Honor guard

Less is known about Lenny Wilkens the man, and the influences that shaped him as he matured. Wilkens, who was named coach of the New York Knicks in January, has never been one to trade on his stature. No nickname has been coined to define his persona, the way the monikers “Dr. J” and “Magic” add gloss to guys who were baptized Julius and Earvin, respectively.
The New York that Wilkens grew up in is one that is now relegated to sepia-tinted images stored in various archives or one that is glimpsed on the occasional newsreel of the era. The fact is that Wilkens came from a staunch Irish-Catholic background rooted in what is now known as the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn. Bed-Stuy is a name that came into usage around the time that Sen. Robert F. Kennedy shone a spotlight on the area in the war on poverty. Before many Brooklyn institutions moved to the suburbs or Los Angeles, only to be replaced by acres of red-brick housing projects, the area was defined more by the many Catholic parishes that served it. In Wilkens’s case, Holy Rosary Parish was his anchor and his world until he left the borough of churches for Providence College in Rhode Island.
Wilkens’s family history was made somewhat opaque by the early deaths of male parental figures in his life. His maternal grandfather set sail from Cork and settled in Brooklyn, where he raised a family of nine children. But by the time Wilkens graced the earth, his grandfather had passed away.
“You’re a young person growing up and you’re busy running here, there and everywhere, and it just never came up,” Wilkens said about the lack of family lore on his Irish grandfather.
Similarly, his own father, Leonard Wilkens Sr., died when he was but a 5-year-old lad. Small in number though his memories may be, they resonate quite strongly. His father liked to bake and the aromas emanating from the Wilkens kitchen still waft in Lenny Jr.’s head. The elder Wilkens was a chauffeur, which is how he came to know the Cross family, a particular member of which caught his fancy, one Henrietta.
Brooklyn of the 1930s was about as much a cultural smorgasbord as could be found in America. When Leonard Wilkens asked Henrietta Cross to marry him, there were some reservations about bridging the racial divide, some resentment from assorted family members, but nothing that was believed insurmountable.
“My neighborhood was a real melting pot,” Wilkens said. “Right across the street from where we lived was a Jewish grocery store, a German delicatessen and a bakery. Then a Greek bought out a vegetable market, the deli and the grocery store and formed a supermarket. But when I was a kid, all those people lived there.”
His world changed irreparably one day when his father was rushed to the hospital.
“He had a bleeding ulcer and back then they weren’t too sophisticated,” Wilkens said. “I learned this years later, but he had a blocked bowel. They gave him an enema and it killed him. It probably would have been a great malpractice suit, but back then people didn’t know about that.”
Henrietta Wilkens found herself in charge of five children, Lenny being the second oldest. She found work in a candy factory and received some public assistance when circumstances required. The family moved from their comfortable brownstone apartment on Pacific Street to more modest accommodations on Marion Street and later Reed Avenue, but never out from under the protective wing of Holy Rosary.
“Her kids were always first with her,” Wilkens said of his mother. “She was a daily communicant and everything that the church had she was there for.”
Although the Wilkens brood may have been latchkey kids before that term defined a generation, that didn’t mean they had carte blanche to run roughshod in the streets. Everyone knew everyone else in Holy Rosary Parish and news of your misbehavior had a way of being transmitted home before you got there.
“She was a tough lady and ruled with an iron fist, but we had great respect for her,” Wilkens said. “I remember as a kid one time, I went to a party, it was on a weekend, I was 13 or 14, and I was supposed to be home by I think it was 11:30. I forgot all about the time and I was at the party dancing, and all of a sudden I noticed everybody moving away and I turned around and there she was with this stick. We had such great respect, it wasn’t the stick that would hurt me, it was being mortified in front of my friends, and I was never late again.”
There was little that Henrietta Wilkens could tell her adolescent son about the travails that awaited a black man in America, but what she did say was well digested.
“First of all, she’d always tell me that I had to be accountable for me, for what I said and did,” Wilkens said. “Then she told me that if you really want to be successful as a man, let honesty and integrity define your character. She just said if you’re a man, you can walk in all worlds, and she was right.”
Wilkens recognizes that he was blessed to have grown up in Brooklyn at a time that observers unanimously believe was a golden era.
“It was a rich area in sports, in politics, in the arts,” Wilkens said. “There were a lot of people who came out of Brooklyn. We used to go to an area called Park Circle on Sundays to play baseball and as far as you could look you could see baseball diamonds. And everybody who was anybody was at a game playing.”
The Dodgers of the Branch Rickey era provided a compass of sorts for the fatherless Wilkens.
“The Dodgers were a huge impact,” said Wilkens, who could appreciate the social changes that were taking place at Ebbets Field, even at the age of 10. “My two favorite guys were Jackie Robinson and Gil Hodges. The thing that I saw with Jackie was that he never made excuses for who he was. He came to do his job every day and he was the guy who had a lot of character about him.”
His contemporaries who left Brooklyn to achieve sporting fame include Tommy Davis (a teammate at Boys High), Sandy Koufax, Frank and Joe Torre, and Ken and Bob Aspromonte. True, they all made their marks in baseball, but even Davis and Koufax were bonafide hoops stars. Koufax even spent a year at the University of Cincinnati on a basketball scholarship before leaving to accept a contract with his hometown baseball team.

A priest’s influence
At that time, the National Basketball Association was just a fledgling league that played many of its games in armories. The colleges drew most of the attention. One might dream of fame, but certainly not fortune, on the hardwood. Lenny Wilkens sure didn’t. If not for Fr. Thomas Mannion, a persuasive young priest at Holy Rosary, Wilkens might never have given basketball a shot.
Mannion opened the parish gym to Wilkens and devised drills to improve his parishioner’s skills. Eventually, the priest saw enough in the teenager to appoint him coach of the parish’s girls’ team. Still, Wilkens hardly stood out. Not until his senior year at Boys High did he make the varsity hoops team and then he only played through January. He graduated that month and immediately became ineligible.
The poor state of his family’s finances discouraged Wilkens from considering attending college, although he gave some long-range thought to cobbling together a program of full-time work and night classes at City College. Then Mannion wrote a letter to the late Joe Mullaney, the basketball coach at Providence College, extolling Wilkens’s virtues, both on and off the court.
Scouting was more primitive then than it is today, so Mullaney had little to go on and was reluctant to grant a scholarship on such scant promise. That changed after Wilkens made a springtime appearance in an amateur tournament in Flushing, Queens, where he was named Most Valuable Player.
“I give Joe’s dad credit for discovering me,” Wilkens said. “He was at a little tournament I played in and asked Joe if I was the same kid that was trying to go to Providence. I had sent the application in and Joe had never really seen me play and he didn’t really jump to sign me. But after his dad saw me play and sent him a clipping and talked about it, I heard from Providence and everything was ready to go.”
Not only did Providence give Wilkens an education and the opportunity to embark on a career in basketball just before the professional game caught on in a big way, it also allowed him to come under the tutelage of Mullaney.
“Joe Mullaney was a great, great coach, a wonderful person,” Wilkens said.
He likened playing for Mullaney to receiving a graduate course in coaching.
Wilkens made the most of his scholarship, earning a degree in economics. He also joined the Army ROTC at Providence and earned the rank of lieutenant. During the late 1950s, the Brooklyn of Wilkens’s youth was changing and the impetus to return dwindled.
“I came back my first year and worked for the Domino Sugar Company,” Wilkens said. “I needed some money and felt that I needed to get stronger. I was loading trucks and freight trains with hundred pound bags of sugar and learned that wasn’t what I wanted to do in life. Then the next year I worked for a knitwear corporation, did bookkeeping. Then the last three years I stayed in Rhode Island and worked. Then when I was drafted by the Hawks, I went straight to St. Louis.”
When he was drafted, Wilkens had his sights set on obtaining a master’s degree in Boston and possibly returning to Providence as a professor. His mother had wanted him to consider the priesthood. But instead, he began a storied career that brought him back to New York for only occasional visits.
Mannion’s insight into Wilkens’s leadership capabilities proved prophetic when Seattle SuperSonics general manager Dick Vertlieb asked Wilkens to assume the role of player-coach in 1969. Wilkens would hardly be a pioneer in this regard as both Bill Russell and Richie Guerin called the shots while on the floor. He was inclined to dismiss the offer, but felt a moral obligation as an African American to accept the job, unsure that similar opportunities might present themselves, not only to himself, but others of African heritage.
Wilkens identifies himself as an African American, but admits that this is a result of society holding a mirror to his face and telling him, “You’re black.” His self-recognition is that of an American of both African and Irish ancestry. He remains a practicing Catholic and those who inspired him, both his mother and Fr. Mannion, are still very much alive.
Wilkens’s coaching career appeared to have run its course when he was fired as coach of the Toronto Raptors last year. But Knicks general manager Isiah Thomas recognized certain essentials that Wilkens brings to his position, not the least of which is his penchant for getting underachieving teams to play up to their potential. In the short time that Wilkens has been responsible for the Knicks, they have responded with a verve that had been lacking, although they still have a ways to go before they are viewed as title contenders.
Some observers view Wilkens as a stopgap, someone Thomas has brought in to keep the coach’s seat warm until he reveals more of his master plan for remaking the Knicks. As for that, time will tell. But for now, the Knicks can only stand to benefit from the wisdom that Lenny Wilkens has accumulated over a lifetime. A lifetime that began just a few miles from Madison Square Garden, nourished by a mother and a priest who encouraged him to always believe in himself.
Lenny Wilkens’s autobiography, “Unguarded: My Forty Years Surviving in the NBA” was published in 2000 by Simon & Schuster and remains in print. Parents may want to note that the book contains no offensive language.

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The Wilkens file

? Family — Marilyn (wife); Leesha, Randy and Jaime (children); Henrietta (mother), Ashley and Nicole (grandchildren)
? Resides in Seattle.
? Degrees — Providence College, B.A. Economics (1960), Honorary Doctorate Humanities (1988); and Seattle University, Honorary Doctorate Humanities (1995)
? Inducted into Basketball Hall of Fame twice — first as a player, then as a coach (only John Wooden shares that distinction).
? Most wins by a coach in NBA history (1,305, through March 10)
? During NBA’s Golden Anniversary in 1996, named one of 10 Greatest Coaches in NBA history and one of 50 Greatest Players.
? Coached Seattle SuperSonics to NBA Championship in 1979.
? Earned Olympic Gold Medals as head coach of U.S. team (1996) and assistant coach of U.S. Team (1992).
? Coached Seattle SuperSonics (1969-72, and 1977-85), Portland Trail Blazers (1974-76), Cleveland Cavaliers (1986-93), Atlanta Hawks (1993-2000), Toronto Raptors (2000-03) and New York Knickerbockers (2004).
? Played for St. Louis Hawks (1960-68), Seattle SuperSonics (1968-72), Cleveland Cavaliers (1972-74) and Portland Trail Blazers (1974-75).
? Ninth on NBA All-Time list with 7,211 career assists.
? Career NBA averages of 16.5 points per game and 6.7 assists per game.
? Appeared in 13 NBA All-Star games — 9 times as player, 4 times as coach.
? Most Valuable Player of 1971 NBA All-Star game.
? Playing number (19) retired by Sonics.
? Vice President, NBA Players Association (1961-69).
? Most Valuable Player of 1960 NIT.
? Second team All-America in 1960.