Boys will be boys, and all the gray hair and potbellies in the world will never convince them otherwise.
”For 30 years we`ve been telling old war stories about you guys,” said Paxton Lumpkin, turning to a tablemate. ”Now we find that you remember our fast breaks and blown free throws like it was yesterday, too.” Lumpkin, who learned to shoot a basketball in a South Side alley, enjoyed a long professional career with the Harlem Globetrotters. But in his heart of hearts, he will always wear a jersey lettered DUSABLE 13, the number he carried as a fancy-dribbling guard on the first black team to be crowned champions of Chicago`s adolescent world.
Seated next to him was Michael H. Rotman, attorney and alter ego of Mickey Rotman, rebound-grabbing forward when Roosevelt High School became the last predominantly Jewish school to win the city title, in 1952.
The last time Lumpkin and Rotman set eyes on each other it was 1954 and DuSable beat Roosevelt by one point. The night after their recent reunion, Lumpkin`s long-ago teammates crammed themselves into gym shorts once more to stretch their lead in the series. The game was played on the neutral ground of Whitney Young High School`s gymnasium.
Each school had periodically played intrasquad old-timers games, and last fall, the Roosevelt captain sent a shot-in-the-dark letter to his DuSable counterpart suggesting that they pick up their interschool rivalry 33 years after the fact. This time, DuSable`s veterans won, 51 to 43, in a hard-fought contest punctuated by the wheezing sounds 50-year-old men make racing Father Time up and down a basketball court.
The evening before, Lumpkin, Rotman and the rest of the players had come together for a banquet, so they could renew acquaintances with teammates, opponents and, most important of all, with themselves.
For the evening, they set aside the names and titles business colleagues know them by to become again ”Mookie” Miller and ”Moose” Malitz, ”Sweet Charlie” Brown and ”Poochie” Moore. For a few hours, they also went blissfully amnesic to the social convention that grown men don`t hug and kiss and reverted to the towel-snapping and tush-patting exuberance of their locker-room days.
”Charlie, you remember Lou Landt?” said one of Brown`s teammates, introducing DuSable`s captain to Roosevelt`s star forward. ”He guarded you.” Brown and Landt stood and stared at each other for a moment, as if each were trying to recover a memory of the other from behind the fleshy mask that now covered his one-time opponent. Finally, each broke into a shy smile, like reunited lovers will, once they forgive each other for their absence. A black hand laid a soft caress on a white face, and vice-versa, as each man reached out to touch a long-ago rival–and his own youth.
”I`m sure Coach (Sam) Edelcup would agree with me,” said retired DuSable coach Jim Brown, pausing in his welcoming remarks to look skyward for confirmation from his late, crosstown rival. ”It was the end of one era and the beginning of another.”
Back in the 1950s, Mickey Rotman and his Roosevelt teammates were the offspring of immigrants who were about to make good on the dream that had lured their parents to America. The very year DuSable won its second straight city championship in 1954, the United States Supreme Court decided that
”separate” never could mean ”equal.” Even at the time, some of these former opponents were vaguely conscious of that crossing point in their peoples` histories.
After graduating from DuSable, Karl Dennis recalled, an athletic scholarship took him to Northern Illinois University. It was the first time he had been away from home, and in the racial geography of 1954, De Kalb was light years distant from Chicago`s Black Belt, as the neighborhood around his high school was known. So his first days on NIU`s then virtually lily-white campus were lonely ones, and he considered chucking the venture and returning to to the psychological safety of big-city streets.
”Then I saw this `black` guy. Boy! Was I glad he`d wound up at Northern, too,” said Dennis, grabbing Jerry ”Moose” Malitz around his considerable middle and momentarily lifting the white, one-time Roosevelt opponent off the banquet-hall floor.
”You got to remember some of the things Jews were still being called back then,” Malitz said, by way of explaining the honorary kinship extended him. ”It was `you dirty` this, and `you lousy` that every time we played away from home, and we had to fight our way from the locker room to the bus after more than one game.”
Indeed, at the time, the prejudice and antagonisms built into Chicago`s ethnic patchwork did not take note of subtleties like family origins. In the eyes of the teenagers who lived on the other side of the railroad viaduct that separated your neighborhood from theirs, you were what your playmates were, recalled one-time Roosevelt center Roy Roe. Even now, his red, albeit thinning, hair bespeaks Roe`s Scandinavian ancestry, an inescapable physical fact of life that rival teams used to account for by according him the title, ”dirty Swede Jew.”
”You bet it bothered me,” said Roe, feeling again the sting of those under-the-backboard confrontations. ”I`m Norwegian.”
Even at a distance of three decades, most of the participants recalled being keenly aware that their championship showdown series represented the passing of an athletic mantle. For a decade before he won the right to wear a Roosevelt ”R” on his letter sweater, Jews had dominated basketball, that most urban of sports, observed Moose Malitz, whose free-form review of Chicago athletic history was the centerpiece of the reunion program. Paxton Lumpkin and his teammates belonged to the first generation of sports heroes to emerge from the black ghetto and those two traditions had run a collision course in a three-game series, which began in 1952.
That year Roosevelt defeated DuSable on the way to a city title. The following year, DuSable was victorious, and all through the subsequent off-season, the outcome of the 1954 championship battle was debated in all the greasy spoons and corner taverns of their respective neighborhoods.
By the final minutes of that last game, Lumpkin and his teammates were beginning to pull away from their perennial rivals, Malitz recalled, as his audience groaned and cheered their assent to his version of the historical record. But then Roosevelt sank a couple of quick baskets, narrowing the score to a one-point difference and, in the final seconds, pint-sized Mort Gellman stole the ball out of the hands of a player twice as big and dribbled through the entire DuSable team.
”For an instant, time itself seemed to stand still,” Malitz said, ”as a flash of white skin and blond hair streaked the length of the court.”
Unfortunately, Malitz explained, his teammate, like a lot of the small but scrappy guards of that era, had gone through his whole career in mortal fear of mixing it up with the big guys under the basket. A dead shot from anyplace else on the floor, Gellman had no layup. Alone at the far end of the court, and in full view of an entire adolescent generation, he banged the ball off the backboard just as the game-ending whistle blew.
”So that is how you guys went on to become living legends,” said Malitz, bowing deep to salute his long-ago rivals. ”And we? We became old Jews.”
On the way to that senior-citizen status, Malitz`s teammates at the Northwest Side school parlayed the disciplined will to win that team sports requries into a one-way ticket out of the inner-city world of their youth.
”We were children of the streets,” recalled Fred Rosen, who teamed at guard for Roosevelt with the unfortunate Gellman. From early grade-school years on, he explained, his generation was taught the ways of the world by their immediate predecessors in the al fresco classrooms of their schoolyard. To this day, Rosen still runs into contemporaries who, when introductions are made, report that they vividly remember his own small role in the chronicles of Chicago`s Jewish geography. Yet in all the years of his prep-school athletic career, his own parents, who ran a little ma-and-pa liquor store in Humboldt Park, never saw him play so much as a single game.
”They were working for survival,” recalled Rosen, who now operates a wine shop for the connoisseur trade. ”In those days, who could afford to close their shop doors for even an afternoon?”
The asphalt-and-concrete world of his upbringing, Rosen added, was a place you had to be to understand. Try as he might, it is a tough thing for him to explain to his own suburban-raised kids.
For those who came of age on South Side streets, the experience is even harder to communicate across generations.
”You talk and talk to your kids,” said DuSable alum David Reed, seconding Rosen`s comments, ”trying to get them to know what you went through. They listen, of course, but they can`t understand.”
Today Reed is the owner of a construction company. But when he was the same age as his grade-school children, Reed was a ”Valley Boy”, a gang-boy citizen of one of the ghetto`s roughest sections. If he had not had the example of Paxton Lumpkin and ”Sweet Charlie” Brown to follow, who knows where he would have wound up in life, said Reed, who played for DuSable a half decade after those glory years of the mid-`50s. The media and movies, he recalled, only presented images of blacks playing buffoon roles, like Amos and Andy.
”I was in 5th grade the year DuSable won the city title a second time,” Reed said. ”I`d see Paxton or `Sweet Charlie` and run half a block to catch up with them. All I wanted out of life was to go down the street, walking alongside those guys.”
Mack Herndon still uses the ghetto streets of his youth to measure where he has come in life. A mountain of a man, Herndon used a basketball scholarship to Bradley University to study accounting and today works for his fellow DuSable alum, David Reed. If Coach Brown had not recruited him in his grade-school years, Herndon said, his biography probably would have been no different from most of the other kids he grew up with.
”Lots of times, when I`m feeling down,” Herndon said, ”or feeling that I`m not getting where I want to be professionally fast enough, I`ll drive back to the old neighborhood and park in front of the YMCA where we used to play ball. It`s never long before some guy will come along from the old days. Like as not, he`s been in prison. Or, he`ll be scuffling and still living in his parents` old flat and not have moved an inch.”
Yet, in other ways, it can be tough not to be able to go home again.
Toward the end of the evening, as uniforms for the game were being distributed, Paxton Lumpkin grew silent. Because of a knee injury that had ended his professional career, he would not be suiting up the next night.
”I must have played a thousand games, all over the world,” the former Globetrotter said quietly, gesturing toward the former teammates and foes with whom he was seated. ”But I`d give half of them back, just to be able to run out on that court tomorrow with these guys one more time.”
Across the table, Ed Rothenberg said that he knew exactly how Lumpkin felt, although he can`t get his own wife to understand it, for the life of him. She tells him he is nuts every time he comes back to Chicago for a class reunion or an intrasquad game, Rothenberg said.
”For a couple of months ahead of time, I`ll wake up in the middle of the night with bad dreams,” the one-time Roosevelt player said. ”It must be from some fear of having to let go of those years. I cried at my high school graduation.”
From Roosevelt, Rothenberg had gone to the University of Cincinnati, then stayed on in that city to become a successful real-estate developer. For a long time, his business has run pretty much on automatic pilot, Rothenberg said, so currently he is running for a seat in the city council.
”No, it`s not for the money,” he said of his new-found political career. ”It`s just that once you`ve walked down a high school corridor wearing a varsity letter, you`re doomed to spending the rest of your life looking for a way to recapture the glory.”
On nights when the bad dreams don`t come, Rothenberg continued, he likes to fall asleep to the same ”Twilight Zone” fantasy. In this persistent daydream, he somehow gets hold of a time machine through which he can go back to his Roosevelt days. For all eternity, he would be content to relive his high school career, year by year, doubling back every graduation day to start all over again as a freshman.
”Who knows?” Rothenberg added. ”Maybe one of those times, Mort would even make that layup and we`d win that last championship game.”
