Unguarded Read online

  UNGUARDED

  My Forty Years

  Surviving in the NBA

  Lenny Wilkens

  with Terry Pluto

  SIMON & SCHUSTER

  NEW YORK LONDON TORONTO SYDNEY SINGAPORE

  SIMON & SCHUSTER

  Rockefeller Center

  1230 Avenue of the Americas

  New York, NY 10020

  www.SimonandSchuster.com

  http://www.SimonSays.com

  Copyright © 2000 by Lee Le-Ja Inc. and Terry Pluto

  All rights reserved,

  including the right of reproduction

  in whole or in part in any form.

  SIMON & SCHUSTER and colophon are

  registered trademarks of SIMON & SCHUSTER, Inc.

  ISBN 0-7432-1513-3

  ISBN-13: 978-0-7432-1513-8

  eISBN-13: 978-0-7432-1513-8

  Acknowledgments

  The authors would like to thank Jeff Neuman, editor at Simon & Schuster, who gave this project a green light. As always, Jeff Neuman is the Red Auerbach of editors. We’d also like to thank Faith Hamlin, our agent on the project, and a word of thanks to Jeff’s assistant, Jon Malki, for all his help.

  To MARILYN …

  the love of my life

  and

  to FATHER THOMAS MANNION …

  who

  has always been there for me.

  —LENNY WILKENS

  To JOE TAIT …

  a great broadcaster,

  and even better friend.

  —TERRY PLUTO

  UNGUARDED

  CHAPTER ONE

  ON MY DESK, there’s a picture of my father.

  He’s a man I never really knew, yet a man who feels very much a part of me today. The man staring at me is always about thirty-five, always in the prime of life, dark-skinned, strong, healthy. He’s the father I wished was there when my team in Seattle won the 1979 NBA title, the father I wanted with me when I was inducted in the Basketball Hall of Fame. When I puffed that cigar to celebrate breaking Red Auerbach’s record for the most career victories by any NBA coach, I wanted my father there. He’s the father I wished could see my children and meet my wife, Marilyn.

  He will always be my father, and he will always live in my head because he died when I was only five years old.

  His name was Leonard. I’m really Leonard R. Wilkens, Jr. Few people know that about me. Few people know very much about me, even though I’ve been in the public eye seemingly forever, as an NBA player and/or coach since 1960. That’s a long time, forty years in pro basketball. No one has survived the NBA storm longer. No one has appeared in more games when you combine all the years that I’ve played and coached. And here am I, at the age of sixty-two. I’ve coached for twenty-seven years, and I still love it. I really do.

  I just wish that my father had been there for some of it.

  Seeing other kids with fathers made me miss my father. There would be functions at school, and other children would have both parents there. I’d have my mother, assuming she could get off from work. Sometimes, no one was there. Later, as I achieved some things, I wondered what my father would have made of it all: graduating from college. Playing in the NBA. Making All-Star teams. Coaching some wonderful teams, coaching in the 1996 Olympics.

  Sometimes I’d ask myself, “What would my father have thought of me? Would he be proud of me?”

  There’s no real answer to that because he’s been gone for so long.

  After my father died, my mother spent a lot of time telling all her children how much our father loved us. She wanted us to know that our father didn’t want to leave us, that he would have loved to have been with us, but God just called him. I never really understood why he was gone, but I knew it wasn’t his fault. He didn’t run off; he died.

  I missed him then, and I always will.

  Those who knew my father say that I’m a lot like him. They say if you look at my hands, you see his hands. That’s what I’ve heard over and over again from those who knew my father—that I have my father’s hands, strong, with long, purposeful fingers. I look at my hands and try to imagine my father’s hands, then I wonder if he was an athlete. I don’t even know if he was a sports fan. Relatives have told me that sometimes I walk like him, or that I gesture like him. I don’t know what to say to that, because the more I think about my father, the less I realize I know.

  I do have one memory of him: I’m sitting in a high chair at the dinner table. I’m not much more than an infant. My father takes a piece of bacon, ties it to a string from something above my head. That bacon attached to a string hangs down, dangling right in front of me. With my little hands, I bang around the bacon, and that keeps me occupied as my parents eat breakfast.

  That was my father, a man who knew how to make a toy for a toddler out of a piece of bacon and a string.

  And he baked.

  I don’t remember seeing him bake, but I remember the smells. Fresh bread. Cakes. The warm aromas filling our brownstone apartment in the Bedford Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn. I can close my eyes and see my sister and myself sitting on a bench. My father is in the kitchen. I don’t see him in the kitchen, I just know he’s in there, baking.

  I can still smell it.

  This time, it was a cake. He’s baking a white cake with chocolate frosting. With my eyes closed and my memory in high gear, I still don’t see him, but I can see the cake. I see my sister Connie and me eating that cake. I know he baked it. But I still don’t see him, and I wish I did—just once more, even in my memory. I just know that my father loved to bake: He did all the baking in the house, and forever in my head are the memories of that white cake with the chocolate frosting.

  And the bacon on a string.

  And the funeral.

  My father died of a bleeding ulcer, that much I’ve been told. He was rushed to a hospital in Brooklyn, which was not far from the brownstone apartment where we lived. The doctors said my father had something called “a locked bowel.” They decided the best way to treat him was with an enema.

  Actually, it was the one thing they never should have done.

  It killed him.

  My mother didn’t know anything about malpractice. Besides, this was in 1943, a time when you just didn’t sue doctors. It was a time when you were glad to have a doctor treat you, a time when doctors seemed like miracle men. And miracle men many of them were—and still are.

  But in the case of this doctor and my father, I can’t help but think that the man killed my father. I didn’t hear this story of my father’s death until I was in college. I wanted to do something, but what? Find the doctor? Sue the hospital for something that happened so long ago? Besides, how do you put a price tag on a young family deprived of a father? No amount of money can repay my mother for all the anguish she had to endure as she raised us, a woman alone with four kids all under the age of seven when she lost her husband.

  When my father died, they put the casket in the living room. The custom back then was to hold a wake in the home. There was a huge lamp on each side of the casket. Behind the coffin were these black drapes. I can still see the room. It’s so dark, it’s eerie. The casket is a shiny wooden box, reflecting the light from the two lamps. People are crying. I remember a nun holding me on her lap: She was a friend of my mother’s from Holy Rosary Church. My mother’s family were staunch Roman Catholics. My father converted to Catholicism to marry my mother. I spent the entire funeral in the arms of that nun. People cried and cried. I clung to that nun.

  The casket was open. My father was in there. He wore his best suit and tie. There was no question that it was my father, and no question that he was dead. I just remember that I didn’t want to be in that room alone with the casket.

&n
bsp; When the wake was over, one of my aunts came up to me. She took me in her arms and said, “Well, you’re going to be the man of the family now.”

  I stared at her. I was five years old. How was I supposed to know what it meant to be the man of the house? But I was the man of that house. I had an older sister, Connie, who was six. My brother, Larry, was three. And there was two-year-old Mary.

  Four kids, no father.

  I was only five years old, but that aunt’s words stuck to me. I was the man of the family. I had no idea what it meant, I just knew that on the day my father died, everything had changed—and more was expected of me. I was his son, and I’ll always be his son. That much I know. And his absence had a far more profound impact on me that his presence, because his being gone meant that I had to grow up, and grow up quick. But his being my father also left me a legacy. Because my father was an African-American, so am I. At least that’s how the world sees me.

  A priest once asked me, “What’s it like to have a foot in both worlds?”

  He knew I came from a mixed-blood family. My father was African-American, my mother was Irish. But I never hesitated when they asked me to list my race on a form—I’d write I was African-American. There is a racist theory that has always existed in this country, that if you have a drop of black blood in you, then you’re an African-American.

  One drop of blood is all it takes to define you as black.

  Why is that?

  If a person is part Irish and part Italian and a little Scottish, we don’t say that person is Scottish—to the exclusion of all else—because he has a bit of Scottish blood in him. But if that same person had a drop of black blood? Well, forget about the Italian, the Irish, the Scottish, or any other roots—you’re black, period. This was done primarily to keep black people down, to deprive people of opportunity, to keep a bigger slice of the American pie for white people, because for much of our history, being considered black immediately relegated you to second-class status.

  The truth is that I’m as much Irish as I’m black, but I’ve never heard anyone say, “Lenny is Irish.” Today, it’s illegal to ask for a person’s race, but once that was common on most job applications and other forms. If I really wanted to be accurate, I should have listed myself as “African-Irish-American,” and then watch what they would have made of that.

  Then again, when former NBA coach Cotton Fitzsimmons first met me, he thought I was Puerto Rican!

  We used to say America was a melting pot. It was in all my history books, stories of how people came from all over the world to find a home in the United States. I took that literally. They told us that we were all created equal, right?

  Then why ask about someone’s race?

  Why define a person by wanting to know, “Do you have any black blood?”

  What is the purpose? Where is the justice?

  There have been light-skinned people who have “passed” as white, but I was never into that. I never wanted to put myself in a position of trying to be something I was not. I had a cousin who did, but that was his hangup; I never had a problem with being considered a black man. I am proud of my father, of my African-American roots. I know that when I was in college, some of my professors were shocked when I did well in certain courses. A black person, especially a black athlete, just wasn’t expected to achieve in the classroom. Sometimes, I wanted to speak out. I knew what they were thinking, how wrong and racist it was… but I just didn’t want to give people the idea that I had a chip on my shoulder or that I wasn’t proud of being black. Most of the time, I just glared at them. I wanted them to be as uncomfortable as they made me, and for some reason, I just knew that eventually I’d find a way to prove them wrong.

  I never heard exactly how my mother and father met. I know that he was a chauffeur, and he often drove around the neighborhood. He got to know a lot of people, and one of them was my mother.

  And they were married, which is all I know.

  That was in April of 1935, when mixed marriages certainly were rare in most parts of America, but there were more than a few in Brooklyn. The Bedford Stuyvesant of my youth was a true melting pot. On my street was a German deli, a Jewish grocery, an Italian market. Within a few streets were all kinds of people from blacks to Puerto Ricans to Jews to Eastern Europeans. Sure, people were aware of the racial and ethnic differences, but most of us learned to live together and get along. We had no choice, because we saw each other all the time on the streets, on the subways, at stores, and at church. Only later did I come to realize how unique this situation was, and how it affected my life: I never doubted that people from different races could work with each other and be friends, because I saw it every day of my life while growing up.

  Granted, there were problems. Some members of my mother’s family weren’t thrilled about the marriage. My mother had six sisters and two brothers. The brothers were always very consumed with their jobs and families, so they were seldom around. Most of the other members of the family were friendly, but my mother’s oldest sister played favorites. She was the oldest and didn’t have any children. I felt like this sister and her husband liked my cousins better than us, and my cousins were part-Chinese. My mother’s sister had married a Chinese man, and that was OK with some of the family—but my mother was considered an outcast by this sister because she had married a black man. I know this had to be hard on my mother, but she rarely talked about it. Nor do I ever recall her saying anything about what her family thought of her marriage to my father. I imagine there was some initial resistance to an Irish-Catholic woman marrying a black man. I’d hear some comments secondhand, never to our face; I just knew some of the relatives weren’t thrilled with our “mixed” family.

  You have to understand the times and our family. I was born in 1937, which means I grew up at the end of the Depression, through World War II and then into the Korean War. This was not an era when people had the luxury to become caught up in introspection. Over and over, it was drilled into us, “Don’t feel sorry for yourself.” We had to work. We were fighting to survive. People knew what it was to be hungry. They still talked about “bread lines” and “going to the poorhouse.” They knew what it was to have their husbands and fathers killed on the other side of the world, to see people become instant widows, to see children weeping at a cemetery while clinging to their mother’s skirt as their father is buried, to see flags in the windows of apartments and houses of men who had died in the war.

  It’s not like the affluent times of today, where people look at all the details of their lives, sometimes to the point of distraction. They dig through the fields of their past, turning the same dirt over and over and over, searching for clues to who they are and why they act the way they do. If some of my relatives didn’t love us, so what? Shake it off. We were too busy taking care of ourselves, and we didn’t really expect anyone to help us. We were taught to be thankful for the people who did care about us, rather than to dwell on those who didn’t. Maybe that sounds simplistic, but what other choice did we have? I see too many people today who walk around captives of their past, who have jailed their own hearts with bitterness and regrets about what happened when they grew up, about slights from relatives, parents who somehow failed, money that wasn’t there. That can paralyze you.

  My mother spent most of her time trying to get us to concentrate on what we did have, not moaning about what was missing. For example, two of my mother’s sisters were terrific. They were my favorite aunts because they were so down to earth, they just loved us. Like my mother, they were Irish Catholics, and they quickly embraced her children. It wouldn’t have mattered to them if we were purple: We were family to those two aunts. My father’s family was also great. He had three sisters, and they accepted us as their own—no questions asked, no hesitation. My father’s youngest sister was a loving woman who bought me my first suit when I was in high school. We seemed to spend more time with my father’s family. As I mentioned, two of my mother’s sisters were outstanding, but all o
f my father’s family was that way; with them, I always felt like “family.”

  Yes, outside the home, some kids called me “half-breed.”

  But “half-breed” never bothered me much, because I always had a sense of who I was. Besides, we all were just kids back then, and there weren’t the same racial hangups we have today. Kids talked about each other being Jews, Poles, Irish, whatever. It wasn’t a putdown, just a statement of fact. Besides, my mother never talked about race. Not at all. She refused to make it an issue.

  She would just say, “You can be as good as you want to be.”

  Or she’d say, “Don’t make excuses, you can accomplish whatever you set your mind to, you’re just as good as the next person.”

  I believed her. I didn’t let other people define me or limit me. In our immediate family, we didn’t worry about race. She was the mother; we were the kids. She refused to feel sorry for herself, and she expected the same from us. But when we went to the store, people would stare at us.

  My mother was an Irish woman. My brother and one of my sisters are light-skinned, much as I am. And my sister Connie is a beautiful brown-skinned woman; she favored my father.

  Sometimes, people rudely glared. They wondered what that black girl was doing with that white woman, who was obviously her mother. And they stared harder at the rest of the kids. Were we white? Or black? Or what?

  My mother would catch them staring and she’d confront them: “Just what are you looking at?”

  Of course, those people were gutless. They’d never say a word. They’d just look away. Meanwhile, we children were mortified at what my mother would say, how her Irish temper would bubble up, then blow, like a volcano. In these rare instances, she had the vocabulary of a sailor. I couldn’t believe my own mother was saying some of those words! When that happened, we kids wanted to disappear. We really didn’t know why some people stared at us, we just saw that it upset our mother—and that bothered us.