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

and begins playing. It is the Reedsville, Georgia, State Penitentiary Band. In the middle of lay-ins, the public relations director for Atlanta pulls Walt Frazier aside. A member of the band who is doing time for armed robbery stands with both of them. He is an old high school classmate of Frazier’s.
    The scene is about a common heritage which is never completely a thing of the past. Four years earlier in Atlanta, before the Omni was built, the Hawks played in the Georgia Tech fieldhouse, a place Frazier remembers from his childhood as a “real white groove.” That night there was an all-white band playing during warm-ups. They played several popular songs and then played “Dixie.” Every black player on both teams reacted. Their heads turned, they looked at each other and at their opposite number on the other team; one or two glared at me. After a few uncomfortable minutes Bill Bridges, the black Hawk captain, told the band to stop playing “Dixie.” They did.
    Walt Frazier controls the game from the opening buzzer, putting on a show for the eight members of his family in attendance. He scores 34 points against Pete Maravich, the white darling of Atlanta, and the Knicks win by 8. Frazier’s family is dressed in their Sunday best. Clyde (a name Frazier acquired because of his preference for the wide brimmed hats and 1930s styles seen in the movie
Bonnie and Clyde
) arrived at the game in clothes a little more conservative than usual. He, too, respects his past. The first time he came to Atlanta, for example, he shortened his Afro because his grandmother didn’t like hippie long-haired kids, regardless of how “cool” they were.
    Walt Frazier is the oldest of ten children. His grandparents on his father’s side come from farm country near Augusta. Since slavery ended, people in his mother’s family have continuously done subsistence farming on a plot of land near Sandersville. During most summers of his first ten years, Walt, along with his sisters, mother, and grandmother, visited their country relatives. From those days, he remembers the taste of freshly picked corn and newly plucked chicken, fried Southern style. He recalls the near impossibility of catching a baby pig on the run, however quick your hands. Then, at night, conversations about snakes filtered into the kids’ bedroom from the living room where relatives spoke in cautious tones. Finally, the midnight train with its shrill whistle passed so close to the house that Clyde and his sisters feared it might come crashing through the bedroom door one night.
    In Atlanta, Walt lived with his mother, father, brother, and sisters. His father’s parents lived next door. His grandfather worked from dawn to sundown. “You’re not a man unless you have credit,” he said. He worked on an assembly line at the Atlanta Paper Company for thirty years, until he was forced to retire at age sixty-five. He got a good pension, but he still insisted on doing work such as lawn and building maintenance at homes where his wife was employed as a domestic.
    From his grandfather, Walt heard the familiar Puritan litany about hard work and frugality. From his father, he saw the rewards of the fast life. Walter, Sr., was a hustler in the Summerhill section of Atlanta and provided his family with a comfortable lifestyle. “As a kid,” Clyde remembers, “whatever I wanted my father got me, from spending money to tickets for the Globetrotters. We went shopping every Saturday.” Whenever someone in his family wanted to go somewhere, Walter, Sr., sent one of his employees in a Cadillac to drive him. A maid came once a week to cook and to clean and there was always plenty of food and clothing. “I can remember trying on my father’s clothes alone in front of the mirror,” Clyde says, “wishing I was big enough to wear the bright two-button sport shirts that opened in front, or the brown and white Stacey Adams shoes. I liked the way they looked on him and I wanted to look the