Basketball’s legendary bad-ass went missing in Africa and was declared dead. He couldn’t have gone out quietly.
By G.B. Joyce
This is the fifth instalment of a weekly series. Click here for Part One. And click here for Part Two, and , Part Three, and Part Four.
John Brisker didn’t take shit from anyone.
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.
She hardly could bear to look at Donnelly, so happy with himself. The type who had opportunities handed to him, who collects his payment—an easy life—and believes he has somehow earned it. She didn’t want his sympathy. She didn’t need it. She didn’t believe it was real, not for a second.
He had killed her father. Others had wanted to. Some would have tried. Only her father’s strength and the weakness of others had let him last as long as he did. The blows life had leveled at Hines’s mother eventually broke her, killed her as certainly as this man sitting here killed John Brisker.
How could she not hate Donnelly, not just for what he did but for everything he represented? He was like all those white men in uniform on the streets on Twelfth Avenue and other streets on fire those nights. Who beat her people down, and killed when they wouldn’t be beaten.
Hines was all that was left of those two teenagers who had just gone to a show that night before the shooting started and the fires were set. At least all that was left living and breathing.
There was more left of John Brisker. Stuff of lore lingered, sometimes larger than the life that inspired it. But some details were hard, cold, dull fact and that’s where she’d started.
Brisker had married a woman later on; he also had girlfriends. There were other children, some with his name, unlike her. She tried to find them, but whenever she’d find a number the frustration started. A number out of service. Twenty rings without a pick-up. A pick-up and the person on the other end saying she had the wrong number. A hang-up without a word of explanation as soon as she identified herself. At best, a sympathetic voice letting her down softly. “Sorry,” it would begin.
She kept looking and would always keep looking. Maybe someone out there wanted to know about him the way she did. Maybe they’d want to know that this man, Donnelly, killed him. Or maybe they couldn’t get far enough away from whatever the history was.
Of course she became a ballplayer like him.
Where she grew up, kids played. She played less than a lot of the others because her grandmother wouldn’t let her loose all hours. But she got out there. There weren’t games for the girls. The boys ran the courts. She could only get on a hoop when the one at the other end was torn down and the boys moved on to a better court. It’s different now. Girls have organized teams, travel teams. They get courts. A coach asked her out for the track team in TK grade and she told him that she would do it so long as she didn’t have to run more than a minute, so he put her in the 220 and the 440. She won the city meet in both. She still had a school record at Hamtramck.
She was always going to play the game. She was his flesh and blood. She was long and athletic. The game ran in her veins. His game ran in her.
It wasn’t just him. Ralph Brisker might have been an even better player. They were both all state at Hamtramck. Ralph was a year ahead of John in school and was first team all state when her father was third team. The sophomore on their team who was only honorable mention was Rudy Tomjanovich, who ended up being the first pick in the NBA draft. Tomjanovich played behind her father and uncle.
Ralph played a couple of years at a JC in Wyoming to get his marks up and then came back home to go to Detroit Mercy, where he ended up leading the team in scoring for a couple of seasons, about 16 points in a game. “Rapid Ralph” was what they called him. The coach at Mercy, a guy named Bob Callihan who the arena was named after, said Ralph had a shot at playing pro, but her uncle didn’t seem to like his chances and just did his degree in business. She found all that in the Free Press and the News and on the Detroit Mercy website.
Hines called Ralph Brisker once. She left a message. She never heard back. She didn’t blame him. It could have been something just too painful to even think about, a brother you lost.
Both of the Briskers were six-feet-five. That’s what it said in the program, anyway. Hines had seen her name in a program so she knew there was always the one- or two-inch lie. She was almost six feet by her freshman year in high school, made the varsity right away. She was still just learning the game. Still, once the coach told her what to do, she went after those older girls in practice. She put on a mad face and gritted her teeth and if she had to out-jump them she did. If there was a spot on the floor that she was supposed to go, she owned it.
And like her father and her uncle, she was all state in her junior and senior years. Like them she had scholarship offers. Like them she didn’t hear from the big schools. Different reasons, but still it was cold.
John and Ralph Brisker could have played Big Ten, played in Ann Arbor or East Lansing. Rudy T did and so did white boys who didn’t make first or second team all state. But black men from Detroit city didn’t get recruited by the big colleges. A few black players, like Cazzie Russell, made it to Big Ten schools but they were the lucky ones who played at the right high schools. A Catholic high school, a private school, a prep, would come looking for the best player on the playground to play with their white boys. To get to the big places you had to be lucky, then good and also have the marks. Hines’s high school coach talked about playing against Spencer Haywood, who was the best player in the state when the Briskers were at Hamtramck. “Rudy T couldn’t carry Spencer’s jockstrap,” he told people. “Greatest player in state history.” Her coach said that Spencer Haywood was just 19 when he took the American team to the gold medal at the Olympics in Mexico, when Abdul-Jabbar and others didn’t go. “All Spencer could get was a ride to an itty-bitty JC in Colorado and then a ride to U of D,” he said.
Hines got a couple offers as a senior but not from the Big Ten schools. They had their pick of the state and she wasn’t their pick. She knew her coach was in recruiters’ ears, telling them that she was trouble, a good student but discipline issues, maybe drugs, anger management. Not a good home, or an unhealthy home at least. So Ann Arbor got a big blonde off a farm in Iowa and East Lansing got a girl from Holland. Not Holland, Michigan, but Holland in Europe. And Hines ended up like her uncle Ralph, at Detroit Mercy. It was a good deal for the school, giving her a ride that didn’t include residence. It was just about the only deal out there for her and the Mercy coach knew that. He told her going in: “Tone down your act and get with the program.”
In early days, she hadn’t understood why she wasn’t getting recruited. Once she did, she got angry in a hurry. Nothing could have mitigated it then and nothing in the years since ever did. She never mellowed that way, never put it down to the times. The coach at Mercy said, “I’ll take a chance on you.” Said it like he was making her an offer out the goodness of his heart. And she might have believed it until the second week of practice her first fall on campus when she found out that the athletic director was worried about getting fired and wanted to be able to point to winning teams when he had to make his case to keep his job. The coach at Mercy needed her but he expected her to be thankful for her chance. That was always the way it was with college coaches, she would come to think, slicker and dirtier than indicted congressmen.
She thought that if she scored enough points and pulled down enough rebounds and won enough games in her sophomore season she’d hear from a Big Ten school wanting her to transfer. She was sure it would happen after she led the conference in scoring that year. And, and—and nothing. She led the team in scoring again as a junior and a senior but Detroit Mercy couldn’t stay above .500 and she didn’t care. Losses washed off her in the shower. By her junior year she just wanted to get her degree and get on with her life and the game was just the way she paid her tuition.
She graduated in history and ended up at teacher’s college in Slippery Rock, Penn. She got some help from a scholarship program and from the woman who coached the basketball team there. She never brought up Hines’s “act” when she interviewed her for a job as a student assistant coach. Hines supposed the Slippery Rock coach’s “act” was the same as her own.
The Rock was Hines’s first time away from home. She came back at Thanksgiving that first year and found her grandmother weeping. “You have so much to be thankful for,” she told her granddaughter.
“I’m thankful to you two,” Hines told her grandparents. She didn’t put anyone or anything else on the list. She didn’t have any parents to be thankful for. She didn’t have any family or a woman in her life to be thankful for. She didn’t feel thankful for the game she played because she had earned everything it supposedly had given her. When she sat in her room in the noisy student residence back in Slippery Rock, she felt like she should have gotten more for her athletic gifts. She didn’t have a home, not even a bed or furniture to call her own. She thought: If I had been a man, I was enough of a player to go pro. But that opportunity didn’t exist for a woman. Basketball had given her a degree, which she earned on her own, and a job coaching 13 white girls and a light-skinned black girl in a small town the Amish roll through in horse-drawn carriages.
It was just Hines and her grandparents at that Thanksgiving dinner. A year later it was Hines and her grandmother, who wore a black mourning dress and couldn’t stop crying. And a year after that, when Hines had her first teaching work in Grove City, Penn., there was nowhere to go at Thanksgiving—she’d buried her grandmother beside her grandfather before the start of school that fall.
She was alone. She knew no one else she could reach out to. Her grandparents came from the south but she didn’t know what it was like to sit on an uncle’s knee or feel an aunt’s hug or play with cousins. Any clue about living relatives had been reduced to ash by the fire that took her grandparents’ home. Anything like a family was gone except for markers in the ground.
And because of emptiness, she made a jump, like she was up grabbing a rim. She went from believing that John Brisker was her father to knowing he was. And knowing she would find him, whatever it took, wherever it took her. She wished on stars and threw coins in fountains, but it wasn’t dreaming that brought her to this coffee shop in Florida. It was work. It was fire, her father’s, hers.
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Check back Wednesdays on Sportsnet.ca/NBA for the next instalment of Detroit Mercy.
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