That spring, in 1977, they had won the championship, the youngest team in history to do so, and the exuberance of their youth and the profusion and seeming perfection of their many talents, and their rare ability to control their own egos, had seemed to promise yet more, not just that something was over and accomplished, but that it had only begun. The residents of the city, then the smallest in the league, somewhat accustomed to being snubbed and scorned over the lack of size and sophistication of their hometown (“How can I,” had said Ned Irish, owner of the then grand New York Knicks, when it was suggested that the city might receive a professional franchise, “put the name Portland Trail Blazers on the marquee of Madison Square Garden?”), accustomed to losing and accustomed as well to loving their losers, had seized the moment joyously. On the final day of the playoffs, the Coliseum had been filled some two hours before the starting time. The din was both enormous and intimidating to the visiting players, waiting in their locker room, like lions about to be thrown to the Christians; with the pregame warmups not yet begun, it sounded like a crowd in the final hysterical two minutes of an exciting game. The visiting writers from Philadelphia were appalled by the almost naive enthusiasm of the crowd, its lack of cool. They did not like the city anyway; there was too much talk by the residents about being mellow, and the writers were sure that when they went out for dinner the Portland waiters spotted them for what they were, agents of the enemy forces, and deliberately extended them terrible service. When later that afternoon the last game was over, and Portland had in fact won the championship, the Center and Captain, until then the target of more local criticism than praise—for his politics, for the length of his hair, for his culinary preferences, for his medical history (earlier in his career, local fans, annoyed by his recurring record of injuries, had printed up T-shirts saying that he had brain spurs, not bone spurs)—had ripped off his shirt and tossed it into the crowd. A young freelance photographer named Barbara Gundle, new to sports, captured the exact moment, the Center adored, people reaching out to touch him, his own elongated arms spread in triumph from a powerful but surprisingly spavined chest. A Christlike image, she thought. The Center said, much later, that if they won again, it would be his pants he would take off and throw into the crowd. The television ratings for the final game in the state of Oregon, an area known for its love of the outdoors rather than for its love of indoor sports such as watching basketball on television, were 96 percent. No one in the history of television had any memory of one event so dominating a single television market.
In the locker room after the game the players poured champagne on each other. The coach said of the Center that he had never known a finer player. Nor, he added, had he ever known a finer competitor. Nor, he added, a finer person. At that point, fortunately, his superlatives gave out. Then the players had thrown the coach into a cold shower and for added good measure had thrown in the Center’s best friend, a young man named Jack Scott, who in the past had been described not so much as the Center’s friend as his political guru. Though all of this was part of the traditional tribal ritual of bigtime televised American sports, the inherent right of victorious athletes to pour someone else’s champagne upon each other and to embrace each other, half-naked, live and in color, none of it made the national airwaves. CBS, the network which broadcast the league, but in larger truth sponsored the league as well, had, the moment the last basket had been shot and the score posted, departed the Portland Coliseum for the green fairways of a new, invented-for-television golf tournament, the Kemper Open. The die-hard basketball fans, perhaps ten million of them, who had stayed the course of a long and laborious twin season of basketball, first the interminable regular season and then the semi-interminable second season of the playoffs, waiting to see what Bill Walton looked like in victory (would he attack the President? the FBI?) and Julius Erving in defeat, saw instead the head of the Kemper Insurance Company welcoming them to a golf course. No one was pouring champagne on his head. Many of them turned off. Many others called CBS to complain irately over this injustice. It was, they knew, a decision which would never have been made at the end of a baseball World Series or a football Super Bowl, where the fans’ right to see their winners was inalienable. The decision of CBS to cut away was a reminder that for all of its artistic beauty and its high salaries, and the fact that it might employ more truly brilliant and complete athletes than any other sport, professional basketball had not entered the national psyche or become part of the national myth. It remained, the grace and skill of its athletes notwithstanding, a sport of some isolated urban areas and some rural areas struggling for national acceptance.
The decision at CBS to switch to golf was not made out of malice, but largely out of indifference. The head of CBS Sports, Frank Smith, a man since departed, was a golfer himself and he lived in Greenwich, Connecticut, part of the great upper-middle-class white suburban ring which spanned American cities; it was, by and large, the cities that produced the basketball players, and suburban rings that produced television and advertising executives. Like many another high-level television and advertising executive in Greenwich, Frank Smith not only played a good deal more golf than he did basketball, but he also conducted a fair amount of his business upon the fairways. Thus golf was to him not just a more pleasant athletic and social endeavor than basketball, it was a far more serious one as well. He loaded up the CBS schedule with golf matches, which though they drew low ratings pleased many of his friends and business associates, among them the owners of the affiliate stations. They were the proprietors of television stations in many middling and small towns and cities. Low ratings or not, they liked golf, for in those towns and cities, golf was an even more essential part of the social-business fabric than it was in Greenwich, and they and their colleagues from advertising thought that CBS, if anything, did not program enough golf.
Still the small slight of CBS in depriving fans of the opportunity to share in the revelry via television was soon forgotten. A few days later the Portland team was honored at a downtown plaza and some 250,000 people turned out, not bad in a city generally estimated to have 365,000 inhabitants all told. No one could remember anything like those days, the victory itself, the celebration, the joy that it produced. Not even the end of World War II seemed to compare. It was a wonderful moment and because they were all so young—Walton the center was only 24, Hollins 23, Lucas 25, Gross 23, Davis 21, and Twardzik, the oldest starter, 26—everyone was sure that it would continue. Everyone spoke of the future and often both average citizens and people on the team used the word dynasty. It was not just that they had won, but the way that they had won, unselfish in a selfish world and a selfish profession. It had been not just a matter of scoring baskets, but of scoring baskets off the perfect pass. Philadelphia, because of its modified schoolyard play, its one-on-one style, had been cast by the media, by fans, by other coaches, as the bad guys. Philadelphia had paid millions for George McGinnis and some $6 million for Julius Erving. The Philly players were aware of the role chosen for them. “What have we done wrong?” Erving, one of the most intelligent and gracious men in professional sports, had complained after one playoff game. “Why is everyone treating us like outlaws?” When Portland won, the phone rang off the hook in the Portland coach’s offices with congratulations from other coaches, professional and college. There were hundreds of telegrams and letters thanking the coach and the players for helping their programs and making it easier to coach basketball the right way. Some people thought there were racial overtones in this, as if white basketball had beaten out black basketball (despite the fact that three and sometimes four of the Portland starters were black). Others saw it differently: the basketball of purity had beaten out the basketball of materialism and selfishness.
That summer was a high for the city of Portland and almost all of the players. The players were champions, so too was the city. It had been made bigtime by the victory. No longer would it be confused, in idle conversations with strangers, with Portland, Maine. It had even achieved parity now, in the minds of its residents, with the hated metropolis to the north called Seattle. Jack Ramsay, the Portland coach, was lionized. He had arrived a year earlier and promised a winner, and then had brought the city a championship in his very first season. He was a distinctive figure on the scene, his bald head and his bushy eyebrows appearing countless times on television during the season and the playoffs. There was even one short television commercial shot for Kentucky Fried Chicken in which he volunteered his own autograph to a pretty young waitress who rejected it, prefering instead the autograph of Wally Walker, one of the least used but handsomest and whitest Portland players. “Wally Who?” Ramsay had demanded. It was all in all a rare sports euphoria, and unlike most sports highs it did not evaporate in two or three days after the final victory but seemed to go on and on, in part because the fans were so grateful, there being no other big league sport in town, and in part because there was so much promise for the future. What had happened before would happen again. Basketball was a winter sport, but in the sweetness of that summer, Oregonians gathered and talked about the playoffs and about Walton and about how he had changed, how he had become more normal, more like them, though of course at Walton’s house, his friends gathered and talked about how the fans had changed. People’s connections to each other seemed to come through basketball; it had become, even more than the rain, their common denominator.
That summer of 1977, amidst all the enthusiasm of the championship, Herm Gilliam, then thirty-one and the oldest player on a very young team, found himself a celebrity. Wherever he went there were people who recognized him and wanted to help him out, and do him favors, and to talk with him about the season and in particular about the great game he had played against Los Angeles. In a city this size, Gilliam thought, fame is even more intense and more lasting. They are shorter on heroes than most cities. Black himself, he was intrigued by the adulation of heroes so black by a community so white. Yet, unlike Maurice Lucas and Bill Walton and his other teammates, his position on the team was tenuous; he was a bench player, he was older, and he was not a particular favorite of the coaches. He knew that in the recent draft of college players Portland had picked up several promising guards who wanted nothing better than to take his place. So that summer he worked harder than he ever had to stay in shape and to keep his eye. He was not a great shooter, he had come in the game as a defensive player and his shot was a manufactured one, part stolen from Rick Mount, a college teammate who was a great pure shooter, and another part from the great Oscar Robertson when Gilliam had played with him at Cincinnati. That summer he had worked on the fingertip action which was crucial to his shot, and he had run and played tennis. His teammates were coasting through the summer; they took their youth for granted. But Gilliam’s youth was almost gone. All he wanted was one more season and one more championship. In the summer, running to keep in shape, he often broke into a sweat and felt the pain in his lungs. He knew it was important to feel that pain. He remembered now preseason camps in his early years in the pros, the veteran players coming back, struggling to stay in shape, having dropped back, over the summer, one crucial level from the season before. How distant their problems had seemed to him then. Herm Gilliam was the senior player on the Portland team, experienced, confident, outspoken, a leader among the blacks. More than the other players, who were young and expected these things, he knew what a championship meant, how rare it was to be the best; he had played on too many teams that had fallen just short. In college his Purdue team had made it to the finals of the NCAA only to be demolished by one of the Lew Alcindor UCLA teams. Perhaps, he had thought at the time, there ought to be two national championships, one awarded to UCLA, and one for every other school to compete for. Later, in the pros, he had played several difficult seasons with good teams that lacked a dominating center, and it struck him that there ought to be a rule permitting every guard in the league to play at least one year with Alcindor—or rather with Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, as his name now was. Gilliam had joined Portland in time for the championship season and he had been excited by the prospect of playing with a talented big man like Bill Walton. Though his role on the Portland team had not at first been a major one, he sensed early on that this team might win everything. Thus in midseason, when Coach Jack Ramsay, knowing that Gilliam was restless with his lack of playing time, said that New Orleans wanted him badly, and that a trade could be worked out, Gilliam had gone home and talked it over with his wife, Betty. “But you told me you had a chance for the championship here and that’s what you’ve always wanted, isn’t it?” she said. He had nodded. “Then we ought to stay here,” she said. They stayed and he had loved being a part of the championship team. As the season progressed his playing time had increased. In the crucial playoff series against Los Angeles, a team which had beaten Portland all four regular-season games, he played one memorable game. Thereafter his teammates referred to it simply as Herm’s Game. Los Angeles was playing at home and playing a strong game, and it led 77–70 going into the fourth quarter. Herm Gilliam started the fourth quarter for Portland and played brilliantly, scoring, stealing the ball, scoring again, hitting difficult off-balance shots, making one particular shot, a falling away jump shot off the wrong foot, with Ramsay, it was said, on the bench shouting as he took the shot, “No, no, no.... Yes!” Portland, largely through his efforts, had gone on to win and Gilliam had scored 24 points on 12 of 18 shooting. Though the general view of the coaching staff was that he was a talented but somewhat erratic player, there was also a feeling that the Los Angeles game had assured his status for one more year.
At the fall training camp Gilliam returned in the best shape of his career. It turned out almost immediately that the main competition was for the job of fourth guard between Gilliam and a rookie from Alabama named T. R. Dunn, whom Portland had chosen on its second pick. Dunn had the strongest body of any guard in the camp and probably in the league; he seemed to be sculpted out of black marble and his physique was the first thing that coaches looked at. To some of the other blacks on the team it was frustrating to see Gilliam and Dunn pitted against each other; they did not think the coaches were being racist, but they also felt that black players were always more vulnerable, their jobs less secure, particularly those of bench players. (On many teams the lower bench positions were often filled by marginal white players, kept aboard principally as a bone to the fans. The blacks resented this and they had a word for it, when a white was kept instead of a black. He’s stealin’, they would say, just stealin’ it.) Some of the blacks were bothered by the fact that the competition was restricted to Gilliam and Dunn, and that David Twardzik and Larry Steele, both white, were excluded. To the coaches that was not an issue. Twardzik, they felt, could run the offense as Gilliam could not (no one, thought Stu Inman, the head of player personnel, used other players as intelligently as Twardzik), and Steele, once a guard, had now been switched to the job of backup small forward. The blacks were aware of that, but they also wondered at it—Gross, Walker, Steele, three small forwards, all of them white....
Gilliam, arriving in excellent shape, knowing his job was on the line, had been assessed by most players as the best guard in camp. Nevertheless at the last minute he was cut. Inman and Ramsay made the decision. For Inman, who dealt in the future, the decision had not been particularly hard; he thought Gilliam was a good player but erratic (he used the word streaky), and he believed that Dunn might develop into one of the premier defensive guards in the league. For Ramsay, a man who had been forced to adapt his emotions to the unsentimental profession he was in, it was a more difficult decision. He was giving up an important player from a championship team, a popular player who had delivered for him, and that meant that he was changing, however peripherally, the texture of that team, and potentially changing the stability of it. There was some emotional reluctance on Ramsay’s part, but it was limited—this was professional sports and it was a business. The edge between winning and losing was too thin. Some of the players were upset with the decision. Maurice Lucas, the power forward who was particularly close to Gilliam, stood apart for a time during practice, his arms folded on his chest in a kind of protest. Bill Walton said nothing at the time, though he later called Gilliam and said he thought management had made a mistake. Walton’s close friend Jack Scott, the radical sports activist, thought Walton had made a mistake in not protesting the decision. But it was done. The core of the championship team had been changed. Nothing in the NBA stayed the same very long; nothing was that stable.
Soon Herm Gilliam was almost forgotten in Portland. The new season seemed to begin where the last one had left off. The Portland team seemed never to have stopped; if anything it was even better. Walton was playing better than ever. Three-quarters of the way through the season the record was 50 and 10, astonishing in a league so well balanced, where games on the road were unusually hard to win. It was a team of destiny and members of the team began to talk about destiny, about setting a record for the most number of regular-season wins, 70 and 12. Then Walton had been hurt and had missed the last part of the season. His foot bothered him as the playoffs began, but he had with some reluctance taken shots for it, and in the second game of the playoffs he had broken the foot. The season was over for him and, it turned out, for his team as well. There was no championship, no won-lost record. A few months later, denouncing almost all members of the Portland staff, Walton declared that he wanted to be traded, and that if there was to be destiny, he would seek it elsewhere.
The Walton era was over and finished. He was particularly hard in his criticism of the team doctor and trainer, who had been regarded as two of his closest friends in Portland. The next day Bobby Knight, the fiery, intense coach of Indiana University, had called his friend Stu Inman. Usually Knight’s calls were as volatile as the man who made them, often coming at 6 a.m. Pacific time, since time differences meant little to Knight; he would demand that Inman share whatever majestic experience Knight had just partaken of (for example Inman must see Patton since it was the greatest movie in the history of the world). Elinor Inman had long ago decided that any phone call before 7 a.m. was Bobby Knight and she would automatically hand the phone to Stu. That was the price of such an exotic friendship, for Knight was passionate, difficult, arbitrary, often blasphemous, his own worst enemy. Yet he was, Inman thought, a rare contemporary coach, different from many of his modern contemporaries because he was intensely moral and obsessed by the idea of team, hating much of what was happening in basketball, the shortcuts taken by other coaches to lure players to their schools, the eventual indifference of these same coaches to the academic progress of their players. Bobby Knight, for all of his histrionics, insisted that his players graduate and deal with life as they dealt with basketball. In 1976 his own Indiana team, devoid of truly great college players, had won the national title and remained undefeated for the entire season. Not surprisingly he was fascinated by the Portland championship team and he often called Inman to talk about it, how well the characters of the players seemed to fit together, how well the team had been isolated from so many of the corrupting pressures of modern athletics. Inman had told Knight that they had been lucky in their mix of both talent and character and that Walton was crucial, his very style of play was essential to keeping the egos of the other players in line. It was as if Knight had a personal stake in the Portland team. On this day when he called he was somber, and he talked sadly with Inman about Walton, about what had happened, the breaking up of a great team, perhaps an ultimate team, when it was still so young. At the end of the conversation he had asked his friend, “Stu, is there any way in this day and age to keep a team together? Can it be done anymore?”