He Couldn’t Take It Sitting Down

To be or not to be. That was Jamaal Wilkes’ question. To be in the National Basketball Assn. or not to be.

Or, more to the point, to be in professional basketball or to be with the Clippers.

After spending parts of seven seasons with the across-town, run-around, wear-the-crown, boogie-down Lakers, life with the Clippers proved somewhat dreary for Wilkes. It was like evicting Magic Johnson from Bel Air and telling him to go live in a Taco Bell. It was like putting Meryl Streep in a Jerry Lewis movie.

Jamaal Wilkes, a class act, could not co-exist with the sad-sack Clippers. He could get along with them, because he could get along with practically anybody. But when it came to playing with them--or, a fate worse than death, sitting there and watching them play--the Silky One just couldn’t stand it anymore.

So, he got up and walked out.

It was only intermission, but Wilkes had seen enough. After winning their first five games, and looking for all the world like the Junior Lakers, the Clippers stopped wiping off their perspiration and threw their towels in. They quit.

They quit on their coach, Don Chaney, almost costing him his job. They quit not in the middle of games but at the start of them, falling so far behind in the first few minutes that they never even bothered trying to recover.

Oh, it isn’t easy when a guy who is throwing down 25 points a game goes out of the lineup with an injury, as Derek Smith did. But that is hardly an excuse for the way the Clippers have played in his absence. They don’t just get beat; they get buried. Night after night.

You watch Norman Nixon and Marques Johnson and Cedric Maxwell and Junior Bridgeman and Benoit Benjamin walk out onto that floor and you say to yourself, “Hey, not a bad little ballclub.” Then they go out and get whomped.

Sure, Nixon sat out a while, Johnson had some bad times, Maxwell was physically damaged a bit, and Junior is no kid anymore at 32. Benjamin, well, he never has worked out. Center or no center, the Clippers could have used Xavier McDaniel from that 1985 college draft instead.

All that aside, this is not the sort of basketball team that should be as bad as it is. After Thursday night’s game with Philadelphia, it had lost 20 of its last 25 games. You could throw Moses Malone and any four guys from Petersburg, Va., out on those NBA floors and they might not lose 20 of 25.

Anyway, Silk Wilkes could stand it no more. He had gotten too accustomed to winning, both at UCLA and at the Forum in Inglewood. This is a guy who won an NBA championship in his rookie year--with the Golden State Warriors, of all people. The same Warriors who have won one more NBA championship than the Clippers have.

Wilkes thought it was nice of the Clippers to rescue him from unemployment after the Lakers let him go. Time had frayed Silk a little, and he was not the player he used to be. But he, too, at 32, did not consider himself to be washed up. There were a few slingshot jumpers left in those arms.

Larry Costello, once an NBA coach, now coach at a small college in New York, once watched Wilkes popping those unorthodox shots of his from the baseline, looked over at the scorer’s table and told a friend: “I keep thinking he’s gonna throw that thing over the backboard, and he just keeps throwing it into the basket.”

Alas, the hoops came too infrequently for Wilkes with the Clippers, and for the Clippers in general. Wilkes might have been able to ride the bench for all but 10 or 15 minutes a night if those nights were spent with the Boston Celtics or Denver Nuggets or Milwaukee Bucks. But to warm a seat while getting beat, well, there is no greater torment for a man who has been a champion.

You will not hear anybody in the NBA knocking Jamaal Wilkes, or anybody outside the NBA, either. At least it is extremely doubtful. The sarcasm fairly drips from the lips of former teammates, or heated arch-rivals, or nasty sportswriters, or disappointed fans, when the discussion turns to many of the people in the sports business, but to hear a criticism of a perfect gentleman such as Jamaal Wilkes would be tantamount to hearing somebody rant and rave against Dale Murphy.

The most controversial thing Wilkes ever did was changing his first name from Keith to Jamaal, and anybody upset by that deserved to be upset.

No one should be upset with Jamaal Wilkes for retiring. They should just be upset that he had to retire from the wrong team.