Credit:

Guy Carbonneau, C, Montreal

I had the chance to play a long time in the NHL. But nothing I experienced ever compared to Montreal and Quebec City.

Clint Malarchuk, G, Quebec There was just this intensity, and not just with the players but the fans, too. When we pulled up three hours before a game there were already fans outside the Forum chanting and whatnot. You knew you were in a war, and it wasn’t just on the ice.
This is the second instalment of a weekly series. Click here for chapters one through four.

5

“I wouldn’t have come all this way if I could be his girl,” Hines said.

If Donnelly was going to patronize her, then she saw no need to even try to be polite.

His admission wasn’t a confession and it didn’t ambush her. Didn’t take her off guard at all. She had presumed he was the last one to see Brisker alive, the first one to see him dead. Everything had pointed to it.

Hines didn’t tell him all that, though—didn’t show her cards. She still had to get her bearings. Nothing prepares you for stuff like this, she thought. No handbook or homilies. Nothing that you draw from a mother’s dying words, nothing from hours on a grandmother’s knee.

She had been her mother’s girl growing up. She had only a few memories of the time before she started going to public school, all of them full of her mother. This was reasonable to her: A child’s mind is clear and what’s most important to a child is clearest. Even at four or five she had a sense of her mother’s heaving sadness. Hines wanted to be both daughter and mother to her. To pick her up when she fell, to give her the same assurances that the bruises would heal. But even at four or five, as much as Hines would not have wanted to believe it, as much as she would have tried to deny it, she knew her mother’s bruises were deeper and the hurt was never going to go away. Her mother would wait to tell her about it. That would take years and even after Hines doubted that her mother had done much more than scratch the surface.

She couldn’t remember the moment when she realized she didn’t have a father. She’d see other kids meet their mothers and fathers after school. She noticed some kids had very part-time fathers, occasional, almost not in the picture. She didn’t see herself as much different than those who were father-deficient, semi-fatherless, father-lite, although she grew up not having one even in theory. At least until she landed at Hamtramck High and then as a frosh she saw him, passed right by him, a photo hanging on a wall outside the gym.

If she were raised anywhere else, even anywhere else in Detroit, then she would never have found out. She would have let go of her fatherlessness—to the degree she could. But then she went out for the freshman team. She came off the court after the first tryout and saw the yellowing photos on the Wall of Fame. John Brisker, 1966 All-State First Team, 1965 All-State Honorable Mention. He was posed in Hamtramck maroon and white. Smiling. Ball on hip. Left of him on the wall was his brother Ralph, 1964 All-State First Team, 1963 All-State Honorable Mention.

She looked like both Brisker brothers, but especially the younger one. She noticed but was willing to let it go until Tonya said something she couldn’t: “That could be your brother, your own blood.” Hines could pretend not to see it, but couldn’t pretend not to hear. She couldn’t ignore her friend, even after a tough run at hoops practice. And so she tried to make Tonya laugh.

“A good-looking man,” she said. “Wonder if he has a son.”

Tonya moved on and it never came up again, not with anyone at school. Later, though, Hines wondered about that photo. Hamtramck High used to be in a beat-up building at Wyandotte and Hewitt, but a couple of years after the Briskers graduated, the board of ed moved the school into what had been a junior high. That Wall of Fame was new, then, a way to keep a connection to the past. But even if some things changed, others had to remain the same. Teachers just never leave. They dig in, from graduating teacher’s college to retirement. Some of hers would have taught the Briskers. It was only 16 years before she started at HHS that John Brisker had been the best-known student there. Those same teachers would have taught her mother. Did they recognize the surname when they took attendance and Hines said “here” or see a resemblance to John Brisker when they looked at her? She wondered and worried about that but only for a while, only until she realized that nobody looked at her that closely, that she blended in with scenery like her mother had.

It was Tonya who had first noticed and it was Hines who kept noticing, trying not to have anyone notice her staring at that photo every day, John Brisker had been a head taller than the other boys. Natural strength. She could see it in the photos outside the gym and in the trophy cases. He hadn’t been all puffy like the guys who spent all day and night in the gym. Just natural muscle, that’s what he had. She made sense of the social dynamic: The Briskers brothers were two of the three black faces in the varsity team photo.

At HHS Hines didn’t know anything about her father’s story. Neither its beginnings nor its unwritten end. All she knew she could put together from his place on the Wall of Fame: One winter a long time before he had been the best guy on the court or just about on any court in the state of Michigan.

His picture had hung on a wall in a long line. Dozens of others who’d played for Hamtramck were up there beside him, going back to the 30s. Hines’s photo would go up there at the end of her senior year. Far enough from Brisker’s that no one would pick up on the resemblance. No one ever raised it again across all those years after Tonya mentioned it that one time.

But here she was, decades later, sitting in this coffee shop in Florida across from this old man who saw it too.

Hines had spent all her life imagining the man her father was, what his life was like. Her mother had come down sick the summer before Hines’s freshman year. Just a few months later her mother was bed-ridden and fading, too far gone to tell Hines much about him when she first put it together that John Brisker had been her mother’s boyfriend, the long-gone teenage father. In Hines’s sophomore year she missed two weeks of school after the funeral but came back numbed, not ready for classes and condolences but not ready to miss the first practice of the season. She respected her grandparents grieving but worked up the nerve to ask about Brisker in her junior year. Her grandmother closed the subject harshly. “The man who brought shame on the family,” she’d said. “Put him out of your mind, child. Don’t mention his name in this house.”

Hines was left to her own devices. She would have to search out information without help from her grandparents. And for years she ran the hypotheticals in her mind, how old he’d be, how he might have aged, how he might have come down sick and died like her mother, how he might have come to a violent end.

Now, in the middle of her life or past that, she was sitting across from the man who killed him.

Shouldn’t a man who killed somebody have landed his ass in jail? She drew another mental picture: this white man talking to her from behind a sheet of plexiglass with a guard leaning over his shoulder. Instead, he walked over from a century-home, view of the Gulf from the front porch and a golf course just past the backyard. She wanted remorse, some sense of guilt or suffering, but none was coming. He didn’t look the least bit worried telling her that he killed a man and that the man was her father.

Hines didn’t doubt Donnelly. She couldn’t find a good reason to doubt this cracked and creased and liver-spotted white man. A senior citizen and looked it but still in command of his faculties, she thought. Mostly. Maybe at some point his memory would go, maybe even soon. And when that happened everything would be lost. Maybe the slide had already just begun with the loss of inhibitions and that would work out for getting at the truth. Like Mark Felt, who went senile and blabbed to people on the street that he had been Deep Throat. It was down to him. Closing in on forty years since John Brisker was last seen or heard from a lot who had any memory of her father were already gone. So many dead. Memories faded in the living. She composed herself. Be smart. Push too hard and he walks. Don’t push and he gives up nothing at all. Too emotional and it’s a scene.

“How did it happen?” she asked.

6

Donnelly had no training in interrogation. He was given a pass on that. And he had never had to take an oath and testify. Gamesmanship, he thought. Lead. Don’t be led. Question the questioner.

“What do you know about your father?”

Obviously she knew more than she let on, he thought. She looked back at him impatiently, angrily, and more angrily with every silent second. Clearly not going to be so easily deflected. Two students walked in and set up their computers within earshot just as he was about to speak. Donnelly lowered his voice.

“I met your father in Pittsburgh,” he said. “I was just a kid and he was with the Condors.”

Her phone hummed where she’d laid it on the table. She looked at the number.

“Home. I have to take this. I’ll be a minute.”

She answered without waiting for him to reply. As she talked he put memories in order. What he wanted, needed, to be a bare trickle came flooding back to him. Her prompting is all it took for the scene to play out vividly. Reflex only. Involuntary. For good reason he hadn’t opened the boxes of the old programs he kept for no good reason.

It was fall of ’71. Classes at Duquesne had started but practices were still a few weeks off. Donnelly was going to be working on his second varsity letter and hoping to work his way into the rotation, hoping to be the third guy off the bench. He kept his aspirations reasonable, or what he thought was reasonable. This was, after all, a team that Sports Illustrated had put in the top 10 in its preseason rankings. All that and he was two years removed from that first varsity letter. His eligibility was sand in the hourglass. It seemed unfair that he couldn’t get a second redshirt year, given that he had came down with an illness as a direct result of public service and could have died. But he knew that he was stuck by the five-year rule that was laid out in by the NCAA administrators in stone tablets. Didn’t matter that he had signed up with a Catholic mission to Africa in the summer after his sophomore year. Didn’t matter that he had contracted malaria and the doctors took more than 20 months to give him the green light to play.

Donnelly went with a bunch of Dukes to a playground at Mellon Park. They could count on a few playground legends being there—guys who had been all-city but not gone on to college or maybe put in a season or a part of a season at a junior college, just to keep playing. The best high-school juniors and seniors were going to show too, kids who were getting recruiting letters from D-I schools, who’d learn pretty quickly about the value of a decent SAT. Go to any playground and it’s the same mosaic: kids who think the game can take them anywhere and others a bit older who, for better or worse, can tell them that a good handle and killer jumper only go so far. The kids wouldn’t listen to Donnelly or anyone else who came down from the Bluff. The Dukes were the Establishment, the Catholic boys in a Catholic town, even the Protestant kids who went to the school on rides. The kids should have taken heed of those former all-city guys who crawled onto the court after a day of minimum-wage labor or desperate job-hunting. But they didn’t.

Duquesne’s traditions and the Condors nesting at the Civic Center notwithstanding, Pittsburgh had never been a hoops town. The city playgrounds weren’t like New York’s or Chicago’s or L.A.’s. No NBA pros called Pittsburgh home. In the summer pick-up ball that stretched into warm autumn days the Dukes represented the top of the food chain.

The Nelson twins, 13 feet and eight inches if you laid them end-to-end, were Duquesne’s best and the Dukes had climbed on their backs and ridden them to the NCAA tournament one season and to the NIT another. They’d kicked Bob Lanier’s ass a couple of times. Barry even got into the ring with a wrestling bear once and Garry was considered the tougher of the twins. The Nelsons would even get a brief look as pros. The young lions and fading legends who came out to the playground had never seen anybody that big, never mind two at a time. The Nelsons could take Donnelly’s lobs and throw the ball down and if the defenders were lucky it would carom off the pavement rather than pinball off the tops of their heads. Back in the ‘60s the NCAA had outlawed the dunk, the old Alcindor Rule, and Lewis Ferdinand’s gift to the Nelsons and the rest was three varsity years of layups. Somehow it was fitting that when school was out, Prohibition was lifted and the dunk was on. At least for the Nelsons it was. Even though Donnelly was about six-foot-five (an eighth of an inch shy if truth be told), dunking wasn’t his game. He could stick a J, 17 or 18 feet. He could throw the lob. He could play passable D. In his sophomore year he had been a complementary player at the varsity level, very complementary, a glue guy, five to ten minutes off the bench and maybe not that, maybe nothing at all against the big schools. Still he could take his game to the playground, though his greatest asset on any team was his friendship with the Nelsons.

It was just another afternoon. The Dukes owned the court. Five games to eleven hoops and they won one walk after another: eleven-two, eleven-four and if a team made it to eleven-six, you knew the Dukes were just fooling around out there. Donnelly didn’t pay attention to comings and goings on the sidelines. They were all faceless to the college boys. He allowed himself to think he was 100 percent and that he could get all the way back, maybe be better than he ever was before—not that there was much call for pre-law students on a varsity team ranked in the national top 10. But maybe they could use him as a practice player. Maybe he could even become third off the bench, he thought, drunk on a surge of testosterone after a jumper rainbowed through the hoop and rattled the short chain mesh.

At one point between games, while Donnelly and the other Dukes drank Cokes, the court turned quiet. Donnelly thought it was the ennui of the inevitably defeated. It wasn’t. Instead it was shock registering on the occasion of the arrival of a black Cadillac with an opaque windshield, which, to Donnelly and the others, was no more jarring than the touchdown of the spacecraft in The Day The World Stood Still. And, instead of an emissary from the cosmos, emerging from the backseat was a big black guy in a plain white t-shirt and jeans. Donnelly, the Nelsons and a couple of others recognized him as John Brisker.

“Got next,” Brisker announced.

And John Brisker got next. No one was going to dispute it. Sometimes pros parachuting into a pick-up game are shown up by the unheralded and unknown. Brisker wasn’t shown up, not off the hop. It fell to Donnelly to guard him and Donnelly’s glow faded. He became an inch shorter and a step slower. He rushed a couple of jumpers that hit iron hard and Brisker swatted one back in his face. Donnelly decided to stick to getting the ball to the Nelsons but turned it over. The Dukes fell behind 8-4. The guys on the sidelines, the ones the college boys had beaten all day, ate it up and their yelling and laughter rang in the Dukes’ ears.

“Switch,” R.E. said. “I’ve got him.”

R.E. was going to be the Dukes’ sixth man by season’s end. He was a Slavic kid whose father died in a coalmine cave-in in West Virginia. He had been back on campus only a couple of days after working all summer in the same mine where his father lay buried and irretrievable. R.E. was two years younger than Donnelly; he could run faster and jump higher and summon more toughness. Between Vet money, the insurance payout and the remains of family savings, R.E.’s family had scratched up enough money to pay for his freshman year at DU. R.E. was back that fall because he had walked on with the freshman team and, with an intensity borne of desperation, earned a full ride.

An ABA all-star versus a 19-year-old who had yet to play a minute of varsity ball: The game should have lasted only three more possessions. It didn’t. R.E. was in John Brisker’s face for the next five minutes and the sidelines went as quiet as the chapel on the Bluff. He stole the ball off Brisker on one possession. He blocked one of Brisker’s drives to the hoop. So close to Brisker that the pro wore the soph’s sweat, R.E. forced him to settle for jumpers outside his comfort zone.

On his young, thick back, the Dukes came back and won 12-10.

No one celebrated. R.E. didn’t say a word or even smile. John Brisker walked off the court and to his Caddy. He threw his gym bag on the passenger seat and effected a could-care-less expression as he got in.

The action on the court went into recess and all in attendance meditated on what had just taken place. Brisker was three or four blocks away by the time someone—not Donnelly, not the Nelsons, not a Duke—spoke the truth, however understated.

“R.E., that was one bad black dude you took on there.”

R.E.’s reply was matter of fact. “When I come up the shaft at the end of a shift I’m blacker than he is,” he said.

All of it had flooded back in the minute or two that Hines was pacing outside the Starbucks, taking her call.. Donnelly snapped out of the reverie when she slapped the phone down on the table. Yes, Donnelly thought, she did look very much like John Brisker.

“What do you know about him?” he said again. Again he tried to question the questioner, although this time he was genuinely looking for a point of entry. “Then I’ll know where to start, I guess.”

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

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