Those who got in his way realized that they were a lot better off walking than trying to stand their ground. Brisker came out of the Detroit projects and lived by no one’s rules. He was kicked off the University of Toledo varsity hoops team for insubordination, but stuck around to play tuba in the band. He tore up the American Basketball Association with the Pittsburgh Condors in the early ‘70s, inciting street fights with the league’s toughest and taking a gun courtside in his gym bag. By the mid-‘70s he was languishing at the end of the Seattle Supersonics’ bench, content to collect a paycheck and absorb the wrath of coach Bill Russell. Then, after securing a buyout from the Sonics, John Brisker left his wife and family at home and went to Africa, supposedly to pursue business interests. He was never seen again.

For years rumors made the rounds. Brisker was on the run from the Feds. Brisker was on the run from the mob. Brisker went to work as a soldier of fortune, a mercenary. Brisker fell in with some shady Liberian grifters. Brisker fell in with Idi Amin, boxing with the bloodthirsty tyrant and coaching his Ugandan national basketball team. Brisker got on the wrong side of Amin and wound up on a pile of a thousand corpses. Brisker lived under an assumed identity in Africa. Brisker made it back to the States. Brisker’s dead, long gone. Brisker’s alive, still.

Detroit Mercy is a work of fiction. In weekly installments posted on Sportsnet.ca, Gare Joyce is writing a speculative history of the real-life figure who wrote his own improbable narrative but disappeared without tying up the story. “Where are they now?” and “What ever happened to?” are boilerplate fixtures in sports media. Using research that includes declassified CIA documents secured through a Freedom of Information Act request and interviews with those who knew Brisker, Detroit Mercy imagines how it finally went down for John Brisker.

This is the second instalment of a weekly series. Click here for chapters one through four.

7

“What I know about him is that however he died … however you killed him … it didn’t happen in Pittsburgh.”

Hines took a sip of her iced coffee and only then did it occur to her that she couldn’t even say that for certain. Could he have died in Pittsburgh? It wasn’t impossible. Some who looked for him in vain believed he somehow sneaked back to the States. After all, she knew about his time in Detroit and Toledo and Pittsburgh and Seattle and the rest was smoke. The rest was Africa. The rest was anything else.

What she knew about him with any degree of certainty came from the walls of the high school, from three old yearbooks in the H.H.S. library. The one from his senior year in ’66 was missing. It came from the years she had spent searching for matters of the record in public libraries. It came from her investment of thousands of dollars a quarter at a time in photocopies. It came from late nights and weekends scouring the Internet and screen-saving every mention of his name.

She knew what had been written in obituaries when he was declared dead in ‘85. She also knew what other people believed about him. Google search was all it took; just the images, didn’t even need words. Each hit made her heart race. One, though, was different than the rest: the cover of the Pittsburgh Condors 1970-71 media guide. She saw it up for sale as a collectible on ebay and she had to have it even though it cost her a day’s take-home pay. It was too strange. It wasn’t an action shot or any standard pose for a portrait. No, he was wearing a sombrero and poised to draw on holstered guns.

When Hines finally held the guide in her hands, her stomach twisted into a knot. What was that expression on his face? Probably they were looking for him to smile some sort of malevolent smile, like he wanted someone, anyone, to just give him a reason. But that wasn’t a smile. That wasn’t confidence either. That was someone who didn’t want here and be doing this. A sombrero. Not a cowboy hat, which would have made sense. Not a black hat, which made even more sense. No, they gave him a Mexican straw hat. Probably couldn’t find a cowboy hat in Pittsburgh when they brought him in to take this picture. And he knew it was ridiculous. No, that look on his face, that was a man in a minstrel show, a man humiliated by it simply because he understood that he was being reduced to a cartoon. 1970-71 PRESS, RADIO, TV GUIDE: Who would have been holding and reading that in Pittsburgh back in the early 70s? A bunch of fat, middle-aged white men who worked for newspapers or television stations and watched a bunch of black men playing a game, entertainers like that was a role acceptable for black men. Hines saw pain when she looked at his face below that sombrero. A professional athlete and it looked like he’d fumble the guns away if he had to reach for them. Impotence. That’s what would have made it even funnier to those fat, middle-aged white men. This isn’t Shaft. This isn’t Superfly. This isn’t Jim Brown. This isn’t Fred The Hammer Williamson. No, this is the opposite. And if the white guy behind the camera didn’t know, the black man in front of it did.

“What do I know about him?” Donnelly had asked her.

She knew the day that her father stood in front of the that camera, and he knew what they wanted him to do and he knew he shouldn’t have done it. Maybe when they handed him the sombrero. Maybe they were in the middle of it when he realized that. Maybe only later when he saw that the guide in print and heard the laughs that it got from those the fat, middle-aged white guys on press row. She looked at Donnelly. It would have amused you or probably your father’s generation, the ones who bought the tickets to games, the ones who signed his paycheck.

That cover was John Brisker like they would have wanted him. But there was a different John Brisker in the action shots.

He looked like he was jumping right into those lights hanging down from the roof of the arena. Gliding. Soaring. Like the headband gave him the power of flight. It made her proud to think that he was one of the best players in the world. She liked the shots where she could see a crowd, validations that people actually saw him and knew what he was, at least as a player. But empty seats were the usual background.

Nobody was there at all in the shots from Pittsburgh.

“What do you know about him?” Donnelly had asked.

If she could in that awful moment put her thoughts in order she would have said: “What do you know about trying to find your father on the back of a bubblegum card?”

He was from Detroit. He went to school in Toledo. He was six-foot-five and 210 pounds. He was the best in the world at what he did and no one knew it. He hated what the Condors’ management made him do, the sombrero just part of it. She hated what the sportswriters made him into, a savage and more.

“What do you know about him?”

She wanted to say: Don’t ask me questions. Don’t patronize me; don’t demand answers. I found you and that should be enough to stop you from asking me questions.

No way she was telling him about those hours in the library as a kid. Her grandparents saying it was like her home, that it made her “special” for a kid. They could drop her there and she’d get lost in books for hours. It allowed her to find worlds that she would never have known about otherwise. She wouldn’t have known the history of Detroit, the city she grew up in. She wouldn’t have known about the northward migration of her people to find jobs in the auto plants. She wouldn’t have found James Baldwin or Angela Davis. In dropping her off at the library her grandparents had left her in the one place where as a young woman she could set about finding her father—or at least finding what he was about.

She knew small things, things that were barely important when he was alive, the detritus forgotten now. From her mother, nothing but the bare facts—or at least the facts as she remembered them. She knew what she believed. She didn’t have the time or the inclination to get into her history with Donnelly sitting across from her. She didn’t share any of it with anyone and she wasn’t going to start. She wasn’t going to let him turn the tables. It’s not about what I know. It’s about what you know.

The big things, no the big thing, she could only guess at, she could only suspect. She knew she was the spitting image of John Brisker. And what she knew of John Brisker was all image.

8

“What do you know about him beyond the—”

Donnelly didn’t want to say “basics” or anything that sounded dismissive. Obviously, unless this was a stunt or she was a crank, Hines was reopening a deep wound that remained tender through all those years and never really healed. “—details from your investigation so far?”

There. Maybe too bureaucratic. Okay, definitely too bureaucratic, but necessarily. Suck the emotion out of the room.

Here they sat in a coffee shop, a spilled latte away from a busy six-lane thoroughfare, where cars speeded by in the heat. The students who walked in soon enough had noses down in their laptops and headphones on. Others came in picking at their iPhones. Then it was five nurses in their drab garb grabbing a caffeine jolt before their shift. This wasn’t the time or place for damp eyes and sobbing and all that goes with a spectacle. To Donnelly’s mind there really wasn’t much of a time or place for that at all.

The way she described it, her coming all the way to Florida to find out about her father was about filling in blanks. Donnelly believed, knew, that wasn’t all of it. She had come here, to this place, found what Donnelly had thought was unfindable: him. His past. As irretrievable as Brisker’s he had thought, maybe more so, he had hoped.

Hines knew exactly what she wanted to find out. She wanted affirmation of a heroic vision she had of her father. Broken, yes, but heroic, even an anti-hero is heroic in a way. Brisker created her in a frozen moment those years ago, just so many strands of DNA tangling up. In the years, decades, since, she had created him—or at least this great spectral narrative of who he should have been. She had come to find a character in defiance of his well-established reputation. Not that Donnelly could blame her. He felt sorry for her. It was and had always been a fool’s errand, even if she wasn’t a fool but for her heart.

Donnelly believed in appropriate heroes, a fundamental tenet of his wholly appropriate upbringing. By Donnelly Sr.’s standard the list was a short one, each name preceded by his prefix of choice, “a man like.” The obvious example: “A man like Jack Kennedy.” This, of course, made Donnelly’s father in no way exceptional. No matter, Donnelly Sr. stumped for Kennedy in life and death. “A man like Jack Kennedy could have stayed back in Boston and taken it easy on all his father’s filthy lucre but instead chose a path as steep as Boustead Street. You know it? God, I remember when your grandfather got me a job working for the old Gazette driving a truck one summer to drop off papers for the delivery boys in Beechview and the dispatcher told me to only go up Boustead because ‘not a truck I trus’ t’go dahn in it.’ That’s the type of climb it was. A man like Jack Kennedy … by way of comparison, Edmund Hilary might as well have used an escalator.”

Other heroes with Donnelly Sr.’s seal of approval included: Chief Justice Warren; Rev. Jeremiah Joseph Callahan, who happened to reign at Duquesne over Sr.’s years in law school; John Glenn; Maz, because he made good on nerve, that one great afternoon back in ’60 but “more often with his glove than you’ll ever know or appreciate”; Bobby Kennedy; Bing Crosby because “he’s not just a talent but he has done a lot for people you never hear about and the Catholic Church is right there at the top of the list”; Donnelly Sr.’s father, the Grand Old Man; and an assortment of senior partners who were generous to him when he passed the bar. To Donnelly Sr.’s mind, each of these had a particular brand of valor depending on the elevation and celebration of his work and his individual ratio of heart:soul:balls.

These weren’t aspirational figures. When Donnelly Sr said “A man like” he was implying that his sons would never have a chance to do anything as important, to do anything so well. By way of comparison, the son was destined to take a run at Boustead Street with one of the P-G’s old wrecks dropped into reverse gear.

Donnelly’s brothers bought into the tyranny of their father’s “A man like,” but Donnelly wanted heroes of his own. They do, after all, define a notion of the heroic but also define the worshipper.

Donnelly needed someone who was appropriately inappropriate as his personal icon. He started with the Berrigans and Thomas Merton, names that when first mentioned at the family table back in ’67 were enough to drop the fork from Donnelly Sr.’s hand. The father was neither a staunch defender of the persecution of war nor a proponent of immediate and unconditional withdrawal. Nonetheless he believed the Berrigans and Merton had over-stepped. “Criminals,” he called them, their crimes defined not just by the state but the sanctimony of Catholic men of his generation. The father regarded the insurrection in his own house as his failure and his son’s betrayal. In that one breath, a moment over the dinner table, the father came to realize that his oldest was never going to be anything more than a visitor at the firm and not a terrifically welcome one.

Donnelly Sr. should have known that already, just like his oldest son had known a respectful mention of the Berrigans and Merton would push his father’s buttons.

A little while later, that night maybe, a day or two later, the father asked and the oldest son assured him that he would go to DU law school per the family tradition. And yet when Donnelly told him that he wanted to go on a mission to Africa and later when he told him that he wanted to spend the summer on a Catholic mission to Africa and, maybe, down the line, a year in the Peace Corps the father was not blindsided. Illusions were just being shattered into tinier shards and Sr. had given up trying to piece them together.

The Berrigans, the Catholic mission and the Peace Corps were just the latest skirmishes in dinner-table hostilities that had been going on for a couple of years. The catalyst had been Norman Morrison. Back in the fall of ‘65 Morrison sat outside the window of Robert MacNamara, LBJ’s Secreary of Defence. There he doused himself with gasoline and then set himself ablaze. The subject of Morrison came up at the dinner table in the days after and Donnelly Sr weighed in with his opinion that it was, one, “the act of a madman” and, two, “a by-product of a crank religion.” To his mind, the Quakers were cranks.

“No different than those Buddhist monks sitting there cross-legged turning themselves into embers,” Sr. said. “God knows what those people believe in.”

“Or the guy who took the photograph and the people watching,” Donnelly said, his younger brothers head down to their plates, his mother feeling a low-pressure system blowing in.

“What’s your point?”

“I mean, wouldn’t the right thing be to try and save them?”

“And risk your own life? Going up in flames with them? I suppose you’re obliged to pray for them but risk death with no hope of saving them … I don’t suppose that might be an irrational reaction but not ‘the right thing.’”

People talk a lot about Norman Morrison to this day. But a week later it was Roger Allen Laporte, forgotten now.

Donnelly remembered vividly the day that he heard the news of Laporte’s death. Funny how it sticks. He was driving his mother’s Corvair, going to Honus Wagner Sports to buy a new pair of Chuck Taylors. He had pulled the car up into a parking spot and the Supremes’ I Hear a Symphony was playing on WEEP. He was just ready to pull the key out of the ignition but he thought he’d wait out the end of the song and see what was up next, maybe Get Off of My Cloud. There was a “We interrupt the program” advisory and then a report from New York that an anti-war protestor had set himself on fire outside the United Nations. No name at that point. Probably, Donnelly though, the hold-up had to do with identifying him or notifying his next of kin. Fact is, unlike the monks or Morrison, someone was able to extinguish the fire and Laporte was rushed to hospital where he was treated and clung to life however involuntarily. Intervention is the risk you run committing suicide as a public performance.

Sr. went on that night again. “This guy making a bonfire of himself outside the UN … another religious crank or some sort of radical believing in God knows what … the state of the world … values system’s all out of whack… they don’t understand that some wars have to be waged, however awful the cost, for the greater good …”

And the son piped up, something between mouthfuls about “moral relativism” and “belief systems of others no less valid than our own” and “maybe we just can’t understand.” Just a couple of shots across his father’s bow, enough to satisfy his slightly post-adolescent need to shit-disturb. Lacking the guts to take his vague protests to the streets or the front lines, he staged a demonstration in the comfort of home while the maid collected the plates and the retriever curled up at his feet. Looking back on it now, the courage of his idealistic conviction could be weighed in fractions of an ounce.

Sr. was exasperated. “You’ll see,” he said. “This guy will be some sort of radical. Any normal person might have complaints about the war—the result of not understanding the issues—but they’d know it’s madness to destroy a human life, never mind your own, if it accomplishes nothing.”

“And what about his wife, his parents and the rest of his family?” Donnelly’s mother added. “What did they do to be punished like that? Their lives are ruined. Maybe whoever that was thought he had a reason but …”

“You can say that about parents and brothers and sisters or any guy shipping out to Vietnam,” Donnelly said. “I mean, I’ve gone to school with some of them.”

A silence fell over the table and the matter never came up again. Donnelly took some satisfaction when the reports came out a day later: The man who set himself on fire outside the U.N. succumbed to injuries. He was identified as Roger Allen Laporte. He was 22, so close in age to Donnelly. Even though he had suffered burns to 95 percent of his body, Laporte was able to talk and was questioned by the authorities on his deathbed. They asked him why he had torched himself and he said: “I’m a Catholic Worker. I’m against war, all wars. I did this as a religious action.” Turned out that he had been a seminarian and dropped out. He had his system of belief and it overlapped the Donnellys’.

Idealism had been a way for Donnelly to separate himself from his pragmatic father. These decades later, Donnelly’s attitude toward Morrison and Laporte had evolved as his idealism petrified. He was more inclined to see it his father’s way. Destroying a life, especially your own, for nothing more than symbolism was some sort of perversion of a vision of right and wrong. Back in ’67, however, Donnelly was awed that anyone could care so deeply about a cause. He wanted to care that way. The fact he never had was a wound. Even worse was the prospect that he never would. So it was that the deaths of Morrison and Laporte made him think about making a difference even if it were just to make one person’s lot better. He could do that with a humanitarian mission set in place at DU. Maybe, he thought he could do that with the Peace Corps, a year or more in full, not just the summer. In a day of work in Africa or wherever else as desperate he could do more to make this world a better place than he could in years, even a lifetime, of shuffling through briefs and depositions in at his father’s firm. He was radicalized into doing some good, or, in fact, any good. Not radicalized like the Berrigans, not about to take it to the streets, not about to Burn Baby Burn. Still, he wanted to go out into the uncontrollable world and test his faith and flesh. He needed a righteous adventure.

Donnelly was sure this young woman sitting across from him had no real sense of good causes and pure evil. Not the way young people did in the ‘60s and early ‘70s, back when there were young men, friends in his classes or on his teams, who shipped out and came back in body bags. But then again, these younger generations have heard all about that and much less about those who served and came back broken or hollowed out. That’s how it was with R.E. Donnelly never knew him before he arrived at Duquesne, he only ever knew the man who came back from the war. Not all of him came back, Donnelly had always thought, like past abilities and facilities after a stroke. That would make R.E. a victim to some, but carrying on all these years, seeking a higher path, made him a hero to Donnelly. That their paths intersected with her hero’s was just one of life’s odd turns, Donnelly thought, so small this world.

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Check back Wednesdays on Sportsnet.ca/NBA for the next instalment of Detroit Mercy.