The Breaks of the Game by David Halberstam

Author:David Halberstam
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Hyperion

The controversy over Bill Walton’s foot, which was to lead to his departure from Portland, and much acrimony, some of it legal, began on January 31, 1978, in a game against Milwaukee. At the time the Blazers were playing the best basketball in their history and, some thought, the best basketball in the history of the NBA. Their record at the time was 39–8. There was talk of their winning more games than any other team during the regular season (the previous record was 69) and a belief that they were a team of destiny. This was not just the illusion of fans and sportswriters, but of professional basketball people, and in fact the Blazer players themselves. Later Walton compared that excessive desire to be the best and to enter the record books with the excessiveness that marked the activities of CREEP, the Committee to Re-Elect the President, which led to Watergate.

That may well be a legitimate comparison but there was also no doubt that Walton, with his unique competitiveness, played a large role in Portland’s obsession to win. During the Milwaukee game he felt a soreness in his right foot and when the game was over he peeled off his sweat sock, expecting to find a raw blister. Far more disquieting, he found no blister, but the pain continued. Still the team was winning, he was playing well, the pain seemed for a time acceptable. He played through the month of February until, with the pain steadily increasing, he finally had to take himself out during a game against Philadelphia on February 28. As he came out of the game he told Culp, “I’m tired, my left leg is tired—just very tired.” At the time Portland’s record was 50 and 10. No one seemed to know exactly what was wrong with Walton, though he did have a major neuroma in his right foot (plus a nagging fatigue in his left one), and on March 3 there was an operation to remove the neuroma. Without him a brilliant team became a less than ordinary team; it won 8 and lost 14. Destiny was becoming a good deal more elusive.

In his early days as a professional Walton had been suspicious of sports doctors; he believed them an extension of management. But over the past two years he had become extremely close to the Portland team physician, Dr. Robert Cook. Cook was not just the team doctor, he was, along with Jack Scott, one of Walton’s two best friends; the bonds between Cook and Walton were a shared love of outdoor sports, backpacking, white-water canoeing and a mutual concern for so vulnerable a body in so exceptional an athlete. Cook was thirty-six at the time, already tested in far harsher terrain than basketball locker rooms—he had been with the first wave of combat troops arriving in Vietnam in 1965 and there he had seen enough gore and brutality and leg amputations to last several lifetimes. He was young, modern and hip. Before

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.