Bob Love plans to make a short speech Friday night after his No. 10 Bulls jersey is hoisted to the Stadium ceiling, midst those championship banners. This ceremony, though, will be duly recorded as a triumph of the spirit.
“Dreams won’t come true if you don’t allow yourself to dream in the first place,” Love says. “If you lose hope, you lose everything.”
As one of 14 children in his grandmother’s Louisiana house containing but three beds, Love discovered early that he had a certain gift. He would shoot a basketball and hear it go swish. All net, time after time. What he couldn’t do was express his joy for the game, because he stuttered. The thoughts were there, as well as the urge to verbalize them, but when Bob Love’s mouth opened and his hands moved and his head contorted, his dream came out in body English only.
“And you know how kids in school can be so cruel,” he says. “I figured, if I couldn’t speak off the court, maybe I’d let my actions speak for me on the court.”
He came to the Bulls in 1968 as something of an afterthought in a deal with the Milwaukee Bucks. What followed was terrific stuff. Love grew into an NBA All-Star. He led the Bulls in scoring for seven straight seasons, and those were fun seasons indeed. Every night, the tightly-knit Bulls came to the arena on a streetcar named desire, and everybody in Chicago talked about the Bulls. Everybody except Bob Love, a beautiful human being whose heart was rarely explored.
“I understood,” he says. “You writers have deadlines. And the TV and radio people, they couldn’t stand around my locker, either, waiting for something to come out of my mouth.”
Alas, all dreams come to an end. Love retired with 12,623 points, the Bulls’ highest total until Michael Jordan arrived in 1984. That was the same year Love, pounding the pavement for work in Seattle, met a full-court press unlike any he’d ever seen when he was playing games. Nobody cared about his ability to hit the jumper then, although he was recognized on occasion.
“Lots of odd jobs, including one as a busboy and dishwasher,” he says. “That was at a large department store, Nordstrom’s. I was in the cafeteria. Every once in a while, former players, or even current ones in town to play Seattle, would come by for a cup of coffee or a sandwich. I’d be there in my apron and my little hat, pushing a cart and clearing tables for $4.45 an hour. Yeah, I used to be Bob Love.
“I was embarrassed, and they were embarrassed for me. But there’s only two ways you can go. You can take off the apron and the hat and give up. Or you can decide to be the best dishwasher in the world. I kept on washing. Man, I did a lot of pots and pans for almost two years. Then, maybe because I cared, because I took the first step, Nordstrom’s cared and took the next step for me.”
Love was sent to Susan Hamilton, a speech therapist-the best speech therapist in the whole wide world to hear him talk now, with only a trace of the impediment that haunted him. He turned in his apron and his hat for a better job, although the dream job was still out there. Steve Schanwald of the Bulls’ front office called one morning. They needed a director of community relations, someone to earn a salary by speaking about the Bulls and basketball and life to Chicago.
“I guess they heard I’d finally learned to talk at age 45,” Love says. “I didn’t accept right away because I was in a state of shock. What I did was leave work early. I went home, got on my knees and thanked God for giving me the strength. Then I called Steve the next day to say yes. Early. Real early.”
The jersey of Jerry Sloan, one of Love’s teammates, is up there already. Sloan and his Utah Jazz will be there Friday night. But Bob Love’s audience is everywhere now, and everybody is listening.
“I tell kids in the inner-city not to give up,” he says. “Have a dream and make it happen. Take that first step. I know it’s possible. I’m talking from experience. I’m talking.”
