Halberstam, David. The Breaks of the Game, 1981.
A Harvard-trained journalist who made his bones chronicling the Vietnam War, David Halberstam was the first high-profile journalist to spill ample amounts of ink on the NBA. His classic The Breaks of the Game is the result of a year, the 1979-1980 season, spent with the Portland Trail Blazers who had only a few years earlier been league champions. Through the story of one team, Halberstam was able to offer a view of the entire professional sport at what, nearly 30 years later, was a crucial moment in that sport’s history. Halberstam’s book profiles too many players, coaches, and executives to have one real protagonist. In fact, the man on the cover of the current edition of the book, Bill Walton, isn’t even a Blazer during the season Halberstam covered. Yet Walton’s legacy, especially his contribution to the Blazers’s championship in 1976-1977 championship, hangs over the entire book like a thick fog. In addition to Walton, Halberstam spends considerable time covering, among others, the Blazer players Kermit Washington, Maurice Lucas, Larry Steele, and Billy Ray Bates; coaches Jack Ramsey and Lenny Wilkins; as well as Blazers GM Stu Inman and owner Larry Weinberg. In Halberstam’s hands, the season encapsulates the conflict of sports and business, the tensions of individual and team success, and the turn-on-a-dime nature of professional heartbreak or jubilation. This is the best sports book I’ve ever read.
The NBA is a business masquerading as a sport.
Halberstam began his project in the last year of the 1970s, a decade during which professional basketball had undergone massive changes. The league had survived a rival, the ABA, which folded in 1976. Over the course of the decade, the league grew by eight teams (four of them came via the ABA) to go from 14 to 22. During this same period of league expansion, player salaries had skyrocketed. A star like Bob McAdoo or promising rookie like Sidney Wicks might command a salary of $75k per year in 1971. In 1979, those same players—star veterans and high draft picks—were signing for over $500k per year. One contributor to this increase was the bidding war started by the ABA for the best talent. Another was the influx of advertising dollars from television contracts, as executives like Roone Arledge discovered that the medium was well suited to display the grace and power of the league’s players. A third was the burgeoning set of labor laws demanded by the players union under the guidance of Larry Fleisher.
Consequently, salary issues play a huge role in the book. There isn’t a single Blazer player Halberstam profiles who doesn’t have his salary–and his feelings about that salary—scrutinized. Larry Steele provides a synecdoche for this larger discussion. A veteran of the Blazers championship team, Steele had played for Adolph Rupp at the University of Kentucky and came to the Blazers during the team’s second year on a one-year guaranteed contract of $25,000. Now in his ninth year, he makes over $100k, by far his largest salary, but one of the lowest on the team. In a telling moment, Halberstam writes, “Steele thought the greatest mistake an athlete could make was to regard professional basketball as a sport, not a business.” Steele has reasons to think this way. By the end of the season, his knees are so shot that he’ll have to retire. His veteran-status on the team means little, and he is waived so that the team won’t have to pick up any part of his salary while he convalesces. While the book’s title indicates basketball is a game, the professional incarnation of the sport is actually a business.
The more things change, the more they stay the same.
Of course, Steele’s basic gripe with the team—that loyalty means less than the bottom line—is not new. Think of the Celtics trading Isaiah Thomas in 2017 after Thomas played injured and permanently derailed his career during a playoff run before he had signed a big contract. Sure, there are lots of differences between the game Halberstam describes in the book and how we experience it today, but I left the book shocked at the similarities.
The feeling that the slog of an 82-game regular season was purgatory before the league’s best players tried hard in the playoffs? It’s been around since the 70s. The crucial role race plays in the way owners, executives, coaches, players, and fans engage with the game? Halberstam describes Dr. Jack Ramsey’s offensive system as “an odd thing, racial without being racist.” This nuance and complexity has not gone away even as the demographics of the sport’s fans have changed. A nagging sense that NBA players are too entitled and thus won’t take instruction? The era Halberstam chronicles captures the moment where it’s a firmly entrenched reality for players to make considerably more money than their coaches and the subsequent fear among coaches and executives that this will make giving a team any kind of stern discipline impossible. Of course, innovative and successful professional coaches like Pat Riley, Phil Jackson, Chuck Daly, Greg Popovich, Brad Stevens, and Steve Kerr prove that the best coaches are the ones who offer not only Xs and Os knowledge but also a sense of how to relate to their players more as partners and less as employees. The certainty of a dynasty being derailed by injuries? Bill Walton’s foot injury in the middle of a 50-10 regular season for the 1977-1978 Blazers season will resonate with anyone who marveled at how a spate of injuries ended this latest Golden State Warriors dynastic run. And finally, sports agents that drive GMs up the wall and play havoc with team chemistry? Check out agent-cum-philosopher Howard Shuster who before he got into the agent game to represent Blazers glue guy Bobby Gross wrote a book titled Man, Sport, and Existence that owed a lot to Jewish philosopher Martin Buber and then extracted $300k from Blazers’ owner Weinberg for his player.
This is not to say things haven’t changed. The media coverage of the game has changed considerably. Halberstam’s book was the first of its kind about the NBA. More words are typed now about the game during the offseason than were written about the game in the regular season. Halberstam was afforded rare access and reported on his sources in a way that was not present in books like The Jordan Rules. The medical professionals and procedures at the disposal of these players have greatly improved. This book is littered with men who needed better knee surgeries, state of the art training facilities, and good plain medical guidance. Everyone from Bill Walton to LaRue Martin may have had a longer career. Finally, the game is national here. When we do catch a glimpse of what basketball looks like outside the states via Kermit Washington—a new addition to the 1979-1980 Blazers and a veteran of the infamous 1972 American Olympic team that lost to the USSR—the international game is denigrated. That’s certainly not the case in 2019 where at the FIBA World Cup, the competition’s best player and reigning league MVP is Greek, not American.
Team success is ephemeral and demands you catch some breaks.
To fans of the league, the Blazers championship team was a synecdoche for an entire style of basketball. Their defeat of the more individually-talented Philadelphia 76ers in the 76-77 Finals was read as a triumph of coaching over instinct (logos), dedication over entitlement (ethos), and team over individual (pathos). The year after the championship, they were even better, but with Walton’s injury, that team collapsed. With Walton’s acrimonious departure, so did the team’s championship hopes. In the 79-80 season, no player from that championship team played a crucial part in the team’s success. Bill Walton spent his first season in San Diego on and off the injured list. Maurice Lucas and Lionel Hollins started the season as Blazers but were gone by the end of the season. Bobby Gross, Dave Twardzik, and Larry Steele were injured and ineffective. Everyone else was already retired or gone.
Early in the book, Indiana head coach Bob Knight calls Blazers GM Stu Inman to commiserate about the Walton-led Blazers falling apart: “Stu, is there any way in this day and age to keep a team together?” Not with the breaks of the game: the vicissitudes of health, attitude, and opportunity. Or perhaps, Halberstam is making the point that success and heartbreak are both the result of breaks. Walton needed Maurice Lucas. Both of them needed Jack Ramsey. Jack Ramsey needed each of the players Stu Inman landed. And the team’s legend and legacy needed the basketball-crazy setting of Portland, Oregon, where basketball was the only game in not just the town but the state.
Until 1970, the league’s paragon of success was the Boston Celtics who excelled before expansion and big-time money, but since the influx of cash and player empowerment, the Celtics had not been quite as successful. Still, Red Auerbach had put his 1979-1980 team in a good position for the future by obtaining Larry Bird. Reading in 2019, the 1979-1980 season’s most remarkable feature is that it was the rookie year of Bird and another rookie, Magic Johnson. Their brief competition in college turned into a full-blown professional rivalry as the Celtics and Lakers claimed seven of the next eight championships. Nobody predicted this kind of success for either team at the beginning of the 1979-1980 season. In fact, one of the funny revelations in this book is that at the beginning of the season, league experts were more convinced that Bird was a player than Magic. Of course, it was the Lakers who ended the season with the title. It was Kareem Abdul-Jabaar’s first title since joining the team in 1975.
No one gets it right all the time.
Halberstam offers insight into Blazers GM Stu Inman early and often. He had the good fortune to pick Bill Walton #1 overall, brought Jack Ramsey from Buffalo to be his head coach, and constructed the rest of what is still the franchise’s only championship team. Yet he also had his misses.
His first #1 draft was Sidney Wicks, a mercurial talent whose bafflingly erratic play led to multiple head coaches getting fired. Another conspicuous miss? The Blazers had the rights to ABA standout Moses Malone and chose to pass on him because they didn’t think they could fit him into a lineup with Walton and Lucas. As Walton sat on the sidelines and Lucas bickered about his salary, Moses Malone lit up the Blazers every time his Houston Rockets faced Portland.
The larger point is that no one is right all the time. Everyone Halberstam covers is human. Even as the book lionizes Walton and his unselfish style of play, Halberstam reveals ways that Walton was entitled and helped to sow the seeds of his team’s demise. Halberstam writes, “When [Walton] had announced that he was leaving Portland and joining San Diego, he had given a press conference and at that press conference he said that before his injury, ‘I was fifty and ten.’” I instead of we. Not exactly the team-first player everybody fell in love with. Yes, Jack Ramsey was a great coach, one who according to the Sporting News was according to his peers the most respected coach in the league. Yet too often we see him believe more in his system than his players. He is not an authoritarian like Bob Knight but he is unremittingly prideful, believing it was his genius that had led the Blazers to greatness and would do so again. Larry Weinburg, the Blazers owner, is a shrewd businessman and, from Halberstam’s portrayal, a decent guy. But too frequently he sees his employees as products, and while he may save money, he loses his players’ goodwill as well their commitment. Stu Inman had a deal set up with Chicago that had the oft-perturbed Maurice Lucas headed out of town for a sweet haul before the season began. But Weinberg vetoed the trade because Lucas’s low contract—the source of Lucas’s discontent—was a better deal than the larger contracts the Blazers would have gotten back. Lucas’s unhappiness forms raincloud darkens the team’s entire season.
I am sure that there are things that Halberstam gets wrong too. I don’t know enough, however, to identify what those things would be.
The book is full of wonderful stories.
I scarcely have time to talk about Billy Ray Bates, a sharecropper’s son from Mississippi who didn’t join the Blazers until ¾ of the season was done and helped lead the team to the playoffs. Or Julius Erving, whose game is wonderfully captured its beauty and power in a few short paragraphs. Or Lloyd Neal, aka “Ice”, a Portland bench player who has a memorable run-in with Los Angeles Lakers super-fan Jack Nicholson, aka “Cuckooman.” Or the travails of Ron Culp, the Blazers trainer who Walton sued after his foot issues, or Bruce Ogilvie, the paradoxically anxiety-producing Blazers psychiatrist who was crucial to helping the team choose players who would build chemistry. Or Maurice Lucas, the man who once grabbed his coach Hubie Brown and told in him in no certain terms never to talk to like to him like that again. I won’t be forgetting these stories any time soon. And as for the hundred other anecdotes I could have mentioned? Welp, those are the breaks of the game.