[When Street & Smith’s started publishing a separate pro basketball yearbook in the late 1980s, Houston Chronicle reporter Fran Blinebury joined the editorial team with his annual profiles of some of the NBA’s top players. I’ve already run several of them on the blog, mainly to credit to Blinebury. He’s a fantastic sportswriter with great tone, knowledge, and a keen eye for detail.
What follows is Blinebury at his 1,200 words-or-less best from the 1991-1992 Street & Smith’s Pro Basketball annual. Blinebury profiles the veteran Dominique Wilkins as his Human Highlight Film approached what would be his final run in Atlanta. No need for me to say anymore. Blinebury has it all under control. Take a look.]
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They give you a label, and you spend the rest of your life trying to shake it. They smother you with their own perceptions and never come to know the reality.
That is the burden of being a Dominique Wilkins, the Human Highlight Film. The player that everyone marvels at while watching the backboard-shaking, rim-rattling replays on the evening news and then dismisses quickly when the topic of conversation changes to the true winners in the NBA.
For eight years, he was the man without a conscience, his critics said. The man who both carried the Atlanta Hawks on his strong and athletic back and prevented them from reaching their full potential at the same time.
For so long, they said, both his strength and his weakness were in his knowing just how much he brought to each game. He was far too good to be just another player who blended in with the pack. And far too good, individually, it was believed, to ever allow the rest of the Hawks to blossom.
“There were a lot of things I didn’t understand,” Wilkins says.
Things like how he could play his heart out night after night and make the NBA Eastern Conference All-Star team six years in a row and still have people wondering about him. Things like how he could so often be the only player on the team giving his all on every trip down the court, and then have critics claim he simply wasn’t doing enough. That is, until now, when Wilkins is belatedly getting his due.
“If people now are learning to respect the way I play, I just say that it’s about time,” he says. “I’ve always felt that I was a complete player. Maturity has brought out some things in my game that maybe weren’t there before, I’ll say that. But overall, I don’t think my game needed changing in a big way.”
Perhaps it was just his image that needed a complete makeover. But whatever the case, it is just a bit odd that at age 31, when other players of his generation are beginning to be slowed by the aches and pains of knees and feet and backs worn out from years of pounding, the man who, for so long carried so much of the weight alone, is still romping like a young colt and, for the first time, getting a measure of respect for his efforts as well.
Notice that while Larry Bird and Magic Johnson and Kevin McHale and Tom Chambers are starting to wear down, the career of Wilkins appears to be going nowhere but up. You watch the videotapes from his games now and find it is no longer just the monster dunks that seem to leap out of the screen.
Now you can see him race 94 feet on defense to block what seemed to be a sure layup. You see him jump into the passing lanes to cut off the entry feeds into the post. You see him find an open teammate with a nice pass when Dominique is covered. You see him go into the jungle of arms and legs and come away with a key rebound. Watch him knock down a jumper or twist through a maze of defenders for two points. Watch him play solid defense.
Now Wilkins is no longer only an artist putting on a one-man show. He can be part of a different kind of masterpiece—a team.
Others say it has all come about as a result of Wilkins finally opening his eyes and realizing the only way to get the total respect that he desires is by being part of a successful team. Back in 1989, when the Hawks’ big-name team of Wilkins, Moses Malone, and Reggie Theus suffered another first-round playoff loss that has become the franchise trademark, then-coach Mike Fratello said of Dominique” “What you see is what you get.”
But what you get out of Wilkins today appears, at least on the surface, to be something completely different. The player gives much of the credit for the change—which he doesn’t completely admit has occurred—to his current coach, Bobby Weiss.
“Playing under Bobby Weiss has made me more comfortable doing all that I can do,” Wilkins says. “I knew I could do those things all along, but it was just a matter of playing my type of game. What I started trying even harder to do was getting the rebounds, playing team defense, and passing the ball.
“I’m an overall player. It took a guy like Bobby Weiss to really understand the type of game I could play. I’m an easy person to get along with. It was just a tough situation here with Mike Fratello. At one time, it was good. But near the end, there was a whole lot of negative stuff. With Weiss, there is a different atmosphere.”
The difference in Wilkins was reflected in his stats last season. His 25.9 per game scoring average was his lowest since 1983-84, his second year in the league, and his nine rebounds a game were easily a career high.
It has been suggested that Wilkins and Portland’s Clyde Drexler were cut from the same bolt of cloth. Both are wonderfully talented players who developed—perhaps unfairly—the reputation of being egotistical, me-first types in a game where selflessness is what builds champions.
There were questions about whether Hawks owner and cable TV impresario Ted Turner ever really wanted Wilkins to tone down his act. After all, when a guy is billed coast-to-coast as the Human Highlight Film, you don’t get big TV ratings points for having him help on weakside defense.
“Before I came to Atlanta, I thought Dominique was an athletic scorer who could put numbers up, but I wasn’t sure how much he could help other people,” Weiss says. “I think now he wants to get rid of that reputation. I think he wants to be recognized as a complete player, not just a super talent.”
But it is difficult to get Wilkins himself to admit that he’s changed, or ever needed to change. “If I was the player that they said I was, I wouldn’t have been on the all-star team six straight years,” he says. “Any time you play on a marginal team, you’re going to get those labels—selfish, one-dimensional, unwilling to help your team. But one guy cannot carry a team, no matter who he is.”
These are lessons that are only learned by some over time. “Early in your career, you’re in the proving stage,” says veteran teammate Sidney Moncrief. “You feel that you have to prove to everybody that you’re a great player. I sense that ‘Nique now seems more at peace with his abilities and his standing in the eyes of the fans and his peers.”
After years of watching him, try vainly to live up to the perceptions of the Human Highlight Film, it would be nice to think that what Dominique Wilkins is now showing us is the reality.
From Way Downtown 