As for Koufax and Drysdale, their holdout ended after a few weeks, when they got raises to, respectively, $125,000 and $110,000 a season. It was less than what they had been asking for, but still, I was relieved. Justice had been served.
BY THE TIME I was fourteen, in 1968, I was desperate to chart my own fate, to be in charge of something. I was by then a huge Los Angeles Lakers fan, and my fame as Opie had provided me with an opportunity to meet my favorite player, Elgin Baylor, at an Easter Seals fundraising event. We stood together for no more than thirty seconds as a photographer took our picture outside of the Lakers’ locker room at the Los Angeles Memorial Sports Arena. But simply standing next to the man known as Rabbit—me pointing upward to the basket while Elgin pretended that he was about to shoot—had a huge impact on me. I knew that I had no hope of ever playing basketball on his level, but I was crazy about the game, and it became my best sport.
As a player, I was an undersized but dogged, pesky little shooting guard. Well, to be honest, I was terrible when I started out in sixth grade. My friend Noel Salvatore was legitimately good at basketball, though, and when we discovered that we had missed the cutoff date to sign up for the Burbank Parks and Recreation Center’s Bantam League, Noel audaciously proposed that we take the unusual step of putting together our own team. We went door-to-door to local businesses, cold-calling them, until we found a sponsor, a local bank called Surety Savings and Loan. Then the league found a grown-up who was willing to be our coach.
Once again, I was subjected to ridicule. The very first time I caught a pass, I nervously dribbled the ball out of bounds; I didn’t understand the court layout. Can you imagine Opie making such an ass of himself, losing track of court boundaries, and then taking too many steps to the basket and getting called for traveling? It was hideous.
But I practiced and practiced until I got pretty good. And by the time I was in eighth grade and jonesing to be a leader, I hit upon the idea of being Clint’s coach. What if I put together a squad composed of Clint and his third-grade buddies and molded them in my image? This time, I went straight to Dad: Could he be the sponsor and nominal coach of a Bantam League team?
He wrote a check, and thus, Howards Hurricanes were born. Dad was the figurehead and disciplinarian, but he left the actual coaching to me. We had HOWARDS HURRICANES uniforms made up, with green T-shirts and yellow shorts.
There was nothing subliminal about why I was so driven to do this: it was to prepare myself to become a film director. I actually said the words aloud: If I can learn how to handle a bunch of unruly eight-year-olds, I could one day probably figure out how to cope with a temperamental actor. I won’t name any names, but I have since discovered that, behaviorally, there are times when Category 1 and Category 2 are almost exactly the same thing.
In the Bantam League, the hoops were lowered from ten feet to eight to give the kids a better chance at scoring. I ran practices once or twice a week and we played the games on Saturday. Clint was a good player and he had a couple of friends who were natural athletes, authentically skilled. But the others ranged from average to downright uncoordinated. What I’m proudest of about my tenure as the Howards Hurricanes coach is that I molded our strategies to the kids’ abilities. At John Burroughs High School, where I was playing roundball, I was nagged by a feeling that my coach was too systematic and inflexible, running patterns and setting defenses that stifled our players’ individual talents. I didn’t want to duplicate his approach.
The Hurricanes were, for the most part, an undersized team. I thought that we stood a better chance if we played in a wide-open runand-gun style, allowing our players more freedom to shoot from the outside and cover their opponents one-on-one. I set out to maximize the abilities that each kid brought naturally to the court. We had one kid who was gangly and couldn’t shoot to save his life, so I made him our defensive enforcer and rebounder. Another kid was tiny but proficient at dribbling, so when we were trying to run out the clock, I told him, “We’re gonna pass it to you and let you do your thing.” Over time, through repeated practice and regular playing time, these kids would transcend their limited roles and become more well-rounded players. That was another thing: at Dad’s insistence, every boy had to play at least half the game. So I couldn’t just ride my best players and keep the less skilled on the bench.