Unraveled Ideal

By B.J. Phillips

THE BREAKS OF THE GAME by David Halberstam Knopf; 362 pages; $15

The 1976-77 Portland Trail Blazers were less a basketball team than a fan's dream. With Center Bill Walton healthy for the only full season of his ill-starred career, the club won the National Basketball Association championship and, in the process, made the works of a Swiss watch look haphazard. Three seasons later, the Trail Blazers had slipped into the second division, the bright hopes of dynasty ended. The parabola of the Trail Blazers is the stuff of tragedy. But Author David Halberstam (The Powers That Be) has produced a tome so heavy that he contracts what basketball insiders call "white man's disease": no leaping ability.

When Halberstam picks up the team during the 1979-80 season, Walton has left in a fury of lawsuits against the team, its trainer and doctor over treatments with pain killers. Maurice Lucas, the power forward who had provided muscle and meanness under the boards, was locked in an acrimonious contract dispute with Portland's owner. Guard Lionel Hollins, ball-handler and playmaker nonpareil, also wrangled with management; he and Lucas were soon traded. Their running mate, Dave Twardzik, stumbled about the court, a man suddenly severed from a rare athletic symbiosis. Forward Bobby Gross was injured for most of the season, and when he did play was so shell-shocked by the devastating changes that he was unable to blend into the new club. Presiding over it all was Coach Jack Ramsay, a fiercely proud tactician who did not coach as much as seek a vision of perfection on court. Ramsay was in turn bewildered, angry and, finally, bitter over the unraveling of the ideal.

Why were the Trail Blazers undone?

The answers lay in professional basketball itself: a season too long for the human body to stand its stresses; a roster too short for the team's chemistry to survive disaffection; an ownership weakened by the financial fevers of big-time sports. The sources of affliction intrigue Halberstam, but on their trail he stumbles as badly as the team. His account is told at one remove. Throughout, the season is observed with 20/20 hindsight in the subjunctive mood that is the hallmark of Halberstam's style: "Later, he would realize...."

Rarely is there the aura of the locker room, and the volume's only sense of life comes when the players speak, all too rarely, in their own voices. Between the testimonies are pages of ponderous speculations and familiar psychological and political theorizing. "Many of the blacks had never seen anything like it [Portland] before--the mountains, the forests, the river--they had heard of land like this but it always seemed to be something that would belong to white people." The book's one insight is into the character of Bill Walton. He casts an emotional shadow that is even larger than his considerable (6 ft. 11 in.) physical presence. Long misunderstood as a hippie superstar with a low tolerance for pain, Walton emerges here as courageous in the face of injury but petty about his prerogatives as the team's key player, a man first spoiled by his physical gifts, then petulant, even vindictive when they desert him. But this is not a fair return for 362 pages. Later, readers would realize that they had been had.

--By B.J. Phillips

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