Gene Banks is in serious trouble. Most of the time, he can talk his way out of any situation. He can charm or cajole or just BS his way through. He is as famous for his ability to convince people that the sun will rise tomorrow morning in the west as he is for his ability to play basketball.
But now he has met his match. Standing in the living room of her grandparents’ home, India Banks is not buying any of the famous Banks excuses. “Honey, I don’t want to leave, believe me,” he says, almost pleading. “I’ll be back tomorrow, I really will. If there was any way I could take you I would.”
India has heard the speech before. She doesn’t like it now any more than in the past because she knows the bottom line is the same: Her daddy is leaving her behind.
“Daddy,” she says mournfully, “will you be home for my birthday?”
Gene Banks drops the excuses. “Honey, I would never miss your birthday,” he says. “That I can promise you.”
India’s face lights up. Her birthday is Saturday—in two days and she knows when Daddy is telling the truth. She may be one of the few people in the world who knows when Gene Banks is handing out a line and when he is handing out the truth. India will be four on Saturday.
“Children always know,” Banks says, climbing into the car. “I can BS adults any time I have to. But not my children. They can always tell when I mean something and when I don’t.”
The trip from Greensboro to Durham will not be an easy one. A major snowstorm has blown into North Carolina and the interstate is down to one lane. But Banks needs to get there, not because his alma mater is playing at home against North Carolina State tonight but because his agent, Herb Rudoy, is in town. So are a number of NBA scouts and coaches.
Gene Banks is looking for work. He talks about this fact almost casually. He isn’t in need of money; in fact the Italian team that he left at the beginning of February paid him off quite handsomely. But he is three months shy of thirty and he knows his basketball life is slipping away. He isn’t ready to quit yet. So he sits by the phone and waits for it to ring. It hasn’t rung yet.
The man every college in America chased through the streets of Philadelphia in 1977 is living with his wife and their two children in his father-in-law’s house, waiting to find out if he will get the one last shot to play basketball that he craves so much.
“If I didn’t think I could still play, I’d do something else,” he says, sounding like many players near the end of their careers. “I’ve worked hard, I’m in shape, and I know there are teams I could help. I’m just waiting for someone to give me a chance.”
Looking at him, there is little doubt that Banks is in shape. Eleven years after he awed his teammates with his teenage physique, he is still impressive to look at, even in an overcoat. His face is a little fuller than it was back then, but he is still handsome and his body looks rock hard.
“After I got hurt I got almost up to 240,” he says. “But right now, I weigh 215. I’m in as good condition as I ever have been. No one but me knows how hard I worked to come back. It was the hardest thing I’ve ever done in my life.”
There is no BSing going on here. The last eighteen months have been as challenging as any Banks has ever lived through. In July of 1987, having completed his sixth and best year in the NBA, Banks was playing in the Baker League, a staple of summer life in Philadelphia. Although he had never become the megastar he had been cast as when he first arrived at Duke, Banks had become a solid NBA player and had started for much of the previous season with the Chicago Bulls. He had one more year left on his contract, which called for him to make $345,000 in salary and possibly another $100,000 in incentive clauses.
After that, he would be a free agent, able to sell his services to the highest bidder. Then, on a warm July afternoon in a Philadelphia schoolyard, it all changed for Banks. “I got a rebound and spun around to throw an outlet pass upcourt,” he says. “I reached back to throw the pass and pushed off on my back [right] foot. I felt this sudden pain and I knew I had done something, but I wasn’t sure what. I hobbled off, figuring I had pulled something and shouldn’t take any chances.”
It was too late. The pain Banks had felt was his Achilles tendon snapping. He went back to Chicago where the Bulls doctors confirmed that he needed surgery. It was after the operation that the Bulls told him they had no intention of paying him for the upcoming season. With all its tradition, the Baker League is not formally sanctioned by the NBA the way some other summer leagues are. That meant, according to the Bulls, that they did not have to pay Banks for the lost season. NBA teams routinely encourage their players to take part in summer leagues to stay in shape. Now, though, the Bulls were claiming that Banks was at fault for injuring himself in an “unauthorized” league.
“I was really hurt by that,” Banks said. “I thought I had really contributed the previous season and been an important part of the team. Now, it was like they wanted to discard me and try to save themselves some money because I wasn’t any use to them. I was shocked.”
All athletes find out sooner or later that the teams they play for are more than willing to discard them if they are no longer useful. For Banks this was a particularly painful discovery. He had always been sought. Now he was being dumped.
This was not the first time the NBA had disappointed him, but that didn’t make it easier to take. Banks had come into the league in 1981 as a second-round draft pick of the San Antonio Spurs—the twenty-eighth player chosen overall. That was about twenty to twenty-seven players later than most people had thought Gene Banks would go when his time came to be drafted.
But his senior year at Duke had ended painfully—literally and figuratively. Bill Foster’s departure the year before had been harder on Banks and his alter ego Kenny Dennard than on anyone else. Both said they understood why Foster had to leave. But both, especially Banks, knew they had lost something when Foster left.
“Let’s face it, he was like a father to me,” Banks said. “After all was said and done, the main reason I chose Duke was because I really liked Bill. I felt I could relate to him and get along with him.
“He put up with a lot from me. When I got into trouble, he got mad at me, but he was always there to help. He kept that can of BS repellant in his desk to use when I came in with a story, but he always said yes when he knew I needed something. It would be very hard for any other coach to understand me the way Bill did.”
Banks had arrived at Duke as the father of a son who had been born in Philadelphia his senior year in high school. Foster helped him deal with that. Two years later, Banks fathered another boy. Foster was there to help him with that too. He constantly counseled Banks to change his partying ways, and Banks listened—sometimes.
“I’ve always tried hard to be good,” he said. “My parents met in a Pentecostal church. I believe very much in God and I pray all the time. I believe he has a plan for me and I want to do what is right.”
He smiled. “But the problem is, there’s always been fifty percent of me that wants to be good and fifty percent of me that wants to have fun. I’m like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. When I was at Duke, Mr. Hyde took over a lot.”
Dr. Jekyll and Coach Foster usually bailed Banks out when Mr. Hyde got into trouble. Banks could BS his way through most things, usually with a story so wild it had to be believed—because how could it have possibly been made up? Foster and the other coaches and players would shrug their shoulders, say, “That’s Tink,” and life would go on.
But Mike Krzyzewski wasn’t Bill Foster. He told Banks and Dennard in no uncertain terms that the partying, the constant use of the basketball office telephones, the trips home or to Florida, and the general anarchy would stop. Foster had figured that if he could get Banks and Dennard to go to class and keep them out of jail and showing up at practice every day, he was doing well. Krzyzewski wanted more.
“It was toe-the-line time,” Banks said. “With Bill, we always knew there was a line we better not cross. But Mike moved the line and when he did, we were way over it. We were seniors. We didn’t really want some new coach coming in and telling us what we had been doing for three years didn’t work anymore. It was tough for me; just about impossible for Kenny.”
Even though the two team captains and the former Army captain-turned-coach clashed often, Krzyzewski soon learned there had been a reason why Foster had put up with Banks and Dennard. For all their wildness, both came to practice ready and came to games to play. “There was always a respect between us because we were all competitors,” Krzyzewski said. “Gene and Kenny had faults, no doubt about it. But they never once backed away in a game.”
Banks had a superb senior year. Playing on a team with no center and inexperienced guards, he was the key to victories over Top Ten teams like North Carolina and Maryland. He kept the team competitive in the ACC. And he finished his home career with exactly the kind of flourish one would expect from Tinkerbell.
When the seniors were introduced, Banks went last. Dennard and Jim Suddath were already on the floor when Banks was introduced. When they called his name, Cameron shaking with cheers, he came out carrying roses. He ran to each corner of the court and laid a rose in each corner. It was his way of saying thank you—and making sure no one would ever forget it.
There is a picture of that pregame scene, with Dennard and Banks exchanging their traditional hug. Dennard has his hand over his eyes, apparently overcome by the emotion of the moment. “I wasn’t crying,” Dennard says of that picture. “I was covering my eyes because I knew what Gene was about to do.”
The roses may have been hokey, but the game itself was truly unforgettable. Banks scored 25 points and had 16 rebounds. That didn’t tell the story, though. The Philadelphia legend played a legendary game. First, he hit the rainbow twenty-three-footer over Sam Perkins at the buzzer to send the game into overtime. It was easily the longest—and most remarkable—shot of his Duke career. Then, in the overtime, with Suddath’s assist, he scored the winning basket. Duke had won, 66–65, and Banks was as heroic as a hero can possibly be. “When the game was over, I couldn’t believe what happened,” he said. “Before I knew it, I was up on everyone’s shoulders and they were carrying me around. It was so loud, I thought I was dreaming.
“I saw this movie last week, Everybody’s All-American, and there’s this scene where the hero scores the winning touchdown in the Sugar Bowl and they pick him up and carry him around, and, as he’s sitting there he knows his life can never get better than it is right at that moment. That’s the way I felt. I can remember thinking, ‘It will never be like this again. Never.’ The love I felt that day …” He stops and shakes his head. “Wow. Just talking about it chokes me up.”
Much like Gavin Grey, the hero of Everybody’s All-American, Banks has never achieved a moment quite like that one again. He and Grey both understood that pure joy such as that would probably never come again—but that didn’t prevent them from seeking it.
Duke was invited to the NIT that season, thanks to the victory over Carolina. They opened play at home against North Carolina A&T. Six minutes into the game, Banks went up for a rebound, got shoved, and came down hard, landing on his right wrist. Slightly more than four years later, he had suffered the identical injury Tate Armstrong had suffered at Virginia: a broken navicular bone in his right wrist.
He underwent surgery that night. The break was a serious one, serious enough that the doctor told him he might not play again. “I knew I would play basketball again,” Banks said. “But when the word went out on the grapevine that the wrist injury was serious, it hurt my draft position a lot.”
Banks showed up for Duke’s second-round NIT game against Alabama dressed in a tuxedo—“Gene never did anything quietly,” Suddath remembers—and received a huge ovation when he was introduced. But it wasn’t the same, of course, as Carolina. He did have one more gratifying moment at Duke, though, when he was selected as a student speaker at graduation. Four years after people had whispered about Duke admitting him in spite of his low SAT scores, he spoke to and for his classmates.
“I still have the speech,” he said. “I talked about the fact that all the people in the world are like an orchestra and we all play different instruments. But if we’re going to survive, we all have to play together and in harmony or the orchestra will fall apart.
“That was important to me. After all the talk that I could never get through Duke and I would never graduate, it meant something to me to show people that not only did I graduate but I was able to stand before my classmates and deliver a speech. It was the most nervous I’ve ever been. Playing in the Final Four was nothing compared to that.”
The NBA draft was a disappointment to Banks, but he went to San Antonio and became a solid role player. At 6–6, he wasn’t big enough to dominate NBA games inside the way he had done in college. He was not a good enough shooter to step outside. “Gene is a power forward in a small forward’s body,” Dennard said. “It’s a tribute to him that in spite of that he became a good NBA player.”
After four seasons in San Antonio, Banks was traded to Chicago, where he became a starter. Michael Jordan was on the scene and there was no question about who the team’s superstar was, but Banks had a very definite role before the Achilles injury. He was a consistent re-bounder, a good defensive player, and he could score inside well enough to take some pressure off Jordan. Still, being a solid role player is a lot different from being Gene “Tinkerbell” Banks.
“It sure is,” he said, shaking his head. “In college, I usually had more ability than the guys I played against. I was bigger or stronger or faster. In the pros, I had to work my ass off to be a good player. There was satisfaction in it, though. I enjoyed finding out that I could be put in a tough position and not only handle it, but prosper and get better.”
The NBA lifestyle did not make things easy on his marriage. Banks had met Belle Johnson as a sophomore at Duke. He, Harold Morrison, and John Harrell had been wandering around a Greensboro mall before a preseason scrimmage down there when they had spotted a goodlooking woman working in one of the stores.
“We went in to talk to her and I was kind of clowning around with her,” Morrison said. “She seemed to like me. Well, Gene couldn’t take that. So he started talking about the fact that yes, he was planning to go on to the NBA after college. You could see her eyes go wide. I said, ‘That’s it, I’m out of here.’ ”
Her name was Debbie and she and Banks exchanged phone numbers. A couple of weeks later she called Gene to say that she and a friend were coming down to Durham for a party. Did Gene want to go? Of course. “I was standing on the porch of this house where the party was,” Gene said. “And they pulled up. Debbie gets out of the car and then comes her friend. It was Belle. I mean, she was beautiful. Absolutely beautiful. I said to myself, ‘I have got to get to know her.’ ”
Banks had a problem though. Debbie was his date. He raced into the house and called Morrison. Would he come over and bail him out by taking Debbie off his hands? Morrison was sick in bed. He also remembered that initially, Banks had taken Debbie off of his hands. “You’re on your own, Gene,” he told his friend.
Banks handled it. He told Debbie that he really liked her but his friend Harold really liked her and he would feel guilty if they kept seeing each other. Debbie wasn’t too sure about all this. After all, where was Harold? Sick in bed and sick with disappointment that he couldn’t be there to see her. Debbie still wasn’t buying all this. It didn’t matter. At the end of the night, Banks got Belle’s phone number. Debbie was history.
“But it wasn’t easy,” Banks said, laughing at the memory. “First of all, Belle was four years older than I was. She had already graduated from North Carolina A&T. She couldn’t have cared less about me being a basketball star. She kept telling me I was just a baby and I should leave her alone.
“But I courted her. I mean, really courted her: flowers, telegrams, playing a guitar under her window …”
Whoa. Playing a guitar under her window?
“Well, not exactly, but you know what I mean.”
Belle finally broke down. Maybe it was to avoid having Tink play a guitar under her window. They were engaged when Gene graduated and were married a year later. But the NBA lifestyle, with all the time that is spent on the road, does not always lend itself to monogamy. Gene and Belle were separated for eighteen months beginning in 1983, got back together, and separated again briefly after India was born. Now they have two children. Banks’s two sons, Benjamin, twelve, and Eugene, ten, both live in Philadelphia with their mothers, although he sees them often. Benjamin went to his first basketball camp in the summer of 1989—at Duke.
Having learned to deal with not being a superstar, having learned how to be a consistent NBA role player, having learned how to be a husband, Banks was riding high on that summer afternoon in Philadelphia when his Achilles snapped. That is why the injury was painful in so many ways. He went through rehab and by the summer of ’88 felt he was ready to come back and play in the NBA.
But no one wanted to give him a tryout. The fact that he had sued the Bulls for his salary—and won a settlement that paid him the $345,000—may very well have influenced NBA owners to stay away from him. They are, after all, a fraternity just like the owners are in all sports. Banks had taken on one of their own—and won.
Banks thought he was going to get a tryout with the expansion Charlotte Hornets. This would have been a perfect setup for him. His wife’s family lived ninety miles away in Greensboro and he certainly could help an expansion team.
“I had worked my tail off for a full year and I was ready to go there and perform,” Banks said. “But I never got the chance.”
At the last moment, the Hornets told Banks they were not going to offer him a contract. He was a man without a team. Herb Rudoy made some phone calls and found an Italian team in Bologna that was willing to pay Banks $200,000 to come and play for them. Artis Gilmore would be the other American on the team. Banks accepted. He, Belle, India, and their newborn baby girl moved to Bologna in the fall.
The next five months were difficult. The American players are generally looked to in Italy to carry a team, and Gilmore, who is forty, struggled. That left a lot of the burden on Banks. At times he played very well, at other times not so well. He and the family were not happy in Bologna and when the team began looking for someone to take his place, Banks and Rudoy negotiated a buyout of Banks’s contract. He came back to the U.S. the first week in February and set up headquarters in Greensboro hoping the phone would ring shortly.
“There are a lot of possibilities out there,” he said on that snowy February day. “Several teams have said they’re interested. We just have to wait and see.”
The end of the season came and Banks was still waiting. He played in the Los Angeles Summer league for the Hornets hoping they would invite him to training camp. Banks knows he could go back to Europe and play and extend his career that way. But that isn’t what he wants to do.
“For one thing, I don’t want to move my family again,” he said. “I’d like for us to pick a place to settle down. I’ve thought about building a place in Charlotte and I still own a place back in San Antonio. I don’t need to go back to Europe for the money. I want to play at the highest level, that’s the way I want to go out.”
Looking at him, it is difficult to believe that Banks can’t help someone in the NBA. Anyone who saw him at Duke back in that glorious freshman year—or even on that remarkable day when he beat Carolina single-handed—has trouble coming to terms with the notion that a day will come when Gene Banks can’t play basketball anymore.
Bob Bender explained it better than anyone. “From the very first day we practiced with him, Gene was Superman to all of us. He could do anything. The night we beat Villanova to go to the Final Four Gene won a dance contest, for crying out loud. To us, there’s never been anything that could stop Gene when he wanted something.”
All he wants now is a final chance. Before it’s too late, Tinkerbell wants to fly one last time.