In the spring of 1995, the New Jersey Nets hit a new bottom. Neither a string of losses nor their point guard skipping morning practice to attend Scores, a Manhattan strip club, put them there. (When Kenny Anderson’s whereabouts were confirmed, the New York Post’s back page read, “He Scoots, He Scores.”)
No, you knew the season was over when, in the middle of the locker room before a game, the trash talking was done by the reporters — sadly, about their Scrabble prowess.
Anderson and Derrick Coleman, whose numerous misdeeds were fodder for us that year, buckled with laughter. Chris Morris cackled and laughed, too. One player did not.
“I want in,” Armen Gilliam said. “Your hyperbole and language skills mean nothing to me.”
Ooooohhh. It’s on. It is so on.
And it was. The Hammer arrived at my Hackensack, N.J., apartment promptly that night with, if I recall correctly, his own Scrabble board. He left three hours later, having called out Dan Garcia from the Newark Star-Ledger for numerous misspellings and word inventions and having soundly beaten the rest of us. He won one round with a 24-point word, ambidextrous — apropos because Armen Gilliam had the best left hand of any right-handed player I’ve ever covered.
“Everything about him broke the mold and killed that gotta-get-mine stereotype of the modern NBA player,” said Paul Silas, now coach of the Bobcats and then a Nets assistant to Butch Beard, by telephone from Charlotte. “He was somethin’ different, all right.”
During the 1994-95 season, the one year I covered the Nets, “different” was in no short supply. The team finished last in the Atlantic Division, but was as outrageous off the court as it was putrid on it.
Against that backdrop stood one sane, stable veteran. Gilliam was thoughtful. He knew good food and fashion. He read complete novels during cross-country flights. When P.J. Brown got on a plane next to Gilliam as a rookie, Silas recalled, he couldn’t help but notice the financial portfolio Gilliam brought with him to look over.
“That’s who I want to be,” Brown remembered thinking.
I always thought he could have written a handbook for the NBA rookie symposium entitled, “What the Young Fellas Need to Know.”
But now, inexplicably, he’s gone.
Armen Gilliam died of an apparent heart attack at 47 while playing basketball at a Pittsburgh area sports club Tuesday? That’s the greatest head-shaker of them all.
“Blew me away,” Silas said. “I just really couldn’t believe it. He stayed in shape. Watched what he ate. Makes no sense. None at all.”
Part of the shock stems from Gilliam’s place on that roster, that of the mature sage among young knuckleheads, old comedians and dysfunction everywhere. The most gifted of screenwriters could not make up that team.
Morris showed up to play one night with words written on his sneakers. The right foot said “Please.” The left foot said “Trade Me.”
When told Anderson didn’t show up for practice that day, Coleman responded, “Whoopeedamndoo!” During a scoreboard malfunction that season, he sat on the press table, disgusted. Within earshot, a writer jokingly pointed out, “D.C., they’re not getting you the ball enough.”
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