September 2006 Archives
MY BOOK’S TITLE: BRILLIANT OR CRAP?
Really, I want to know. This subject will become an important one in a few days. (I’ll explain next Monday.) Sound off on what you think. Include your name and hometown if you want to get mentioned.
September 27, 2006
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ACROSS THE GREAT DIVIDE: MY BIG TRIP WEST
The Western leg of my book tour commences this Friday in foodie-rific Berkeley, California, and continues for the better part of the following week. Here are the details of where I’ll be doing readings/signings/schmoozings/etc.:
On Friday, September 29, at 7 p.m., I will be appearing at Cody’s on Fourth Street in Berkeley, CA.
On Monday, October 2, at 7 p.m., I will be appearing at Vroman’s Bookstore in Pasadena, CA (Julia Child’s hometown).
On Tuesday, October 3, at 7:30 p.m., I will be appearing at Powell’s City of Books on Burnside in Portland, OR.
On Wednesday, October 4, at 7 p.m., I will be appearing at the University Book Store (the University District location) in Seattle, WA.
And on Friday, October 6, at 11:30 a.m., just hours after my return to New York, I’ll be participating in a chat with Clark Wolf, restaurant consultant and foodie-culture analyst extraordinaire, at New York University–specifically, at the Fales Collection (3rd floor of the Bobst Library on Washington Square South). My homegirl Marion Nestle says she might be there, too.
September 26, 2006
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BRUNI RAPS ABOUT “U.S. OF ARUGULA”
Well, he doesn’t literally rap, though in these hang-loose days at the Times, anything is possible. But the Paper of Record’s restaurant critic, Frank Bruni, has kind words to say about The United States of Arugula: How We Became a Gourmet Nation in his podcast, which was heard on National Public Radio last week. Click on the link below to hear what Mr. Bruni has to say:
Bruni Podcast
September 25, 2006
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I HEART POWELL’S BOOKSTORE
Powell’s is a remarkable institution in Portland, Oregon, a bookstore run by the father-son team of Walter and Michael Powell, open 365 days a year. They’ve been at it since the 1970s and got in early on the e-commerce front, starting up their web site in 1994.
And they’re being very nice to me. The United States of Arugula: How We Became a Gourmet Nation has been selected as one of their vaunted Staff Picks by an employee named Jill. (Thanks, Jill, I owe you a plate of Dungeness crabs and a glass of pinot noir.) And Powell’s also asks authors to fill out a Q&A that, charmingly, includes esoteric questions that have nothing to do with the book the author is hustling. You can read my Q&A here.
I will be reading at the flagship Burnside location (a.k.a. Powell’s City of Books) at 7:30 p.m. on Tuesday, October 3rd. More info on my upcoming West Coast tour to come.
September 23, 2006
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A NON-HECTORING VOICE FOR FOOD CHANGE
One thing I want you to understand about The United States of Arugula: How We Became a Gourmet Nation is that it is a book rooted in pleasure: the pleasure of cooking, the pleasure of eating, the pleasure Americans have taken over the last 50-60 years in their discovery that food can be so much more than mere sustenance. (And that it can be so much better than canned Dinty Moore beef stew.) It’s not a “food issues” book like Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation or Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma, though I loved those books and recommend them as complements to mine; I’m relating the good news, Schlosser the bad, and Pollan is the guy trying to sort out where we go from here.
What I especially admire about Schlosser’s and Pollan’s books is their tone. They’re telling you what’s wrong with the way Americans eat, but they’re not hectoring you or guilt-tripping you; they’re not saying “Bad fat Americans! Stupid little tools of corporate interests!” They’re sincere in their desire to enlighten, which is refreshing in a heated climate where, too often, food activists reflexively take adversarial, I’m-smart-you’re-stupid stances. (To see an example of what I mean, look at the thread of sour-spirited reader comments that followed my interview with Salon–some of which had little or nothing to do with the interview itself.)
Which brings me to another great food activist, one of my favorite people I got to meet in the course of writing and researching my book: a young woman named Nina Planck. Nina is the author of the books Real Food: What to Eat and Why and The Farmers’ Market Cookbook. She’s the daughter of Virginia farmers, and I like her not only because she’s a nice person, but because of the jolliness of her activism, her prescriptiveness and fundamental upbeatness. In her fine Op-Ed piece in today’s New York Times about the E. coli spinach scare, she points out that the strain of E. coli bacteria that’s getting people sick is often a byproduct of feeding cattle grain, which stresses the digestive systems of the animals (who, as ruminants, aren’t supposed to be eating grain). “It’s the infected manure from these grain-fed cattle that contaminates the groundwater and spreads the bacteria to produce, like spinach, growing on neighborhing farms,” Nina writes. She then points out the “good news” that cattle switched to a grass-fed diet for even a few days experience a sharp downturn in the amount of this especially nasty strain of E. coli (O157:H7) in their systems.
Nina sheds light on the problem and points the way toward a solution, while acknowledging that implementing this solution will take time and effort. (And she is brave enough not to pile scorn on Earthbound Farm, the “corporate organic” outfit whose massive recalls and current troubles have prompted some bouts of schadenfreudal cackling from other food activists, even though Pollan, in his book, finds them to be the good guys among the big outfits.)
One other thing: There was a little party in New York City last week to celebrate the launch of my book. Nina brought along her mom, Susan, who was fresh from the farm in Virginny. Susan got off the night’s best line: “I bet I’m the only person in this room who actually planted arugula yesterday.”
September 21, 2006
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OLD-MEDIA FOOD DORKS, LIKE, DISCOVER BLOGGING
My friend Adam Platt, who reviews restaurants for New York magazine, has just informed me that he has entered the “cyber era” (Geez, what a fogyish phrase; he must be over 30!) with a new, magazine-sanctioned blog called Gobbler.
Adam joins such other old-media blog adventurers as Chow, a print magazine that’s just been freshly reconceived as a Web-based food network (complete with a “Food Media Blog” called The Grinder), and, of course, the New York Times, whose Web site features restaurant critic Frank Bruni’s Diner’s Journal.
As a smug cyber-veteran who’s had an independent Web presence for ages–well, seventeen and a half months–I feel it’s my duty to assume the stance of the plucky new media and mock the latecomers.
So here goes: Whoop-de-doo! The square old-media companies have discovered that there is something called “the World Wide Web” that features something called “blogging”! Nyah-nyah! And furthermore, nyah-nyah!
Did I do that well?
September 20, 2006
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I LOVE IT WHEN TWO PASSIONS CONVERGE...
...in this case, football and food. An avid New York Giants fan, I can’t stop reading recaps of my team’s improbable comeback victory over the Philadelphia Eagles last Sunday. My favorite line from all the postgame coverage came from Plaxico Burress, the tall, spindly wide receiver who caught Eli Manning’s final pass for the winning TD in overtime. Earlier in the game, Burress made a catch downfield but lost control of the ball, fumbling it forward. After it bounced off of an Eagle or two, the ball squirted into the end zone, where Burress’s fellow wideout Tim Carter fell on it for the touchdown that began the Giants’ comeback.
Burress is often derided in the sports press as a moody head case, but I pull for him because he blocks well (a task many receivers are too selfish to take on) and because he’s devoted to the memory of his mom, Vicki Burress, who raised three boys singlehandedly in Virginia Beach and died of diabetes when she was just 49. And I love what Plax said about Tim Carter, who turned his miscue into a score: “I owe him a steak, a lobster, a glass of merlot or something.”
September 19, 2006
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SALON INTERVIEW, PLUS SOME GOOD PRESS
Hey, I was interviewed by Ratha Tep of Salon.com a few weeks ago, and here is the result. WARNING: In this Q&A, I confess to liking Jif peanut butter (!!!) in addition to heirloom tomatoes and other virtuous, locally produced foods. Already, in the “Comments” section, I’ve been upbraided by some smug sustainable-ista (who nevertheless echoes the very points I make in the interview).
Reviews are starting to come in, too. Got a very nice writeup in USA Today on Monday, Sept 18.
September 19, 2006
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I’VE BEEN EVERYWHERE, MAN
Though I’m currently in pitchman mode for The United States of Arugula: How We Became a Gourmet Nation, and encourage you to buy the book and check out the October issue of Vanity Fair, which contains an excerpt from Chapter 5 of the book, I also keep busy doing other bits of writing here and there, and thought I’d clue you in on this stuff.
In the September issue of GQ, which is still on some newsstands, I have a profile of Troy Polamalu, the intense safety for the Pittsburgh Steelers. (Pro football is as much of an abiding passion of mine as food; maybe “pathology” is a better word than “passion.”)
I also have an essay in Bon Appetit’s 50th-Anniversary issue, now on the stands. (Article not available online.)
I give a thumbs-up to Mark Haddon for his new novel, A Spot of Bother, in the current New York Times Book Review.
And, as ever, you’re encouraged to check out the article archives on this Web site, reachable by clicking on the box at the top right of this page. I’m verrry slowly posting my back catalogue, and the latest addition is of one of my early pieces for GQ, about the cult British indie film Withnail & I.
September 17, 2006
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WELL, IT’S A GOOD THING I DIDN’T CALL THE BOOK “THE UNITED STATES OF RAW SPINACH”...
...but I’m nevertheless saddened by the E. coli outbreak that’s caused all that spinach to be recalled. I guess this is a good argument for the local-foods movement; big processors like Natural Selection Foods LLC are compelled to take such drastic measures because their products are distributed all over the country, under a variety of brand names, and lord knows which batch of spinach was contaminated. Whereas, if you buy your spinach from Farmer Chard’s stand down the road, you know exactly where your food is coming from.
Still, it’s tough for most Americans to buy local all the time, especially where leafy greens are concerned. In my book, Emeril Lagasse, whose own brand of pre-packaged baby spinach is among those affected by the recall, says that he got into selling salad greens under his name not because he’s a whore to commerce, as his detractors are wont to say, but “because of my children and the crap that’s in the supermarket. Look, most people don’t live in New York City, where you can just go down the street and get whatever you want. Most people have to settle for brown lettuce that’s been up there for a couple of weeks, and it’s sad.”
September 16, 2006
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WELL, IT’S A GOOD THING I DIDN’T CALL THE BOOK “THE UNITED STATES OF CILANTRO”...
...because I think these folks are serious.
September 16, 2006
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BARNES & NOBLE READING ON FRIDAY IN NYC
With the Today show appearance* now behind me (Matt Lauer charmingly ate a handful of the display prosciutto as soon as they cut to commercial), I now invite you to come see me read from The United States of Arugula: How We Became a Gourmet Nation at the Lincoln Center location of Barnes & Noble at 7 p.m. on Friday, September 15. Let me reiterate that it’s the Lincoln Center location, and not the big B&N on Union Square. Arianna Huffington is reading at that one; totally different vibe.
In other news, the Today show’s web site has posted the first chapter of my book, and Vanity Fair’s web site has posted the excerpt from Chapter 5 of my book (which is not the whole chapter) that appears in the October print issue, a.k.a. the Suri Cruise issue.
In still other news, the reading I was supposed to do in Washington, D.C., next Tuesday, as seen on the event schedule posted by my publisher, has been postponed. I’ll give updates on readings and appearances as I get new info.
* Click here to watch my five minutes with Matt. But keep in mind that in order for NBC’s video player to work on your computer, you have to use the Firefox 1.5 web browser and have Macromedia Flash installed.
September 14, 2006
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GREAT TELEVISION IN THE MAKING
Terrific news! I’m going to be appearing on NBC’s Today show on Thursday, September 14, to talk about The United States of Arugula: How We Became a Gourmet Nation. (I’ll be on some time between 8 and 9 a.m.; I’ll update this post with specifics if I get them.) [UPDATE: The NBC dudes say 8:45 a.m., give or take, is likely.]
But oh, dear: I’ve gone and broken my left foot. In a characteristically clumsy moment over the Labor Day weekend, I suffered an avulsion fracture of the fifth metatarsal. As injuries go, it’s not serious, and should heal completely in a month or so. Unfortunately, the healing process necessitates that I wear a protective but dorky-looking cast boot most of the time. Now, I’m sufficiently vain that I don’t want to wear the boot on Today; my orthopedist has given me permission to wear a regular shoe on the foot for the TV appearance, as long as I keep pressure off of it.
What this means is that there’s potential for me to stumble and fall on live television. Which would be humiliating, but a classic YouTube moment. I’d tune in if I were you.
September 13, 2006
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BEING TRUE TO LA GOULUE
I promised that I would post corrections if readers found mistakes in the book, and already, eagle-eyed Amy Fine Collins of Vanity Fair has caught a wee muck-up by me. On p. 241 of the book, in writing about Wolfgang Puck’s short-lived stay in New York City in the early 1970s, I describe La Goulue as “the ladies-who-lunch bistro on Madison Avenue.” (Puck, thinking a plum restaurant job awaited him in New York, was affronted to discover that the job was at La Goulue, and turned it down.)
Collins, a lady who lunches, notes that in those days, La Goulue was not on Madison, as it is now, but in the east 60s. Got it? Okay, now, readers: Order Collins’s The God of Driving, and find some mistakes in her book.
September 12, 2006
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Dept. of Corrections
PUB DATE
That whirring sound you hear is of box after heavy box of books sliding down the roller ramps from the delivery trucks to your bookstore’s cargo bay. At last, real hardcover copies of of The United States of Arugula: How We Became a Gourmet Nation have arrived. Sound the trumpets! Macerate the peaches!
I’ll be busy doing plugola in New York City this week. You can catch me on NBC’s Today show on Thursday, September 14 (Meredith’s second day and also the second day the show will be available in hi-def; anyone have some botox?) and, if you care to, you can hear me read from the book in person at the Lincoln Center location of Barnes & Noble at 7 p.m. this Friday, September 15.
September 12, 2006
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A LOVELY MENTION IN THE BRUNI BLOG
Frank Bruni, the New York Times’s restaurant critic, offers a very positive assessment of The United States of Arugula: How We Became a Gourmet Nation in the September 8 editon of his Times-sanctioned blog. And he admits to having not yet finished the book! I hope he enjoys the rest of it and doesn’t retract his kind words in a future post.
September 10, 2006
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NEW “VANITY FAIR” ISH EXCERPTS MY BOOK!
The new, October-dated issue of Vanity Fair hits newsstands in New York and L.A. today, and in the rest of the country next week. Excitingly, wonderfully, the issue contains a lengthy excerpt from The United States of Arugula: How We Became a Gourmet Nation–specifically, an adapted, streamlined version of the chapter dealing with the birth of Chez Panisse, the seminal Berkeley restaurant.
I guess people are also excited about this issue of VF because of some baby pictures in it.
September 6, 2006
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WELCOME TO THE SITE
Hello. My name is David Kamp. I am a writer based in New York City, and I draw my paycheck from Condé Nast Publications, which publishes my work in Vanity Fair and GQ. The occasion of this site launch is a new book I’ve written called The United States of Arugula: How We Became a Gourmet Nation. I hope you buy and read the book, but I also hope you pay regular visits to this site itself, which, in the Gladwellian spirit of these times, will not be solely a promotional device but an archive for my magazine articles and a place to read site-specific stuff by me.
The article archive is a work in progress, but already, I have posted a few pieces I’ve written over the years. Click on the links provided at the top right of this page to read these pieces and pick up on my tendency to overuse the words alas, mien, and upscale. Click on the box at the top left of this page to learn more about The United States of Arugula, a book that I think you’ll really enjoy if you’ve ever eaten food.
September 4, 2006
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My Father, the Car
A valentine to my dad on the eve of his seventy-fifth birthday.
Was there ever a better automotive sales team than the classic DeAngelis Buick lineup of the ’60s and ’70s, that veritable Murderers’ Row of the Central Jersey motor trade? You had Jack Moskowitz, Dick Summers, and Rene Abril on the showroom floor, and holding down the sales manager’s office, Seymour Kamp. The same four guys for twenty years, almost—you just don’t see that kind of dynastic continuity anymore. I had the pleasure of watching this team in action, and let me tell you, there was never a quartet more charismatic and scrupulous in its pursuit of making its customers’ V8-engine fantasies come true.
DeAngelis had a magnificent Art Deco showroom—the skinny tip of a long, trapezoidal building that occupied its own triangular island between French Street and Jersey Avenue in downtown New Brunswick—and these men, in their John Weitz suits and ASK ME ABOUT BUICK VALUE lapel pins, worked it with appropriate dignity, strolling up to customers casually, never in a caffeinated hustle. Kamp, especially, was extraordinary: a magnetic force with his booming voice and football player’s build. (He played tackle on both offense and defense for New Brunswick High in the ’40s.) People bought six, seven, eight cars from him and sent their friends to do the same—“Whatever you need, see Seymour!” the newspaper ads said. Those who didn’t recognize his face from the paper knew his voice from the radio commercials he did on WCTC-AM, in which he pluggerooed the latest Electras, LeSabres, and Regals in a rat-a-tat delivery so rapid that the copywriters had to give him twenty-six lines of text to fill a minute of airtime rather than the requisite twenty-four. Even today, Jack Ellery, the radio host who manned the drive-time shift on CTC in that era and intro’d the ads with an offhand “Now let’s hear from Seymour Kamp—Mr. Buick,” ranks Kamp as one of Central Jersey’s top three all-time merchant celebrities of the airwaves, along with the clothiers Wally Steinberg of Steinberg’s Men’s Shop and Norman Miller of Miller’s on the Mall.
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I reveled in being the son of Mr. Buick. (Prince
Buick?) It wasn’t even so much that his customers admired his honesty (though
he was honest, and cringed at TV portrayals of loud-jacketed, sleazy car
salesmen) as they valued his friendship and company. They brought him
things—steaks, Knicks tickets, bottles of scotch he never drank—and he kept in
touch after the sale, making house calls when their cars wouldn’t start,
dropping everything to hurry over with the jumper cables he always kept in his
trunk. The man was verily invested in his burg, being a member of two
synagogues, the junior chamber of commerce (president, 1956–57), the Rotary
Club (chairman, program committee), the Elks (Lodge #324), and the Masons
(Lodge #240), and he knew his Buicks inside and out, studiously attending the
training sessions up in Union where men from Detroit explained the latest about
wheelbases and gas-tank capacity. These twin faiths—to community and
brand—conspired to make Mr. Buick the consummate local salesman, a trusted
neighborhood vendor like your green-grocer, butcher, or dry cleaner, except his
goods weighed two tons apiece and arrived on a trailer from Flint, Michigan.
The showroom was mine to roam whenever I visited,
its boattail Riviera coupes mine to climb into and pretend-drive. (I
liked the Rivieras best because they came with whitewall tires and
had the highest sticker price.) I loved the aspirational gleam of the place,
though I wouldn’t have called it that then—the way its crenellated outer walls
made it look like a castle and the way its sparkly, speedlined, sunny interior,
with exposures to the north, east, and west, suggested an open vista of happy
motoring. Having a car-salesman father, furthermore, did wonders for my
standing in school. For one thing, the other kids found my father’s job more
tangible and fundamentally uplifting than their fathers’—exactly what does an
arbitrator or a professor of mechanical engineering do? For another, my
father was, well, Mr. Buick, with all that it entailed. They heard him
on the radio as they ate their breakfast in the morning, tagged along as their
parents bought cars from him, wrapped their textbooks in the protective book
covers he supplied to the schools (featuring prints of antique-model Buicks,
naturally), and envied us Kamps for the fact that we got a new car every single
year, even if it was a dealer demo that technically wasn’t ours.
At home, we lived a life of intense Buick loyalty.
We knew that the Buick wasn’t tip-top of the line, that General Motors
considered Cadillac its marquee luxury brand, and that the very word Buick was
absurd, a reliable laugh-getter for comedians. But Buicks suited us, their
quiet respectability simpatico with our unpretentious way of life. Our basement
was festooned by my sister, brother, and me with surplus paraphernalia from the
dealership, its support pillars adorned with DeAngelis bumper stickers and
labels that said BUILT WITH GENUINE GM PARTS, its walls papered with circular
posters bearing the words THE NUMBER ONE LITTLE ONE, leftovers from a promotion
for the Opel, the crapola German-manufactured compact that gave Buick a
foothold in the small-car market.
Seemingly half of our worldly possessions were the
booty of sales contests put on by the Buick Motor Division, redemptions of the
gift points my father accrued for every car he sold—our beds, our camping
equipment, our clocks, our record player, our Lenox china, the little cordial
glasses with the words BUICK SALESMASTER etched into them (which we used as
ceremonial wineglasses during Passover seders), and the huge, chunky gold rings
with tigereye insets, each more elaborate than the next, that my father
received every time he surpassed another sales milestone. And also the
binoculars in the dimpled-leather case autographed by Muhammad Ali. My father
spotted a Rolls-Royce convertible on the shoulder of the New Jersey Turnpike
one day in 1971, pulled over, and saw who the driver was. “Car trouble, Champ?”
he asked. “Naw,” said Ali, “it’s just gettin’ cold! I’m puttin’ the roof up.”
Dad had a ballpoint, but neither he nor Ali had a piece of paper. The
binoculars case had to do.
Your
friendly DeAngelis sales staff: Jack Moskowitz, lean and affable, looked to me
like Gene Rayburn; Dick Summers, white-haired and a little aloof, was Johnny
Carson; and Rene Abril, diminutive, suave, and ethnic (Cuban, actually)…well,
maybe he was Fred De Cordova. That I saw them in these roles, of unreconstructed
midcentury men hanging on in the jive-turkey 1970s, is revealing, for I realize
now that the world I was witnessing was already an anachronism, a spectral
glimpse of what America used to be—not unlike the Doc Severinsen–conducted
swing band that Carson stubbornly kept on his show even as the whole world
around him went druggy and electric. The DeAngelis showroom was redolent of
cologne, hair tonic, and cigarette smoke, a man’s province; the “girls” who
answered the phones did so from segregated balcony offices that overlooked the
sales floor. It was all so irretrievably adult, with no heed paid to the
fun-fun-fun teenybop car culture that was migrating eastward from California,
no acknowledgement of an impatient, capricious “youth market” that needed to be
flattered and dazzled with sweet rides and kustom-kool stereos. A
swinging door behind Dick Summers’s cubicle led back to an even more
time-warped world: the cavernously dark body shop, which was populated with
gnarled mechanics straight out of Walker Evans photographs, some of whom had
been with the dealership since it was DeAngelis Nash in the 1930s. These
apparitional figures kept up the illusion—within the walls of the
strange, sarcophagus-shaped building, anyway—that New Brunswick remained a vital industrial city.
But half a mile from DeAngelis Buick, in the heart
of the city’s commercial district, the urban rot had set in. Albany Street, the main drag of my father’s boyhood, had become a blaxploitation
thoroughfare of head shops, empty storefronts, and glorious old Deco cinemas
reduced to showing porn; you half expected everyone to be walking in slanted,
freaky gaits like R. Crumb characters. The original Tops Appliance store had
been on Albany, its proprietor another local merchant-celebrity,
Les Turchin, the man whose ubiquitous newspaper ads depicted him as “Topsy,” a
pointy-hatted cartoon figure with Hebraic features so grotesquely
rendered that he looked like some hateful caricature out of Der Stürmer.
But Les, ambitious and savvy, could see that Albany Street was going down
the tubes; he moved his whole operation to a strip mall in Edison,
where his giant new store, renamed Tops Appliance City, begat further mall megastores that siphoned
business from New Jersey’s dying downtowns. This circumstance so panicked
the city’s administrators and Johnson & Johnson, its major corporate
presence, that they would eventually level the whole strip and replace it with
an antiseptic complex of office buildings and esplanade shops, a faithful
re-creation of some lame-ass urban planner’s diorama.
DeAngelis Buick somehow held fast against all this
decay-renewal tumult, even as its customers, the children of the Hungarian,
Italian, and Jewish immigrants who’d settled the neighborhood in the early
twentieth century, forsook the inner city for split-levels and neocolonials in
the former farmlands of the “other” Brunswicks, North, South, and East. The six
DeAngelis brothers and their partner brother-in-law, known collectively as the
Seven Thieves, were Old World guys whose American-dream optimism buffed up the
place and kept it shiny; they’d emigrated from a village outside of Rome (“the
other side,” as my father put it), started out in bicycles, moved up to Nashes,
and finally to Buicks and prosperity. My father, the son of another immigrant,
a baker from Poland, was a kindred spirit. Shortly after his return
from service in Korea in ’54, he answered a “Salesman Wanted” ad in the
paper, was hired on the spot by the DeAngelises, and immediately demonstrated a
facility for finding good homes for the Specials, Centurys, Supers, and
Roadmasters on the floor. He was anointed sales manager in ’57, when he
was just 26. Over the decades, his fame and his customer following grew and
made him a wanted man, forever courted and flattered by other car
dealers, who were eager to lure him from the DeAngelises’ relatively small
inner-city showroom to the airier, bigger, newer dealerships on the
white-flight highways out of town. But Kamp resisted—he and DeAngelis
Buick were synonymous. In their vestigial wonderland in a fraying neighborhood,
Seymour and the Seven Thieves kept up appearances and ideals, championing cars
as a means to a better life.
By
the time I became a sentient human being, at the dawn of the 1970s, the
Moskowitz-Summers-Abril-Kamp team was a veteran group, in place for a decade. I
had no idea that I was witnessing the beginning of the end of something,
namely, my father’s favorite time in the car business, and that over the next
ten or fifteen years, Mr. Buick would endure some rough patches.
The thing about America’s being a car
culture is, every time this culture undergoes a tectonic shift, car families
like ours get knocked around and thrown to the carpet. The energy crisis of
1973 was one of those times. I remember idling in fumey gas lines, and I vaguely
registered the TV reports of the OPEC oil embargo, but it wasn’t until Dad
delivered the shocking news—that he was leaving the car business and taking a
sales job at his friend’s sporting-goods company—that I understood its immediate
ramifications. As Dad explained, he’d been accustomed to selling twenty,
thirty cars a month. Now he was struggling to sell six or seven. His loyal
clientele, stuck in those gas lines and hurting for cash themselves, were
putting off their new-car purchases or, apostasy of apostasies, buying Japanese
compacts. The energy crisis introduced me to the concept of parental
fallibility. I couldn’t help but notice how strangely downcast my parents were
as we opened our Chanukah presents in 1973, me not quite understanding why they
considered it a comedown for us to receive “just” colored pencils and new jean
jackets. What I did understand was how weird it felt to have to ride around in
a used car like everyone else.
In ’74, with the energy crisis in remission, my father returned to
DeAngelis, happily reporting to us that the gas-guzzling Electra 225s were “big
as ever, like nothing happened.” But six years later came another jolt: I
overheard a friend of my father’s asking him, “So, Seymour, what’s it like to go
from working for the Seven Thieves to working for an A-rab?” Thus did I learn
that the DeAngelises were selling out to Richie Malouf, a Lebanese American
who’d been in the car business in Central Jersey for almost as long as my
father. With his pompadour, mustache, and visually assaultive plaid jackets,
Richie looked more like your central-casting car salesman than the
Sinatra-natty DeAngelises, but to his credit, he respected Mr. Buick and asked
him to stay on.
Nevertheless, the change of ownership, and Richie’s
desecration of that gorgeous Art Deco showroom with rec-room veneer paneling,
marked the end of the charmed, tinsel-and-bunting world in which my father had
come of professional age. Cut loose from his DeAngelis moorings, jostled awake
from his pleasant ’50s dream, my father discovered that it was morning in
America and decided, in the parlance of the Reagan era, to go for it.
For years, Ray Catena, the luxury-car magnate, the ultimate big shot of the
Central Jersey auto trade, had been after Dad, imploring him to come on board
at Catena’s Mercedes dealership and make the big bucks he so richly deserved.
Over and over, Dad had turned Catena down. But in 1983, he relented. Like
George Bailey lowering himself into the sunken chair across from Mr. Potter’s
desk, my father entered Catena’s office and sat silent as the maestro put on
his show, flipping through the pay stubs of his Mercedes salesmen, noting
aloud that these guys made twice what Dad made as a Buick sales manager.
Seriously, what was he waiting for?
But Catena’s staff was mostly younger guys, a
generation younger than my father, with foul mouths and Mamet tics; they didn’t
appreciate collegiality, and they sure as hell didn’t care for Mr. Buick, with
his nice manners and one degree of separation from every human being in Central
Jersey. He was out of there in less than a year.
Dad, worldlier and sadder, returned to Buicks, his
true love. He got old with them, becoming a granddad as Buicks became granddad
cars, no longer the dream luxury objects of sharp young guys on the make. (The
median age of the 2005 Buick buyer is 61.) And he began to wear down. Late in
1984, he suffered a heart attack and missed a few weeks of work. I was with him
in his room at the Robert Wood Johnson hospital when who should come calling
but Norman Miller of Miller’s on the Mall, jovial and schmoozy in his shorty
gown, in for bypass surgery—the two former WCTC merchant-personalities,
reunited in the cardio ward by the tsuris of keeping up with the
ever-mutating world of retail. Norman chatted with us for a while and then bade
us farewell. He died on the operating table a few days later.
Seymour healed and still did okay saleswise. But
while he had always prided himself on his ability to sell cars to any member of
any ethnic group, he was palpably frustrated at his inability to forge an
emotional connection with the latest immigrants to make their mark in
heterogeneous Central Jersey: the Indians from the Gujarat region, whose
numbers were swelling the populations of Edison and Woodbridge. “They don’t
want to make any conversation,” he said forlornly when I visited him one day.
“They just get right down to business. [Indian accent] ‘I want
veddy—goot—deal!’ ”
But this had to be the capper: His
urban-professional son—who had reaped the benefits of his father’s Old
World ethos, which dictated that the material benefits and advanced
degrees should be deferred to the next generation; who had seen his father work
five days and three nights a week, including Saturdays, so that his child
would have the freedom to pursue a life of the mind and get paid to think up
clever thoughts from the comfiness of a Herman Miller ergonomic
chair—chose, in an appalling act of demographic conformity, to make his
first car purchase…a Volvo.
Dad didn’t take the news well. In fact, he tried to
kibosh the deal, accusing the Connecticut salesman over the phone of swindling
me, and attempted to hook me up with one of his used-car buddies in New Jersey.
It was awful, fraught, even harder than when I had to tell him I wasn’t
marrying a Jewish girl.
But he got over it; the very personability and
compassion that made him Mr. Buick precluded him from holding a grudge. (He
grew to respect the Volvo and love the bride.) What’s strange is, in this time
of agony for General Motors, as they cut jobs by the thousands and shut down
factories, I feel more bereft than he, now 74 and retired. To my surprise, I
haven’t lost the Buick pride that was instilled in me in childhood. I’ve found
myself again coveting those boattail Riviera coupes and eternal Electras, both
for how they look (fantastic, still) and, I suppose, for what they evoke: that
safe, strong world of dads going about their dad business in dad style. They’re
still out there, these jumbos, in vintage showrooms and on eBay auctions, but
I’m gun-shy about actually consummating any deal. What I really want—though I
know perfectly well that it’s too late—is to buy a Buick from Seymour Kamp.
« Close
September 4, 2006
Link
GQ
Beautiful Loser
Another in my series of loving
profiles of character actors: Paul Giamatti, in this case. The peg of this
piece was Cinderella Man, an old-fashioned, Cagney-style boxing
weepie that was pretty good but tanked. Paul is one of the nicest guys you
could hope to meet.
The feel-good cine-story of 2004: Sideways,
a low-budget road movie about two male buddies’ calamitous trek through California wine country, triumphantly closes out the New York
Film Festival in October. There’s praise not only for the writer-director,
Alexander Payne, a mensch outsider for whom a crit-love drumbeat has been
building for years, but also for the film’s unlikely cast, which includes
two veterans of the Hollywood grind who were thought to be past their sell-by
dates, Thomas Haden Church and Virginia Madsen, and an Asian Canadian actress,
Sandra Oh, who is playing neither a geisha nor a
ninja but a straight-up American broad. But the most effusive gush is reserved
for the cast’s de facto leader, Paul Giamatti. Giamatti’s been scrapping around
for ages, endlessly, tirelessly—Sideways
is his twenty-ninth movie in twelve years—and only recently has he begun to
register in the public consciousness. A year earlier he was extraordinary in
the lead role of American Splendor, a
mesmerizingly odd film about the schlubby underground-comix author Harvey
Pekar, and now this new picture is cementing his status as one of our acting
treasures. The physical descriptions of Giamatti are never kind—“paunchy,”
“schlumpy,” “chinless,” “balding,” “stooped”—but the critics kvell over his
acting chops, calling him a revelation, a virtuosic line reader, a master of
nuance and body language. His role is thankless—a depressive, divorced failed
novelist and wine snob who steals cash from his mother—but Giamatti, restive
and resourceful, turns in an electric performance that transcends the
film’s drab, indie-sludge trappings.
Read More »
As the weeks
progress, the whole Sideways thing just keeps snowballing: This
modest picture is suddenly being touted as an Oscar contender, up there with
Martin Scorsese’s megabucks epic The
Aviator, and Giamatti is considered a shoo-in for a best-actor nomination.
He’s enlisted to host Saturday Night Live
(with musical guest Ludacris!) and invited to partake in a Newsweek cover-story roundtable discussion with A-listers Jamie
Foxx, Hilary Swank, Leonardo DiCaprio, Kate Winslet, and Annette Bening.
Meanwhile, the movie’s wine-country theme begets its own phenomenon, a
veritable oeno-porn explosion, with restaurants nearly selling out their stock
of the boutique wines mentioned in the movie, with fetishistic fans re-creating
the characters’ tours through the vineyards of California’s Central Coast, with sales of Pinot Noir upticking
dramatically thanks to the Giamatti character’s praise of the grape.
And then, in
January, the Academy Award
nominations come out. Sideways is
nominated for five Oscars, including best picture, best director, best supporting actor (Church), and best supporting
actress (Madsen)…but Giamatti is not among the anointed. Well, isn’t
this just too damned perfect! That they can’t acknowledge the work of the
paunchy, schlumpy, chinless, balding, stooped guy who holds the whole picture
together, because the ossified geezers of the Academy have to pay
obeisance to the creaking Rushmore majesty of Clint Eastwood! The Giamatti faithful of the chat rooms are outraged, mystified, indignant.
There are murmurings that perhaps Giamatti, a New Yorker, won’t even show his
face in Los Angeles on Oscar weekend—and really, could you blame him?
Well, it turns out that he does make
the trip, but mainly for the purpose of attending the Independent Spirit
Awards, where he is up for best
actor. The Independent Spirit Awards ceremony is a casual affair that takes
place the day before the Oscars. I’ve arranged to meet Giamatti that day, in
the morning.
He is hunched in a
booth at a Los Feliz breakfast joint, reading a giveaway L.A. paper, when I
introduce myself. Gingerly, fearing
that he’ll take offense, I say, “Well, I
suppose it’s best to just get right on with it and acknowledge the elephant in
the room.”
“Uh…which
elephant?” he says, smiling nervously, spreading his palms across the table. “I
mean, there are a lot of elephants.”
“Um,
that…you…weren’t…nominatedforanOscarandstuff.”
Giamatti
immediately relaxes. “Look, man,” he says, in that familiar confiding-cabbie
voice of his. (The very sound of it evokes tweed caps and lumbar rolls.) “I’ve
been doing this for a long time, and those things have never seemed like a
particularly real thing to me—they’ve seemed like a different profession,
almost. I mean, you sit there going, ‘Boy, it’d be great if that happened.’ But
I wasn’t disappointed, and I wasn’t surprised. I also think, frankly, and I’m
not being Mr. über-Modest, that I
don’t really deserve a nomination anyway. I mean, the hardest part of this,
honestly, has been the soft hand on the shoulder I get from a lot of
people—that pursed-lipped, stick-with-it-pal kind of thing.”
He’s a
better-looking man in real life, without the humiliations the wardrobe and
makeup departments have inflicted upon him—the hair fuller, the face
thinner. He looks his actual age, 38, instead of the cirrhotic 41-to-55 he
appears to be on-screen. “The camera, they say, puts ten pounds on you,” he
notes. “It puts about
twenty-five on me.” But even cleaned up, with the beard trimmed and a pair of Libeskind-chic eyeglasses on,
Giamatti still reflexively refers to himself as the “fat guy with
glasses” or the “funny fat guy.” He tells me he was genuinely befuddled
by the Newsweek experience and the photo shoot with the likes of Swank, Winslet, and DiCaprio:
“I mean, what’s wrong with this picture? Who doesn’t quite
fit in here?” Even to the indie crowd, he says, he was an outcast
until recently, since a lot of his small parts came in big-budget movies like Saving Private Ryan, My Best Friend’s
Wedding, and Planet of the Apes.
“I was more of a Hollywood-cheese guy to them,” he says. “Couldn’t
get arrested for an independent film. Wasn’t
cool enough.”
He calls his
two-picture-strong run as a terrific leading man a “fluke,” and
when I ask him in a later conversation what sort of tasty part he’d love to
land, expecting some rumination about playing Willy Loman on Broadway or doing
his own Mr. Holland’s Opus, he
mentions the roles played by Dann Florek and S. Epatha Merkerson on Law & Order: “The angry-lieutenant
guy,” he says. “You know,
you get to say, ‘Bring ’em in for questioning!’ or ‘You got twenty-four
hours—don’t blow it!’ You get to have choice scenes of outrage, but it isn’t so
much to do. Which would be
fine with me.”
This is a man for whom unassuming
might be too forceful an adjective. Indeed, Giamatti has made a career of
playing ordinary men. Not Everymen, those idealized American archetypes
embodied by Tom Hanks and Gary Cooper at their most populist, but mere
scufflers, guys who exist on the fringes of the camera frame—dudes who spend
their time in betting parlors and back offices, eating Fritos and thinking
about what’s on Fox tonight. Giamatti has played scores of these guys, in roles
tiny, medium, and, recently, large, and the trick he’s pulled is never to
repeat himself, never to fall into a stock-character performance, even when
it’s all the script demands. This is partly by design: “The one thing I’ve
successfully tried to avoid,” he says, “is the script where I have to sit down
at a terminal and be Geeky Computer Guy, doing this [mimes furious keystroking] and tracking the hero as he’s fighting terrorists: ‘Get
outta there, Spike!’ ”
But Giamatti is also remarkably
chameleonic, transmogrifying from harried nebbish to sleazy confidence
man to loyal best friend to orangutan (in Tim Burton’s Planet of the Apes) like a career criminal perpetually on the lam.
Ron Howard had already cast Giamatti in his latest film, Cinderella Man, an old-fashioned boxing
yarn that opens this month, before the director realized that this was the same
actor he’d loved six years earlier as Howard Stern’s apoplectic nemesis, NBC
radio programming executive Kenny “Pig Vomit” Rushton, in Private Parts. “I sort of backtracked to Pig Vomit after the fact,”
Howard says. “I saw Paul in American
Splendor when I was casting Cinderella
Man and thought he was perfect for the Joe Gould part. But I hadn’t linked
Harvey Pekar to Pig Vomit in my mind.”
As Joe Gould, the
ringside sage who engineers the unlikely 1934 comeback of Jim Braddock (Russell
Crowe), a real-life heavyweight contender from New Jersey who was reduced to
working on the docks when the Great Depression hit, Giamatti is more dapper
than usual—his hair slicked with Brylcreem, his body draped in bespoke woolens
and gabardines—but his performance is pure Boy-jess
Meredith, all salt and snarl. (When Braddock gets entangled in the ring
with the heavyweight champ, Max Baer [Craig Bierko], Giamatti-as-Gould shouts,
“Hey, Maxela! You gonna punch him or pork him?”) It’s funny just to see
Giamatti opposite Crowe, who is at his most stoic as
Braddock—like watching a hummingbird flit spasmodically around a sequoia.
Gould may be the sophisticate to Braddock’s rube, but it’s still another case
of Giamatti as a mere mortal, watching from the sidelines, cockeyed and
pear-shaped, as the chiseled hero has his date with destiny.
The
twist on this premise is that Giamatti’s life has been anything
but ordinary. He grew up in New Haven, Connecticut, as the youngest son of A.
Bartlett Giamatti, the beloved Yale English professor who became the
university’s youngest-ever president in 1978 and served in that position until
1986, when he left to become the president of baseball’s National League and,
subsequently, commissioner of the entire league. Bart Giamatti died on September 1, 1989, just 154 days
into his tenure as the big league’s top man and just eight days after he
famously banished Pete Rose from baseball for betting on games. “I don’t have
an opinion on Pete Rose, which people find hard to believe,” Giamatti
says. “All that event means to me in my mind is, it’s
when my father died, so it’s just depressing.”
Giamatti’s
education was heavy-duty—Choate, followed by Yale undergrad, followed by the
Yale School of Drama—and he spent his childhood in the company of some of
America’s greatest public intellectuals, who just happened to be his dad’s
colleagues and buddies: the literary critic Harold Bloom, the architecture
critic Vincent Scully, the art historian Robert Farris Thompson. I put it to
Giamatti that his performance as Harvey Pekar, my favorite, must have been
influenced by knowing Bloom. I’ve seen the latter shufflng around the
campus of New York University, where Bloom also
teaches, and I thought I detected echoes of the great Western Canon man in Giamatti-as-Pekar’s dyspeptic facial
expressions and extreme posture—the head slung low and forward, almost
perpendicular to the shoulders. “Probably, unconsciously, I did think of Harold
Bloom,” he says. “I mean, there’s definitely a turtle-out-of-its-shell
kind of quality, the super-world-weary thing, that they both have. You know,
when I did Planet of the Apes, I
actually think I do remember consciously thinking of Harold Bloom a couple of
times, ’cause I had that sort of big orangutan sac-goiter thing around my neck.
So if you want to see any Harold Bloom in any of my performances…”
Of his upbringing
among the all-stars of academe, Giamatti protests that he can’t view his youth
as having been anything but normal, since it was all he knew. “These were just
guys my dad worked with,” he says. “I’m not saying it’s not special. The place,
physically, to grow up in, was amazing. I can remember playing with Robert
Thompson’s kid, sneaking into the Kline Bio Tower and stuff. But it
was just my dad’s job.” Giamatti
likewise downplays his time at the Yale School of Drama, incubator of such
talents as Paul Newman, Meryl Streep, and Sigourney Weaver. “I was the old-man
actor,” he says. “If there had to be somebody in a Chekhov play, you know, in a
wheelchair with a blanket over his legs and a Panama hat on, that was me.”
But to hear it
from others, Giamatti was not the nonentity he makes himself out to be. Ron
Howard says that a former executive at his production company, Imagine
Entertainment, was a classmate of Giamatti’s at Yale and told Howard that “the
whole student body went to the theater when they heard that Paul Giamatti was
in a play.” And Robert Thompson recalls being struck by Giamatti’s performing
gifts at an early age. “Once, when he was a kid, I gave him a French-language
phrase booklet,” says Thompson, “and he instantly turned it into this hilarious
performance: ‘I need a hospital! I need an ambulance! I have a fever! I need a
car! I need gas!’ Later on, he took my course The Black Atlantic Visual
Tradition, and he sat way in the back, in the hip row, where Jodie Foster also
sat, and I called on him when I needed a pithy response, something that had
some humor. I think that with Sideways,
the inevitable happened. Eventually, he will play Tom Cruise roles. Mark my
words.”
Thompson doesn’t
see it as a stretch to liken Paul, the sleepy-eyed homunculus who plays losers
and says frickin’ a lot, to Bart, the
Renaissance man who “spoke the baccalaureate in this resonant tone.” Bart, for
all his magnetism and intellect, was a rumpled eccentric—a smoker who would
fish a half-spent butt out of the pocket of his suit jacket before
launching into a discourse on Carl Yastrzemski—and Paul has inherited his
appealing combo of smarts and unpretentiousness. “The genes are the closest we
get to immortality,” Thompson says, a palpable longing for his late friend in
his voice, “and when I watch Paul in movies, I see and hear Bart.”
Giamatti lost his
mother, Toni, last September, on the eve of Sideways-mania.
“My sister and I are constantly saying the irony is that the person who would
have most enjoyed all the hoopla would have been my mom,” he says. “In a funny way, that might have contributed to my feelings about the Academy
Award stuff,” he continues. “I’d had something much worse happen to me,
very recently. So I was kind of like, ‘On the list of the worst things that
have happened to me, [the snub] is pretty low.’ ”
So where does the hoopla lead? I express my concern to
Giamatti that he might go Hollywood on us and
suddenly get buff like Michael (The
Shield) Chiklis—“Man, he’s seriously streamlined!” Giamatti interjects—or
renounce his King Schlump status, much as Renée Zellweger seems to contract
immediately into thinness after finishing a Bridget Jones, wearing size 0 couture as if to say “Only kidding!”
“The short answer
to that is no, I won’t be doing that anytime soon,” he says. “There’s a part of
me that feels like I actually have a mission to look like crap on film.
In a way, I’m glad I look the way I look. I’m not ashamed of it—you read some
things and would think that I look like a wild boar or something. But if there
was a viable reason in the script to lose weight—’cause I’ve been starving in
the desert for years—I would do it.”
I bemoan to
Giamatti the oppressive fitness of movie stars, even comic actors. “Ben
Stiller is really buff,” I say, “and he has no business being buff.”
“I know!” he says.
“And then when you see him in a movie, you’re kind of like, ‘Now it’s not funny
anymore.’ It really happens with women. They get all hard and muscly and sunken
cheeked, with those broad James Caan shoulders. But the pressure on them is a
thousand times worse. I’m lucky. I get to just look like crap.”
Giamatti being
Giamatti, he hasn’t spent much of the capital, monetary or professional, that
his recent success has brought. His sole extravagance, if it can be called that, is
the Brooklyn Heights apartment he now
lives in with his wife and young son after years on the Lower East Side. And rather than
use his newfound leverage to work with, say, Steven Soderbergh to signify his
arrival at the cinematic vanguard, he has chosen to follow up Sideways with a small film set in
Vienna called The Illusionist,
directed by a little-known filmmaker named Neil Burger, in which he takes second
billing to Edward Norton.
Should Giamatti
choose to go flagrantly commercial, however, there is the still
unsubsided Sideways
phenomenon. These gastro- and oeno-porn things have legs, I tell him, as the Toujours Provence and Babette’s Feast legions can attest.
“Somebody did say to me the other day, ‘Dude, you should get on that bandwagon.
You should be Orson Welles. Go up and make appearances at wineries,’ ” he
replies. “At this point, I am not choosing to milk that. But I suppose, if
times get lean for me, I could. For, like, ten years, I bet, I could ride that
out.” He chuckles and shakes his head. “How sad would that be?”
« Close
September 4, 2006
Link
GQ
Only the Ball Was Brown
Everyone knows about Jackie Robinson. I was curious about the black men who integrated what is today America’s most black-identified sports league, the NBA. And I was delighted to learn that Earl Lloyd, the very first black man to play in a regular-season NBA game, in the fall of 1950, was alive and well in Tennessee. So in 2001, I went down to his house to spend some time with him, and I also interviewed most of the other surviving black players who broke into the league in the 1950s. As it turns out, this story didn’t have the deep drama of Robinson’s, but for a fascinating reason: Whereas the white world of baseball was heavily populated by poorly educated yokels unused to being around blacks (and more inclined to be openly racist), the NBA in the 1950s was largely the domain of educated urbanites, what you might call white ethnics–Jews, Italians, Irish and Polish Catholics–who were used to being around blacks and less inclined to make a big deal of integration. Still, it was a tough road for most of the black guys who played professional basketball in the ’50s, as this story–inexplicably, one of the most obscure in my back catalog; no one read it–shows.
P.S. The headline for this story was devised by the late Art Cooper, then GQ’s editor, as a wink to Robert Peterson’s history of baseball’s Negro Leagues, Only the Ball Was White.
Read More »
The National Basketball Association, spring 1950. The season just ending is the league’s first under the NBA moniker, which came about when the Basketball Association of America (BAA), an East Coast–based league, absorbed six teams from the defunct National Basketball League (NBL), which had served the Midwest. There are seventeen NBA teams, six of which—the Chicago Stags, the St. Louis Bombers, the Denver Nuggets, the Anderson (Indiana) Packers, the Sheboygan (Wisconsin) Redskins and the Waterloo (Iowa) Hawks—will not scrape together funds to continue into the 1950–51 season. There are 200-odd players playing. Every one of them is white.
The game is played in sateen shorts cut as high as majorettes’ pants, in ringed white socks pulled up to just below the knees, in arenas built for hockey and in dingy gymnasiums borrowed from high schools. It is played by men named Stanczak and Sadowski and Schatzman and Zaslofsky. The Rochester Royals, one of the league’s premier teams, have two big men named Arnie, both of whom are fed passes by a canny little guard out of CCNY, name of Holzman, whose shoulders are as furry as a chimp’s. The league’s biggest star, literally and figuratively, is a six-foot-ten Illinoisian who, with his steel-rimmed glasses and Rockwellian cowlick, looks like nothing so much as an elongated pharmacist. His name is George Mikan, and though he’s the center for the champion Minneapolis Lakers and averages more than twenty-seven points a game, he does not dunk. Dunking is something players do for fun during pregame shoot-arounds, but never, ever, during a game—that would be hotdogging, unsportsmanlike. Scoring is executed by completing a layup or a two-handed set shot. The contagion of the jump shot has only just begun; it is a new technique, embraced by younger players but regarded with suspicion by some coaches because, after all, how can a man control his body if he’s airborne?
Though it barely stretches west of the Mississippi, the NBA is the first truly national league for the second-tier sport of basketball, which, since its invention by Dr. James Naismith in 1891, has led a Balkanized existence of regional leagues, semipro leagues and unaffiliated clubs that barnstorm from city to city. The Philadelphia Warriors, one of the current NBA teams, are holdovers from this murky past, having begun their life as an offshoot of a fierce barnstorming outfit known as the SPHA—short for the South Philadelphia Hebrew Association—who, in the ’20s, enjoyed a rousing rivalry with the mighty Cleveland Rosenblums. Joe Lapchick, perhaps the mightiest Rosenblum of them all, is now the coach of the New York Knickerbockers. The Fort Wayne (Indiana) Pistons, another current NBA team, were once the NBL’s Fort Wayne Zollner Pistons, so named for the owner, Fred Zollner, whose company manufactures pistons for automobile engines. Taking a nickname from one’s sponsor was until recently a common practice; hence, in the 1940s, the Toledo Jim White Chevrolets, the Fort Wayne General Electrics, the Akron Firestone Non-Skids and the Chicago Duffy Florals.
It is not uncommon to see black men playing alongside white men on integrated teams at college-basketball double-headers at Madison Square Garden, or to see all-black college squads playing each other in the South. But the only black men playing professional basketball right now are the Harlem Globetrotters, they of the striped shorts and whistled renditions of “Sweet Georgia Brown.” Until recently, there were also the New York Rens, but they folded last year. In their time, the Rens, so named for having played their early games in the Renaissance ballroom on 128th Street in Harlem, were the greatest of the barnstorming teams, compiling an astonishing record of 2,588 wins against 529 losses in twenty-seven years. In 1939 they defeated the NBL’s reigning champs, the all-white Oshkosh All-Stars, to win the first World Professional Basketball Tournament, an unofficial “basketball World Series” sponsored by the Chicago Herald American newspaper. Nine years later, as the NBL was foundering in its final season, the Rens were invited to take the place of the league’s just-collapsed Detroit franchise, the Vagabond Kings. But the Rens were by then an aging and rickety collection of men; playing out of Ohio as the Dayton Rens, they went 14-26 and called it a day.
The Globetrotters are not, in fact, from Harlem but from Chicago, their misnomer imposed upon them by their sixty-three-inch-tall fireplug of an owner, Abe Saperstein. As a young man in the late 1920s, Saperstein, a tailor’s son, persuaded a promising group of black South Side players, then known as the Savoy Big Five, to let him manage them. Saperstein rechristened them the Harlem Globetrotters to evoke black cosmopolitanism and, more to the point, encourage comparison with the Rens, who had already acquired a national reputation. His father stitched together the striped shorts. Although the Globetrotters quickly emerged as a competitive force to be reckoned with—and defeated the Rens en route to taking the 1940 World Professional Basketball Tournament title—they are most renowned for their clowning and trickery: spinning balls on their fingers, performing virtuosic dribbling displays, dumping buckets of confetti on their opponents, etc.
This flair for showmanship has made the Globetrotters the biggest draw in pro basketball. When they came to the Minneapolis Auditorium in March of 1949 to play an exhibition game against Mikan’s Lakers, then the reigning champs of the NBL, the reported attendance of 10,112 was the highest in Lakers history—and shall remain so until the Lakers move to Los Angeles in 1960. The fledgling NBA, desperate for coattail business, has taken to putting its games on double bills with the Globetrotters’ contests against college All-Star teas and patsy semipro outfits. These circumstances have conspired to give Saperstein formidable leverage: If you’re an NBA-team owner and want to pull crowds, you talk to Abe. If you’re a black man and you want to be paid to play basketball, you talk to Abe.
But at the 1950 NBA draft, held in a Chicago hotel on April 25, something surprising happens. When the time comes for the Boston Celtics to make their second-round pick, the Celtics’ owner, Walter Brown, confers with the 32-year-old coach he has just hired, Arnold “Red” Auerbach, and then announces, “Boston takes Charles Cooper of Duquesne.”
Cooper, better known as Chuck, is an all-American forward who happens to be black. Light-skinned, but certifiably Negroid.
“Walter,” says someone in the room, “don’t you know he’s a colored boy?”
“I don’t give a damn if he’s striped, plaid or polka-dot!” says Brown. “Boston takes Chuck Cooper of Duquesne!”
“Uh-oh,” says Eddie Gottlieb, the coach of the Philadelphia Warriors and a chum of Saperstein’s. “Abe’s gonna go crazy.”
Seven rounds later, in the ninth, the Washington Capitols select Earl Lloyd out of West Virginia State. West Virginia State is an all-black college, so this time no one attempts to ascertain the team owner’s knowledge of his draft pick’s skin pigmentation. Lloyd, in fact, has recently spent a week touring with the Globetrotters as a sort of trial run, to see if he’s suited for a life in striped shorts.
Upon hearing the news that Cooper and Lloyd have been drafted, Abe does indeed go crazy. He retaliates by announcing that the Globetrotters and their boffo gate receipts shall forever be withheld from the cities of Boston and Washington. But Walter Brown withholds his ground. “As far as I’m concerned,” he says, “Abe Saperstein is out of the Boston Garden right now.” Cooper and Lloyd are NBA-bound.
So, by summertime, is Nat “Sweetwater” Clifton, a 27-year-old member of the Globetrotters. Clifton has incurred Saperstein’s wrath by informing his teammates of a discovery he has made: The white collegiate All-Stars against whom the Globetrotters are competing on their current tour are being paid more per game than the Globetrotters are. Saperstein decides to offload the ingrate Clifton to Lapchick and the Knicks, who are happy to purchase his contract.
And so the 1950-51 season begins with Cooper, Lloyd and Clifton poised to integrate the NBA. Cooper and Clifton are northerners, from Pittsburgh and Chicago, respectively, and have mixed with whites all their lives. Lloyd, by contrast, has spent most of his twenty-two years in segregation, having grown up in an all-black enclave of Alexandria, Virginia, having attended an all-black college in the mountains of West Virginia, having never even engaged in a conversation with a white man until arriving at the Capitols’ training camp and meeting with his new coach, Horace “Bones” McKinney. But owing to a scheduling quirk that dictates that the Capitols open their season before the Celtics and the Knicks, it so transpires that on October 31, 1950, in an away game against the Rochester Royals, Lloyd, the son of a Virginia coal-yard worker, becomes the first black man ever to play basketball in the NBA.
“I MEAN, HERE YOU ARE,” SAYS LLOYD, LEANING FORWARD IN AN armchair. “You’re a young black kid from a very small town, extremely segregated—the cradle of segregation—and you’re picked to play in the NBA. Which is basically a white league. I’ve never sat next to a white peer, never had a conversation, never exchanged a pleasantry. And your first major contract with white people has to be at this level of competition. Even though you don’t want to admit it, it’s frightening. You’ve been treated inferiorly all your life, so it’s very easy to believe you’re…what? Inferior. And the first question you ask yourself—you know, quietly—‘Do I belong here?’”
Lloyd is 73 now, the only living member of the original trio, and he spent much of the past NBA season on a league-sponsored victory lap, appearing at various ceremonies commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the league’s integration. Belonging, obviously, is no longer a concern, nor is the novelty of interacting with white folks. He lives with his wife in an acutely Caucasoid golfing development in Fairfield Glade, Tennessee, a circumstance that he acknowledges is rather rich given his background and even richer given that he doesn’t golf. He lives in this place simply because he’s retired and “the livin’ is good here, as I think you’ll find.” His overall audiovisual self-presentation is typical of a senior in such a community: the paunch of contentment, the propensity to recline, the easy volubility, the cushiony arch-support sneakers over white socks—although the retiree-high hitch of his trousers serves to emphasize the uncommon length of his legs, making him seem even taller than his Official NBA Encyclopedia height of six feet six.
Lloyd’s tenure with the Capitols was short-lived, but only because he was drafted into the army seven games into his rookie season—which was just as well, since the lowly Caps folded a few weeks later, reducing the league to just ten teams. Upon completing his military duty, in 1952, he was welcomed back into the NBA and played six years for the Syracuse Nationals, winning a championship with them in ’55, before finishing his career with the Pistons, who had moved to Detroit in 1957. Thereafter, he spent most of his adult life in Detroit, working for the Pistons as a scout, assistant coach and briefly, head coach and then as a member of the city’s board of education.
That Halloween night in Rochester proved to be oddly unepochal. Lloyd says his fears of not belonging were overcome weeks earlier in training camp, when he was accepted without incident by the other players and made the team despite his low-pick status. The Caps lost to the Royals in that first game, but Lloyd led all rebounders with ten. “In all honesty, that particular night was uneventful,” he says. “You’re in Rochester, New York. You’re in a town where the university is integrated, the high school is integrated. So as a consequence, the newspaper didn’t play it up. The Ku Klux Klan wasn’t there with ropes and robes and stuff.”
So that’s it—a debut, a career, a landscaped split-level in eastern Tennessee. No mythology, no wide-screen epic of struggle overcome, no Jackie Robinson–style breakthrough for the first black man to play in what is now America’s most black-identified professional sports league, a league that has borrowed from hip-hop vernacular for its new slogan, IT’S ALL GOOD. In fact, comparison with Robinson makes Lloyd indignant: “Man, you can’t compare the first black player coming to pro basketball with Jackie Robinson! I’m not gonna even dignify that. That man was a world-class track athlete, all-American football player, the leading scorer of the Pacific Coast Conference in basketball. And he makes the Hall of Fame in his worst sport? You’re kidding, man!”
Lloyd is right: He is no Robinson, and there’s no single incident in basketball’s history that compares with the vortical momentousness of Robinson’s 1947 debut with the Brooklyn Dodgers. But he, Cooper and Clifton were part of an incremental, under-the-radar process that ultimately proved every bit as important, since basketball would come to be, as Nelson George put it in his book Elevating the Game: Black Men and Basketball, “the prime arena after World War II for black athletic innovation” and the main showcase for what George calls the “modern black athletic aesthetic,” that identifiably African-American fusion of flamboyance, improvisation and intimidation. Beyond that, the integration of basketball would have massive cultural implications. For anyone under 50, it’s hard to contemplate that there was ever a time when basketball was not a black-identified sport; trying to do so is a mind-warping exercise, like trying to contemplate what the universe was like before earth was formed or what being dead will be like. Basketball is today, along with hip-hop, one of the tent poles of African-American cultural identity. And since young white America takes its cues from young black America, basketball is, when you get right down to it, a cornerstone of American cultural identity. But when these men came up, basketball carried no such weight. They were the unknowing instigators of a cultural sea change.
One of the reasons no one foresaw this transformation—and why no news organization sent its ace correspondent to cover the breaking of the NBA color barrier—is the NBA was no big deal at the time, a poor relation to Major League Baseball, the National Football League and even the National Hockey League. (Indeed, as recently as 1980, the NBA was sufficiently unimportant that the decisive Game 6 of that year’s Finals was broadcast only on tape delay on the East Coast, well after prime time. That game happened to be the one in which the Lakers rookie Magic Johnson stepped in for the injured Kareem Abdul-Jabbar to torch the Philadelphia 76ers for forty-two points, sealing his stardom.) “Baseball was the sport in the ’50s,” says Lloyd. “I mean, basketball was, like, ho-hum. Even to me. I was a big Joe DiMaggio fan.”
The lack of a basketball figure comparable to Robinson is further explained by the fact that, technically speaking, Lloyd, Cooper and Clifton weren’t the first blacks to integrate a professional basketball league. The NBL, volatile and small-market though it was, was a genuine pro league, and it had admitted black players in dribs and drabs throughout the 1940s. Blacks were playing in the NBL as early as 1942, when the league’s Toledo Jim White Chevrolets and Chicago Studebakers, their ranks depleted by the World War II draft, signed black players to short-term deals to shore up their rosters. Among those signed by the Chevrolets was Bill Jones, a former University of Toledo star who later logged some time with the Globetrotters and is now an 87-year-old ex-schoolteacher in Los Angeles. “I wasn’t aware of it at the time, but I was the first African-American to play in the National Basketball League,” he says. “I played four games, and then on December 15, 1942, Jim White disbanded the team.”
If any one player deserves the designation “the Jackie Robinson of basketball,” it’s Bill Russell, the NBA’s first black superstar, who altered the balance of the league when he joined the Boston Celtics in 1956 and led them to eleven titles in the next thirteen years—and, every bit as important, never took any gruff from anyone, about his game, his race or his (then controversial) goatee. Nevertheless, it’s surprising that the men who paved the way for Russell—Lloyd, Cooper and Clifton, along with eighteen other blacks who entered the league before he did—are so unsung. Although they might not have faced as difficult a road as Robinson, it still took some kind of drive and turn-the-other-cheek fortitude to enter a league in which they were a microminority, dispatched night after night into potentially hostile environments. It’s telling that most of these players were college graduates and that most of them went on to have an afterlife of eminence, to emerge as men of great standing and good works—Bill Cosby ideals of black achievement. Cooper returned to school after his NBA career fizzled, got his master’s degree in social work, and later became a Pittsburgh businessman and the city’s Parks and Recreation director. Jim Tucker, who became the Syracuse National’s second black player, in 1954, won a fellowship to Harvard and wound up an executive at Pillsbury. Jesse Arnelle, a Penn State star who spent one season in the mid-’50s with the Pistons, later founded the largest minority-owned law firm in the United States. Bob Wilson, Jr., who followed the original black trio into the league in 1951 with the Milwaukee Hawks, was, until his 1995 retirement, the executive vice president of the YMCA Retirement Fund, where he managed $2 billion in assets.
The campus pedigrees of these men underscore the one unmistakable advantage they had over Robinson: They were operating in a realm in which not only were they college graduates but their white peers were as well. None faced a situation as acute as Robinson’s vis-à-vis his teammate Dixie Walker, a revered, popular Dodgers veteran who organized a petition to keep Robinson off the team because he feared infection and contamination from using the same facilities as a Negro. “Most of the people who played baseball at that time were from below the Mason-Dixon Line, and most of ’em never seen a college,” says Lloyd. “I mean, you got some guys from down south—hell, their first pair of shoes were baseball shoes! But my teammates were very intelligent, man. Dolph Schayes was a smart, kind of absentminded-professor kind of guy. I mean, anybody finishes NYU with a degree in engineering at 19 years old, you gotta be kind of smart.”
Red Auerbach recalls that his white players greeted the news of Cooper’s imminent arrival with admirable magnanimity. “As soon as we drafted him,” he says, “a couple of guys came to me—Bob Cousy was one of them—and said ‘Can we room with Chuck?’ ” That same year, Cousy, a Queens-born Catholic kid who’d starred at Holy Cross, took umbrage when a hotel in Raleigh, North Carolina, where the Celtics had played an exhibition game, refused to let Cooper stay there. So he walked the streets with Cooper for hours until they could catch a 3 A.M. sleeper train back to Boston. Sweetwater Clifton, so nicknamed for his fondness for soda pop, was similarly embraced by his teammates, says Ray Lumpp, a Knick in the late ’40s and early ’50s. “Sweets was one of us,” he says. “My wife and I socialized with him and his wife, and my kids used to call him Sweet-wawa.”
The NBA’s early days abound with such stories, touching evidence of the vanished outsider alliance between blacks and white ethnics. Basketball, long before it was explicitly a black-identified game, was more broadly an urban-identified game, embraced by the Irish, German, Italian, Jewish and black populations of inner cities and therefore by people used to living in heterogeneous populations. Not coincidentally, the college basketball teams of the Northeast attracted dedicated followings well before the pro teams did, especially at integrated schools such as St. John’s, Villanova, Seton Hall, Duquesne, the City College of New York, New York University and Long Island University.
But mid-century America was still too unforgiving in its racial attitudes for the NBA’s integration to have been a heart-warming tale of pure uplift. Draw Lloyd out on his experiences, get into the details, and his recollections become less facile and more pained. The same goes for his fellow pioneers, and in the case of one player, Hank DeZonie, the bitterness preempts any jovial wasn’t-that-a-time reminisces whatsoever. DeZonie is a kind of footnote to Lloyd, Cooper and Clifton, a former New York Rens star who led that team in scoring in its final, miserable season in Dayton and then briefly played in the NBA in ’50-51, the same season the original trio made their debut. He landed on the roster of the Tri-Cities Blackhawks, a particularly unstable team that played out of Moline, Illinois, and eventually morphed into the Atlanta Hawks, with stops in Milwaukee and St. Louis along the way. Though he was at the peak of his basketball powers, DeZonie played only five games for Tri-Cities. Today he is retired from the restaurant business and living in Harlem. “I ain’t too hot on the subject, ’cause it ain’t about nothin’,” he says of his abbreviated NBA career. “It’s a story that every black athlete went through: If you can’t do what you can do in your time, when can you do it? It’s not pleasant to talk about.” And that—click!—is all you’re going to hear from Hank DeZonie.
THE GREAT INTEGRATION EXPERIMENT OF 1950 did not exactly precipitate a gusher of black talent into the NBA. When Lloyd returned from military service in 1952 to join the Syracuse Nats, he found just two more black players than before, both with the Baltimore Bullets: Don Barksdale, the former UCLA star who in 1948 became the first black gold medalist on a U.S. Olympic basketball team, and Davage Minor, another UCLA alumnus. Barksdale was arguably the league’s first black glamour figure, telegenic and savvy in the Michael Jordan–Magic Johnson vein; he had his own off-season TV and radio programs in his native Oakland, and the Baltimore Sun reported that the “6-foot-6 Negro hoopster” had signed the richest contract in the city’s professional sports history, paying him even more money than the $18,000 that Y.A. Tittle, the Colts’ quarterback, reputedly made. But Barksdale’s pro career was relatively short-lived—he lasted four years in the league—and Minor’s was even more of a blip, just two seasons.
Another black player, Lloyd’s old West Virginia State teammate Bob Wilson Jr., had already been and gone in his buddy’s absence, spending the 1951-52 season with the Milwaukee Hawks. Had circumstances panned out differently, Wilson would today be mentioned in the same breath as Lloyd, Cooper and Clifton. The Chicago Stags had acquired rights to him in 1950, the year of integration, but the team folded before the season began. Expecting his first child and leery of the NBA’s instability, Wilson accepted a teaching post in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, oblivious to the fact that his rights had been transferred to Tri-Cities, whose front office didn’t know where to reach him. When the Blackhawks finally found him, they invited him up to their 1951 training camp. “I don’t know how much you know about Moline or Davenport, Iowa, but it was a very prejudiced place,” he says. “It was late at night, and I had driven all the way from West Virginia. All of the players were staying at the YMCA. And when I showed up at the Y, they said I couldn’t stay at the Y.” (This to a man who would later serve as an executive for the very same organization.) At training camp, Wilson discovered yet another disorganized team that was on the verge of folding. At the last minute, the team moved to Milwaukee, becoming the Milwaukee Hawks. When the smoke cleared, Wilson was the only black player on the roster.
Wilson spent one rough season with the last-place Hawks, forging an unlikely friendship with his Mormon roommate, Mel Hutchins, and enduring a misery of hostile hotels that grudgingly let him stay but expressly forbade him from eating in their restaurants. Doxie Moore, the Hawks’ sympathetic coach, forewarned Wilson when a segregated NBA city was coming up—the dreaded ones were Fort Wayne, Indianapolis and Baltimore—but Wilson couldn’t help responding with caustic gallows humor: “I said, ‘Doxie, you know what’s gonna happen one of these days? They’re gonna segregate me. They’re gonna have a separate basket that only I can shoot at. And I’m gonna score a hundred points!”
Wilson’s career effectively ended when, late in the season, he was tripped in a game against the Philadelphia Warriors and injured his knee. He returned for the ’52 training camp but didn’t make the team. “They said I wasn’t cutting it because of the knee,” he says. “It wasn’t really that. It was the new coach who’d replaced Doxie, Fuzzy Levane. I don’t think he liked me from day one. He was a racist sucker.”
The 81-year-old Levane is flabbergasted when Wilson’s charge is put to him. “Jesus, I’m just the opposite!” he says. “Oh shit! Hey if she was good enough to play, I woulda played my grandmother! Tell him I cut a lot of white guys too!” Levane, who is of Italian extraction, notes that when he played with the Rochester Royals in the NBL in the late ’40s, he, Red Holzman and the black former Long Island University star Dolly King roomed together at the city’s Hotel Seneca. “A paesan, a Jew and a black,” he says, “and we all got along famously.”
By the mid-’50s, black players were still just trickling into the NBA, but now enough of them were in the league—including three all-Americans who’d followed in Chuck Cooper’s footsteps at Duquesne University, Jim Tucker, Dick Ricketts and Sihugo Green—to constitute a sort of informal support group, a b-ball brotherhood. Players exchanged information on navigating hostile cities—Indianapolis and St. Louis were where fans were most likely to spit on you and call you “nigger”; St. Louis had a cafeteria called Miss Hulling’s where you could get served without contempt—and they sometimes even put up out-of-town opponents for the night, to spare them the ignominy of hotel hassles.
By dint of his age and experience, Lloyd emerged as an elder of the brotherhood. “I mean, it was kind of a tacit responsibility,” he says. “You got to step up. I’d call ’em and say, ‘Hey, look, man, what you want to do after the game? These are some of the things happening right now. If you choose to go out, I’ll pick you up and take you home’—the whole thing.” In Syracuse this often meant dinner at Lloyd’s home in the Fifteenth Ward, the city’s black neighborhood, and a trip to his favorite haunt, a jazz club called the Embassy. As a general rule, in fact, jazz clubs were a good postgame option. “Downbeat was my bible,” Lloyd says. “Every city I went to had jazz clubs Downbeat had rated. That’s where I spent my time. I never got lonely. Lonely people get lonely, boring people get bored. There’s too much to do, man. John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Dexter Gordon…”
Lloyd surmises that he handled the racial adversity on the road better than Cooper and Clifton because, having grown up in the segregated South, he was never surprised by a slight. “In exhibition season, you played a lot of little tank towns, towns like Alton, Illinois, or Mount Vernon, Illinois—you know, they’re not user-friendly for people like me. For Chuck, it was a kick in the groin, man, sleeping in a hotel but not being allowed to eat there. But here I am, from Virginia…. Man, I was shocked they let me sleep there.” Lloyd’s approach stood in marked contrast to the righteous agitation of later black players, such as Russell and Elgin Baylor, who chose to boycott exhibition games in southern cities rather than sleep in Negro hotels or accept the sleep-yes, eat-no arrangement offered them in white hotels. (Baylor told a white teammate, “I’m a human being. I’m not an animal to be put in a cage and let out for the show.”)
But Lloyd never thought of this as a matter of accepting second-class status, being the docile “good Negro.” “I was not a subservient type of person,” he says. “You have to pick and choose the issues that you want to fight for. You don’t want to win battles and then lose the war. And with three guys in the league, it’s like pissing into a hurricane. What the hell you gonna accomplish? Chuck, Sweets, myself—what could we say? I mean, how am I gonna pave the way for somebody else if I’m thinking in this vein and I get fired? Because if Syracuse cuts me loose, and they label me a rabble-rouser or a clubhouse lawyer, who’s gonna pick me up? I mean, they’re scared to death of you anyhow.”
“IN ATHLETICS, YOU KIND OF FORGET ABOUT race,” says Willie Naulls, a black Knicks and Celtics stalwart who joined the league in 1956. “You concentrate on the mission of a team. It’s on of the great things about sports.” He adds, rather tetchily and pointedly, “Race was not much of an issue within the team. It was more something brought up by sportswriters.” But in Bill Russell’s bracingly blunt first memoir, Go Up For Glory, published in 1966, when he and Naulls were both with the Celtics, race is the topic that won’t go away; it’s forever insinuating itself into the narrative. One chapter is titled “It,” the two-letter pronoun denoting the constant, lurking presence of racial prejudice and its potential to erupt into a “situation” (“Another place ‘it’ happened was in Marion, Indiana…”). Russell’s anecdotes of “it” aren’t limited to the usual 1950s villains, the redneck fans and snippy waitresses. Indeed, the book functions partially as a thorough catalog of the racial slights inflicted upon him by teammates, coaches and executives. Red Auerbach, we learn, was unequaled in his embrace of black talent but too willing to accept segregated conditions down south and offensive in his naïve expectations that Russell would have heard of an obscure North Carolina College prospect named Sam Jones because “he’s a schvartze…I thought you’d know about him.” Even bighearted, principled Walter Brown, who never did wrong by Cooper, Russell or any of the other Celtics’ black players, is portrayed as delusional in denying Russell’s public claim that the NBA had an unofficial quota on blacks in the late ’50s, allowing no more than two or three per team.
It’s true that race was hardly ever talked about within the confines of locker rooms and team trains and planes, but the issue was always there, subtly affecting the dynamics among players. “It wasn’t discussed, but you felt it,” says Jackie Moore, the first black player on the Philadelphia Warriors, who says he never developed a close friendship with anyone on the otherwise all-white team. “You got the feeling sometimes that you weren’t wanted on the team. And I heard racial slurs from time to time in game situations.” Lloyd, for his part, can think of an instance in which he wishes race were talked about more openly. “Syracuse played an exhibition in South Carolina, I think in 1953, and I couldn’t make the trip because they don’t allow blacks and whites to play against each other in South Carolina,” he says. “And not one person on that team ever said, ‘If Earl can’t go, I’m not going.’ The question I would ask now: Why would you schedule a game when all your players can’t go? What are you saying about how you feel about me?”
The response of the 1950s white players is generally one of remorse and contextualization. “In those days, it was a little different,” says Al Bianchi, one of Lloyd’s white friends on the Nats and later the general manager of the Knicks. “It never really sank in until later on. When I think back at it now, I think, Jesus, why didn’t we say, ‘Hell, we ain’t goin’!’? But then it was an accepted part of life.”
Then there was the whole thing about playing defense—about how, if you were the black guy on the team, you were there to block, guard, rebound and foul out in the cause of the shooters and playmakers. This was a subliminal sentiment, never uttered aloud and perhaps not even consciously thought by coaches, but there it was: the beast-of-burden stereotype made manifest. “The early perception was that black players were enforcers,” says Tucker, who, at six feet eight and a mere 180 pounds, was not built for enforcing. “I was an offensive player at Duquesne—the plays were designed for me and my roommate, Dick Ricketts. When I came to Syracuse, they didn’t know what to do with me.”
With their offensive games held in check, a lot of the early black players suffered serious career consequences, unsure of their roles, disenchanted, or dogged by the perception that they were merely “role players.” Tucker never really adjusted to his new “enforcer” role and lasted little more than two seasons with the Nats, averaging just 4.1 points per game. Ricketts, despite being the Milwaukee Hawks’ first-round pick from that year, Jesse Arnelle, lasted all of thirty-one games with Fort Wayne, averaging 4.7 points a game despite being, to this day, Penn State University’s all-time leading scorer. Cooper made more of a go of it, lasting six years with the Celtics, the Hawks and the Pistons, but he, too, felt his style had been cramped. “There was a sense of bitterness about Chuck,” says Tucker, who remained friends with Cooper after both men were out of the league. Before his death in 1984, Cooper told an interviewer, “There were things I had to adapt to throughout my career that I wouldn’t have had to if I were white. I was expected to play good, sound, intensified defense and really get under the boards for the heavy dirty work.”
Of all the black NBA players in the early 1950s, the ex-Globetrotter Clifton had the most manifestly “black” game as we think of it today, incorporating no-look passes, behind-the-back dribbling and graceful moves to the basket—what Lloyd summarizes as “Globie flair” (whereas Lloyd was, in his own words, “a traditional basketball player who happened to be black”). Although he averaged ten points a game over an eight-year career and made the ’57 All-Star team, Clifton bristled at the limitations placed on him. “When I first came to the Knicks, I found I had to change over,” he said. “They didn’t want me to do anything fancy. What I was supposed to do was rebound and play defense.” This de facto prohibition against showy play produced an ironic situation in which, as Nelson George wrote, “the prime exponent of what is now considered black style was a skinny white Catholic kid from Queens,” namely the Celtics’ Cousy. It was OK for Cousy to dribble between his legs and look one way and pass another, but if Clifton tried this kind of stuff he was being uppity. In one preseason game against the Celtics in the early ’50s, Clifton riled Cousy’s teammate Bob “Gabby” Harris, a white player from Oklahoma, by putting some Globie moves on him. “He said where he came from, people didn’t do him like that,” Clifton recalled. Clifton, not thrilled by the implications of this statement, knocked out a few of Harris’ front teeth. But this was an atypical episode for Clifton, who is generally remembered as a gentle, eccentric soul: “He had a nice soft voice, almost like a gay guy,” says Tucker. Clifton spent his post-basketball career happily working as a cab driver in Chicago, resisting all entreaties from his NBA and Globetrotter friends to take a basketball-related job. He died of a heart attack in his taxi in 1990.
THE SPECTER OF ABE SAPERSTEIN CONTINUED to loom large in the 1950s, even after integration. In 1956 more black men were on his three traveling Globetrotter squads than in the NBA, and if you were a Negro college hoops star whose graduation was imminent, you could do worse than to take a meeting with Abe. Among the NBA’s early black players, opinions of Saperstein are mixed. On the one hand, he provided well-paying jobs in a well-run organization unburdened by the financial difficulties of the NBA clubs. On the other hand, being a Globetrotter meant incorporating clowning into one’s game, the very notion of which evoked an unpalatable Stepin Fetchit-ism in some players’ minds, and it also meant working for a man whose conviction that he held first-look rights to all black players bordered uncomfortably on the…proprietary. “I did feel that if Saperstein had wanted to keep me out of the NBA, he could’ve,” says Tucker, who played on a summer tour for the Globetrotters after graduating from Duquesne and briefly rejoined them after he left the Nats. “He even said to me, ‘I’ll see to it that you don’t go to Syracuse.’ But he ended up being very nice to me. He was almost like a relative.” Wilt Chamberlain was also a Saperstein fan, calling him a “dear friend” who rescued Chamberlain from his misery at the University of Kansas and gave him a job in an era when underclassmen were not allowed to jump straight from school to the NBA. Biding his time with the Globetrotters in 1958 and ’59, Chamberlain had “the most fun of his career,” and then, NBA-eligible at last, signed with the Philadelphia Warriors.
But the man who made negritude unequivocally acceptable in the NBA didn’t do it for Saperstein. “He asked me to sign with him, but I never even considered it,” says Bill Russell. “I came in from a different place than most black guys. I conducted myself as a star. I didn’t have the approach that I was lucky to be here, that it was a privilege. I wanted to play professional basketball in the NBA, because I thought I was the best basketball player in the world.” Nevertheless, Russell, who had led the previously obscure University of San Francisco basketball team to two NCAA titles in a row, in ’55 and ’56, went through the motions and met with Saperstein before graduation. “He asked me and my coach to visit him,” Russell says. “Then he starts talking to my coach about the ‘social advantages’ of playing for the Globetrotters. I figure, Well, I guess he wants to sign the coach! That, or he thinks I’m not smart enough to talk to.”
Russell worked out a deal with Walter Brown to join the Celtics partway through the 1956-57 season so he could play on the 1956 Olympic team. Naulls, who was also a rookie that season, remembers that when Russell finally caught up with the Celtics, eighteen games into their schedule, his impact was so immediate, his dominance so profound, that the league was instantly severed from its past. “He was the difference; he changed the NBA,” says Naulls. “All the mediocrity that had been succeeding was pushed out of the league. It opened up competition for everyone, especially people of my color.”
In the next thirteen years, the Celtics would be the winningest and most racially progressive of the NBA teams, drafting or acquiring, among others, Sam Jones, K.C. Jones (Russell’s old roommate at the University of San Francisco), Bennie Swain, Tom “Satch” Sanders, Naulls, John Thompson and Wayne Embry. The game too would change. The introduction of the twenty-four-second shot clock in 1954 had already picked up the pace, eradicating the old, collegiate, stalling-oriented half-court game. Abetted by the twenty-four-second rule and bolstered by their swelling ranks, black players felt freer to play a more open, fast-break game; “Globie flair” was no longer taboo, nor was the up-tempo schoolyard style that had developed in black urban neighborhoods. By 1958 the Lakers had a new star in Elgin Baylor, the proto-Jordan, and by 1960 the Warriors had Chamberlain and the Cincinnati Royals had Oscar Robertson. The lodging and dining hassles didn’t disappear overnight, nor did the suspicions that fans wouldn’t come out to see four or five Negroes in a starting lineup, but the identity of the league, and the game, had started to shift.
Few of the NBA’s early black players lasted long enough in the league to play professional basketball by the time it had become a black-identified sport. Lloyd, in fact, would argue that none of them did. “It was in the ’70s, when you start seeing teams throughout the whole league with nine black players and three white players, or ten and two—that’s when,” he says. “Like when the Knicks had twelve black guys. You know what they called ’em? They didn’t call them the New York Knicker-bockers. You know where I’m going with that.”
But Russell is secure in his belief that the complexion of the game changed, literally and figuratively, in 1960, when he and Wilt Chamberlain began their personal rivalry, the greatest center matchup and arguably the greatest one-on-one player matchup in basketball history. “Oh, it was the confrontation between Wilt and me,” he says. “Everyone accepted that: You’ve got the two best players in the league, and you had to take sides, and you couldn’t take the side of a white guy because”—a pause for a chuckle—“there wasn’t one!”
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September 4, 2006
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GQ
Have You Seen This Man?
Philip Seymour Hoffman probably wouldn’t want to be described as a character actor anymore. But for me, this is my favorite kind of actor: all those guys who appeared in supporting roles in Preston Sturges movies (e.g. William Demarest, Jimmy Conlin, Franklin Pangborn), all those Italian-Americans used by Coppola, Scorsese,Lumet, and David Chase (e.g. John Cazale, David Proval, Vincent Curatola), all those doughy, waddly guys who pull their big weight in small roles (e.g. Martin Balsam, Jack Warden, Kenneth McMillan). At the time of this article, four years before Capote, Hoffman was in transition from beloved character actor to alternative male lead.
Around my house, we had a special
word—well, it was my brother’s special word—for an actor who steals a scene, or
even an entire movie, with a great performance in a smallish role. Such an
actor was called a Moe—for making the MOst of his MOment. The archetypal Moe
was a decrepit old codger who turns up in one scene of the 1987 film Barfly.
He’s shuffli