Life on the Run

  Ten minutes before the scheduled flight departure a green Oldsmobile stops in front of the United Airlines terminal. Willis Reed steps out. He takes his fishing tackle boxes and his camping clothes from the car (he is going hunting in Montana after the clinic), checks in (“OK, Mr. Reed, glad to have you flying with us to Denver”), and walks to the gate. (“Isn’t that Willis Reed? Hey, Willis, how’s the leg?”) He limps noticeably. We settle into the row with extra leg room at the front of the DC-10’s first class section.

  After we are in the air for forty-five minutes, Willis and I begin to talk about his leg and his future, both of which at the moment are uncertain. “I went to see Dr. O’Donohue four days ago,” he says. “He said that what I was feelin’ in the play-offs against Boston was a, what’ ya call it, a Baker’s cyst or maybe a spur deep inside the back of my knee. If I wanted to play he said that I’d have to have another operation.”

  “When were you last healthy?” I ask.

  “I felt pretty good in the final L.A. series in ’73, like, you know, the best since 1971, when I started havin’ the tendon trouble in my left knee. With legs like this…” he looks at his knees. “No athlete can play unless he’s healthy. You want to do it but you can’t; it’s not severe pain but just enough to prevent you from getting into good shape.”

  “You going to have the operation?” I ask.

  Willis’s big left hand moves across the side of his face, covering and then exposing first his nose and mouth and then his cheek. His fingers meet under his chin, where they pause momentarily. His face looks wrinkled as he looks up and says, “I don’t know. I don’t know. You got to be up for an operation—emotionally up just like for a game. I’m not now. I’ve had a severely strained shoulder, bone chips removed in my ankle, an operation in my left knee for tendonitis, and an operation in my right knee for a torn cartilage. The pain the first four or five days after an operation is horrible. You just lay there and can’t move. You call for the nurse to give you a shot to numb the pain; you sleep an hour and then it’s the same thing. On my left knee they put the cast on too soon and the leg didn’t have anyplace to go. It swelled up like a balloon. The pain was a monster. With the right knee I had a 103° temperature for three days. I don’t know. I don’t know if I want to go through all that again, particularly when, if I played after it, I might get a permanent injury. Medicine can’t help me now. I guess I need somethin’ more. But I got two years on my contract.”

  “Will the Garden honor your contract if you quit?”

  “It depends on whether they say I have to get the operation. They said they thought I was OK. I say, ‘Hey, I did too, but you see what O’Donohue says.’” He starts fidgeting with the medal that hangs around his neck. “I had planned to retire in two years. I’d have enough money, then, to get by on; no big numbers, but enough to be my own man. I don’t want to quit now, but with the knee, the operation, and the money being doubtful, I don’t know. I got to decide in a week.”

  We switch to Frontier Airlines in Denver. When we arrive in Rapid City the sun is shining brightly; the horizon wide open. There are few trees; just grass and space. It is startling at first. Mike-Her-Many-Horses greets us at the airport. He wears his straight black hair in a ponytail. His shoulders are broad and his hips narrow. He smiles easily. After a brief TV interview at the studio in “Rapid” we drive 50 miles to the reservation in Mike’s pickup truck. Mike says that he is so used to the rolling open hills that he can’t leave them. One summer he worked in Glacier National Park in Montana but left after three weeks because “the mountains and trees gave me the feeling I was closed in.” We drive slowly through a town called Scenic on the edge of the reservation; then past the Long Horn Saloon, the Badlands Jail, and a gas station. “Since the reservation is dry,” Mike says, “here’s where people go to let off steam. There is no law and in that saloon there are lots of shootings and stabbings.”

  “You carry a gun on you?” Willis asks.

  “No, I keep one in the back of the pickup.”

  The reservation land is 4,353 square miles of dirt buttes and “cheet” grass; mostly badlands, which means bad land. Originally the Sioux treaties with the U.S. government had guaranteed the Sioux the fertile Black Hills, then a holy ground, but when gold was discovered in them, the treaties were abrogated and thousands of fortune hunters occupied and settled the area with the help of the U.S. Army. Later when there was a large immigration from Northern Europe to the West—Phil Jackson’s ancestors were in this group—the reservation shrank further until it has become land of great acreage but of little productive value for a people who have never escaped their nomadic past.

  We pass a fenced-off field of about 200 acres. The man who leased the Indian land from the Bureau of Indian Affairs for $1 an acre has put up a sign which warns Indians—no trespassing, no hunting, no firewood. Mike says there are some deer and antelope in the hills and catfish in the White River, which runs through the land. We pass a house that belongs to an Indian jockey, who lives well on the reservation with his racing winnings. Windmills stand behind houses, whining in the wind and providing energy to pump water. At intervals along the desolate two-lane highway, cars lie abandoned and rusting in the fields as if they were the successors of the dinosaurs that died in the area; as if the Indians drove them to death taking out their fury on the white man’s machines.

  Driving to Pine Ridge, the reservation’s main town (pop. 1,000), we stop at Wounded Knee. The Sacred Heart Church, or what’s left of it, sits on a small hill overlooking a little valley through which runs the Wounded Knee Creek. One year earlier hundreds of U.S. marshals with automatic weapons lined the hills and banks of the creek. On the charred foundation of the church are scribbled “AIM Wounded Knee 1890–1973” and “Fuck you Dick______,” the last name is rubbed out. Behind the church is the graveyard, where some of Mike’s relatives lie buried. The old souvenir shop and museum have collapsed, and along the road is a monument and sign commemorating the events of 1890, when on the morning of December 28, the U.S. Seventh Cavalry surrounded an encampment of Oglala Sioux and with the help of Hotchkiss guns killed 194 men, women, and children. It was the last recorded skirmish between the U.S. Army and the American Indian. We get out of the car and walk to the sign. Willis limps like a wounded buffalo, each step painful. I wonder how he will get through his demonstration this evening. The wind whips through the “cheet” grass and jack pines, providing an eerie background hum. Willis, Mike, and Phil stand silhouetted against the sky reading the inscription on the sign: “Unrest on the reservation was due to a reduction in beef rations by the U.S. Congress and to the ghost-dancing of Chief Kicking Bear and Sitting Bull, who said that by wearing the ghost shirt and doing the ghost dances of Wovoka, the Piaute mystic, the warriors would become immune to the whiteman’s bullets; could openly defy the soldiers and white settlers; and could bring back the days of the old buffalo herds.”

  “Those days ain’t never comin’ back,” says Willis.

  We slowly move back to the car and then on to Pine Ridge. About thirty Indian kids await us in the gym. During my demonstration they are silent and still; quite different from the nervous fidgeting of inner-city kids. They ask me only two questions:

  “If a ball player don’t get hurt or nothin’, how long can he play?”

  “What happens if you punched a referee in the mouth?”

  Finally, Willis Reed comes on the court, positions himself at the low post, and begins to explain pivot play. “You take the ball with both hands, turn, and shoot. Always keep the ball high. Now if he plays you to the right, you fake and go left. If he plays you to the left, go right. Or, you can turn all the way around like this, and show him the ball and drive. After you drive once you’ve got him set up for the drop dribble. Face him, fake a drive, take one bounce away from the basket, turn, and shoot. You’ll have him flat-footed.”

  Willis doesn’t move much, and when one of the kids asks him if he will play next year, he says yes and h
e expects the Knicks to be in contention for the title. In closing, Willis gives the group a little lecture about hard work, responsibility, and the need to set goals. He says practice and study go hand in hand with a clean life. He speaks with the assurance of a man whose life has been built upon moral certainties. He says never to get down when you lose because there is always another game. He is glistening with sweat; though he is still standing in one spot, his tee shirt is wet. The kids are enraptured. “There isn’t much these days that hasn’t been done,” he says. “There’s been a man on the moon and somebody has already run a mile in 3:55. But you have a chance for a real first: One of you can be the first Indian to play in the NBA.”