The sweat is separating on his forehead. Like oil from water. It separates again, from his head to the floor. Drip. Drip. Some drops hit the ground; the sound of droplets. For others, silence. Yet they still fall. Separation.
He is wearing a soaked white tank top, black trim—old school. His beautiful piteous skin is glistening, a deep shade of brown. His eyes are squinting as he lifts his chin from his chest. He never wipes the sweat away. To him it is not a distraction; it is simply part of his soul escaping to touch the outside world. He looks cold into what is looking at him. You. He becomes Rakim, without saying one rhyme.
| This article appears in the April 2004 issue of Hoop Magazine. |
“You know, I don’t know why I never had a nickname back in the day,” he says, head down again, sound of a basketball being dribbled some 10 feet away. “I guess you could have called me ‘The Executioner.’”
Another kind of silence overcomes the room, outside the room. One that occurs when Gods speak. I did say Rakim, right? He continues, explanation like Bible verses.
“You might as well have gotten yourself a priest, ate your last meal and walked to the court blindfolded, because I tell ya [New York accent riding thick] if you were assigned to check me...forget it! I would bury you.” There is a pause, not a long one, but one that allows breaths to be taken, caught and gathered. “I had a quick release. My spin moves were too fast. Once I let the pill go, there was no stay of execution, no court of appeal...”
His voice rises as the sound of the ball falls threw a net. The sound of his life.
“You were done.”
So was he. Silence again overcame the room. The camera stopped filming. He had spoken what everyone had felt for almost ten years, but were never able to put into words. Bernard King then looked at you in that camera for the last time. Still sweating, still dripping, he said nothing more. He said goodbye. Forever.
His was not the story that was to be told. His baby brother Albert was supposed to be The One. In the classic Heaven Is A Playground by Rick Telander, the younger King is painted as the prodigy, the godsend, God’s son. He, not Bernard, was New York City’s finesse, Brooklyn’s finest. But hunger can drive different people in different ways.
University of Tennessee. Knoxville is directly 776 miles south of New York. It was around the time when Rick Telander’s book was becoming known in urban America that Bernard was making noise in rural. The Ernie and Bernie Show is what it was being hailed as. All hailed the King.
“I think we had a sort of cockiness and flair that hadn’t been seen down South before,” says Milwaukee Bucks GM Ernie Grunfeld, a New York native who was the other half of the show.
The NBA began to look like his route out of Brooklyn. While Albert’s heaven was the playground, Bernard’s heaven was about to be an arena. But hell also awaits those whose hearts and minds are sometimes vulnerable to success, escapism, stardom and even love.
Here’s the story nobody caught. At the time Bernard entered the League, Micheal Ray Richardson was beginning to paint a picture of the black athlete that was the perfect duality of what W.E.B. DuBois called The Soul. There was so much pain and turmoil inside of Richardson once he stepped off the court, so much that it destroyed his career. Yet New York loved him. On the streets in every borough, from Brownsville to the Bronx, Marcy to Lefrak, Sugar was more than an urban legend or cultural icon, he was a hero. The one often loved, adored and sad to say, honored.
While Richardson was in New York playing behind Ray Williams, BK was in New Jersey playing behind John Williams. Then Sugar started to get out of control. His game blew up and so did his life. He started to rule the basketball world.
Bernard was straight; trying to keep the demons under control, while his game was angelically outta control. Fate must have felt that the proximity of King in Jersey and Richardson in New York at the same time was too much. Bernard was sent to Golden State, far away from Micheal Ray, disassociation before birth.
With the Warriors, King played behind no one; he played along with World B. Free and became a star. It seemed that almost (an important word) everything Micheal Ray was publicly getting busted for, Bernard was publicly getting away with. Not to synergize the two but life had an idiosyncratic way of increasing the degrees of separation. Because Richardson became the reason King would achieve greatness.
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Bernard King: His Royal Highness. Noren Trotman/NBAE/Getty Images |
It was the week of April 17th when he lost his mind. Some will say he had done this before—in Tennessee, in Jersey, in Oakland—but on the other end of the spectrum, where his faults took over his virtues. Alcohol was the main one. It did things to him, changed him into someone different when he had that oil, that “Remy in his system.”
“He did some scandalous things,” New York Post columnist Peter Vescey would confess. “[Things] I won’t even talk about.”
But one week nullified all; buried the demons. The abuse King gave the Detroit Pistons (without justifiable bragging or boasting) was worse than any abuse he ever put on himself. There had been similar performances, but none like this. Dr. J in the final ABA Finals in 1976 was the last time anyone had seen anything like it, but still...this was...
Isiah Thomas explains: “What he did to us I had never seen before. We caught him in the middle of a three-year stretch where he was playing better than any small forward in the history of the game. It wasn’t like he was scoring 45 points and taking 40 shots, he was scoring 45 on us only taking 22 shots!”
1984. The year before he led the League in scoring. The year before he was supposed to get the MVP. The year where he solidified the truth that he, not Larry Bird or Magic Johnson, was not just the best, but the greatest basketball player alive. The year before the injury that would change not only his life, but the landscape of basketball. Yes, many still have Jerry Wachter’s frozen moment, that Sports Illustrated, BK on the cover, fingers broken and taped, flu pouring out of his body, wreaking havoc, wreckin’ shop. “His Royal Highness” it read. Most keep it in cellophane, framed. He means that much to them. They are not alone.
Let Isiah Thomas tell it. He was the one who watched a mind get lost, it was he who saw the episodes unfold, shot after shot falling game after game, some never blessing rim or glass. He saw a man score 213 points in five games, missing only 40 percent of the time. Zeke—who himself played so well that week that Bernard’s teammate Rory Sparrow said, “God placed his hand on Isiah and said, ‘You shall play basketball and you shall play great,’”—20 years later, still in awe.
“In the final game against us in that series, I think he scored 50 [editor’s note: 44] and Kevin McHale told me—because [the Celtics] had to play the Knicks in the next round—‘There’s no way he’s scoring 50 on us. We won’t let him.’ I said to McHale, ‘OK.’ In the first game against Boston in the next series, I think Bernard scored 60.”
One name puts this performance in perspective: Kobe Bryant. Nine games. Forty-plus points every time. Nothing like anyone had ever seen. The most dominant offensive performance (according to the media) this side of MJ or Wilt. Incredible, right? This is why Bernard King is so culturally revered, because no one of circumstance or substance remembers. Or cares. Or gives a damn just how sick BK was. They let the drama of his life, the abuse of substance, what he did off the court shape their memories, not just opinions.
To understand just how beyond-Kobe Bernard was, return to the scenes of the crime: NYC vs. Detroit, 1984. He did in a playoff series—where the pressure is much greater—exactly what Bryant did, only better: King averaged one less point per game (44 to 43), while shooting 60 percent as opposed to Kobe’s 49 percent. King averaged five less shots per game than Kobe (27 shots per game to Bryant’s 32). He only once shot the ball over 30 times (In Game 2 he shot 35 times, the most attempts all season), while Kobe had five 30-plus shot games (in one game Kobe shot 41 times). King also did it without the use of a three-pointer, meaning it was there—but he never used it. Then once that playoff series was over, King averaged 30 (including two more 40-point games) in the next series, (which they lost to Boston in seven games), when his game was considered off!
Which leads to only one question: What’s up with the love? He had scoring stretches that lasted seasons, not just games.
1978: 24ppg (as a rookie)
1982: 23.2
1984: 26.3
1985: 32.9 (led League)
1990: 28.4
Not to mention, his shooting percentages unheard of by anyone under the age of 7. “You were surprised whenever he missed,” Vescey says. “And he’d scare the [heck] out of anyone who had to guard him.”
He was a genius interrupted. Ball games written in stanzas as opposed to chapters. The universal love that evaded his career was found scrolled inside a book penned by his peers.
“From my standpoint, and understand I’m one that believes the game of basketball is all about matchups,” Julius Erving expresses, “Bernard King was the toughest matchup of my career. And I say that from the heart.”
Bernard King had only three moves in his arsenal,” Mark Aguirre said to a reporter once. “But you couldn’t stop any one of them. He would just kill you, not softly either.”
“He was unstoppable.” The words of Alex English flow. “I hated to see him coming on the break on the wing because I knew. He was a small small forward but he was so strong. But he also had an inner strength. I believe, myself, Bob McAdoo and Bernard King should not have been left off of the NBA’s 50 Greatest Players. Of all of us, he should have been [on] there.”
His friend for life, Grunfeld finishes the testimonial. “He always had his best games in the biggest moments, even in college; and unbelievable moments in the Garden. He had great mental toughness. He was a very, very special player and still a good friend.”
There’s the love. His people knew.
Everyone heard the pop. I, instead, felt it.
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After tearing his ACL, King won Comeback Player of the Year with the Washington Bullets in 1990. Dale Tait/NBAE/Getty Images |
After scoring 12 points in the first six minutes of the game, it happened. My eyes closed as I saw him go down under the basket. I felt the sharpness of it; I felt the finality of it. As they carried him off the court, I looked at my sister. She saw it in my eyes. Bernard King’s career had just ended.
ACL tears create tears; no one is supposed to come back the same from them. For most athletes, depression sets in, manifests itself into the psyche. Weak individuals fold; allow the curse to control the gift. For too many GMs and head coaches in the League, Bernard King was about to be the next victim, the next one to throw it all away. They knew his kind. No one returns from ACL tears. Not even kings.
It is usually the ones with the greatest weaknesses that have the strongest resolve. They do things no one else can. “One of the most significant things [Bernard] did, of all athletes in any sport, is when he came back from his injury and returned to All-Star status,” Erving says.
In a Bullets uniform, BK mounted a four-year comeback that would not only get him the NBA Comeback Player of the Year (1990), but back to the status as one of the most feared players alive.
From 17.2 ppg in ’87 to the 28.4 in ’90, he ruled. Every critic he ever had finally silenced, their words resting in peace. Never to be heard on another professional basketball court again.
His forever has ended in Atlanta...for now. He has a new wife, new baby, new business. He travels often, building his Costum Crown empire. He lays low. Appearing every now and then on ESPN Classic, to talk about one of his performances or laughing about his role in the movie, Fastbreak. Or for an honor in his name at the Garden. Or showing up to pass on the game to a young player as a favor to his friend Grunfeld.
He was contacted to tell his story for this story. He never called back.
Understandable. Years ago he told this exact same magazine, “I realized that if I drank there would be no career, there would be no life. There’s not much more you can say after that.” Again, truth.
His game was luxury as a Birkin handbag. As exotic as Zane, he could get warm like Kane, vintage as Louis Roederer champagne. Inside/Out. Both places he was amazingly unstoppable. And that’s an understatement. Peter Vescey put it best: “Bernard King could score 30 effortlessly, 40 whenever he wanted, and 50 when it was serious.” They say he invented the term “game face” without the word ever coming out of his mouth.
His legacy rests on a piece of paper: that SI cover. Over the years it has become the greatest lasting image of what he did, all he meant. An invalidated career, validated for a minute, one week to be exact.
It was not the word “Highness” on that cover that made the statement that explained his impact. It was something else. The subtext read: Bernard King Raises The Game To A New Level. Not “his” game, “the” game. There in three small letters lies the essence of why he is so endeared. He raised the game of basketball to that next level, brought it to where he was at.
Yet his contribution goes unrecognized by the powers that be, not just because of some of the illicit things he did but because he never won a championship, never won MVP, never played for the Celtics, wasn’t considered top 50, and is not (yet) in the Hall of Fame, even though it’s been over 10 years.
But we know. To Bernard King the word “the” instead of “his” makes a great difference in his life, in proclaiming his greatness with a basketball in his hand. It says a lot. It acknowledges the truth.
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