Life on the Run (29 page)

From what his manager says it seems to me that Charley Pride is to country music in the 1970s what Elvis Presley was to rhythm and blues in the 1950s. Both have tread the musical territory of the other’s race and in so doing have affected the whole field, demonstrating that nothing is so narrow as racial clichés. Both Elvis, with his assorted mansions and Cadillacs, and Charley, with his $170,000 home in Dallas, show conspicuously the payoff for following their personal inclinations. Both, simply by their appearance, bring the unexpected. Elvis said that all the sexual energy beating beneath the surface should break out of white America. Let go those Puritan shackles and “get all shook up!” Charley says that quietude, symbolic patriotism, tragic love, and work also have charted the legitimacy of our society. Accept that order of things which preserves the old values and “work for the day is coming.” Elvis was more famous, a greater synthesizer, and a bigger influence in the world, but Charley Pride sings of an American future as much as the past. He owes his creative debt to a rough, rambling, American soul as much white as black—a token black he will be only as long as it takes for the next black man with talent to admit that the influences of America are too diverse to preclude
any
creative vision.

The card game continues until the plane lands in Oklahoma City. One of the four men in blue denim and white boots leaving the plane says to Pride: “You lost, boy!” Charley smiles at the comment from a member of his band. He wins the last hand, as he did most during the flight, and, with his manager, he leaves moving gracefully down the steps. The three band members wait below with a new man also dressed in a western suit and cowboy hat. Charley shakes the dignitary’s hand, and jumps into a white Cadillac limousine parked a few feet away. His manager and the band join him. Through the back window I see Charley laugh as the car pulls away.

After arriving in Houston I have a shower, a massage at the University Club, and a nap. DeBusschere, Lucas, and I have dinner at the Marriott. Lucas tells us of another idea to strike it rich, though this one is on reserve until he can devote more time to it. “I’ve worked on it for five years,” he says. “If it hits, it’s all over. I use a simple mechanical principle to generate energy. It could be a source that would make nuclear energy unnecessary. You want to be on my Board of Directors?”

“How does it work?” Dave asks.

“Simple,” Luke says. “I get an incline which I graduate at a certain degree and shape it in the form of a circular track. Then I put a steel ball on that track and attach it to the center by way of a steel rod. The angle causes gravity to move the ball, creating friction, which is the source of energy. You get a big field somewhere in Illinois and build an enormous model and it’ll generate all the energy for a town—all the energy you’ll ever need.”

After dinner Lucas has some calls to make and DeBusschere is tired, so Jackson and I go for a ride. It is dusk as we drive through the River Oaks section of Houston, one of the wealthiest areas in the world—many homes selling for $600,000. At the end of a grand boulevard flanked on either side by palatial mansions stands the River Oaks Country Club. We pull up to the entrance and ask the guard, who wears a holster and a gun, if he knows which house on the street belongs to Governor John Connally.

“Who?” the guard asks.

“John Connally, the former Texas Governor, Democrat for Nixon, and Secretary of the Treasury.” We smile at our put-on, for we know Connally lives nearby.

“No,” the guard answers protectively. “I never heard of him.”

T
HE NEXT MORNING I SEE DANNY IN THE LOBBY OF THE
Marriott. He is on his way to the trial of Wayne Hendley, the young man accused of 26 murders in the Houston area. Danny says that he has to get there early for a seat; it’s a popular trial. Frazier sits at the counter and I join him.

“What’d you do last night?” I ask.

“Went out with a friend.”

“Do you think you could live here?” I ask.

“No,” Clyde says, “it doesn’t seem to have much to offer black people. I still feel the tension of segregation.”

“How?”

“Just by walkin’ in the stores and how people wait on you; like here at the Marriott, the way the lady gives you change. They’re just little things I can relate to because I grew up in the South, and it reminds me of that again. The same thing in Phoenix; the other day I went into a store and four saleswomen just stood there looking at me asking each other, ‘Who’s going to wait on him?’ Anywhere in the South we go on Delta or Eastern Airlines, I can feel the tension between white and black, starting with the stewardesses; it’s different when we fly United or Northwest.”

“Will the South ever be different for you?”

“It will always be the same.”

“Why?”

“Because of the parents,” says Frazier. “Kids know no prejudice. They just go out and have a good time playing. Then the parents start saying black is wrong, don’t play with black kids, don’t be a nigger lover. So they change early in life and that’s the problem.”

“What were all those leaflets in the Garden last week about your liquor store?” I ask. Frazier and Reed both have liquor stores in Harlem.

“Guy walks into the store one day while I’m there and says he’s going to picket my store because we offer Mateus wine for sale in the window, which only supports the Portuguese economy, which allows them to fight in Africa. I told him to go downtown if he wanted to stop Mateus. I don’t make much on it anyway. Man, the public is somethin’ else. There’s no way you can win. Like on our TV games they always ask why I don’t smile and then once when the camera caught me smiling, they say I’m not taking the game serious.”

“Are you glad the public knows you’re a great dresser?” I ask. Clyde has been voted the best-dressed athlete, and he judges beauty contests.

“Sure.”

“Would you ever want to be a clothes designer?”

“I have thought of that, but I don’t do as much designing as I used to. Now I’m concerned with fabric. I pick them all myself. I like a quiet elegance that you see in the shape of the garment. So it’s not jumping at you. It takes me two days just to pick fabrics and buttons for shirts. Suits I never stop buying. This year I’ve had 14 made. The tailor, like the shirtmaker, has my favorite pattern. With certain fabrics I want a certain style. Like with twill I want a safari look and with gabardine a more dressy look. The fabric is what determines the style of the suit.”

Clyde then describes three separate looks in clothes down to the minutest detail. He talks in rapid fire order: Shawl collar suits, turtle necks, burgundy pants, tams, polyester pants, high black boots, single button suits, plaid jackets of beige and rust colors, blue hats, green hats, notch lapels, peak lapels, vents vs. no vents, white straw hats—all fill his conversation as easily as picks and rolls, or jump shots. I begin to think that maybe one of America’s greatest athletes could be a designer of clothes at heart.

After breakfast I take a taxi to the home of a Houston friend. The black driver cannot find the street. He stops at a gasoline station and waits. No one comes out to service him. He gets out finally and goes inside where two white men stand talking. “Do you know where Pine Wald Lane is?” the driver asks.

“No,” they say, “not exactly. It’s somewhere around here but I’m not sure. Why don’t you go down four blocks and ask at the Esso station.”

At the Esso station a black attendant and a black manager come out.

“Hey brother,” the driver says, “you know where Pine Wald Lane is?”

The attendant says no but the manager says, “Sure, Pine Wald. Go back up four blocks to the gas station, take a left and it’s one block down.”

The driver gets back in and as we’re passing the first station he mutters, “The street is one block from the station. Why’d he say he don’t know where it is? Why?”

Later in the day I sit in the lobby of the Marriott talking with a Houston friend and his 13-year-old son. He is an alumnus of Princeton. He tells me how he is trying to recruit blacks to go to Princeton. “It was my first time in a black high school. I went in and they told me that they’re different. Yeah, they are different.”

“Hey, Charlie,” shouts his son, running over to a black kid on his school football team who is accompanied by his mother.

“Is that your Daddy?” the black woman asks the 13-year-old.

“Yes,” the boy answers, but his father, less than 15 feet away, makes no move.

The bus for the game arrived twenty-five minutes late (the driver said he got lost). I munch on a chocolate bar while Barnett tells about a past game. His team, the Los Angeles Lakers, was in St. Louis for a game against the Hawks, scheduled for 8
P.M
. The Lakers were still warming up alone at 8:30; people started throwing things on the floor. At 9
P.M
. it was announced that the Hawks were on their way from the airport. About half an hour later the Hawks walked in wearing overcoats and hats over their uniforms. They went straight to the bench and the game began. The Hawks won by 35 points. Maybe our bus driver is a lucky charm.

The Houston Rockets is another young team that has not jelled. They shout at each other and at the coach. We play our game as if we are the X’s and they are the O’s on our blackboard. DeBusschere hits two jump shots and a drive and then calls a backdoor play for me. Frazier throws the ball to DeBusschere and jogs with Monroe to the left side of the court with Willis. DeBusschere dribbles the ball toward me in the far right corner. He approaches at a 45° angle, giving my defensive man the impression that he will set a screen for me to take a jump shot. I take a step and a half toward him and my man anticipates the screen by moving a step in front of me. Pushing off suddenly with my left foot, I cut to the basket. DeBusschere drops a bounce pass to me and I make a wide open lay-up.

Later in the game Lucas runs the same play with our rookie guard who, when his man expects a screen from the forward, overplays to the side only to watch helplessly while the rookie streaks down the middle of the lane for a bounce pass from Lucas and a lay-up.

We move the ball well, no player holding it longer than a few seconds and we have the patience to find the man with the least contested shot. He gets the ball and usually two points. We are a team of shooters. Critics say we don’t solo enough. They might be right but when we play with finesse like tonight we only need to move the ball. Our shooting touches take care of the rest. In one game in the play-offs two years ago we shot 70 percent as a team.

During the last quarter we run our plays to perfection, giving the man at the end the split seconds he needs to shoot. A dribble or a slow pass forces the shooter to rush. Timing is crucial to a patient offense. Everything we do seems to work. It’s too bad there are only 2,300 people in the arena and no TV back to New York. We win easily.

The money and the championships are reasons I play, but what I’m addicted to are the nights like tonight when something special happens on the court. The experience is one of beautiful isolation. It cannot be deduced from the self-evident, like a philosophical proposition. It cannot be generally agreed upon, like an empirically verifiable fact, and it is far more than a passing emotion. It is as if a lightning bolt strikes, bringing insight into an uncharted area of human experience. It makes perfect sense at the same time it seems new and undiscovered. The moment in basketball depends on the blending of human forces at the right time and in the right degree. It goes beyond the competition that brings goose pimples or the ecstasy of victory. With my team, before the crowd, against our opponents, no one else but me can feel what it all means. It’s my private world. No one else can sense the inexorable rightness of the moment. A back-door play that comes with perfect execution at a critical time charges the crowd, but I sense an immediate transporting enthusiasm and a feeling that everything is in perfect balance.

Those moments require a childlike imagination. “We can only know as adults what we can only feel as children,” says Leslie Fiedler. In those moments on a basketball court I feel as a child and know as an adult. Experience rushes through my pores as if sucked by a strong vacuum. I feel the power of imagination that creates a sense of mystery and wonder I last accepted in childhood, before the mind hardened. When a friend tells me that his son cries when I miss a last-second shot, I know how he feels. I cry a little, too. That’s why ultimately when I play for anyone outside the team, I play for children. With them the communication of joy or sorrow rings true and through the playing that allows me to continue feeling as a child I sense a child’s innocent yearning and love.

T
HE FLIGHT FROM HOUSTON IS UNEVENTFUL
.
DEBUSSCHERE
sleeps most of the time. Tomorrow will be his “night” at the Garden. Throughout the year he has been honored in each city as he made his last appearance. Most teams gave him plaques, and one, Cleveland, presented him with a color television. After each ceremony Dave would say a few words of appreciation, never varying his basic response. Now New York will say good-bye.

“It represents a deep satisfying feeling to be honored in such a manner,” I read him quoted in the afternoon
New York Post
, as I ride into the city with Phil and Clyde.

DeBusschere is a little nervous when I arrive at the Garden for the game against the Philadelphia ’76ers on Dave DeBusschere Night. He chuckles when he reads one of his letters and pitches it to me.