SOME BAD BOUNCES HAVEN’T DAUNTED SONICS COACH BERNIE BICKERSTAFF

By GLENN NELSON

April 24, 1988

Publication: PACIFIC MAGAZINE, THE SEATTLE TIMES

Page: 16

Word Count: 4287

Benham, Ky., is a company town fast losing its company. An economically battered and slowly vanishing coal-mining community nestled in the Appalachians, it offers few inducements to visitors. The road to Benham is itself a major deterrent to a journey there.

A Seattle-Atlanta flight leads to a stomach-turning puddle jumper to an airfield near Kingsport, Tenn. A car ride then takes one to a windy and often harrowing mountain road through Big Stone Cap.

Along almost every bend lie rusted and abandoned automobiles _ markers, one fears, to those who tried, and failed, to conquer the treacherous thoroughfare.

As difficult as it is to get to Benham, getting out is even trickier. For the head coach of the Seattle SuperSonics, still known in his home town as Bernard Bickerstaff, the road from Benham to Bernie was fraught with potholes and dead-end turns.

“To make it out of there . . .” a ruminating Bickerstaff says. “I appreciate where I am now. I reflect on that every day. That way, I get more enjoyment out of life. I don’t take anything for granted.”

Triumphing over the area’s racial segregation, endemic poverty and mining perils imbued the black children of Benham with a source of great strength. Whatever other hardships life cared to toss in their path would appear inconsequential by comparison.

During Bernie Bickerstaff’s youth, racial integration was still a dream that interrupted fitful nights of sleep for men like Martin Luther King Jr. Time, and the Civil Rights Act, have changed much _ and changed little _ in southeastern Kentucky.

A day in Cumberland, now the area’s economic center, reveals little interaction between the races _ until evening Cumberland High basketball games, where black faces in a sea of white are like Aleutians in the Pacific. In the comfort of their own company, some whites still refer to their black neighbors with casual use of the “N” word. A certificate hangs in an office in neighboring Lynch, declaring a certain manager’s service to Lester Maddox. The former Georgia governor once enforce d segregation in his Atlanta restaurant with an axe handle.

The phonied document is meant to be a joke. Or so one is told.

In Cumberland, University of Kentucky basketball reigns supreme, as it does in the rest of the state. Mere minutes from Benham exists a pervasive ignorance of the nationally chronicled National Basketball Association exploits of one Bernie Bickerstaff. Even at Benham City Hall, mention of the Sonic coach draw a “Who?” from a city employee.

It does spark a scintilla of recognition from a bystander.

“Ain’t that the colored coach in Seattle?” he asks. “I think I read about him once. If you want to talk to people who know him, you’ll have to go down to colored town.”

From Benham City Hall, “colored town” is just across a bridge over the Poor Forks tributary of the Cumberland River. Black-owned homes line both sides of a street for the length of about three city blocks.

Benham Methodist Church sits on a hill overlooking them. The Eastern Kentucky Social Club is about a block down from the church.

There, and in neighboring Lynch, the accomplishments of favorite son Bernard Bickerstaff are well-known, though sometimes, as Benham resident Archie Williams points out, “Times are too hard to follow him.”

Outside “colored town,” as such enclaves were known back in the mining heyday, sat a world of blissful ignorance. The East Benham High Rams once ventured far into the hills to play a game. During the first half, the basketball flew into the crowd. Bickerstaff went into the stands to retrieve it. A fan reached out, not to help him but, to Bickerstaff’s horror, to hike down his shorts.

At halftime, the opposing coach told the Ram players not to take offense. The folks there were told that all black people had tails. One of them wanted to see Bickerstaff’s.

Folks who lived there say Benham was free of racial tension.

But racial delineations were innately recognized. “That was just the deal,” Bickerstaff says. “I didn’t even think about color until I left the South.”

Like most boys in the state, Bickerstaff spent cold winter nights by the radio. The program of choice was almighty Kentucky basketball, then presented to the worshiping masses by coaching deity Adolph Rupp.

After each game, Bickerstaff visited a gravel lot next to the home of Herman “Jelly” Rogers. With him was the basketball that came every Christmas. He’d fashion a hoop out of a coat hanger or baking-soda can, attach a burlap net cut from a hog-feed bag and string them up on a tree. Coal dust blackening his clothes and permeating his pores, he’d reenact the game he’d just heard on the radio.

During those make-believe encore performances, Bickerstaff played the part of Johnny Cox, Cliff Hagan, Cotton Nash and Frank Ramsey _ every Kentucky Wildcat. They all were white. He is black. But they were just names, not white faces.

“They were my heroes,” Bickerstaff says. “All I cared about was the University of Kentucky winning games.”

When it came time to care more about East Benham winning games, Bickerstaff’s world still was a disparate black and white. Until his senior year in high school, the “colored” schools competed in their own state tournaments. Nevertheless, word leaked out about a wunderkind black player, the likes of which the region had never seen before. The boldest of the area’s whites sneaked into Benham to watch Bickerstaff play, or to play with him.

“Bernie was one of the first blacks most of us got to know,” says John Bond, a white, now girls’ basketball coach at Cumberland High. “Everybody liked him. He was a breakthrough.”

Breakthroughs were fleeting on the road from Benham to Bernie.

The migration out of Benham already had begun in earnest when Bernard Tyrone Bickerstaff was born in the four-room Benham house of his grandparents, Joseph and Georgia Willie Bickerstaff, on Nov. 2, 1943.

Two years after giving birth, Olivia Harris fled the region for New York, leaving her son Bernard. Benham held nothing for young women who wanted or needed work. Bernard’s father, the now deceased Ralph Hood, already had drifted along. After some debate, Olivia’s father, Joseph Bickerstaff, permitted his daughter to leave. Her son had to stay, he commanded. Joseph and Georgia Willie formally adopted their grandson soon afterward.

Life in Benham was artificially comfortable in those days.

Rental homes and schooling were provided by the company. Children had wide open spaces and athletics. The Bickerstaffs kept their own garden, raised hogs up in the hills and chickens on the sly. Other provisions could be claimed at the company store in Benham. Most miners made purchases there on scrip.

“Next thing you know, you’re working just to eat and wear,” says Archie Williams, who toiled 52 years in the mines. “You learned never to get fond of something that cost a lot and took a long time to pay for. Not around the coal mines.”“We had the poor man’s pocketbook,” she says, “but always with middle-class aspirations.”

Miners like the late Joseph Bickerstaff worked 10-to-12 hour shifts miles underground. Rock falls and errant machinery were a constant danger. Years of breathing coal dust wrought damage to lung tissues. Some, like Joseph Bickerstaff, succumbed to the insidious disease, Black Lung. After deductions for rent and other expenses, a Benham miner may have taken home close to $9 every two weeks.

“After 35 years in the mines,” Bickerstaff laments, “all my grandfather got was a pin and Black Lung.”

One thing about Black Lung, though. The disease did not discriminate between black and white. In many ways, coal was the great equalizer. Joyce Bickerstaff recalls meeting her father after shifts in the mines and having to distinguish dust-blackened white miners by searching for pairs of blue eyes.

Psychologists have found that coal mining produces a peculiar social cohesion, wrought by the perils of the profession. In Benham, it produced a brand of cooperative community spirit. In the 1930s, miners, black and white, banded together to establish the presence of the United Mine Workers union. The contentious effort dubbed the region “Bloody Harlan County.” Upon the foundation of cross-racial cooperative spirit, segregation served to further bond the region’s blacks into a kind of extended family. Many of them still reunite on Memorial Day and Labor Day every year.

Years later, Bickerstaff instilled the same notion of extended family into his basketball team. All but two of his players, Tom Chambers and Kevin Williams, hail from the South like he. Bickerstaff says this was not intentional, but people from like backgrounds are most apt to form family-like ties. On his youthful club, the coach also serves as patriarchal leader.

The late Georgia Willie Bickerstaff was the lifeblood of young Bernard’s support systems. They listened to baseball games together on the radio. Lacking much formal schooling, she was a glib and resourceful woman. She built and maintained her own egg incubator, fashioned colorful quilts out of scraps and kept an equally colorful flower garden. And, as family and neighbors testify, Georgia Willie was extremely particular about Bernard.

To this day, Georgia still is very much on Bickerstaff’s mind.

“She was the most important thing to me in life,” he says.

“I have only the highest accolades. My only regret was she was not around when I got my job in the NBA. Women are so strong. I believe strongly that they are the backbone of our society.”

While paving his road out of Benham, young Bernard stood out in many ways. A former teacher, Constance Ellison, recalls him as being “the best-dressed boy in school.” It is a trait he retains. In a recent USA Today survey of the NBA’s best-dressed coaches, Bickerstaff trailed only Los Angeles’ Pat Riley and Detroit’s Chuck Daly.

Dressed for success, Bickerstaff was the first to arrive at school every morning, beating the bus which farmed in many of his classmates. He was among the brightest of East Benham’s students. And one of its most outspoken.

“Bernie could out-talk most everybody,” recalls Dr. William Turner, a Lynch native, now a professor at Winston-Salem (N.C.) State University. “He was smaller than most, but had that booming voice and would look you straight in the eyes. He could not be intimidated by other people.”

Bickerstaff apparently talked his way into more trouble than out of it. He was the quintessential non-conformist, or “clown,” as most describe him. “You could never be down around Bernie,” a lifelong friend, John Holloway, says. “He was always cutting up.”

Ellison reckons Bickerstaff’s penchant for being the center of attention was the mark of a budding leader. Yet folks around Benham began to worry that Bickerstaff was going to clown his life away. “I was constantly talking to him,” Ellison says, “telling him what kind of potential he had, and not to waste it.”

It was a serious concern. Ellison and Joseph Bickerstaff were among the city’s elders who constantly preached to Benham’s youth about the necessity of breaking coal mining’s dead-end cycle.

“Guys like Bernie accepted the view of guys like their fathers who said you must reach for the stars, because their livelihood was sort of reaching for the bowels,” Turner says. “In a place like Benham, parents had to say, `The world is yours. Now get the hell out of here and find it.’ ”

Everyone knew basketball was Bernie’s ticket out of Benham.

“When he got to know his way, there was no stopping him,” says Lacy Lee, another of Bickerstaff’s lifelong friends. “He always knew what he wanted. There was no doubting he’d get it. He was a take-charge kind of guy.”

The incessant banging of a ball against the side of his home still rings in the otherwise faulty ears of Herman “Jelly” Rogers. On many a late night he turned to his wife, Leola, and declared wistfully, “I wish Bernard would go home so we can go to sleep.” When Bickerstaff did go home, makeshift hoops strung up in his bedroom offered the chance for a few more pre-slumber jump shots. Rogers figures young Bernard slept with his ball.

Elsewhere, the sound of a bouncing ball sparked a hankering for hoops that superseded the original agenda. “Bernie would be dressed for a date and still stop to shoot a couple baskets,” Holloway says.

“He was possessed by basketball.”

This obsession transformed Bickerstaff into a gifted player.

His flashy, above-the-rim style, many say, was ahead of its time. Local newspaper write-ups often refer to Bickerstaff’s “Dr. J style of play.” Folks around the Lucky Penny in Cumberland still tell tales of a 6-foot forward at the colored school who could dunk from a flat-footed start.

East Benham High, coached by Emmett Broadus, now with the Louisville Board of Education, was marked by characteristics which should be familiar to those who follow a certain NBA team in Seattle.

The Rams were well-drilled and extremely athletic. They bedeviled opponents with their quickness on defense. Their defense fueled an attack that went full throttle in the open court, catering marvelously to the offensive skills of their star player.

Bickerstaff’s last season at East Benham was the first year of open _ black and white _ competition in the Kentucky state tournament.

He was named all-tourney after pelting Lynch with 33 points in the regionals. During the game’s waning moments, however, Bickerstaff picked up his dribble in the corner and immediately was trapped. His desperate heave was picked off by a Lynch player who scored a last-second layup.

Bickerstaff never forgot the resulting score: Lynch 64-63.

The bittersweet memories evaporated soon enough in the sweltering heat of the big city. In the summer, Bickerstaff bused, basketball in tow, to Cleveland, where he stayed with an uncle, or New York City to visit his mother. In those places, his eyes were opened to a whole new world. This expanse of land was pregnant with opportunity, and one could prevail with guile and a healthy work ethic.

Starting in 1957, the Ray Felix Tournament was held on a spanking new playground at P.S. 127 in the Elmhurst district of Queens, just two blocks from the home of Olivia and Ernest Harris. Now the Neighborhood Basketball League, the Ray Felix Tournament was a summer-long endeavor.

The Rucker League, held over on the concrete island in Harlem, is more well-known. But anyone who was anything in basketball played in the Ray Felix Tournament. The pro division was stocked by such giants as Wilt Chamberlain and Bill Russell. They still buzz about the summer when the playground was invaded by a group of suburban kids from Long Island, led by a young master of levitation named Julius Erving.

Even among this galaxy of basketball stars, a young player hailing from a small mining town in the South was destined to shine.

Those summers in Queens proved to Bickerstaff “that I could compete against the big boys.” It was a lesson he would later tap in Seattle. Last year, when a decaying Sonic squad was disassembled, it was restocked with several playoff-tested veterans. With Dale Ellis, Eddie Johnson, Alton Lister, Clemon Johnson and Maurice Lucas providing a foundation of post-season experience, Bickerstaff’s Sonics were a surprise entry in the Western Conference finals.

From Queens and Cleveland, Bickerstaff embarked on the most difficult leg of his road from Benham to Bernie. At Rio Grande (Ohio) Junior College he was introduced to the evils of racial bigotry.

Invariably, Bickerstaff was left at a service station outside some all-white town while the Rio Grande coach negotiated the entry of his lone black player. Occasionally, Bickerstaff was forced to relinquish his starting spot during visits to the home towns of white Rio Grande reserves.

Embittered and distrustful of the white power structure, Bickerstaff left a stint as a scarfer at a Cleveland steel mill for San Diego.

There, Phil Woolpert, now deceased, wooed Bickerstaff to the University of San Diego from Cal-Western Coach Bob Kloppenburg, now a Sonic assistant.

Woolpert weaned the street from Bickerstaff’s game and the chip from his shoulder. Later, Woolpert would recall his prize protege from the clutches of the Harlem Globetrotters and an NBA expansion team, the San Diego Rockets, to become his assistant. Two years later, at 25, Bickerstaff succeeded Woolpert, becoming the youngest college head coach in the country.

Bickerstaff likes to evoke an observation from Duke Ellington, that it seemed in his own life there always was someone on the corner pointing him in the right direction. Woolpert, a college legend who coached national titles at San Francisco in 1955 and 1956 with Bill Russell and K.C. Jones, was Bickerstaff’s most significant someone.

“I owe a lot to Phil Woolpert,” he says of the “I found out about fairness, and that’s all I wanted.”

San Diego also was where Bickerstaff met K.C. Jones, who was coaching the Conquistadors of the American Basketball Association. When Jones was offered the job as head coach of the NBA Bullets, he took Bickerstaff with him to Washington as an assistant. Bickerstaff was only 29.

The greased skids ended in Washington. Bickerstaff quickly was hailed as one of the brightest assistants in the game. Nevertheless, he toiled for 12 years under Jones, Dick Motta and Gene Shue, three of the winningest coaches in NBA history. His former bosses and ex-players say racism was the reason for Bickerstaff’s interminably long wait for an NBA head-coaching job. “The only reason he hasn’t gotten a job before is because he’s black,” a white ex-Bullet, Jeff Ruland, said short ly before Bickerstaff was hired by the Sonics.

Rather than face the question of race again, Bickerstaff says he either wasn’t ready or was waiting for the right opening. His wife, Eugenia, says, “I think Bernie rationalized it all to minimize the pain.”

Significantly, it was Lenny Wilkens who salved the wound. When the then-Sonic general manager hired Bickerstaff on June 20, 1985, he had been the only black head coach in NBA history who was hired by one team (Seattle) after a losing season with another (Portland). In Seattle, Bickerstaff followed Wilkens (twice), Bob Hopkins and Bill Russell, all blacks. The Sonics now are in their 18th season under a black head coach, the most in professional sports history.

Men like Woolpert, Jones and Wilkens may have opened doors for Bickerstaff. Clearly, Benham was the backlighting beacon that showed him the way to, and through, such openings.

Its support systems _ family, community, religion _ forged a strong sense of self-assuredness. Benhamites like Bickerstaff, having been poor and black, nearly are ignorant of obstacles that are supposed to hold them back. The coal mines accustomed them to hard work. And Benham’s looming death created an almost Diasporan population instilled with an urgent sense of never daring to turn back.

Many of Bickerstaff’s black southeastern Kentucky contemporaries today are doctors, lawyers and heads of companies. Cousin Joyce is a professor at Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, N.Y. Willie Thomas is an ex-Globetrotter and University of District Columbia coach.

Camelsville’s Clem Haskins, Bickerstaff’s major basketball foil in high school, played in the NBA. Dick Allen, Roberta Flack, Jesse Jackson, Charley Pride, Carl Rowan and Booker T. Washington are among black Appalachia’s other offspring.

Bickerstaff’s three oldest children _ Tim Lee, 23; Robin, 22, and Cyndi, 19 _ are seeking a better way in college. His two youngest _ Bernard, 12, and John Blair, 9 _ reside with him and Eugenia in the outskirts of Redmond, amidst gently rolling and densely timbered hills reminiscent of Bickerstaff’s hometown.

The sharp, uplifting wit remains. Bickerstaff uses it continuously to needle generally defiant NBA officials. His disarming charm has helped mold the Seattle media _ which ravaged and consumed his predecessor, Wilkens _ into an understanding and generously forgiving lot. Bickerstaff’s players consider their coach, as Ellis is wont to point out, “one of the guys.”

“Basketball players read through something that’s not real,” says Milwaukee’s John Lucas, who played under Bickerstaff in Washington. “Bernie’s sincerity comes through. He’s seen several ends of the spectrum. For the modern-day player, he’s one of the top three or four coaches around.”

In Bickerstaff’s Sonic family, fidelity reigns as the greatest requirement. Opportunity is the payback. He has surrounded himself with assistants Kloppenburg and Tom Newell, both out of his past in San Diego. The club he’s assembled resembles an NBA way station, chock full of cast-offs and misfits. Ellis, who became a star in Seattle after languishing three years on the Dallas Maverick bench, is the brightest of the Bickerstaff-induced Sonic success stories.

“There’s a lot of talent in every aspect of life that’s untapped,” Bickerstaff says. “Opportunity is all people are looking for. Lay it all out for them: `This is what you need to do to succeed.’ If a guy can’t handle that, he deserves to fail.”

Life has left Bickerstaff with highly developed survival skills. To an NBA head coach, survival means winning. Bernie Bickerstaff knows through experience that success can be won only through hard work. This is a theme he constantly hammers at his own team. He delivers the message mostly by example.

Bickerstaff endlessly jots ideas or plays on note cards he carries with him everywhere he goes. He keeps every one, stacked in an office at his Redmond home.

“And don’t even think of trying to talk when he’s writing on one of those cards,” warns Eugenia Bickerstaff, who met her husband in San Diego.

Win or lose, Bickerstaff rises two or three times during a night after a game, to replay it either in his head or on his VCR.

“Bernie doesn’t discover,” Newell says, “he notices.” It is not uncommon for the phone to ring late at night in the room of one of Bickerstaff’s advisers after a road loss. “What’s wrong with us?” a pained voice will beg. At home, Eugenia Bickerstaff provides a sounding board.

“The only thing you can be sure of is you, but you don’t always have control,” Bickerstaff says. “I’m damn sure not going to be the reason for my own failure. I believe you have to catch the little things. Don’t let them manifest themselves. And there’s a million little things going on, so you’ve always got to be after it.”

Life has shown Bickerstaff the fragile nature of triumph. Here today, easily gone tomorrow. As frugal as his grandparents once were, he hoards his money like he does his ideas. One never knows when that rainy day will come. Especially in Seattle.

One of the most utterly emotional moments in Sonic history graced the Coliseum on May 25, 1987. That afternoon, the Sonics were being swept out of the playoffs by the Los Angeles Lakers in the last game of the conference finals. During the final seconds of the Sonics’ Cinderella season, the Seattle fans rose to their feet and chanted, “Ber-nie, Ber-nie, Ber-nie,” as Bickerstaff stood misty-eyed on the sidelines.

The echoes hadn’t even died when Bickerstaff, already plotting his next conquest, warned the media not to take the outpouring too seriously because “you all could turn on me tomorrow.”

Bickerstaff signed a new three-year Sonic contract last month.

NBA coaching agreements sometimes guarantee salary, but rarely job security. Even the game’s best and brightest succumb when victories _ the currency on which the big business of professional basketball is built _ dry up. Desperation, mental drain, physical deterioration and, eventually, unemployment are the usual consequences.

The Sonic coach is humbled, yet unfettered. After all, the NBA, that pressure-cooker profession, holds nothing for Bernard Bickerstaff that he didn’t see on his road from Benham to Bernie.

“Where I came from was pressure,” he says. “Being poor was pressure. Being black was pressure. That was daily. Compared to that, this is lightweight.”