Life on the Run by Bill Bradley Read Free Book Online Page A

were interesting foreigners and then even a few of the less serious-minded Americans. I traveled widely in Russia, the Middle East, and western Europe. Specific studies were neglected without guilt. I stopped taking myself so seriously, recognizing that life is as much a good laugh as a stirring sermon. I began to see how far I had to grow and change if I was to become a person that even I would like to know.
    Toward the end of my second year, after not touching a basketball for nine months, I went to the Oxford gym simply for some long overdue exercise. There I shot alone—just the ball, the basket, and my imagination. As I heard the swish and felt my body loosen into familiar movements—the jumper, the hook, the reverse pivot—I could hear the crowd though I was alone on the floor. A feeling came over me that stirred something deep inside. I realized that I missed the game and that the law could not replace it. I knew that never to play again, never to play against the best, the pros, would be to deny an aspect of my personality perhaps more fundamental than any other. Uneasiness about the public would not, I vowed, prevent me from doing what I loved. Three weeks later I signed a contract with the New York Knicks.
    The Atlanta locker room is quiet. Walt Frazier has not arrived. Atlanta is his home, and because he visits relatives when we’re here he usually arrives at the Omni late. Some of the players go out early to practice. That leaves Whelan, Barnett, DeBusschere, and me in the taping room. The talk as always is of crime, death, money, sex—visions of the real world through the locker-room lens.
    “When I was a trainer for Rochester in the International League,” says Danny, “we used to play in Cuba. A guy in a white suit used to visit in the locker room after the game. See, he was a Battista man. He would offer a ring to players for $800 and he’d say it was worth $2,000. Of course, the players didn’t believe him, so the guy in the white suit would say, ‘Take it to New York, have it appraised at Tiffany’s. That’ll cost you $25 and if it’s not worth what I say, keep it and don’t pay me nothing.’ Well, a couple of guys started doing this, and the rings were worth what he said, ya see, ’cause he got ’em real cheap from Switzerland.
    “One day I asked Jesus, one of the Cubans on our team, if he was for Castro or Battista. He stared at me, pulled me over into the corner, whispered, ‘I for Castro, but don’t tell any of the other Cubans or I die.’
    “When Castro finally did take over, the guy in the white suit,” Danny says, pausing and aiming an imaginary gun at an imaginary line of traitors, “shit, he fell into the ditch with a lot of other people I used to know around baseball when we traveled there in the International League.”
    Barnett picks up the general thread of discussion. “Yeah, but in the United States rich people never go to jail. When did you ever hear of a rich man going to jail? They pay off the judges and everyone else. Shit, where there’s millions to be made, no court is going to stop the big men with the money.”
    “Yeah,” Danny says, “you can always find a crooked lawyer. I’ve seen enough of them to know.”
    “Motherfucker steals a loaf of bread and gets ten years, and there are big fuckin’ corporation presidents rippin’ us all off and gettin’ suspended sentences,” says Barnett. “That’s justice?”
    The other players return and listen to Red go over the Atlanta team, its strengths, its weaknesses, what might work and what we have to do to win. We leave the locker room and begin taking warm-up lay-ins. In the ceiling a latticework of lights and speakers comes alive with sound and brightness. The steep pastel seats become darker as they lead at one end to a big American flag. At the opposite end are signs which say, “Kristel Kritters” and “Junior Hawk Corner.” Only a few people are in the Omni. A band assembles at one end of the court