The Spenser Haywood Rule: Battles, Basketball, and the Making of an American Iconoclast, Mark J. Spears & Gary Washburn, 2020.
I New York 1975
Four years settled into full-time work as a newly licensed clinical psychologist, I had scant aspirations as a writer. After all, outside my “fields” (psychology and law), what did I really know about, other than basketball? It was too late–I thought–to backtrack into coaching.
My writing had been confined to occasional celebratory essays: tributes to Willis Reed and Dave DeBusschere upon their retirements from the Knicks; an appreciation of the magic of Ernie DiGregorio as a college player, arguing that his lack of suitability for the pro game (as it was played then) should not (but would) cause people to forget how great a college player he was; also, a tribute to Floyd Lane, when he returned to City College as Head Coach, having been disgraced decades earlier by his participation in point shaving on the team that made history by capturing both the NIT and NCAA titles in 1950.
Then something happened that shook my basketball world, which had seemed to re-steady itself after the 1960 scandals, which had involved our star player at Columbia, as well my camp counselor Joe Greene, who had been Jack Molinas (Mr. Big)’s right hand man in the fixer business. That scandal unfolded in stages, forever turning me into an ardent opponent of all forms of sports gambling.
The Knicks, their short-lived dynasty fading rapidly, purchased–yes, purchased–all-league player Spencer Haywood from the fledging Seattle Super Sonics franchise. What? A player who had been in the league four years, twice as a first-team all-star, then twice a second teamer, simply for sale? Amazing to think back to those days, when caps were worn by New York cabbies, rather than team salaries.
Haywood had fascinated me from the time he burst on the scene–as a complete unknown; only later would be become a rolling stone–to rescue USA basketball. Hailing from rural Mississippi, he had played a single year in junior college [1] before suddenly emerging to rescue the United States from losing its hegemonic international status prematurely, when Lew Alcindor, Elvin Hayes, and Wes Unseld all boycotted the 1968 Olympics, in the same spirit that raised the black-gloved fists of track and field stars Tommy Smith and John Carlos. Without Haywood, the US could not have withstood the onslaught of Eastern European teams good enough to unseat the US in subsequent years, Olympic basketball’s last remaining ones as an amateur sport [2].
After just one year in college, at the University of Detroit, Haywood moved on to the renegade start-up American Basketball Association.
The ABA was eager to sign him, as the NBA could not, given its rule prohibiting signing players who had entered college, but whose class had not yet graduated. This was the rule that had sent Wilt Chamberlain to the Harlem Globe Trotters for a year, after Wilt had become bored with college ball after his junior year.
Wilt had been known, anticipated, and feared from the time he was a 6’11” fourteen year old, outplaying–often destroying–college All-Americans and NBA players in the Catskill summer league. What company for the previously obscure Mississippi-born Haywood!
But young Spencer was still discontented, and had not stopped making history with his year in the ABA, where he was MVP on the basis of his 30 point 20 rebound averages, numbers closely approximating those he compiled (32/22) in his year of freshman college ball at Detroit.
Already mentionable in the same sentence as Wilt, Haywood then proceeded to couple himself with Oscar Robertson (who guided the players’ union to full recognition by the owners, thereby in effect creating free agency) by suing the NBA for admission to the league a year earlier than he would otherwise have been eligible. He won his case, on the grounds of “hardship,” which, as of 1970, became the criterion for being allowed into the league early, until even that hurdle was eliminated in 1976, allowing free access to the league for all players.
This guy Haywood had gotten around! And now here he was, a pure commodity for sale, being asked in effect to replace both DeBusschere and Reed, at a time when the other Knickerbocker machine’s cogs (Walt Frazier, Earl Monroe, and Bill Bradley) were past their respective primes, a reality that Knick fans did not readily accept.
So, wanting to express my outrage at this escalation of the rampant commercialization of the game, I wrote something: a piece that I entitled (for reasons that should now be apparent) “Is Spencer Haywood Good For Business?” Still a question worth posing, I think.
II The Odyssey According to Spencer
Though he was deservedly–though belatedly–inducted into the Basketball Hall of Fame in 2015, Haywood’s significance in basketball history is still underappreciated. His full story remained untold, until the recent (2020) publication of The Spencer Haywood Rule: Battles, Basketball, and The Making of an American Iconoclast, by Marc J. Spears and Gary Washburn.
Haywood’s remarkable journey began in Silver City, Mississippi, where he was born into slavery, as the ninth child of a remarkably strong and loving mother, Eunice, whom he describes as having cushioned him against the racism and violence he repeatedly encountered, and came to expect. Eunice’s husband John, Spencer’s father, was a successful entrepreneur: 6”4,” a builder of houses, who died of a heart attack just weeks before Spencer was due.
Traumatized, Eunice, with the help of a midwife, gave birth to Spencer prematurely, but compensated by ministering to him so lavishly that he became known–and thought of himself–as “The Chosen One,” believing that his mother’s amply and freely dispensed milk would protect him from any buffeting blows life might deliver.
Spencer’s size and agility enabled him to earn the unusually high reward of $2 a day for picking cotton, which Haywood credits for his great strength and endurance. He parleyed these abilities into sufficient basketball prowess to make his journey North to Detroit a roaring success. There, at Detroit’s Pershing High School he was taken under legendary Coach Will Robinson’s fatherly wing.
Robinson was to have become Haywood’s coach at the University of Detroit, ironically, the alma mater of Dave DeBusschere, whose shoes Haywood would be asked to fill seven years later with the Knicks. Had Detroit followed through with its stated intention to make Robinson the first black major college head coach, a pipeline of great local black players, including George Gervin, would have followed in Haywood’s wake.
Upon arriving in the 1968 Olympic village in Mexico City, the nineteen year old phenom quickly loses his virginity with an older woman, to whom Coach Robinson lends his stamp of approval. Spencer loves that she too is an athlete. Upon winning the gold medal with his team-mates (shooting 71.9% from the field, while leading the team in rebounds), he felt transformed: “In three years time, I had gone from picking and chopping cotton as a slave to being a hero for the United States.” In discussing his role in NBA history, Haywood points out that he was the perfect hardship candidate, as his mother was making $2 a day picking cotton.
Throughout the book, Haywood is liberally quoted. His language is simple, colorful, uninhibited, and direct. When in need of a descriptive noun, he generally makes do with “shit.” Too often, though, in effect channeling Haywood, the authors give full faith and credit to his subjective accounts as if they represent objective assessments of what are often controversial issues. It’s as if Spencer Haywood was born to be a plaintiff.
Haywood’s version of his journey is a story of victimization and betrayal, followed by heroic transcendence of poverty, oppression, and lack of opportunity. Despite having blazed trails to riches, glory, and fame for future black players, however, he says that he felt like an outcast when he entered the NBA.
His list of grievances includes Denver’s firing of Coach John McLendon, Haywood’s black mentor on the 1968 Olympic team, as well as Detroit’s failure to hire Will Robinson. He sees racism around every corner (where undoubtedly it lurked; this is indeed a book for our times!), but gives short shrift to the special opportunities accorded him because of his raw talent.
For example (p.95), he talks about how unfair it was that he had to fight his way into the NBA, when this was true of anyone who entered college, until him! It never occurs to him that he could have gone straight to the NBA after the Olympics, having only been to junior college, though perhaps it took his astounding Olympic success to establish his stature and value. He dismisses the lucrative contract he had with the Denver Nuggets as “fraudulent,” seeing its deferred compensation structure as representing yet another betrayal by a white authority figure, his agent. Spencer’s narrative ignores his failure to win consistently throughout his itinerant career.
III NBA Years: Broken Promises in the Promised Land
A phenomenally gifted athlete, at 6”8” and 230, Haywood had those four all-star years in Seattle, but never elevated the Sonics to championship contention, and eventually fell into the disfavor of their coach, none other than Bill Russell. Haywood says that he felt crushed by Russell’s telling him that his team-mates widely disliked him: “You know, Spence, you have a lot of enemies on that team.” (p. 118). Haywood immediately withdrew, stung by what he immediately concluded was the hitherto unexpressed jealousy of his team-mates.
Being sold outright to New York, with that transaction’s eerie overtones of the slave trade, marked the end of Haywood’s tenure as an all-star; as his scoring totals dipped, all-league teams no longer claimed him. Meanwhile, he began to appreciate cosmopolitan New York, met and married Iman, a younger woman from Somalia, a model, who shared his cultural interests, including the Quran.
Injured in his second year with the Knicks, Spencer believes that he was “forced” to play before he had a chance to fully heal. He began to develop a reputation as a malcontent (quite a come-down from savior), soon became a journeyman, then a cocaine addict, marring his full participation in his only championship run, with the 1979-80 Lakers, before adding Italy to his list of stops. There, in a less rigorous setting, he still had the chops and hops to resume being a star, turning the tides of fortune enough-in a remarkable transformation, which the book chronicles in loving detail, to reclaim his life and spirit.
Haywood reports having felt happily at home during his four years in Seattle, but his landing in New York was not soft, more like a collision: the ultimate commercial metropolis and as “country”[4] a brand of superstar as the NBA had ever known, an historical fact easily obscured by Haywood’s frequent involvement in controversy and litigation.
His only title-winning year was as a role player on the 1979-80 Lakers in Magic’s magical rookie season, Kareem’s sixth MVP season in eleven years. But Haywood spent that championship season nursing a growing cocaine habit that he attributes to having been side-tracked by the Devil, who, in Spencer’s cosmology, resides in Los Angeles. No matter that playing with Kareem and Magic made the game both easy and joyful; Spencer chose the Devil, and still resents having had to pay the price.
Falling asleep in practice and getting “expelled” from the Lakers before the last three games of the NBA Final series, he wound being denied his championship ring or a full playoff share. Nor was he welcome at the championship parade.
Instead, he was sent to Italy, as a condition of his receiving his expected salary from the Lakers; only later did he get recognition with a belatedly bestowed championship ring. Haywood feels that the NBA was punishing him for his earlier suit to enter the league, and trying to represent a league-wide cocaine problem as being limited to him. His separation from the Lakers, as he sees it, cost him five more championship rings!
He then played a year in Italy, returning to all-star and celebrity status on a lower level, and made a comeback effort with the Washington Bullets, but that too ended badly. A final effort to hook up with the Detroit Pistons, who had come to employ Coach Robinson in their organization, came to naught, leaving Haywood once again embittered, angry, and disillusioned.
Up to that point, Haywood’s sense of entitlement–which he came by honestly–colors his perception of nearly all subsequent encounters. He is highly critical of many of his coaches, painting himself as a martyr and as the one who made the sacrifices and saw things clearly.
VI Spencer’s NBA
It was on December 30, 1970, forty games into the season on what would, exactly fourteen years later, become the birthday of Lebron James, another player who would become known as “The Chosen One,” that Seattle Super Sonics owner Sam Schulman signed Haywood to his historic NBA contract, but, because of a series of injunctions, it was not until March 8, 1971, on a night that Haywood was to face Jabbar and Robertson’s Milwaukee bucks, that a 7-2 U.S. Supreme Court decision cemented Haywood’s right to join the league. Spencer says that he hardly realized its significance; he was just happy to be allowed to play.
In that first game, he recounts, Jabbar hugged him. To Spencer, this was the king of the NBA welcoming and embracing his “new friend, the new prince of the NBA.” Jabbar, whose place he had taken in the 1968 Olympics, was already on his way to being named MVP as a second-year player.
Kareem had just adopted Islam and, along with fellow UCLA star Mahdi Abdul-Rahman (formerly, Walt Hazzard), mentored Haywood to the point where he called his devoutly Christian mother to let her know his intention to convert to Islam. I won’t spoil it by quoting Eunice’s response (the book’s best four lines) but can’t resist quoting Spencer’s response: “Oh, boy, with all this drama, I’ll just keep my name and y’all just call me Abdullah (p.108).”
The 1970’s was the decade in which Abdul-Jabbar corralled a record six MVP trophies, but it also the decade in which the NBA became a predominantly black league and drifted into fan disfavor, before being saved by the simultaneous advent of Larry Bird and Magic Johnson, soon abetted by Commissioner David Stern’s marketing genius. Haywood believes that he was the target of resentment and dirty play, because he represented a new breed of talented black players who were ready for the NBA without college experience. He describes himself as having constituted the biggest threat to the league since integration.
Haywood’s epic odyssey (which also includes having been Nike’s first superstar, as the young shoe company strove to compete with Converse, Adidas, and Puma) and astounding early success makes credible the idea that it was he, as much as Jabbar, who defined that decade, but if Haywood had indeed vaulted himself into the exalted company of Wilt, Russell, Oscar, and Kareem, the true greats of the defining era of the NBA (1960-1980), he could not then escape being judged according to their high standards they set.
By the standards of these giants, who seemed–from his early promise– to be his true forebears, he fell short, just as David Thompson’s descent into cocaine addiction short-circuited his chances to be grouped with Julius Erving, Bernard King, and James Worthy.
Haywood’s proper company should have been Moses Malone, Elvin Hayes (whose physical equipment makes him Haywood’s nearest twin), Wes Unseld, and Gus Johnson, as the premier frontcourt luminaries of the 1970’s and ‘80’s. Instead, people tend to group him with Sidney Wicks, whose sensational early years were soon followed by a rapid descent into a maelstrom of rancor, disappointment, discord, and drug abuse.
Or does he more properly belong with that other ABA MVP (that fledgling league’s first) Connie Hawkins, with his different kind of checkered career? Or should he be remembered with Jack Molinas and Joe Greene, who considered themselves bigger than the game they tried to take down; and nearly did?
Haywood voices few regrets about his time on the court. What he truly regrets is that after having captured the gold medal for the USA in 1968, he refused to grace his mother and Silver City with his presence for the parade to honor him. He could not then swallow his resentment toward the town, accept its desire to honor him, and make the gesture that would have established his mother’s status in the town where she always longed for full acceptance.
V Retirement and Redemption
This sad tale’s rancor and regret are echoed throughout the book, until Haywood hits bottom with his cocaine addiction and dishonorable separation from the championship-bound Laker team only three games from the end of their journey. Digesting the book’s accounts of his basketball odyssey as a player, I felt ready to answer my question in the negative. But then, a remarkable transformation occurs, and is documented in a wholly different tone, with Spencer joyously embracing a recovery mentality, learning humility, letting go of bitterness, and resentment, and becoming a positive force for social justice and humanitarian causes, locally and nationally, such as a pension plan for retired NBA players who did not make the outrageous salaries regularly dispensed today, and a variety of civic renewal efforts in his adopted hometown of Detroit.
Haywood credits his second marriage (which brought him four more daughters in addition to the one from his first marriage; never shy or short of ideas, Spencer consulted with Richard Williams, father of Venus and Serena, about making them into tennis greats, only to be disappointed by their unaccountable allegiance to the game of basketball) with imbuing him with the sense of responsibility and mission with which he began to approach his new life. Embracing not only recovery but psychotherapy, Spencer gets a different angle on many things, and shows an impressive capacity to face and grapple with deep psychological wounds and nonchemical devils, and to emerge from his battle feeling whole, if not unscarred.
It’s as if he had finally freed himself from a different and more insidious kind of slavery, his enslavement to his relentless and insatiable need to prove himself, which had burdened him throughout his meandering odyssey as a player.
With his new sense of true freedom, Spencer still believes that he is deserving of more credit and recognition that he got. He goes so far as to trace his direct line of descent directly to LeBron James, that “other Chosen One,” for whose early entrance to the NBA directly from high school Haywood takes full credit, asserting that James directly benefitted from what he believes should be known as the Spencer Haywood Rule, the title Haywood uses to subsume all the subsequent rule modifications allowing players to enter the NBA without waiting for their respective classes to graduate college. Grandiose? Perhaps a bit, but not far off when you look at Haywood’s early 20’s, compare it to Wilt, Oscar, Russell, Kareem, Magic, LeBron, and very few others.
VI Revisiting My Question
Returning to the title of my 1975 article, looking beyond an evaluation of his place in the pantheon of great players, what was Haywood’s true significance to the business of the game of basketball? Like Wilt, Russ, Oscar, and Kareem, Spencer Haywood was a unique phenomenon. He was similar in his meteoric rise, but, with his great hops, turned out more like Icarus, having flown too close to the sun. He was a lightning rod for controversy and the spectacular, in all its forms. He also was Nike’s first superstar athlete that Nike signed, but Nike story, too, is one of betrayal (p.124), on the part of Haywood’s agent. Whether or not he was good for business, he was not much good at it.
Reading Spears and Washburn’s fascinating and colorful account of Haywood’s multi-phased journey tells us much of interest about the man, star, pioneer, hero, scapegoat, pawn, martyr, and commodity of wildly fluctuating value, but leaves me only a bit closer to a definitive answer to the question I posed nearly half a century ago. Maybe I should try to answer it from the standpoint of the two disciplines I try to eschew as a writer.
The arc of Spencer Haywood’s life bends toward late-life immersion in spirituality. Before this arc became apparent, it seemed unclear, from his lingering sense of entitlement, whether his bout with the Devil in L.A. not only cost him the timely receipt of his only championship ring, but also a piece of his soul, which still longs to march in a redemptive parade alongside his mother in Silver City.
But the character strength, generosity and love that Haywood the man showed after his odyssey through the game had left him shipwrecked across the ocean in Italy, makes me think that yes, he was good, for many businesses actually, only some related to basketball: plaintiff, entertainer, father, lover, preacher man, business man, man who can. Larger than life, his mother’s milk flowing within his soul, he could allow life’s real business to come later.
NOTES
1 Trinidad Junior College, in Colorado, where Haywood averaged 28 points and 22 rebounds. In the 1960’s, junior college basketball thrived on the large pool of black players not yet welcomed by “major colleges” throughout the South.
2 Haywood portrays himself as not having understood the political maelstrom around the 1968 Olympics: “Honestly, I came down there for the bags and the gear,” (p. 48) To him, it was pure opportunity. He didn’t even have the requisite birth certificate to get a passport for the trip to Mexico City, and had to have one made for him in Silver City, where, finally, the name “Spensie,” with his date of birth, was inscribed in one of his mother’s bibles.
“I didn’t think about the Civil Rights Movement at the time. I just wanted a passport.” (p. 58). “I’m doing this for America. For myself. My country. I’m getting my mother out of this cotton field. I’m not a sellout. I’m an American- I got a passport” (p. 61).
Nonetheless, seeing how badly Smith and Carlos were treated made Haywood realize that he would come home as a Black man, more than as an Olympic hero. Sadly, he declined to return to his home town for the parade honoring him, which he deeply regretted, because of how much it would have meant to his mother, for her being accepted and honored in her home city.
3 New York skeptics, myself then included, opined that the Knicks should have stood forewarned by Bill Russell’s willingness (perhaps eagerness) to let him go, instead of investing in and developing him, with his unique intuitive genius.
4 “Country” is how Haywood describes himself. His first basketball was made of cotton, admitted no air, and- accordingly- could not be dribbled. His first high school basket was made shooting for the wrong basket, out of overexcitement.
5 Haywood’s catholicity in choice of leagues and schools was echoed in his simultaneous interest in the Jewish religion, kindled by Seattle Owner Sam Schulman, though, I’m tempted to suggest, Spencer’s vertical leap was significantly beyond that of members of Schulman’s tribe.