[No intro needed for this classic piece of long journalism. The headline says it all. But I would be remiss not to add that the article, published in the April 1975 issue of SPORT Magazine, was written by Bill Libby, then Mr. Lakers Insider. Libby, a choppy writer, is better than usual here, and his article, though profoundly sad where it chronicles Dorothy Sharman’s battle with cancer, is definitely worth the historical read. Sharman was one of the pro game’s more influential figures in the second half of the 20th century, though mostly behind the scenes and in an understated way. Also of note, in the 1970s, cancer was so poorly understood that it still carried a strong social stigma. People would be extremely careful around cups and silverware used by someone with cancer, out of fear that they might contract the dread disease. So, Sharman’s devotion should be viewed with a capital “D.” He was quite a man to coach the Lakers and care for his wife during the longest of NBA seasons.]
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For Bill Sharman, it was the perfect marriage—his association with the Los Angeles Lakers. He became the Lakers’ head coach in 1971, and in that first season together, the Lakers and Sharman assembled a record 33-game winning streak, a record 69-victory season, and the only NBA championship in the history of the franchise. The Forum rang with the cheers of a capacity crowd almost every night.
The cheers are mainly memories now. There are empty seats almost every night, and boos occasionally rise from the seats that are filled. Elgin, Baylor, Jerry West, and Wilt Chamberlain, the men who anchored the Lakers, have retired. The team, for the first time since Sharman became coach, will not win its division. For the first time in almost a decade, the Lakers may wind up below .500.
Bill Sharman sits on the bench, frustrated by the boos, frustrated by a group of players who do not come close to measuring up to the past. Sharman bears a professional burden and a personal burden, too.
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For most of his life, Bill Sharman has looked younger than his age. But now, at 48, he does not look so young. His close-cropped hair is graying. His sun-tanned face is seamed. His blue eyes have lost some of their sparkle. Eventually, he leaves the arena, after explaining in his thin voice one more defeat. But, instead of heading for his $150,000 home in plush Palos Verdes, he drives to his rented apartment in nearby Marina del Rey. He rented the apartment last September—one month after his wife Dorothy died of cancer.
“I couldn’t part with our house,” he says, leaning against the terrace railing, watching small boats bob like driftwood in the bay, “but I couldn’t live there right now, either. I don’t want to dwell on the past, I know life is for the living. But I’ve had a stomach ache for a long time now. I got it the day I found out how sick Dorothy was. I don’t know if it will ever go away completely.”
Ironically, the first seeds of Bill Sharman’s personal troubles were sewn during the harvest of his greatest professional triumphs. About six weeks before the end of the 1971-72 season, while the Lakers were winning the NBA championship, Bill Sharman began losing his voice. Team doctors Robert Kerlan and Frank Jobe were unable to diagnose the cause. Neither could a series of throat specialists. Until Dr. Paul Ward of UCLA discovered an ulcer buried at the base of Bill’s vocal cords. Sharman feared he had cancer.
The only cure was a complete vocal rest, impossible in the heat of a championship season. Instead, Sharman’s voice turned into a harsh croak, painful for him and for his listeners. Finally, after the playoffs, Sharman and his wife took a vacation in Hawaii, then came home to spend the summer—quietly. For the first six weeks, Bill communicated by handwritten notes, which Dorothy usually had to translate. She answered his telephone, she passed on messages. She was his link to the world.
“I think I only spoke twice during that whole time,” Sharman recalls. “Once, Dorothy woke me up to tell me I was talking in my sleep. Another time, I woke up imagining I heard noises, and without thinking, hollered in hopes of scaring off any intruders. It was a strain on both of us, but at least we didn’t have any arguments,” Sharman smiles. “In fact, when I started to speak in the new way, my voice sounded sort of sexy, and I told Dorothy she was getting a new and exciting husband.
“Going through this,” he adds softly, “we came close to one another.”
Gradually, over the next few seasons, thanks to rest and proper speaking methods, the ulcer shrank, the pain diminished. But each time a new season began, Sharman would slip back, under the strains of coaching on his voice and on his psyche. By the start of the present season, Sharman’s voice was almost back to normal. But by then, his life was torn apart.
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Sharman has had a full, rich life, spiced by stardom in two sports, by team championships and individual honors. But it has not been a perfect life, an idyllic life. Almost 30 years ago, Bill Sharman’s only brother died in a car crash. Sharman’s first marriage, which began as his professional athletic career blossomed, lasted more than 20 years and produced four children, then collapsed in 1968. His two sons and two daughters went to live with his ex-wife, Illeana, in Santa Barbara; two are now married, and Sharman is a grandfather.
In 1969, Sharman married for the second time. He was then 42, his new wife, Dorothy, was 35 (and she had a 10-year-old daughter, Jennifer, by a previous marriage). Dorothy was a former schoolteacher, a stunningly attractive blonde, as athletic as Sharman himself. They bought a house on a golf course, next to a tennis club, and often they played tennis and golf together. “He finally found someone who wanted to live his sort of life,” said a friend, “someone he could be comfortable with.”
It was while playing tennis in the summer of 1972 that Dorothy first felt the pain in her back. Bill took her to doctors and chiropractors, but back problems are notoriously difficult to diagnose. When X-rays revealed an old injury that might be acting up, she was given stretching exercises, then put in traction for a couple of weeks. It was not until 1973, when she noticed a hardness in the tissue of her back, on the right side, and exploratory surgery was prescribed.
“Up until that time, we thought it was a minor thing, but then we knew it was something else,” Sharman says. “In November, Dr. Jobe went in and came out with the bad news that it was a kind of cancer, which had begun in the bone marrow of her spine and was spreading across her back and her hip. Dr. Kerlan told me, ‘Bill, I hate to scare you, but the long-term prognosis is not good.’”
“Long-term” meant, at best, three or four years.
Dorothy was sent to Sloan-Kettering Institute in New York City. Jack Kent Cooke, the Lakers’ owner, “was marvelous,” says Sharman. “He told me, ‘Don’t ask me, just do whatever you feel is right for you. Take the season off if you want.’ I wanted to; I wanted to be with her, and I didn’t want to disrupt the team by constantly coming and going.”
In the end, though, Sharman did stay with his team. “I didn’t take the season off because she didn’t want me to, and because I didn’t want it to look to her as if there was no hope and I was with her waiting for her to die. We did have hope at the time.”
Surgeons operated in January 1974 to cut out as much of the cancer as they could, and again in February. At one point, they considered amputating her right leg and hip, but decided not to. When Bill visited, he and Dorothy would play cards and watch TV together, trying to forget what was happening to them and that they were alone far from their family and their friends. Jack Kent Cooke—in New York, to save his troubled Tele-PrompTer Corporation—called Dorothy every day. He visited her at the hospital once, but did not return. Seeing her there, wasting away, might have been—literally—too much for him (Cooke suffered a heart attack two years ago).
Bill says, “When they went into her for the fourth time, it looked like they might have caught the cancer in time and our spirits soared. She wanted to return home, and so I took her home in March in a wheelchair. After a while, she could get around on crutches a little. She seemed to be recovering, but I suppose the disease was just in a temporary remission. After she’d been home about two months, we felt the hardness higher up in her back, and we knew the cancer was spreading. We knew, without saying it, that she was dying. Dr. Jobe took her into the hospital here in Los Angeles and operated again to cut out what he could. She was seldom off her back or out of bed after that.”
All this time, Dorothy insisted the gravity of her condition, be kept secret; she did not want to be pitied. Bill says, Jennifer was 13 when her mother was stricken. We never told her it was cancer in so many words, but after a while, I knew she knew. She never asked about it. Maybe she didn’t want to hear it. But she was brave about it. Near the end, she went to stay with her father, who also had remarried and had children of his own in San Diego. I came to be close to her, but we knew she would have to live with her father when Dorothy died. If Dorothy died . . .”
Dorothy had made herself many friends among the Lakers, among their wives, among the writers who covered the club. As the truth of her terminal condition gradually slipped out, a deepening depression set in around the Forum, the home of the Lakers. The basketball wives had a tree planted outside her window, where she could view it from her bed. At first, many of her friends came to visit, but as her condition worsened, she dreaded having to receive visitors who could see her growing paler and thinner and weaker every day.
“Everyone did everything they could,” says Sharman, “but, in the end, there wasn’t anything anyone can do. The worst thing about an illness like this is the mental part. The physical pain from the cancer and the [surgical] cutting could be kept down with shots and pills, but there is nothing short of putting you under to stop you from thinking about the life that is slipping away from you. We were a husband and wife who could always talk to each other, and after a time, we had to talk about this. At first, we could kid about it. But I tied myself into knots trying to be cheerful, and she’d see it and then try to cheer me up.”
He pauses for a moment, then adds, “Eventually, though, we had to face the reality of life without her. Dorothy was able to talk about it without tears. She talked about wanting me to make a new life for myself, but mostly she talked about what she wanted for Jennifer. I seldom saw her cry, and only twice did I see her break down: Once was when we were talking about how much we had together, and once when she thought of not getting to see her daughter grow up. These times just tore the guts out of me.
“The last six weeks or so, last summer, the doctors told me her time was running out. I didn’t tell her, but by then she was not aware of much. She was weak and sedated and slept most of the time. A private nurse was with her around the clock. I’d stand by her bed every morning before I left the house and every evening after I returned, and if she opened her eyes, I’d speak to her. But she seldom answered. I seldom knew if she understood me or not. I was waiting for it to end, so her suffering would stop.
“The last morning, the ninth of September, she opened her eyes, and I spoke to her. But she didn’t speak to me. I told her I loved her, and I left.” He grows silent for a moment, his eyes watering. That day he had to go to the Internal Revenue Department to clear up a minor matter. A few hours later he returned, and the nurse met him at the door with tears in her eyes. “I’m sorry,” she said. “Mrs. Sharman died about an hour ago.”
Bill went into the bedroom. He sat by Dorothy’s side for a while.
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Preseason basketball practices were about to begin, and Sharman admits that they were, in a sense, his salvation; if anything could fill the void, it was basketball, since for Bill, basketball is both a profession and an obsession. At the University of Southern California, he was outstanding in both basketball and baseball. (Later, he played outfield for the Brooklyn Dodgers farm system and briefly in the majors.) He broke into pro basketball with the old Washington Caps, then went to Boston and became an all-star with the Celtics.
But even while he was still a player, Sharman was planning a career as a pro coach. A superb outside shooter (he still holds the league record for accuracy from the free-throw line). Years ago, he wrote an outstanding instructional book, Sharman on Shooting, and will be following it up this year with a new book done with UCLA’s John Wooden, entitled The Wooden-Sharman Methods, to be published by Macmillan. Even in the offseason, he can’t stop coaching—imparting his basketball wisdom to little Wilts and Wests at his summer basketball camp.
Given his first chance to coach when Abe Saperstein’s American Basketball League was born in 1961, Bill retired as a player to take over the L.A. Jets. The Jets folded at midseason; Bill became coach of the Cleveland Pipers, guiding them from the league’s cellar to the league title.
But the next season, the entire ABL folded, so Bill spent two years coaching at Cal State, Los Angeles, then two years as a basketball broadcaster, before Franklin Mieuli hired him to coach the floundering San Francisco Warriors. In his first season, Bill guided the Warriors to within a couple of baskets of beating Wilt Chamberlain’s Philadelphia team in the playoff finals.
From the beginning, Sharman drilled his team in practices that tested their endurance, even on the day of a game. He used films like a football coach. He made his players sit through meeting after meeting. A perfectionist, he was not popular with his players—and the player who liked him least of all was the player owner Franklin Mieuli loved best of all: Rick Barry, his youthful superstar. The following season, Barry jumped to the new American Basketball Association. Although Sharman again led the Warriors into the playoffs, Mieuli couldn’t forgive him for driving his prodigal son into exile. “I wanted a 24-hour-a-day coach,” Mieuli said, “but I got more than I bargained for.” (When Mieuli refused to pay Sharman what he felt he deserved, Bill jumped to the ABA, too—as coach of the Los Angeles Stars.)
In San Francisco, in one year, he’d built a winner around the nucleus of Nate Thurmond and Rick Barry. In Los Angeles, it took him two years to build a winner without any stars at all. That second year as head coach, after the team move to Utah, he guided the Stars to the ABA championship. Then, hearing Jack Kent Cooke wanted a new coach for his Lakers, Sharman applied for the job and got it. He walked into a stress situation, where an aging assortment of superstars (some with super egos) had lost seven playoff finals in 11 seasons, most of them to Sharman’s old Celtics. In the eyes of the owner, the press, and the public, anything short of an NBA championship would mean that Sharman had failed.
Although his stars—Elgin Baylor, Wilt Chamberlain, and Jerry West—were 37, 35, and 33 years of age, respectively, and soloists, Sharman was set on turning them into a fastbreak ballclub that emphasized teamwork. “That’s the basketball I learned from Red Auerbach,” he says, “and it’s what I teach. You have to hustle every minute of every game, and you have to sacrifice yourself unselfishly for the team.”
He still denies it, but the Barry incident seemed to have softened his approach. This time, he devoted as much energy to soothing his players egos as he did to conditioning their muscles.
“I met with West first,” he recalls. “I played golf with him. He beat me at golf, but I came out ahead: He gave me the real lowdown on my new players. And he was the sort of star who could be coached. He agreed to play his position any way I wanted.
“Wilt was away until shortly before the season started. I invited him to lunch, then forgot to take my wallet. He laughed it off. He is independent, but intelligent, and he was hungry for a championship. He felt he could be the triggerman in a fastbreak brand of ball. I told him I believed in a game day routine of togetherness, which included an early awakening, a morning practice, and an afternoon meeting. He told me he’d try it, although he’s an insomniac who sleeps mornings instead of nights.
“I told him I wanted him to turn out for practices, even if he didn’t need them, and he said he would, just so no one would have an excuse for stirring up trouble. And he did not miss a single practice all season. He grumbled a bit, but we did not have a serious disagreement.
“I tried to get along with Baylor several times,” Sharman adds, “but it just never worked out. When the season started, I was disappointed to discover he no longer was the super player I’d remembered. His knees were weak, and he had an ankle injury. We had a young forward, Jim McMillian, who fit our running game better. I had to tell Elgin that I wanted to bring him in off the bench while starting the younger player. It was the hardest thing I’ve had to do in coaching. It hurt Elgin, but he understood. He did say he wanted to go out on top and asked for a few days to think about it. I didn’t press the point. In a few days, he announced his retirement.
Our record 33-game winning streak started the night McMillian replaced Elgin in the lineup.”
Although his old Celtic teammates were the best team he ever saw over a series of seasons, Sharman says his Laker club was the best ever over one season. “We had beautiful balance in McMillian and Happy Hairston up front. Wilt at center, and West and Gail Goodrich at guards. We had a reliable bench. Every player complemented every other player, and if we’d had Baylor at his peak—when he was the best forward alive—our club would have been incomparable. Wilt was no longer at his peak, and certain players could defense him. But he was still the most powerful player the game has had, and he was still able to dominate games defensively, intimidating others out of their offensive patterns and rebounding and making quick outlet passes to get our offense moving. Hairston helped Wilt with the rebounding.
“McMillian and Goodrich gave us good outside shooting. West handled the ball and quarterbacked the club on defense as well as offense. He must have set a record for steals. He not only was a great clutch shooter but the greatest of defensive guards. He and Oscar Robertson have been the best guards that basketball has had, and Jerry has to have been the best at both ends of the court. I coached in the dressing room and from the bench, but Jerry coached on the court.”
The Lakers finished with 69 victories in 82 games (one victory more than the old record established by Wilt’s former Philadelphia team), then went on to win 12 out of 14 games to capture the NBA championship. Sharman became the first coach ever to win championships in three major basketball leagues: ABL, ABA, and NBA.
The following season, Chamberlain missed the preseason practices, Hairston missed most of the regular season, and West was slowed by injuries in the playoffs. Still, the club won 60 games during the season, its second-highest total ever, retained its divisional, title, and reached the playoff finals before bowing.
The Lakers really should have had a second-straight championship—they were the stronger club—but the New York Knicks were inspired. Willis Reed didn’t know it, but he was really ending his career, and the Knick captain ended it on a high note for him—Most Valuable Player of the championship series—a low note for Sharman.
Last season, 1973-74, Wilt jumped to the ABA, and West missed almost all of the season with an injury. To compound the Lakers’ problems, in the first in a series of debilitating trades, Jim McMillian was sent to Buffalo for a center to replace Wilt. And Elmore Smith turned out to be not only shorter than Wilt, but less talented than the Lakers had hoped. The Lakers limped to 47 victories, but still won their divisional title, before being eliminated in the playoff opener. Then, before the 1974-75 season started, Jerry West retired, leaving Happy Hairston and Gail Goodrich as the only two regulars held over from the 1971-72 championship team.
To get a ballhandling replacement for West, the Lakers traded guard Jim Price to Milwaukee for Lucius Allen—and blushed when Price was named an all-star by the NBA coaches. Meanwhile, Connie Hawkins, Bill Bridges, and Zelmo Beaty had all long passed their prime. “Right now,” says Sharman, “I’m faced with my greatest challenge ever as a coach.”
And as a man, too. Life has already asked more of him at age 48 than most men. He leaves the Forum after a game and goes home alone. He stands by the railing, above the boats, bobbing up and down in the bay, and he holds his silence a while, staring out into the darkness, thinking his own private thoughts. “I’m existing,” he says. “I have to learn to live all over again. If I can, maybe the hurt in my gut will go away. I can’t forget the past, I don’t even want to.
“But I do want to go on. I’ve even begun to date again. I hope people won’t misunderstand, but I felt I should. I’m mourning, but I’m moving on, too.”
Then he sighs and says, “I can lose myself coaching, I can get lost in the games. But then, every once in a while, something reminds me of my wife and our life together, and the hurt is sort of heavy, and I feel like crying but I don’t. Like the other night, during a game, a pretty girl came by behind the bench. I caught a glimpse of her as she was walking away. For an instant, I thought it was Dorothy . . .”
“It was awful when I realized it wasn’t Dorothy—and I was alone, on the bench, alone with my players.”
From Way Downtown 