Lenny Wilkens - Unguarded: My Forty Years Surviving in the NBA

My Forty Years
Surviving in the NBA

Lenny Wilkens
with Terry Pluto

SIMON & SCHUSTER
NEW YORK LONDON TORONTO SYDNEY SINGAPORE

SIMON & SCHUSTER
Rockefeller Center
1230 Avenue of the Americas
New York, NY 10020
www.SimonandSchuster.com
http://www.SimonSays.com

Copyright 2000 by Lee Le-Ja Inc. and Terry Pluto
All rights reserved,
including the right of reproduction
in whole or in part in any form.
SIMON & SCHUSTER and colophon are
registered trademarks of SIMON & SCHUSTER, Inc.

ISBN 0-7432-1513-3
ISBN-13: 978-0-7432-1513-8

eISBN-13: 978-0-7432-1513-8

The authors would like to thank Jeff Neuman, editor at Simon & Schuster, who gave this project a green light. As always, Jeff Neuman is the Red Auerbach of editors. Wed also like to thank Faith Hamlin, our agent on the project, and a word of thanks to Jeffs assistant, Jon Malki, for all his help.

To MARILYN

the love of my life
and
to FATHER THOMAS MANNION

who
has always been there for me.

LENNY WILKENS

To JOE TAIT

a great broadcaster,
and even better friend.
TERRY PLUTO

UNGUARDED

ON MY DESK, theres a picture of my father.

Hes a man I never really knew, yet a man who feels very much a part of me today. The man staring at me is always about thirty-five, always in the prime of life, dark-skinned, strong, healthy. Hes the father I wished was there when my team in Seattle won the 1979 NBA title, the father I wanted with me when I was inducted in the Basketball Hall of Fame. When I puffed that cigar to celebrate breaking Red Auerbachs record for the most career victories by any NBA coach, I wanted my father there. Hes the father I wished could see my children and meet my wife, Marilyn.

He will always be my father, and he will always live in my head because he died when I was only five years old.

His name was Leonard. Im really Leonard R. Wilkens, Jr. Few people know that about me. Few people know very much about me, even though Ive been in the public eye seemingly forever, as an NBA player and/or coach since 1960. Thats a long time, forty years in pro basketball. No one has survived the NBA storm longer. No one has appeared in more games when you combine all the years that Ive played and coached. And here am I, at the age of sixty-two. Ive coached for twenty-seven years, and I still love it. I really do.

I just wish that my father had been there for some of it.

Seeing other kids with fathers made me miss my father. There would be functions at school, and other children would have both parents there. Id have my mother, assuming she could get off from work. Sometimes, no one was there. Later, as I achieved some things, I wondered what my father would have made of it all: graduating from college. Playing in the NBA. Making All-Star teams. Coaching some wonderful teams, coaching in the 1996 Olympics.

Sometimes Id ask myself, What would my father have thought of me? Would he be proud of me?

Theres no real answer to that because hes been gone for so long.

After my father died, my mother spent a lot of time telling all her children how much our father loved us. She wanted us to know that our father didnt want to leave us, that he would have loved to have been with us, but God just called him. I never really understood why he was gone, but I knew it wasnt his fault. He didnt run off; he died.

I missed him then, and I always will.

Those who knew my father say that Im a lot like him. They say if you look at my hands, you see his hands. Thats what Ive heard over and over again from those who knew my fatherthat I have my fathers hands, strong, with long, purposeful fingers. I look at my hands and try to imagine my fathers hands, then I wonder if he was an athlete. I dont even know if he was a sports fan. Relatives have told me that sometimes I walk like him, or that I gesture like him. I dont know what to say to that, because the more I think about my father, the less I realize I know.

I do have one memory of him: Im sitting in a high chair at the dinner table. Im not much more than an infant. My father takes a piece of bacon, ties it to a string from something above my head. That bacon attached to a string hangs down, dangling right in front of me. With my little hands, I bang around the bacon, and that keeps me occupied as my parents eat breakfast.

That was my father, a man who knew how to make a toy for a toddler out of a piece of bacon and a string.

And he baked.

I dont remember seeing him bake, but I remember the smells. Fresh bread. Cakes. The warm aromas filling our brownstone apartment in the Bedford Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn. I can close my eyes and see my sister and myself sitting on a bench. My father is in the kitchen. I dont see him in the kitchen, I just know hes in there, baking.

I can still smell it.

This time, it was a cake. Hes baking a white cake with chocolate frosting. With my eyes closed and my memory in high gear, I still dont see him, but I can see the cake. I see my sister Connie and me eating that cake. I know he baked it. But I still dont see him, and I wish I didjust once more, even in my memory. I just know that my father loved to bake: He did all the baking in the house, and forever in my head are the memories of that white cake with the chocolate frosting.

And the bacon on a string.

And the funeral.

My father died of a bleeding ulcer, that much Ive been told. He was rushed to a hospital in Brooklyn, which was not far from the brownstone apartment where we lived. The doctors said my father had something called a locked bowel. They decided the best way to treat him was with an enema.

Actually, it was the one thing they never should have done.

It killed him.

My mother didnt know anything about malpractice. Besides, this was in 1943, a time when you just didnt sue doctors. It was a time when you were glad to have a doctor treat you, a time when doctors seemed like miracle men. And miracle men many of them wereand still are.

But in the case of this doctor and my father, I cant help but think that the man killed my father. I didnt hear this story of my fathers death until I was in college. I wanted to do something, but what? Find the doctor? Sue the hospital for something that happened so long ago? Besides, how do you put a price tag on a young family deprived of a father? No amount of money can repay my mother for all the anguish she had to endure as she raised us, a woman alone with four kids all under the age of seven when she lost her husband.

When my father died, they put the casket in the living room. The custom back then was to hold a wake in the home. There was a huge lamp on each side of the casket. Behind the coffin were these black drapes. I can still see the room. Its so dark, its eerie. The casket is a shiny wooden box, reflecting the light from the two lamps. People are crying. I remember a nun holding me on her lap: She was a friend of my mothers from Holy Rosary Church. My mothers family were staunch Roman Catholics. My father converted to Catholicism to marry my mother. I spent the entire funeral in the arms of that nun. People cried and cried. I clung to that nun.

The casket was open. My father was in there. He wore his best suit and tie. There was no question that it was my father, and no question that he was dead. I just remember that I didnt want to be in that room alone with the casket.

When the wake was over, one of my aunts came up to me. She took me in her arms and said, Well, youre going to be the man of the family now.