THE ATHLETE AND THE MEDIA : In Time, Abdul-Jabbar and McEnroe Have Learned the Press May Be as Big a Challenge as Their Foes on the Court : Sometimes, <i> After</i> the Game Is More Grueling Than During It

The Philadelphia 76ers were in town, and after the game there was a dinner, so I told Julius Erving I’d give him a ride. Which was fine, except that we made it to the dinner sometime after midnight.

The Doctor had been doing what he always does, standing in the locker room, answering questions from reporters, every single one, the same ones over and over, with incredible patience. It took him two hours to get out of there, and I thought he was crazy.

I still think he’s crazy. Dr. J never refuses an interview, anytime, anyplace, ever. I could never do that.

But he probably has the best relations with the press--and the public--of anyone in professional basketball. And it’s helped his career, his outside interests, enormously.

He’s an example of how to cope with maybe the toughest problem a National Basketball Association athlete faces during his time in the league: dealing with the media. It can be more grueling than going one-on-one with Moses Malone.

I wish Pat Ewing good luck in New York, because at Georgetown, he got no experience in this sort of thing. New York is as hot as it gets, and he’d better be ready.

If Dr. J is the best at this stuff, I’ll give you an example of the worst, of how not to do it: me. Or at least me near the beginning of my career, before I learned some important lessons.

In my case, as it will be with Ewing, part of it was inexperience.

All through high school, when I was All-America and every college in the country was after me, the press was after me, too. But my coach hid me completely.

When I got to college at UCLA, Coach John Wooden did the same thing.

In my freshman year, I wasn’t allowed to talk at all, and for the three years after that, when we were winning national championships every year, he really limited the time the media had to talk to me after games. And I did very few exclusive interviews.

I’m not throwing rocks at my coaches: this was totally new ground to them; it had never happened before.

If I’d done every interview, it would have been all I ever did. And being sheltered helped my academic standing; it gave me time to deal with what was really important.

Still, in retrospect, I think maybe they should have done with me what they were doing with O.J. Simpson over at USC around the same time.

At Southern Cal, they made players available in a controlled situation and on a regular basis, and just let the press confront them. That way, O.J. had some preparation for what was to come.

For me, when I got to the pros, I had no idea of how intense it would be, and I wound up making all the wrong moves.

When I joined the Milwaukee Bucks in 1969, I just wanted to back away from all the attention, and I really wound up putting myself in a hole.

I didn’t like the reporters and they didn’t like my style, either. They didn’t know what I was really like, so they just made stuff up, and that got me mad and it just kept getting worse. I was unknown to them, and no writers got close to me. The image was everything: I was “aloof,” “introspective,” and when I wasn’t cooperative I was “taciturn.”

I had one bad experience early on. It was in Detroit. We had played a night game the day before, and as usual I was too pumped up to go to sleep until 4 in the morning, and we got up at 6:30 to take a plane. And they had set up a press conference for me.

I wasn’t ready for it.

I said as little as I could--monosyllabic answers, no embellishments--and then I just ran up to the hotel room and went to bed. Some of those reporters still haven’t forgiven me for that one.

But there are some reporters I never forgave, like a guy from one of the papers in Los Angeles.

What happened was, there was some home for problem boys that wanted me to come and speak to the kids, which I couldn’t do because of my schedule.

But the woman who ran the place kept calling my manager and hounding him, asking what it would take to get me out there. And somewhere in the conversation he said that I got $5,000 for personal appearances, but I didn’t have the time to come out there anyway.

So in her frustration, she talked to the reporter and made it sound like I was demanding $5,000 to come out and talk to the kids, which wasn’t the case at all.

That’s how it appeared in the article, and we demanded a retraction and didn’t get it. I haven’t talked to that reporter since then. When the reporters were clustered around me and he’d come up, I’d just stop talking.

I had some good experiences, too.

Bob Logan of the Chicago Tribune--when it comes to integrity, he’s got it in spades.

Roger Kahn was very good to me early on, as was Frank Deford, who did a long piece on me for Sports Illustrated at the beginning of my career.

But even then, I was thin-skinned: I wound up writing him a letter saying he wrote something racist or at least that something he wrote could be interpreted that way. It had to do with my ancestors, saying they were African slaves, which was absolutely correct.

It was a stupid letter, and it doesn’t make any sense to me now. The last time I talked to him I told him how silly I thought it was and he just said forget it. But I was defensive: the press would try to bait me, and I’d get smug on them, and then they’d really get angry.

But gradually, just by trial and error, I learned to take the time and effort to separate the good guys in the press from the bad.

In any profession there are decent people, who do a good job, and you’ve got other guys who are any combination of being flaky or cynical or sleazy or whatever.

You have to be able to judge people, to know when to keep your mouth shut, and who will keep a confidence and who won’t.

Certain guys, they’ll talk to a reporter about a certain subject and the conversation will drift away and they think the interview’s over and start talking, giving away a little bit of dirt, a little inside knowledge they wouldn’t dare repeat if they knew it was going to be on the record.

And the guy jumps on it, it’s in the paper the next day, and the player feels terrible, with the statement hung around his neck.

Caution is the best way to proceed.

Slowly, I think I began to get better at it.

It was hard at first, being tall and being black--when you grow up you’re under so much scrutiny it makes you very self-conscious and shy.

You get the feeling people want to use you--come to our university, play in this tournament, buy clothes in our store.

It’s like that movie, “The King of Comedy,” where a fan kidnaps his idol and ties him up. I really got into that. You’re fighting for normalcy in your life, but at the same time there’s a big gap in your development.

You don’t mature because people insult you from the bumps and potholes of life, and then you’re thrown into this strange and contrived situation with the press.

Ewing is going to have to contend with this, and there’s no way he can be prepared for what he’s going to be up against.

The crucial plan is whether or not he can play ball.

If he can’t nobody’s going to care what he has to say and he’s going to be raked over the coals something fierce; I can see the New York Post headlines now.

If he plays well, though, the other things might take care of themselves.

It’s like Moses: he’s no dummy, but he’s inarticulate, and in the beginning some people probably got the idea he was dumb. But he’s such a great athlete now the press just says, “He doesn’t talk much, but he can play .”

It all depends on his personality--I don’t know Ewing. I hope he’s not going to be like Darryl Dawkins, with all that stuff about the planet Lovetron and Chocolate Thunder.

No bad rap--it’s just that he said a lot of stupid stuff. Whether he knows it or not, he’s given himself the image of a clown, a big colorful guy without too much smarts and some strange ideas.

I don’t mean to be on his case, but it just adds to how most people relate to athletes: anything he says affects how we’re all perceived. Especially for black athletes.

Jocks have the image of not being too intelligent, and blacks do, too.

The combination of these images, whether accurate or not, really gives a negative image to kids.

It is my hope, especially for black kids, that this situation will change. It would be a great situation if young blacks would be able to make a different statement with their lives.

In my case, time took care of a lot of my problems with the press.

I relaxed, and once I started to try to give people a chance to be decent, I found to my ultimate surprise that quite a few of them were decent.

When I wrote my book (the best-seller “Giant Steps”), I really put myself out there for the first time, and I was thinking, “What did I do ?”

I expected the worst; I always do. Then afterwards, when everyone seemed to like it, to identify with it, I felt like I was accepted for me, and that gave me more confidence.

Also, the sleazy guys are cautious around me now because of my position in the game.

I’m not what you’d call unassailable, maybe, but I’ve gotten past being just another giant.

And hey, I’m popular now. I’m Jack the Lad.

It’s funny: old ladies will come up to me on the street and pat me on the back--it’s like I’m not menacing any more.

Pretty girls aren’t afraid to approach me. They might think I’m Magic Johnson (it’s happened--I think they’re not used to seeing me without my goggles), but that’s OK.

I’ll accept kisses from pretty ladies anytime. And if that’s what having good press relations can do for you, I’m all for it.

Reprinted with permission from TV Guide Magazine, 1985 by Triangle Publications, Inc., Radnor, Pa.

‘In any profession there are decent people, who do a good job. . . . I relaxed, and once I started to try to give people a chance to be decent, I found to my ultimate surprise that quite a few of them were decent.’

--KAREEM ABDUL-JABBAR