attorney admitted, “Barry had sex with her,” and—fearing embarrassing headlines—Bonds settled out of court for an undisclosed sum.
Although Peace’s paternity claim was ultimately proved false, the damage was already done. On May 27, 1994, after more than six years of marriage, Barry filed for divorce.

* In a late-1995 hearing to determine permanent spousal support, Sun testified that Barry had abused her on a regular basis. According to Sun, Barry kicked her when she was eight months pregnant, choked her, dragged her around the house by her hair, and locked her outside naked.

* And yet, there were a couple of things about Elizabeth Watson most
guests were unaware of. Raised in Montreal, the 28-year-old former track star at Marymount Academy was a one-time exotic dancer. This was her brief career choice in the early- to mid-1990s, when she moved to Toronto to make more money. “In Canada, being an exotic dancer isn’t the stigmatized profession it is in the United States,” says Kristian Gravenor, a columnist for the Montreal Mirror and coauthor of Montreal: The Unknown City. “There’s very little money in Montreal, especially if you’re English, black, or an immigrant. Many of the jobs are kept for the French. So in parts of Canada you’ll find strip clubs filled with pretty black girls. Bonds’s wife was
no exception.”
Through it all, Watson remained steadfast in the belief that she was destined to marry famous. Some could find contentment being the wife of a doctor or lawyer. But Watson, according to a longtime friend, needed more. She wanted to be taken care of in grandiose fashion. Her fi rst famous boyfriend was Tommy Kane, the former Seattle Seahawks and Toronto Argonauts wide receiver who, in 2004 (long aft er his relationship with Watson had ended), pleaded guilty in Montreal to manslaughter in the death of his wife. In the 1990s she also had a tryst with Michael Jordan, the married Chicago Bulls superstar. Watson took great pleasure in playing for friends a message Jordan had left on her answering machine. “One time she was on TV in the background when he was competing in a celebrity golf tournament,” says Watson’s friend. “I thought she was definitely getting caught.” Though Jordan sent Watson bouquets of flowers, as well as plane tickets to meet him on the road, she was never busted. “She was one of those girls who would go to a basketball game and wait afterward to meet the guys,” says the friend. “She was addicted to the idea of fame.”
For a sports celebrity junkie, there were few intoxicants more enticing than Barry Bonds. Watson met the star athlete when the Pirates were visiting Montreal in 1987—the same year he met Sun. Th e two first hooked up at an after-work hot spot called the Sir Winston Churchill Pub. Among a crowd of mostly 20-something Montrealers dancing to pulsating music, Bonds homed in on Watson, a breathtaking woman of West Indian, French, Spanish, and Chinese ancestry.

* There was speculation that Bonds wed Watson not so much out of love but so that his first wife, Sun, would not get sole custody of their children, and because he would face less negative public scrutiny with a nonwhite spouse. Says one former Bonds teammate: “A lot of us assumed Barry and Liz was a business deal, not a marriage.” From Bonds’s vantage point, the arrangement was perfect. At home, he had a beautiful wife to raise his children and provide domestic bliss. On the road, he would rarely spend a lonely night in a hotel room.
No wonder Bonds was bragging to the media that he had recently found God.

* By the time Bonds arrived at Scottsdale Stadium on February 26, 1999, he had a new daughter—Aisha Lynn, born February 5—and a new body. Everything seemed to have blown up—his arms, his chest, his shoulders, his legs, his neck. When asked by Rick Hurd of the Contra Costa Times to explain his physique, Bonds blew the question off. “It’s the same thing I’ve always done,” he said. “It’s just that I started so early.”
Within the San Francisco clubhouse, Bonds’s transformation was met
with skepticism. His face was bloated. His forehead and jaw were substantially larger. “And the zits,” says Jay Canizaro, a Giants second baseman. “Hell, he took off his shirt the first day and his back just looked like a mountain of acne. Anybody who had any kind of intelligence or street smarts
about them knew Barry was using some serious stuff .”

* What was the motivation not to? Sure, the possession of steroids for nonmedical reasons is a crime under United States law. But who was busting athletes? Plus, Major League Baseball had no steroid policy or testing program in place for big leaguers. (Baseball did test minor leaguers, but violators were neither penalized nor required to undergo counseling.) It might be against the law, but it sure wasn’t against the baseball law.

* Among baseball’s advance scouts, an unofficial system emerged to spot athletes who likely abused HGHs. Nearly all players fit comfortably into batting helmets, which are designed to smoothly slide over a capped skull with room to spare. Every so often, however, someone would stand in the dugout frustratingly trying to hammer on his helmet before advancing toward the on-deck circle. Among others, Bonds partook in this ritual.

* In baseball, as a general (and unfortunate) rule, blacks stick with blacks, whites stick with whites, and Latinos stick with Latinos.

* For much of his life, Bonds struggled to cope with his blackness. As a rich suburban kid with all white friends, he was often intimidated by other blacks. He didn’t talk the talk, didn’t walk the walk, certainly didn’t live the lifestyle. In Pittsburgh, outfielder R. J. Reynolds used to plead with his white teammates not to tell Bonds where he and the other African-American Pirates were going that night. “We didn’t want him with us,” says Reynolds. “Dude didn’t fit in.” Bonds speaks in an effeminate, high-pitched manner, reminiscent of the voice Eddie Murphy would use to imitate an uncool white guy on Saturday Night Live. Whereas black players fi lled the San Francisco clubhouse with the beats of Tupac, Nas, Missy Elliott, and Jay-Z, Bonds’s four favorite performers are Barbra Streisand, Kenny G., Michael Bolton, and Celine Dion. He also backed Republican candidates, going so far as to actively campaign for conservative Pete Wilson, an outspoken opponent of affirmative action, in his 1994 race for California governor.

* Bill Jenkinson, the noted baseball historian, was growing suspicious. At his home in Willow Grove, Pennsylvania, Jenkinson compiles what he calls “power performance curves” for anyone with more than 300 major league home runs. The curve measures power versus age, taking into account both the frequency and distances of home runs. “Henry Aaron is my favorite example,” says Jenkinson of the all-time home run leader. “He was so extraordinary because as he aged he got smarter, and that helped him hit more home runs. But he never hit the ball farther as an older man than he did as a young one. Every single slugger I’ve ever evaluated peaked for distance in their mid-to-late 20s.” Jenkinson considers this a point worth emphasizing. “Every . . . single . . . one,” he says.

Except Barry Bonds. “In 2000, Bonds turned 36 in the middle of the season, and his power performance curve just completely whacked out,” says Jenkinson. “It’s ridiculous. From age 36 on he starts hitting the ball farther and farther.” According to Jenkinson, over the first 14 years of his career, Bonds hit three baseballs beyond 450 feet. “I’ve got the Department of Weather records for those three balls,” he says, “and all three had powerful tailwinds.” Beginning in 2000, however, 450-plus foot home runs became commonplace. “His optimum power used to be in the 435–440-feet range,” Jenkinson says. “At age 36 it went up to 480. That is not humanly possible. It cannot be done by even the most amazing athletic specimen of all time.”
Jenkinson pauses. “Unless,” he says, “that specimen is cheating.”

* On July 3, 2001, Kyle Tucker, a summer intern at the Macon Telegraph, became one of the first newspaper writers to directly question Bonds’s assault on the record book. In a piece entitled, “Someone Needs to Take Baseball Off All the Juice,” he wrote: “Everything in baseball is on ’roids. Take a look at the physical makeup of the one major sport that doesn’t regulate the use of steroids. These guys aren’t Mickey Mantle and Willie Mays. Th ey’re Lou Ferrigno and Arnold Schwarzenegger . . . Baseball players once could be confused with golfers. Now it’s hard to tell if you’re looking at a right-fielder or a middle linebacker. So when some people say it’s not the ball, just better athletes, I can’t totally disagree. How they got to be better athletes, that’s the problem. Guys don’t blow up overnight just by hitting the weights a little harder.”

* Civil rights never seemed to interested him.

Posted in Baseball | Comments Off on Love Me, Hate Me: Barry Bonds and the Making of an Antihero

The First Presidential Debate

Posted on September 29, 2020 by Luke Ford

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

Posted on September 29, 2020 by Luke Ford

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.

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

Posted on September 29, 2020 by Luke Ford

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.”

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

Posted on September 27, 2020 by Luke Ford

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.”

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