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74 8 Timing My time in Washington ended when the U.S. Army “deemed me necessary ,” and I received my selective service notice. That would take me into my years in Syracuse, although I didn’t know it at the time. I got drafted to go into the army, and I had to leave the team, and I didn’t know what would happen when I came back. While I was in the army, the Caps folded. The league put all our players into a supplemental draft. Fred Scolari, one of my teammates, was chosen by the Syracuse Nationals. He recommended me to the Syracuse management. Think of that. Think how easily I could have been out of the game. Scolari had played a big role with the Capitols, and if the NBA holds the supplemental draft and nobody picks me, I’m gone, hoping to coach at some little high school someplace. But Scolari made a point of speaking up for me. He was the career high scorer for Washington, and he went out of his way to help a black guy nobody knew about in 1950. It just reminds you about the importance of the way you carry yourself in life, because you never know who you’re impressing, and what difference it can make. You never know. Freddy said to Danny Biasone and Leo Ferris, the guys who ran the team in Syracuse, “There’s this kid down there no one is going to pick; you can pick him up, and you’ll get him for a song.” That was it. No scouts, no nothing. I don’t think I ever got the chance to thank Freddy. But Syracuse, for me, was definitely the right place at the right time, and my teammates were definitely the right people. Before any of that happened, I did my time in the service. Nothing really changed. The army had all the same rules I lived with while growing up: we had all-black troops and all-white officers. I spent six months Timing | 75 in Fort Bragg, and I never went into Fayetteville, where they still had the slave-trading blocks in the middle of town. Believe me, that wasn’t for tourists or education. If anything, for those folks, it was nostalgia. Then we went to Fort Sill, Oklahoma, and Oklahoma was just a terrible place if you were black. The city bus would come on base, and you could sit anywhere you wanted as long as you were in uniform and the bus stayed on the base, but the instant it left the gates you went to the back of the bus. That always got to me, because you were wearing the uniform of your country, and some guys were dying in that uniform in Korea. Guys I went to school with came through Fort Sill and went straight to Korea, where they’d have some of the dirtiest, most dangerous jobs in the artillery: the forward observer. But these guys were humiliated, treated as less than human, in uniform in Oklahoma. You don’t really think of the West in connection with the worst of segregation, but I swore when I left that state I’d never go back. That feeling had something to do with why I didn’t end up in baseball: the Pirates, when they looked at me, wanted me to go to an Oklahoma farm club. My company commander, Captain Westfall, was a white guy who graduated from West Point. He was a hell of an officer. One morning at reveille, he said the battalion basketball team was not doing so well and inquired as to whether any of us played the game. So I started playing for the camp. We’d travel around to different places in that area and play; there was a team from the Brooke Army Medical Center—they were perennial champions—and we beat them. In 1950 a lot of guys out of college got drafted right into the army, and there were guys in those games who could really play. I played against Carl Braun and Charlie Shoptaw . . . man, could he shoot it. Our whole battalion would come down to the gym to watch, these guys who had to sit in the back of the bus, guys who couldn’t do anything in any of those Oklahoma towns. For them, we turned into their Joe Louis: they knew they were being put upon, and when we played...

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