In the late 1970s, Studio 54 in New York was the hottest club on the planet. Anyone and everyone wanted to get through the door, and absolutely anything and everything went on inside.
On any given night, half the people there were out of control. Sometimes, I was among them.
After Nets home games, I would occasionally drive into Manhattan to hang out. I’d gone from a hard-working Brooklyn kid to making more money than I’d imagined in my life, seemingly overnight. I thought hitting the scene was the thing to do.
One particular night at the Studio, I blacked out from drinking. I don’t remember it, but it happened.
Former Knicks guard Dean Meminger was there with his wife. They took me to their apartment because they knew I wasn’t capable of driving back to New Jersey. If I’d tried, I probably would have gotten into a serious accident. I woke up in their home. They’d driven my car there so I wouldn’t wonder whether it had been stolen or towed to an impound lot.
Years later at a Knicks event in Madison Square Garden, I walked up to Dean and said, “I never thanked you for what you did for me that night in ’seventy-seven. But I want to do it now. If you hadn’t brought me over to your place, I might have died.”
In 2013, we lost Dean to a drug overdose. At the time, I was enveloped in sadness. Thirty-five years before drugs took his life, he and his wife saved mine.
Dean was an angel. He offered me a hand when I needed it. And he wasn’t the only one.
The clubs were occasional breaks in my solitude, the exception rather than the norm. When I was in a crowd of partiers, I was hiding from my loneliness in plain sight. Everyone there was part of my disguise; I really didn’t let people get close to me.
But most often I indulged alone. I kept a bottle in my glove box and would start on it after the games. Once, when I was driving back to the team hotel, I was stopped by the cops. I’d had too much to drink, and my car must have been weaving erratically.
I tried to stay calm, but my heart was racing as they exited their cruiser and walked toward me. It wasn’t only because I was intoxicated. After the harassment I’d experienced in Knoxville, I would break into a sweat whenever a police car came up on my rear. I’d been traumatized and expected the worst.
The officers approached my window. When they recognized me as Bernard King of the Nets, they decided not to arrest me. Instead, they took me back to my hotel with a stern warning.
In hindsight, I realize those guys weren’t cops. They wore uniforms and badges, and they carried guns, but like Dean and his wife, they were angels. If not for their intervention, I might have killed myself and others that evening.
Sometimes, though, I didn’t have angels to protect me from myself.
On the road as a rookie, I traveled with alcohol in my checked bag. Our team trainer handled the bags, bringing them from the airport to the hotel. In the lobby, I noticed my bag was soaked and knew the bottle had shattered inside.
Uh oh, I thought. What if someone smelled it?
The trainer didn’t say anything, so I was hoping he hadn’t.
I grabbed the bag, hurried up to my room and opened it. Everything I’d packed was drenched in booze.
I reached for the telephone, sent my dress clothes out to the cleaners, and prayed they could get out the strong stink of whiskey. I didn’t want to include my uniform, realizing it could identify me to
the press or even disappear altogether. Before doing anything else, I washed the uni by hand in the bathtub. Then I called down and asked that it be dried in the hotel laundry.
That incident was the exception to the rule. On most occasions, I had no problems. After road games, I would go out chasing women. I was an NBA player and could find pretty girls in every town.
But the sex never filled the void inside me. Once, I picked up a woman and brought her back to my hotel room. We were in bed, turned on, when I abruptly stopped and asked her to hold me. I didn’t want to do anything besides lay there and know a woman’s warmth. She looked at me like I was an alien.
As a rookie, I used a trick to hide the extent of my partying from inquisitive eyes. When we arrived at our hotel, I’d take my room key from my trainer and go upstairs. Rookies were assigned roommates, something I only found out on our first road trip. I liked the guy but for obvious reasons didn’t want him sharing my room.
After a few minutes, I would go back down to the front desk with the key and ask to change floors. I told the team I was taking a single and would pay the difference. Cost didn’t matter. I wanted my own room. I needed my own room. It was worth it at any price.
Many times I came to the arena after staying up all night. I made sure I was ready for the game and never had a drop-off in performance. I kept my body conditioned and played with passion and intensity. I’d known since college that combination allowed me to overcome fatigue.
That first season with the Nets, my partying stayed under the radar. I played well enough to set a franchise record for most points scored in a season and stay in a tight race for NBA Rookie of the Year. And I never woke up to stories about myself in the paper. In one regard, I was fortunate. But in another, it hurt me, because it gave my self-destructive behavior an opening to continue. I was in denial about my problems, sending them to the back room and shutting the door.
That couldn’t last. It never does.
Sooner or later, they would break out into the open.
ON MARCH 12, 1977, the Nets played game sixty-nine of the season at home against the Detroit Pistons. Our record was 17–52 and we were on our way to finishing with the worst record in the NBA. Detroit was also having a losing year, although on that date, they were only four games under .500 at 31–35.
It was our third matchup on the schedule, but the first in Piscataway. After they defeated us in the season opener, we came back and won our second game against them in Auburn Hills, 117–112.
I’d been tied for highest scorer on the floor that day with 31 points. The Pistons’ veteran star Bob Lanier had scored the same number. We’d played a tough defensive game, forcing turnovers that gave us a lot of successful fast-break opportunities.
Both teams badly wanted that third game. We knew we could beat the Pistons. Meanwhile, they didn’t want to lose a season series to the worst team in the league. And their leader, Lanier, certainly didn’t want to take a loss while being equaled or bettered in the stat column by a rookie forward, one who’d made his splash in the league scoring 41 against Dr. J.
In those days, every kid in the playground knew Lanier’s name. If you were a tall kid, the other boys on the court would shout, “Yo, Lanier!” whenever you blocked a shot or launched one over an opponent’s head. That’s because Lanier was one of the biggest big men in the NBA. At the time, his name was synonymous with the word “big.” His size-twenty-two feet once held the record of the biggest ever to be measured for a pair of league-approved sneakers. They might still have that distinction; I’m not sure.
That last game was a brawl from the opening whistle. My matchup was John Shumate, the Pistons’ forward, but Lanier was their low-post defender, and I’d pulled down 11 rebounds against them the month before.
Eddie Jordan was hot that night. Early in the second quarter, he drained a jumper that put us ahead by 4 and got our home crowd up on their feet. Then one of the Pistons missed a shot, and I went hard to the boards, reaching for the rebound and pulling it down to my chest. That was when Lanier rattled my head with his elbow.
Now, let’s keep something in mind. Lanier was 250 pounds of bulky muscle. That’s almost 50 pounds heavier than I was. He was also almost seven feet tall.
His elbow felt like an oar from a rowboat. And I knew it hadn’t connected by accident. When you’re in the league a while, like Lanier was, you learn to send a message without the ref seeing it. Even one of the sharp-eyed best in the league like Dick Bavetta, who was officiating that night.
But have I mentioned I’m from Brooklyn?
No, I thought. That isn’t gonna work.
I knew Lanier hit me to send a message. And I knew I had to return it, preferably without getting tossed.
All in a heartbeat, I pushed the ball forward off my chest and threw it into the pit of his stomach. I mean, I did it as hard as I could.
BANG!
To my amazement, Lanier wasn’t the least bit staggered. I mean, he didn’t budge.
He just glared, fire in his eyes. And then he rolled up to me under the basket. Picture an enraged bear. I started backing up.
At the Rutgers gymnasium, the stands went right up to the baseline. There was almost nothing between them and the court. But I wasn’t thinking about the stands. I wasn’t thinking about the occupants of those seats. I didn’t even notice whether or not they were occupied.
I just stared at that enormous body coming toward me in the center of the lane, his right hand balled into a fist, and kept backing up behind the basket.
And backing up.
And backing up.
Right into the stands.
I fell backward into someone’s lap just as Lanier charged.
“Bob! Don’t hurt him, Bob! DON’T HURT HIM!”
That was Kevin Loughery, screaming at the top of his lungs.
But Lanier wasn’t paying attention. He’d closed the gap between us with a couple of long strides.
I’d never be sure what made him fall on me. My legs were sticking straight out as I went into the stands, and it’s possible he tripped over them. Or it could be Bavetta or the other referee, Lee Jones, threw him off balance. They were clinging to his back and arms, trying to tear him away from me. Bavetta was a scrapper who’d broken up plenty of rumbles in the Harlem summer league, so he knew how to handle himself.
The only thing I knew absolutely was that Lanier was looming over me one second and the next was sprawled top of me—all two-hundred-fifty muscle-bound pounds of him.
Talk about heavy. I grunted out a breath. It was like having a sack of wet concrete drop on my chest. Then I saw bodies close in around us, pulling us apart. Refs, coaches, teammates.
“That’s it!” Bavetta hollered. He was gesticulating at the sidelines. “You’re both OUT!”
We’d been ejected.
Huh? I thought. It was only the second quarter. I still had over a half game left to play!
But when you’re tossed, you’re tossed. You can’t argue with the ref. Truth is, I was glad Lanier hadn’t flattened me.
I headed for the showers, came out, got dressed. Once you’ve been ejected, the regulations prohibit you from going anywhere near the court. But I knew I’d have to speak to the press about what happened. So I decided to find a place to hang out till after the game.
I left the locker room stepped out into the hallway. And froze in my tracks, my eyes wide, staring at the huge form down the hall.
OH GOD, I thought.
It was Lanier. He was coming straight toward me. And there were no security personnel around. The hallway was empty except for me and him.
“Young man?” he began.
I took a deep breath. Something told me this would be interesting.
“Come on,” he said, and nodded his chin toward the parking lot exit. “Let’s get something to eat.”
I took a long exhale.
It was an afternoon game, so we went to a local diner. I drove. Lanier picked up the check. In between, we ate lunch and talked.
I hadn’t appreciated the elbow. He hadn’t liked the ball getting thrown at him. We understood each other and made peace.
When we returned to Rutgers, the game was just ending.
“I like Bernard,” Lanier said at his locker afterward.
“I like Lanier,” I told reporters at mine.
Thank heaven for our appetites. But we both meant it. Lanier’s a good guy. When we see each other these days, we laugh about what happened.
I’d still tangle with him, though.
As for the game, Detroit edged out a 130–125 win. But that doesn’t really tell you what kind of rough day it was on the court.
Bavetta and Jones called 64 personal fouls, half of them against my team. After Lanier and I were ejected, the Pistons’ Eric Money was also thrown out of the game on double technicals. There were a total of 10 technical fouls, 8 on the Pistons. Five players were sent to the bench after collecting 6 personals each, including Wilson Washington, my backup forward.
Eddie Jordan scored 25 in the loss. He had one of the best nights of his career.
A few fans got crushed underneath us when we fell into the stands. I felt bad about it and apologized at my locker.
“I was just trying to get out of the way,” I said. “I’m not dealing with someone who’s twice my size and outweighs me by a hundred-fifty pounds!”
Okay, I was inflating Lanier’s proportions.
But when you’re getting charged by a grizzly, you don’t ask him to step onto the scale.
ABOUT A MONTH LATER, the New Jersey Nets’ season came to a quiet end with a loss to the Phoenix Suns. On a brighter note, we played better basketball down the stretch, so maybe our battle with Detroit fired us up. I also think Loughery had finally found a more consistent everyday lineup that allowed us to knit as a team. I personally had a strong finish, averaging almost 30 points a game over the thirteen left on the schedule.
I had hope for the coming year, and that helped me deal with the bad taste left by our losing record. But it would be a long offseason wait till training camp… and long waits weren’t a good thing for me.
Then I got a call out of the blue at my Guttenberg, New Jersey, condo. It was Bill Pollak. A Hollywood studio was making a basketball movie, a comedy starring Gabe Kaplan—the comedian with whom I’d posed for a photo after the Dr. J game. The director was on a fast track to start filming and wanted to know if I was interested in being in the cast. If I was, he’d asked that I come in and read for him.
Absolutely, I told Bill. Just say when and where.
I was thinking the summer might not feel so long after all.