In 2003, I was contacted by Bruce Ratner, chief operating officer of the real estate development company, the Ratner Group. He wanted to acquire the New Jersey Nets and move the team to Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn, an area bordering on the neighborhood where I grew up. Ratner had some ideas about getting me involved in his plans and asked to discuss them over steaks in New York.
Shana and I lived in Georgia, just north of Atlanta. We’d moved there when Amina was two years old; it was a nice, quiet place to raise her. So I had to fly up for our meeting.
Ratner offered me the job of executive vice president of the Nets. The Ratner organization would enroll my daughter in private school and arrange for a driver to bring her there and back. And provide other generous perks.
For all my professional success, I’m a kid from Brooklyn at heart. It was a stunning offer.
I seriously contemplated it. The deal was obviously lucrative, but it appealed to me for deeper reasons. I hadn’t achieved all my success without help, and I believed in giving back. Over the years I’d worked with the Boys & Girls Clubs of America, the National Cancer Society, and National Cares Mentoring. I spoke on Capitol Hill for the NBA Stay-in-School program and for world hunger relief efforts. I’d established an endowment scholarship fund at the University of Tennessee to assist disadvantaged youths seeking a higher education. I was also bestowed an Honorary Doctorate from Long Island University in downtown Brooklyn.
The thought that I might contribute to the revitalization of my old neighborhood was a strong enticement. The Coca-Cola, Mattel, and other factories I remembered from childhood had once offered people steady—if low-wage—work, but those businesses had all closed their doors or relocated. No decent job opportunities were left, and the unemployment rate was over 50 percent. I felt that a new basketball arena would be a powerful economic stimulus for the community.
I entered into discussions with the Ratner Group and remained in New York as they slowly progressed.
I typically never traveled with Shana on business trips. My talks with Ratner wore on, keeping me away from home longer than I’d expected. That put strains on our marriage, and I eventually brought my wife north, hoping to smooth them over.
I’d been so focused on the project, Shana felt shut out of things. After ten years together, we weren’t communicating the way we should have been. She knew how much I loved her—how truly she completed me—but she was adamantly opposed to moving to New York.
We wound up arguing in our hotel room. When I look back at that awful night, it’s clear to me that the tensions associated with the Ratner negotiations brought issues we’d never faced to the surface. Issues of trust and openness. Emotions welled up in a way neither of us could have imagined. Things got physical, and the police arrived. I explained what happened to them, but they said they would have to take one of us in. Though they did not file charges, they arrested me.
Shana and I would attend marital counseling and grow closer and more trusting as a result of the incident. Together, we made the decision to stay in Georgia, raising our daughter in the place we called home. We’ve been married for two decades, love each other madly, and look back at that night at the hotel as a learning experience.
But it still pains me to think of it, and I wish it had never occurred.
AS THE YEARS PASSED, and I drew further away from my basketball playing career, I continued to keep my hand in the game through broadcasting. The show I cohosted with Ian Eagle on WFAN led to other on-air opportunities. After NBA TV launched in 2003, I was hired as a parttime announcer for the network. I also occasionally handled some color analyst work on local Knicks game broadcasts in New York, including in-studio work for MSG. I earned two Emmy awards for my broadcast work, something I never would have envisioned when I’d dropped my communications major in college.
It was somehow perfect, however, that Amina was my only audience for one of the more personally interesting basketball moments of recent years. In February 2008, Kobe Bryant broke a Madison Square Garden record I’d set a little over twenty-three years earlier, on Christmas Day 1984, when I became the first player to score 60 points in a game at Madison Square Garden. That happened in a loss to the New Jersey Nets, and as someone who cared only about winning, I’d felt the record was something for others to appreciate more than I could.
Still, I started watching the Kobe game on television with my fellow basketball fan, Amina. Kobe was visiting with the Lakers in what would be a 126–117 win over the Knicks.
About five minutes into the game, I turned to her and said, “Little One, your Dadum’s record is going to be broken tonight.”
Kobe was a unique player, and I saw it in his eyes. I remember when he went to the free-throw line with 59 under his belt. “Come on, let a Brooklyn kid keep the record,” I said to the TV screen.
But I knew it was history, and that was okay. If I could have traded some of my own 60 for a victory over the Nets that long-ago Christmas, I’d have done it in a second.
Six years later, Carmelo Anthony would break the Garden record as a member of the home team. I was on a flight to Houston and missed the game, but found out when my phone started lighting up with texts and voice messages.
In all honesty, that was a delight. Carmelo has told me he patterns certain aspects of his game after mine, so I felt connected to his performance. He’s one of the best offensive players we’ve ever seen. If anything has changed about the NBA game since my era, it’s that many players choose creativity over the sort of consistency that can only be achieved and refined through constant practice.
Carmelo practices. And he’s from Brooklyn.
In my eyes, it’s a winning combination.
ON SEPTEMBER 8, 2013, I was inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame in Springfield, Massachusetts. I couldn’t have imagined a greater honor.
When I think of that day, I always remember how it felt standing in front of an auditorium filled with the greatest legends of the game, and looking out at the proud faces of Shana, Amina, my mother-in-law Susan L. Taylor, and my father-in-law, Khephra Burns.
But that’s not even the first thing that comes to mind.
The first thing is waking up that morning in my hotel room. It was early morning, the sun barely risen. As Shana and Amina slept, I went to the window with my phone and opened the YouTube app. Keeping the volume low so as not to disturb them, I listened to a gospel song by the great Marvin Sapp, “Never Would Have Made It Without You.”
I quietly sang along, my face wet with tears. I wept for those who came before me, who’d shouldered greater burdens than I ever did, made sacrifices beyond anything I could imagine, so that someone like me could reach the heights of achievement.
I thought of Nat Sweetwater Clifton, who was among the first three black NBA players and was the first black member of the Knicks. Muhammad Ali, the Greatest. I thought of people who had nothing to do with sports—Rosa Parks refusing to give up her seat on the bus. Martin Luther King. The poet Langston Hughes. My aunt Perline and grandmother, Evelyn Brown. My parents, Thomas and Thelma King.
I wished my parents could have been there for the celebration. I thought of them as I ascended the steps to make my induction speech before a crowd of basketball luminaries that included Larry Bird, my old rival on the court. But Mom was far too ill.
In 2009, she was diagnosed with bone cancer. The disease quickly took its toll. I hurt for Mom as her health deteriorated. She’d always been a strong woman. Seeing her ravaged by cancer, reduced to a shell of herself, was terrible.
My father was not a young man, and he was unable to care for her on his own, so we placed her in a nursing home where she could receive the proper attention. Dad visited her there every day and would not leave her side to join us in Springfield.
That afternoon at the Hall of Fame, my presenter was the indomitable basketball great Dominique Wilkins. They called him the Human Highlight Film. I referred to him as the Unguardable One. It was a nickname based on my personal experience with Dominique on the court.
As I prepared myself to address the audience, I thought of my long journey from the blacktop courts of Brooklyn. I thought of countless playgrounds, half-moon backboards, the sharp hit of elbows, and the music of the dribble. Game Face hardened, intensity knowing no bounds, I had traveled a long road to the doors of the Hall of Fame, made my mistakes, and learned my lessons.
I’d placed only one call that weekend. It was to my friend Ernie Grunfeld, the other half of the Ernie and Bernie Show. He’d been recovering from surgery and was unable to travel, but I knew he was there in spirit.
I will never forget how it felt to face the podium, then finally hear the words, “And now, welcoming Bernard King into the Hall of Fame, Dominique Wilkins…”
I was there. I had made it. I stood beside the basketball heroes of my youth, Willis Reed, Walt “Clyde” Frazier, Earl “The Pearl” Monroe, and Dave DeBusschere.
I stood beside them.
The captain of the New York Knicks, Bernard King.