Current Biography Excerpts: Basketball

Among the preeminent talents in the National Basketball Association is the outspoken forward of the Philadelphia 76ers, Charles Barkley, whose quick and aggressive play around the basket has placed him among the league's leading rebounders and scorers since the 1986-87 season. At six feet five inches tall, Barkley is the shortest player ever to lead the NBA in rebounding. The 250 pounds packed onto his relatively stubby frame helps Barkley to overpower taller players; never has a player so heavy been able to leap as high or dribble as skillfully.

"Charles Barkley is unique with his body frame, with his structure, with his jumping ability," Pat Riley, the former head coach of the Los Angeles Lakers and currently the head coach of the New York Knicks, explained to Jan Hubbard of New York News day (February 25, 1990). "The whole thing is unique, and that's why he is truly great." An extraordinarily intense competitor, Barkley plays every game as though it were his last. "A game for Charles is a passionate experience," Matt Guokas, Barkley's former head coach with the 76ers, told Mark Ribowsky for Inside Sports (June 1986). "I've never seen anyone so ferocious in wanting to prove he's better than his opponent." But Barkley's highly emotional nature and his frequently blunt comments to reporters have often made him the center of controversy.

The complete article can be found on the Current Biography CD-ROM and in the 1991 Current Biography Yearbook.

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BROWN, LARRY*
Sep. 14, 1940- Basketball coach. A lifelong student of basketball as well as a master teacher of the game, Larry Brown has never enjoyed the iconic status of such sideline legends as Red Auerbach and Dean Smith, largely because he has been perceived as a vagabond who wanders from team to team in search of the perfect coaching situation. While presiding over eight clubs in 24 years of coaching, he has suffered a losing season just once, and he invariably "leaves a team in better shape than it was when he arrived," as Ira Berkow noted in his profile of Brown for the New York Times (June 14, 1993). Twice, however, he has abandoned play-off-bound National Basketball Association teams during the regular season, citing, among other things, his frustration with the arrogance and egotism of professional athletes. On each of those occasions, he defected to the college ranks. In his seven seasons as a college coach, for two universities, he led his team to the Final Four three times, and in 1988 his University of Kansas squad won the national championship. But he has always returned to the NBA, on account of what Berkow called his "distaste for recruiting and coddling young people." Brown has been criticized for becoming paternally close to the players he eventually leaves behind, yet his ability to revitalize mediocre franchises derives from his sternness and his unwavering commitment to unselfish, team-oriented basketball. As Paul Attner wrote in the Sporting News (May 30, 1994), "He's one of the last of a generation of coaches who yell and prod and provoke, who consider winning, not the feelings of players, to be most important, who have established rules and expect them to be followed without exception, who target their stars for the most verbal abuse."

The complete article can be found in the April 1996 issue of Current Biography. An updated version of the article will appear on the 1983-1996 Current Biography CD-ROM (to be released in January 1997) and in the 1996 Current Biography Yearbook (to be published in December 1996).

* Photo courtesy of the Indiana Pacers.

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DALY, CHUCKDALY, CHUCK
July 20, 1933- Basketball coach.

In the history of the National Basketball Association, only three coaches--Red Auerbach of the dynastic Boston Celtics, Pat Riley of the fabulous Los Angeles Lakers, and Chuck Daly of the swaggering Detroit Piston "Bad Boys"--have led their teams to back-to-back championships. If the Larry Bird-led Celtics provided the NBA with a chord-crunching rock-'n'-roll soundtrack in the 1980s and the gifted Lakers were its soul music, then the Bad Boy Pistons--aggressive, menacing, and physically intimidating--were the league's rap attack.

One of basketball's most respected and well-liked coaches, Chuck Daly reached the pinnacle of his profession after more than thirty years of toil, starting out as a lowly $3,600-a-year high school coach in rural Pennsylvania. "People in our business were genuinely happy for Chuck," Ron Rothstein, a former assistant of Daly's, has said. "He worked his way to the top, from high school to college to here. Nobody ever handed Chuck anything." The dapper and fashion-conscious Daly exudes what one writer has called "an easy one-of-the-boys conviviality." "It may have taken a long time," Jack McCallum wrote in Sports Illustrated (December 18, 1989), "but the coach with all those suits and all that hair has proved to be a man of style and a man of substance. And how many men like that are there?"

The complete article can be found on the Current Biography CD-ROM and in the 1991 Current Biography Yearbook.

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DREXLER, CLYDEDREXLER, CLYDE
June 22, 1962- Basketball player.

In February 1995 shooting guard Clyde Drexler of the Portland Trail Blazers was traded to the world champion Houston Rockets for power forward Otis Thorpe, and some Rockets players, mindful of Thorpe's contribution to their team, were openly critical of the move. Drexler, a perennial All-Star who had spent his entire career trying to win a championship, was determined to prove himself by helping to turn the fortunes of the then-struggling Rockets around. When the Rockets superstar center, Hakeem Olajuwon, was sidelined a month later, Drexler stepped up his game to become the team's top scorer. "Dream [Olajuwon] went down, and Clyde all of a sudden started going for 30, 40 points a game," Rockets forward Mario Elie told one interviewer. "Everyone was like, 'O.K., we're convinced.'"

Drexler first came to national attention a decade earlier, while he was a star forward for the University of Houston Cougars. Nicknamed "Clyde the Glide," for his ability to slip by defenders and slam-dunk the basketball, Drexler helped the Cougars reach the Final Four of the annual National Collegiate Athletic Association tournament two years in a row. Drafted by the Trail Blazers in 1983, he improved his game virtually every year, and by the early 1990s, he was widely regarded as the second-best guard in the National Basketball Association, behind Michael Jordan of the Chicago Bulls. Despite his reputation, Drexler won neither the media attention nor the lucrative endorsement contracts accorded to other elite NBA players like Jordan, Larry Bird, and Earvin "Magic" Johnson, all of whom, unlike Drexler, played for championship teams in large-market cities.

An explosive offensive threat, Drexler led the Trail Blazers to the NBA finals in 1990 and 1992, but when his team lost on each occasion, he was singled out for much of the blame. "There remain few doubters regarding Drexler," Michael Martinez wrote in a profile of the basketball star for the New York Times (June 1, 1992), "but the defining moment of a player's career has always been a championship. And Drexler has always fallen short." In 1993 Drexler's level of play slipped as he endured a series of nagging injuries, and the Trail Blazers fell on hard times. The 1995 trade to the Rockets, which reunited Drexler with his college teammate Olajuwon, reinvigorated the guard, who seized on the chance to win a title. His prodigious offensive output helped the fading Rockets regain their dominance in the league, and the team won its second consecutive NBA crown. "If there was any complacency among the Rockets after they won the championship last year," Phil Taylor wrote in Sports Illustrated (June 19, 1995), "bringing in [Drexler], who had never won a championship, was the perfect antidote."

The complete article can be found in the January 1996 issue of Current Biography. An updated version of the article will appear on the 1983-1996 Current Biography CD-ROM (to be released in January 1997) and in the 1996 Current Biography Yearbook (to be published in December 1996).

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EWING, PATRICKEWING, PATRICK
Aug. 5, 1962- Basketball player.

One of the most dominating players in the National Basketball Association is Patrick Ewing, the seven-foot-tall, 240-pound center for the New York Knicks. An intimidating defensive presence and a master shot-blocker, Ewing is also a prolific scorer who has averaged just under twenty-three points a game in his first five seasons. Ewing joined the Knicks after a dazzling career at Georgetown University, during which he led the Hoyas into the National Collegiate Athletic Association championship game three times in four years. The first player selected in the 1985 college draft, Ewing was viewed as a savior by Knicks fans, who expected him singlehandedly to turn the team, then one of the NBA's worst, into an instant contender. Injuries caused Ewing to miss fifty-one games in his first two years with the Knicks, and the team continued to struggle, finishing last in both years. The Knicks finally turned things around in Ewing's fourth season, 1988-89, when they won the NBA's Atlantic Division for the first time in eighteen years, before being eliminated in the second round of the playoffs by the Chicago Bulls. New York was eliminated in the second playoff round again in 1989-90, and they were knocked out in the first round in 1990-91. Ewing performed superbly in each of those seasons, however, placing among the top five in the league in scoring and rebounding in both campaigns.

The complete article can be found on the Current Biography CD-ROM and in the 1991 Current Biography Yearbook.

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JACKSON, PHILJACKSON, PHIL
Sep. 17, 1945- Basketball coach.

Phil Jackson, who led the Chicago Bulls to their second straight world championship in 1992, is one of the most unlikely individuals ever to coach in the National Basketball Association. A low-key, thoughtful, and highly intelligent man who two decades before had been dubbed the "flower child of the New York Knicks" by one of his teammates, Jackson was promoted to the position of head coach of the Bulls after the tumultuous dismissal of his boss Doug Collins in the summer of 1989. At the time, the Chicago franchise was anchored by the presence of the majestic Michael Jordan, but the organization was rife with internal divisions, and Jordan's supporting cast of players did not appear to be of championship caliber. Nevertheless, Jackson's team came within one game of dethroning the 1989 league champion and bitter rival Detroit Pistons in his first year as head coach. One year later the Bulls succeeded the Pistons as the NBA titleholder, and in 1992 Jackson's team was widely acknowledged to be among the greatest in league history as they fell just two games shy of the record for most wins in a season and repeated as NBA champion. "In coaching," Jackson has said, "whatever way you get a team to play hard is acceptable....My particular way is for them to find a way to play for each other where they enjoy playing the game together."

The complete article can be found on the Current Biography CD-ROM and in the 1992 Current Biography Yearbook.

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JONES, K. C.JONES, K. C.
May 25, 1932- Basketball coach.

In coaching the Boston Celtics to the 1985-86 National Basketball Association championship, K. C. Jones secured an almost unprecedented twelfth world championship ring in a playing and coaching association with the NBA going back to 1958. As a play-making defensive guard, Jones helped pace the University of San Francisco basketball team to two National Collegiate Athletic Association championships in the mid-1950s, and he was a member of the Boston club that dominated the NBA from 1958 to 1966. After coaching numerous other teams on the college and professional levels for nine years, he returned to the Celtics as an assistant coach in 1977 and became head coach in 1983. During his first three years as head coach, Boston won the world championship twice and was the runner-up once. Jones and Pat Riley of the Los Angeles Lakers are the only long-term coaches in NBA history to have won more than 70 percent of their regular-season games, and they also have had the most play-off wins among active coaches.

The complete article can be found on the Current Biography CD-ROM and in the 1987 Current Biography Yearbook.

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JORDAN, MICHAELJORDAN, MICHAEL
Feb. 17, 1963- Professional basketball player.

The Chicago Bulls, previously the dullest team in the National Basketball Association, now have one of the top gate attractions in the league--Michael Jordan, an unstoppable "big guard" and a natural showman who occasionally swings to forward, creating excitement with almost his every move, especially when a game is in the balance. As a college player at the University of North Carolina, Jordan was, in the opinion of Coach Dean Smith, the best back-court offensive rebounder he had ever coached. Jordan was twice chosen College Player of the Year and was a unanimous All-American. In addition, he was the leading scorer on the American team that won the gold medal at the Pan American Games in Caracas, Venezuela, in 1983 and the cocaptain of the Olympic team that took the gold in Los Angeles in 1984.

Drafted by the Chicago Bulls in 1984, Jordan was an instant success as a professional, leading the league in scoring and earning the Rookie of the Year award. Kept out of action by a foot injury through most of the 1985-86 season, he returned to lead the NBA in scoring again in 1986-87, when he had a 37.1 point average, third highest in NBA history. Jordan, who is best known for his sensational over-the-head backhand slam dunk, electrifies the crowd with his speed and his stratospheric jumping. Playing taller than his six feet six inches, he soars above opposing forwards of greater height and seems at times to hover in the air before completing his shot. He shoots with a frequency not seen since Wilt Chamberlain, and he displays a combination of talents probably not found in a single player since Oscar Robertson. Those talents combined with his good looks and his friendly, unspoiled personality give him an unsurpassed commercial marketability. His endorsements of Nike athletic gear and other products, his royalties, and his fees for appearances bring him a supplementary income about four times greater than his annual salary as a Chicago Bull, which is reported to be approximately $800,000.

The complete article can be found on the Current Biography CD-ROM and in the 1987 Current Biography Yearbook.

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KNIGHT, BOBKNIGHT, BOB
Oct. 25, 1940- Basketball coach.

Indiana University's intense and volatile Bob Knight is arguably the best active coach in basketball, amateur or professional--and the most controversial. Knight, the master of a patient but aggressive strategy based on relentless, offense-generating man-on-man defense, developed his disciplined system at Army, where he was head coach for six years before moving to Hoosier country, basketball's heartland, following the 1971 season. As coach of the Cream and Crimson, he has dominated the Big Ten and won three national championships (in 1976, 1981, and 1987), a number unequaled by any other contemporary college coach and surpassed in collegiate history only by John Wooden (ten) and Adolph Rupp (four). He is the youngest coach ever to have reached his career win mark of 468 (as against 169 defeats). In addition to his achievements in the Big Ten and the National Collegiate Athletic Association, Knight guided United States teams to gold medals in the 1979 Pan American Games in San Juan (where his hot temper almost created a virtual international--or intranational, if that is the word--incident) and the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles. The gist of the discipline that he demands from his players is, in his words, "doing what you have to do, doing it as well as you possibly can, and doing it that way all the time."

The complete article can be found on the Current Biography CD-ROM and in the 1987 Current Biography Yearbook.

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LUCAS, JOHNLUCAS, JOHN
Oct. 31, 1953- Basketball coach; business executive.

"I came back from the dead," John Lucas, the head coach, general manager, and vice-president of basketball operations of the Philadelphia 76ers, has said of his recovery from drug and alcohol abuse and subsequent return to professional basketball. Lucas began his career as the top college pick in the National Basketball Association's 1976 draft. Although he posted respectable numbers over his fourteen years as a southpaw point guard, he "squandered as much talent as any player in National Basketball Association history," Mark Starr wrote in Newsweek (March 1, 1993). As a result, Lucas bounced around the league, playing for six different teams, and he was suspended several times because of his drug use. He hit bottom in March 1986, when he blacked out after a night-long cocaine binge and woke up with no memory of where he had parked his car or why he was wearing five pairs of athletic socks and no shoes. "Something happened that night that said: I have had enough,'" Lucas told Douglas C. Lyons in an interview for Ebony(June 1993). Lucas, who had tried unsuccessfully to quit drugs several times before, entered a treatment center and recovered. He returned to the NBA, and by the time he retired as a player in 1990, he had begun a second career as the owner of a company whose mission is to help recovering athletes and other substance abusers maintain their sobriety.

In 1992 Red McCombs, the owner of the San Antonio Spurs, hired Lucas as head coach, making him perhaps the most prominent ex-drug addict to lead a major professional sports team. Lucas helped the Spurs rebound from a 9-11 start in the 1992-93 season to a second-place finish in their division. He often inspired players with the lessons of self-discipline and self-reliance that he had learned from his battle with drug abuse. The following year the team had one of its best regular seasons ever but lost in the first round of the play-offs. After the ownership of the Spurs changed hands in 1994, Lucas resigned from the team and accepted the head coaching position with the struggling Philadelphia 76ers. He has written a book with Joseph Moriarity about his life titled Winning a Day at a Time (1994). "It's taken a lot of work to find out who I am," Lucas told Ken Denlinger of the Washington Post (January 20, 1993). "And even now all I can tell people is that I am a grateful recovering addict and alcoholic. I'm grateful I didn't get what I deserved."

The complete article can be found on the Current Biography CD-ROM and in the 1995 Current Biography Yearbook.

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MALONE, KARLMALONE, KARL
July 24, 1963- Basketball player.

In the National Basketball Association draft of 1985, a dozen players were selected in the first round before the Utah Jazz chose Karl Malone, a power forward from Louisiana Tech University with a marketable nickname, "the Mailman," and the physique of Superman. Many NBA scouts had doubts about Malone's attitude and his dedication to the game, but in his third season he became the league's premier power forward, an indomitable force in the lane, where he uses strength and speed to overwhelm would-be defenders. Moreover, Malone and point guard John Stockton, a fellow 1992 Olympian, give the Jazz possibly the best one-two punch in the NBA. "Now the question isn't whether Malone belongs in the NBA paint--the question is who belongs in there with him,"wrote Sports Illustrated's Ralph Wiley. "It's where men are made," Malone has said. "If you're a boy, you should be home with mom. In the paint either put up or shut up. I want to play all forty-eight [minutes]. I don't want nobody coming in for Karl Malone."

The complete article can be found on the Current Biography CD-ROM and in the 1993 Current Biography Yearbook.

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MALONE, MOSESMALONE, MOSES
Mar. 23, 1955- Basketball player.

Six-foot-ten Moses Malone, a professional basketball player since 1974, has been the game's dominant rebounding center, especially on offense, since 1979. In 1981 Malone carried the mediocre Houston Rockets to the National Basketball Association finals, and in 1983 his relentless going to the boards was the key to the successful championship drive of the Philadelphia 76ers. Malone, a three-time most valuable player and nine-time all-star, is a bruiser who becomes stronger as he wears his opponents down, but his rebounding has the finesse of a fine art. As Frank Deford observed in Sports Illustrated (February 19, 1979), "No one has ever been so pure around the rack. There is an eloquence to Moses Malone." In June 1986 Philadelphia traded Malone to the Washington Bullets.

The complete article can be found on the Current Biography CD-ROM and in the 1986 Current Biography Yearbook.

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MCMILLEN, TOMMCMILLEN, TOM
May 26, 1952- Former basketball player and former congressman from Maryland.

"It can be difficult to go from sports to politics," Tom McMillen, an eleven-year veteran of the National Basketball Association, explained to Anthony Violanti of the Buffalo News (December 3, 1986) shortly after he was elected to Congress as a representative from the state of Maryland. "As an athlete, you are revered. You hear the cheers from everyone. In politics, 50 percent of the people like you, and 50 percent of the people don't like you. It's not an easy transition." Nevertheless, it is a transition that McMillen, like Jack Keep and Bill Bradley before him, has managed to negotiate successfully. Like Bradley, McMillen is a former Rhodes scholar who could enter politics without the burden of the "dumb jock" label commonly ascribed by a public convinced that intelligence and athletic ability are mutually exclusive.

A self-described moderate Democrat who is "socially progressive and economically responsible," McMillen has served on the House Energy and Commerce Committee and on the Science, Space, and Technology Committee. Principally interested in the reform of college athletics, he cosponsored the Student Right-to-Know Act of 1990, requiring college administrators to reveal to applicants for athletic scholarships how successfully the school has educated its athletes. In November 1992 McMillen lost his bid for reelection to a fourth term, after redistricting, to make way for a new black-majority seat in the Washington, D.C., suburbs, merged part of his predominantly Democratic district, where he had been returned to office by wide margins, with a neighboring district that was largely conservative and Republican. Matched against another popular incumbent, the Republican Wayne T. Gilchrest, McMillen came up short, losing by just 7000 votes out of the 221,000 cast. In June 1993 President Bill Clinton named McMillen and the track star Florence Griffith Joyner as cochairmen of the President's Council on Physical Fitness and Sports.

The complete article can be found on the Current Biography CD-ROM and in the 1993 Current Biography Yearbook.

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Miller, Reggie*
Aug. 24, 1965- Basketball player.

In the eyes of many fans, Reggie Miller, the Indiana Pacers' angular, pugnacious shooting guard, is the reigning king of the "flash and trash" style that has predominated in professional basketball over the past few years. "I love being the villain," he admitted to Sam Smith in an interview for the Chicago Tribune (April 8, 1994). "You've got to remember the NBA is the entertainment business, like Billy Joel or Michael Jackson. When we take the floor, we have to perform, entertain people. And I love being booed. It really gets me going." Early in his career, Miller was generally considered to be a one-dimensional player--a lethal three-point shooter who rattled opponents with his nonstop, in-your-face needling and woofing. The rap against him was that, for all his histrionics, he performed indifferently on defense and seldom became involved in his team's passing offense. Moreover, because he played in Indianapolis, one of the league's smallest television markets, he labored in the long shadow of the nearby Chicago Bulls, a championship club led by the incandescent Michael Jordan. Nevertheless, largely because of his crowd-baiting antics and cocky demeanor, he became the NBA showman that road fans loved to hate.

With Jordan temporarily pursuing a career in baseball during the 1993-94 campaign, Miller redirected his wrath from the division rival Bulls to a new Eastern Conference foe, the rough-and-tumble New York Knicks. An unselfish team player and an improved defender during the regular season, he emerged as a big-game clutch shooter in that season's play-off series against New York. He electrified Madison Square Garden in game five, shredding the Knicks with 25 fourth-period points while bantering with New York's celebrity superfan, Spike Lee. The following year, when the Pacers knocked New York out of the play-offs, Miller scored eight unanswered points in the waning moments of a game that prematurely celebrating Knicks players and a howling Garden crowd thought New York had won. "My favorite places to play are Chicago and New York, where every time you touch the ball, the focus is on you," Miller told Sam Smith. "I love when the kids come to boo me. . . . I'm not a dirty player. But I like to ruffle some feathers, to see how people react. People pay big money to see a game, so why not have some fun with them? They say something to you, you say something back. It's still a game. Who ever thought we'd be playing at this level?"

The complete article can be found in the March 1996 issue of Current Biography. An updated version of the article will appear on the 1983-1996 Current Biography CD-ROM (to be released in January 1997) and in the 1996 Current Biography Yearbook (to be published in December 1996).

* Photo courtesy of the Indiana Pacers.

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OLAJUWON, HAKEEMOLAJUWON, HAKEEM
(oh-LIE-juh-wahn, hah-KEEM)
Jan. 21, 1963- Basketball player.

"[Hakeem Olajuwon is] the second-best player in the world," George Karl, the coach of the Seattle Supersonics, has proclaimed of the seven-foot-tall, Nigerian-born basketball star, "and I never thought anyone would even get close to Michael [Jordan]." Although he did not begin to play basketball until he was fifteen, Olajuwon led the University of Houston to three consecutive trips to the Final Four of the NCAA basketball tournament, and the Houston Rockets selected him as the first pick in the 1984 National Basketball Association draft, ahead of Michael Jordan and Charles Barkley. Making an immediate impact on the league, Olajuwon teamed up in the frontcourt with seven-foot-four-inch Ralph Sampson to carry the hitherto mediocre Rockets to the playoffs in his rookie season and to the NBA finals in 1986. The so-called twin towers were less successful the following season, and in December 1987 the Rockets traded Sampson, leaving a poor supporting cast around their perennial all-star, whose awesome skills as a shot-blocker, rebounder, and scorer "seemed doomed to regional obscurity," as one writer put it. Although Olajuwon's herculean efforts carried the Rockets to the playoffs in all but one of his seasons, Houston regularly lost in the opening round to more balanced teams. In 1993, however,after the Rockets finally got the outside shooting help they needed to complement their star, they captured their first Midwest Division title in seven years, behind the leadership of a mature and injury-free Olajuwon, who had the best season of his career to date.

The complete article can be found on the Current Biography CD-ROM and in the 1993 Current Biography Yearbook.

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O'NEAL, SHAQUILLEO'NEAL, SHAQUILLE
(shah-KEEL)
Mar. 6, 1972- Basketball player; rap musician.

One of the most formidable big men in basketball history, Shaquille O'Neal has already become something of a fixture at All-Star games after just four seasons in the National Basketball Association. A two-time college All-American who forfeited his senior year to enter the 1992 NBA draft, he quickly turned the anemic Orlando Magic into one of the league's premier franchises. With best-selling rap recordings and a costarring role in a popular Hollywood movie to his credit, the charismatic O'Neal has also emerged as a multifaceted pop culture icon, promoted by the NBA and his upmarket corporate sponsors as a young superstar "equipped to carry the NBA message to a new, global generation of fans," as Edward Tallman wrote in his biography Shaquille O'Neal (1994).

After struggling financially in the late 1970s, the league flourished in the 1980s, propelled by the marquee status of such compelling, once-in-a-generation performers as Michael Jordan, Larry Bird, and Earvin "Magic" Johnson. But in the early 1990s, after Bird and Johnson retired and Jordan temporarily decamped to spend most of two seasons quixotically pursuing a career in baseball, the NBA, having institutionalized a cult of celebrity, embraced O'Neal as its unofficial ambassador. With his sunny personality and signature power slam, Shaq, as he is popularly known, proved that he could entertain as well as dominate in the role of a high-scoring, rebound-snaring, shot-stuffing force in the paint who also possessed the crowd-pleasing appeal of a rock star. "He's got it all," Magic Johnson told Charles P. Pierce, who profiled O'Neal for the New York Times Magazine (November 15, 1992). "He's got the smile and the talent and the charisma. And he's sure got the money, too." O'Neal was one of a dozen NBA stars tapped to play on the United States men's basketball team, known as Dream Team III, at the Summer Games in Atlanta in 1996.

The complete article can be found in the July 1996 issue of Current Biography. An updated version of the article will appear on the 1983-1996 Current Biography CD-ROM ( released in January 1997) and in the 1996 Current Biography Yearbook (to be published in December 1996).

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PIPPEN, SCOTTIEPIPPEN, SCOTTIE
Sept. 25, 1965- Basketball player.

Scottie Pippen, a six-foot-seven-inch, 210-pound small forward with a deft outside touch, the ball-handling skills of a point guard, and the rebounding prowess of a power forward, has been a perennial NBA All-Star and a regular member of the league's all-defensive team, and he was on the United States basketball squad, known as the "Dream Team," in the 1992 Summer Olympics, but until the 1993-94 season he was only the second-best player on the Chicago Bulls. Pippen was not a starter in high school until his senior year, and because he played for the University of Central Arkansas in the National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics (NAIA), an organization whose members' teams are virtually ignored by the national media, he received little recognition during his college career. When he reached the pros, his achievements were overshadowed by the near-perfection of his teammate Michael Jordan, whose accomplishments seemed to magnify any on-court lapses on Pippen's part.

Although his raw talent is comparable to Jordan's, disappointing performances in crucial playoff games against the Bulls' archrivals, the Detroit Pistons, prompted some sportswriters to label Pippen a "soft" player who lacked the heart and self-discipline of a champion. In 1993, when the Bulls were struggling in their ultimately successful quest to win a third consecutive world championship, Pippen once and for all quelled doubts about his status as one of the NBA's elite players by leading Chicago to a playoff victory against the physically imposing New York Knicks. Shortly before the beginning of the 1993-94 season, Jordan announced his retirement from basketball, putting Pippen in the spotlight as the Bulls attempted to capture their fourth straight championship and thus prove that they were more than just Jordan's "supporting cast." Pippen staked his claim as the heir to Jordan with a stellar performance at the 1994 All-Star game, for which he won the event's most-valuable-player trophy.

The complete article can be found on the Current Biography CD-ROM and in the 1994 Current Biography Yearbook.

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RILEY, PATRILEY, PAT
Mar. 20, 1945- Basketball coach.

In the seven seasons that Pat Riley has served as their head coach, the Los Angeles Lakers have won four National Basketball Association championships. The Lakers are not only the dominant team of the current era but also possibly the most glamorous in any professional sport. Their "showtime" style of play is dazzling to watch as well as extremely hard for opponents to stop, and their core players are either basketball legends like Magic Johnson and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar or emerging superstars like James Worthy and Byron Scott. They are, moreover, adored by Tinseltown celebrities, and the actor Jack Nicholson is their prototypically rabid fan. Although his dark good looks and stylish suits make Riley resemble a coach furnished by central casting, he has imbued the Lakers with a work-ethic approach to basketball and given them an air of corporate efficiency. Despite his team's phenomenal success, Riley has never been voted NBA Coach of the Year, and some critics have contended that he is an unexceptional court tactician. But in June 1988 the Lakers became the first team to win back-to-back NBA titles in nineteen years, and Riley is now recognized as one of the shrewdest motivators of athletes in recent sports history.

The complete article can be found on the Current Biography CD-ROM and in the 1988 Current Biography Yearbook.

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ROBINSON, DAVIDROBINSON, DAVID
Aug. 6, 1965- Basketball player.

"Defense is what matters," the basketball star David Robinson has declared, as quoted by George Vecsey in the New York Times (January 12,1990). "Scoring doesn't interest me." Employing that mindset on the basketball court, the seven-foot-one-inch Robinson, nicknamed "the Admiral," set NCAA records for blocked shots while playing for the United States Naval Academy and went on to become an NBA defensive player of the year, as a member of the San Antonio Spurs. Despite his proclaimed lack of interest in scoring, Robinson is also a potent offensive threat, consistently among the top ten in the NBA in scoring. One of the most agile big men in the history of the sport, he was a college basketball player of the year, and he is a mainstay in the NBA All-Star game. He is also one of the few basketball players to have played in two Olympics. Because of the military duties required of service academy graduates, few have succeeded as professional athletes, but after two years of active military duty, Robinson led San Antonio to the greatest single-season turnaround in league history, and he was named rookie of the year. Robinson has surpassed the high standard he set in his first season, but a string of serious injuries to key players and numerous coaching changes have prevented the Spurs from taking the final step toward becoming one of the elite teams in the NBA.

The complete article can be found on the Current Biography CD-ROM and in the 1993 Current Biography Yearbook.

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SMITH, DEANSMITH, DEAN
Feb. 28, 1931- Basketball coach.

"North Carolina may very well be the best program in the country," Rick Majerus, the University of Utah basketball coach, has said, "and Dean Smith may very well be the best coach of all time." As a backup guard for the 1952 national champion Kansas Jayhawks, Dean Smith learned the intricacies of basketball from a coaching legend, Phog Allen. Building on that experience, Smith has developed a coaching philosophy that stresses defense and, above all else, teamwork, and he has put that style to use since becoming head coach for the University of North Carolina Tarheels, in 1961. In the process, he has helped make the Tarheels the most successful college basketball team of all time, in terms of the number of wins, and perhaps the premier college athletics program in the country. While avoiding scandal and graduating almost all his players, Smith has led the Tarheels to sixteen Atlantic Coast Conference regular season and twelve tournament titles, a National Invitational Tournament (NIT) crown, and two NCAA championships. He also coached the United States Olympic basketball squad to a gold medal at the 1976 Olympic Games in Montreal.

The complete article can be found on the Current Biography CD-ROM and in the 1994 Current Biography Yearbook.

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STERN, DAVIDSTERN, DAVID
Sep. 22, 1942- Sports executive; attorney.

One of the most remarkable sports stories of the 1980s was the dramatic turnaround of the National Basketball Association under the leadership of David Stern. In the early years of the decade, the NBA was the laughingstock of professional sports, riddled by runaway salaries, quarrelsome owners, and widespread drug abuse among its players. Television ratings, attendance, and corporate sponsorship were all in decline, and several franchises were on the verge of bankruptcy. The NBA's path to recovery began in 1983, when Stern, who was then the league's vice-president for business and legal affairs, and Larry Fleisher, the head of the National Basketball Players Association, hammered out a revolutionary collective-bargaining agreement that introduced, for the first time in an American sports league, revenue sharing and a per-team "salary cap." Later that year the league, with Stern again playing a major role, introduced a drug-abuse treatment program that many observers consider a model for combining firmness with compassion.

Stern, who succeeded Larry O'Brien as the commissioner of the NBA in February 1984, soon set about further transforming the league by aggressively marketing it as an entertainment company that employs the greatest athletes in the world. Aided by ever-increasing revenues and by the presence of such spectacular and popular players as Larry Bird, Earvin ("Magic") Johnson, and Michael Jordan, the NBA under Stern became the world's most stable and successful sports league and the second-most-widely distributed sports property worldwide, after the Olympic Games. In 1990 Stern, who had been named the sports executive of the decade by the Associated Press, also earned Sport magazine's accolade as "the best commissioner in organized sports." "David has taken us to another level," Magic Johnson told David DuPree of USA Today (February 20, 1990). "He's a great commissioner but also a mastermind at marketing, and that's where he's passed everyone else in sports....We're the hottest league in the world, not just the United States, but the world, and he's the reason why."

The complete article can be found on the Current Biography CD-ROM and in the 1991 Current Biography Yearbook.

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STOCKTON, JOHNSTOCKTON, JOHN
Mar. 26, 1962- Basketball player.

Although he lacks Earvin "Magic" Johnson's dazzling showmanship, Anfernee Hardaway's soaring athleticism, and Isiah Thomas's flair for making sensational highlight-reel plays, John Stockton, the poker-faced point guard of the Utah Jazz, has quietly amassed more assists than any player in the history of the National Basketball Association. Drafted by the Jazz in 1984, he served a promising three-year apprenticeship behind the veteran point guard Rickey Green. But when Stockton became a full-time starter in 1987, he shattered Isiah Thomas's single-season assists record and teamed up with the All-NBA power forward Karl Malone to make the Utah Jazz a perennial play-off contender and Western Conference force. "You get the impression that he's not all that quick, or strong, and he's not really flashy," the Jazz forward David Benoit pointed out to Ira Berkow of the New York Times (January 23, 1995). "I mean, his passes are usually straightforward, nothing behind the back or between the legs, and rarely a no-look. I know that a lot of other point guards in the league, especially black guys, have said, I can take that little white guy.' And then he makes dead meat out of them."

A member of the so-called Dream Team that captured the gold medal in men's basketball for the United States at the 1992 Olympic Games, Stockton has become the Bob Cousy of the 1990s--a heady court general who can knock down clutch three-point jumpers and apply relentless defensive pressure but primarily distributes the ball to open teammates for easy scores. "We had a saying in high school and college, Make your teammate an All-American,' and in this case, Make your teammate an All-Star,' and Stock is one of those guys," Karl Malone gushed when he spoke to Dan Dieffenbach, who profiled Stockton for Sport (February 1995). "He always tries to go out and make his teammates All-Stars. People ask me what I would be without him, and I don't even want to think about it."

The complete article can be found on the Current Biography CD-ROM and in the 1995 Current Biography Yearbook.

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SWOOPES, SHERYLSWOOPES, SHERYL
Mar. 25, 1971- Basketball player

The basketball player Sheryl Swoopes, whose onomatopoeic name has become a rallying cry in college arenas, has redefined the way her sport is played. Nicknamed the Texas Tornado, the six-foot-tall shooting guard and forward has been referred to as the female counterpart of NBA superstar Michael Jordan ever since 1993, when she scored a record-breaking 47 points while leading Texas Tech to victory over Ohio State in the final game of the NCAA championship tournament. "When it was over, my first thought was, 'Is this real?'" she said in a postgame interview with Christine Brennan for the Washington Post (April 5, 1993). "At times, I get it in my mind that there is no way I can miss." The previous record for the most points scored in an NCAA basketball championship game belonged to Bill Walton, who scored 44 points in 1973. The previous women's record for scoring in a championship game was 28 points.

Following her NCAA championship victory, which occurred during her final collegiate game, Swoopes went to Europe to continue her career on the court. She played 10 games in an Italian league in 1993 before returning home later in the year. A member of the 1995-96 USA Basketball Women's National Team, which has been training for the 1996 Summer Olympics, in Atlanta, Swoopes has high hopes that the excitement generated by the women's team at the Olympics will translate into support for the establishment of a professional women's basketball league in the United States. If the proposed American Basketball League gets off the ground in the fall of 1996, she and her 10 teammates would be able to continue to pursue their athletic careers in their home country, instead of having to go overseas, as she did, to play professionally.

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THOMAS, ISIAHTHOMAS, ISIAH
(eye-ZAY-uh)
Apr. 30, 1961- Basketball player.

By all accounts, the best pure point guard in basketball is Isiah Thomas, the captain of the Detroit Pistons. Indeed, the six-foot one-inch Thomas is the first "little man"--under six feet three--to be able to dominate a big man's game since the Boston Celtics' Bob Cousy in the 1950s and the Atlanta Hawks' Lenny Wilkins in the 1960s. When he left Indiana University at the age of twenty, having already led the Hoosiers to the NCAA championship, to join the professional ranks, Thomas was basketball's cherub, a boyishly handsome man-child with a beaming smile and a charismatic presence, both on and off the court. During his first few years as a pro, he was noted for his good works in the public domain as well as for his wondrous, crowd-pleasing style of play, even though the Pistons were one of the National Basketball Association's doormats. In 1987, however, Thomas's image suffered when he seemed to agree with one of his teammates, who had asserted that the Celtic superstar Larry Bird was overrated because he is white. Putting controversy behind him, Thomas recovered to become the undisputed leader of the Motor City "Bad Boys," the bruising, defense-oriented Pistons, who in 1989 won that franchise's first-ever NBA crown.

The complete article can be found on the Current Biography CD-ROM and in the 1989 Current Biography Yearbook.

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THOMPSON, JOHNTHOMPSON, JOHN
Sep. 2, 1941- Basketball coach.

"I'm not Mr. Nice Guy," admits John Thompson, who is, along with Bob Knight, the most controversial coach in college basketball today. But whereas Knight coaches at Indiana University, a large, state-supported institution, Thompson, who was the head coach of the 1988 men's Olympic basketball team, has risen to the top of his profession at Georgetown University, a small, Roman Catholic, and academically exclusive school in Washington, D.C. Thompson's teams employ a bruising, harassing style of play, applying relentless defensive pressure designed to wear down the opponent and force turnovers. Off the court, Thompson shields his players from the press and rarely gives interviews himself. In keeping with Georgetown's high academic standards, he requires his players to be full-time students as well. Since Thompson began coaching at Georgetown in 1972, fifty-seven of the fifty-nine basketball players who entered the university as freshmen, and who did not drop out or transfer, have graduated.

Although his methods, particularly his restriction of media access to players, have been criticized by other coaches, both his players (who address him only as "Mr. Thompson" or "Coach") and his peers regard him with the utmost respect. A self-styled educator as well as a coach, Thompson believes that the lessons learned in athletics apply also to other areas of life. Eric Smith, a former Georgetown player, has summed up Thompson's philosophy as follows: "No one gives you anything on the basketball court if they can help it, and if they can help it, no one gives you anything in life."

The complete article can be found on the Current Biography CD-ROM and in the 1989 Current Biography Yearbook.

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WILKENS, LENNYWILKENS, LENNY
Oct. 28, 1937- Basketball coach.

Despite having won more games than any coach in the history of the National Basketball Association and earned Hall-of-Fame recognition for his 15-year career as an NBA player, Lenny Wilkens is seldom mentioned in the same breath as such coaching immortals as John Wooden or Red Auerbach, the retired Boston Celtics legend whose record of 938 NBA victories was considered to be out of reach even as the low-key Wilkens was quietly approaching it. Having received little fanfare following a truncated high school career at a ghetto basketball factory in Brooklyn, he was an All-American at Providence College, but Oscar Robertson and Jerry West, once-in-a-generation superstars who played at better-known basketball schools, overshadowed him both in college and, later, in the pros. A quick, savvy point guard, Wilkens appeared in nine NBA All-Star games even though he played and coached (sometimes simultaneously) in the NBA hinterlands--St. Louis, Seattle, Cleveland, Portland, and Atlanta--never in such major media markets as New York City, Los Angeles, or Chicago.

Midway through his 22d season at the helm of an NBA franchise, the modest, unassuming Wilkens became the league's winningest coach when, on January 6, 1995, his Atlanta Hawks defeated the Washington Bullets, 112-90. Remarkably, he achieved that landmark without help from a dynastic team (of the four teams he has coached, to date only one--Seattle, in 1979--has won the NBA crown) or the presence of a single superstar on the roster of any club he has commanded. "I never received the recognition a lot of other players did," he said in an interview with Mike Lopresti of USA Today (December 27, 1994). "That's the way it is. In the early years of coaching, maybe I didn't get the recognition. But it's happening now. What goes around, comes around. It catches up." An assistant on the men's basketball squad, popularly known as the Dream Team, that won a gold medal for the United States at the 1992 Olympic Games, Wilkens serves as the head coach of Dream Team III, a collection of NBA All-Pros, at the 1996 Summer Games in Atlanta.

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WILKINS, DOMINIQUEWILKINS, DOMINIQUE
(dah-mi-NEEK)
Jan. 12, 1960- Basketball player.

One of the most prolific scorers in National Basketball Association history, Dominique Wilkins has been a dazzling run-and-dunk artist since he played at the University of Georgia, where his awesome athleticism earned him the nickname "the Human Highlight Film." Over the course of a subsequent twelve-year stint with the Atlanta Hawks, Wilkins mounted a credible challenge to Michael Jordan's status as the NBA's greatest scorer and most flamboyant specialist in crowd-thrilling dunks. Although he helped transform the Hawks from perennial losers to winners in the mid-1980s, Atlanta invariably seemed to fold in the playoffs, prompting some sports reporters and disgruntled fans to accuse him of pursuing individual accomplishments at the expense of team goals. Consequently, while superstars like Earvin "Magic" Johnson, Larry Bird, and Michael Jordan were mainstays of the United States' men's basketball team at the 1992 Olympics, Wilkins, whose absence from the so-called Dream Team was conspicuous, spent an agonizing off-season attempting to recover from a career-threatening injury.

Staging a remarkable comeback in the 1992-93 season, he silenced critics who had questioned his dedication and once again took his place as one of the league's premier offensive performers. Even though the thirty-four-year-old superstar was playing superb all-around basketball, the Hawks traded him to the Los Angeles Clippers during the 1993-94 campaign, and following the season, he signed a three-year contract with the Boston Celtics. "I'll put myself up there with any of the best [small forwards in the NBA]," Wilkins said in an interview with Glenn Sheeley for Inside Sports (December 1990). "It doesn't matter who it is, because I've played on their level and done it. I've accomplished a lot of things they have individually. The only thing I'm missing to be at the top of the NBA is a championship."

The complete article can be found on the Current Biography CD-ROM and in the 1995 Current Biography Yearbook.

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