Work, Basketball, and The Breaks of the Game
One of the most profound books I have read about work chronicles a mediocre basketball team from the late 1970s. The 1979-1980 Portland Trail Blazers won thirty-eight games and lost forty-four. They did make the playoffs but only at the bottom of the seeding and were quickly eliminated. The most memorable feature of the 1979-1980 Blazers was that they were profiled in novelistic detail by journalist David Halberstam in The Breaks of the Game.
But three years before, in 1977, they were great, the champions of the National Basketball Association. They won by their willingness to be unselfish, gaining many of their points “off the perfect pass.” And the year after that they were playing some of the best basketball that had ever been played. At one point, their record stood at fifty wins and ten losses. Then their best player was hurt, and they fell apart. By the 1979-1980 season, age, injury, discontentment, and the departure of the team’s best player had made the Blazers a shell of themselves.
Work may seem an odd theme to identify in a book about basketball, but for the players and coaches basketball is work, not play. The men Halberstam brought to life capture some of the ways men experience work, shaped by their motivation, character, talent, and outcomes. Frustration, not triumph, is the norm.
The Man Who Wasn’t There for the Championship
Geoff Petrie had to deal with the loss of his profession at a young age. He was such a gifted shooter that in practice he could consistently send the ball through the hoop at an angle that would send it bouncing right back to him. But knee injuries drove him from the game in 1976, a year before the Blazers won the title, when he was only twenty-nine. This caused him wrenching grief. “Basketball had been his entire life since he was twelve years old,” wrote Halberstam. It provided “security and confidence. It was the one thing he was good at.” Without his profession, “He was difficult for his wife to live with. His confidence seemed to evaporate.” Not until around the time of the season profiled by Halberstam could he bear to have anything to do with basketball again.
The Man Using Work to Redeem Himself
Kermit Washington, who joined the Blazers just before the 1979-1980 season, grew up in poverty, but in high school he got motivated about basketball and made himself into a dynamic player. In college, he matured even more when he met a woman named Pat and tried to impress her. In his senior year at American University, he averaged twenty points and twenty rebounds per game. Pat married him, and Washington made it to the NBA, where he improved enough to become a valuable member of the Los Angeles Lakers. Then, during a game in 1977, he lost control and almost destroyed both a man’s life and his career when he slugged Houston Rockets player Rudy Tomjanovich. The punch sounded “like a watermelon being dropped on concrete.” Tomjanovich almost died. From then on, Washington was vulnerable to being bullied on the court because he knew he could not risk getting in another fight.
The Man Who Publicly Failed
In 1972, the Blazers made LaRue Martin the top pick in the draft. He proved to be “a nice young man desperately over his head,” so bad he eventually drew fans’ sympathy, rather than their anger. He felt a “constant sense of failure.” Making matters worse, unlike most hapless workers, “he failed in public.” By age twenty-six, he was out of basketball. By the time the Blazers won their championship, he was long gone. In summer 1980, he tried to make a comeback by trying out for the Indiana Pacers. Desperate to make the team, he played through injury. They cut him anyway. This at least gave Martin the motivation to move on from basketball for good – into a much less exciting career. “He went to work,” wrote Halberstam, “for a title insurance company.”
The Troublemaker
Maurice Lucas was an intimidating figure who took out his work frustration on the other members of his organization. He once frightened a referee out of levying a technical foul by glancing at him and saying, “You don’t want to do that.” He led the championship Blazers in scoring. But when he joined the Blazers he signed a long-term low-money contract. By 1979, he thought he deserved better. Portland’s owner refused to budge, so Lucas tried to get himself traded by acting up in various ways, such as skipping practice. His lackadaisical performance undermined the team, but he finally got his wish late in the year.
The Perfectionist
The coach of the Trail Blazers, Dr. Jack Ramsay, longed to succeed. “He was an absolutely driven man,” wrote Halberstam. He loved his family, but made his wife “a basketball widow.” Well past middle age, he was “a physical fitness freak.” He exercised religiously by using the Nautilus machine, biking, and swimming laps. “Dr.” was not a nickname. He had a Ph.D. in education from the University of Pennsylvania. As a young man, he had simultaneously taken graduate school courses, coached high school, and played semipro basketball. Losing crushed him. During games, he coached from his knees and cajoled referees. His face turned red, and he sweated so profusely that he started packing diapers under his armpits to soak it all up. He gave that up when on one occasion the diapers disintegrated and bits of them flew onto the court. In 1966, while coaching for St. Joseph’s College the stress got so intense that it started to cause eye problems. That was what had prodded him into supposedly less stressful professional basketball coaching. The 1977 team was his great achievement. Once it was gone, he couldn’t bear to hear it criticized.
The Snakebit Man
At the center of The Breaks of the Game is a player who was no longer even on the Blazers, center Bill Walton. Walton had the perfect life. He loved basketball and overflowed with talent. He could pass. He could defend. He played college basketball at UCLA, a life that allowed him to indulge his other passion, political activism. On the court, his college team won two national titles. He was so important that he convinced straitlaced coach John Wooden to let him smoke marijuana. In the professionals, he blossomed. He was a key part of the 1977 Blazers. He was league most valuable player in 1978. But Walton was undermined by a small part of such a big man: his feet, which had an arch “like that of a woman in high heel shoes.” They were a problem even during his early career. Fastidious about what he put in his body – except drugs – Walton was a vegetarian and refused to take painkillers. But when unmanageable pain threatened his ability to play, he gave way on the painkillers. Still, his feet broke down in 1978, destroying the Blazers’ chances. He sat out the next season. Then he sued the team medical staff, demanded a trade, and was sent away to the San Diego Clippers. There, plagued by injury, he barely played in 1980. Fans grew so bitter at him that when one showed up at a home game dressed as an injured Walton they cheered.
The Breaks of the Game serves as an illustration of Genesis 3 where, after man’s Fall into sin, God curses work, sentencing mankind to face “thorns and thistles.” In such a world, it is easy to misuse work, obstacles are constant, and success is fleeting.