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.

13

Hines prided herself on her ability to organize. In high school she numbered the pages in her three-ring binders. In college she kept a 40-day plan and then tried to outpace it. That was how she graduated a semester ahead of her class with only a few Bs, and later it was how she managed to keep her jobs at schools that were regularly laying off or firing teachers. The model student became the model educator. Her lesson plans weren’t just neatly printed, they were updated and enriched every year. Her grading system was spelled out in detail for each assignment. She kept the marks of every student in perfect order. Everything she did was designed so she never had to improvise an answer for any principal or parent with a question. Everything she did preempted any challenge from her students. It was all right there, down on the page. Q: Why only a C? A: One full mark docked for incorrect and incomplete names, one full mark docked for events out of sequence, one half mark docked for poor grammar and spelling. She expected special scrutiny and to be thrown over the side after the slightest misstep, because she was a black woman and because of her act.

She did things systematically, but there was no systematic way to search for someone who’d fallen off the face of the planet 40 years ago. If she had been rich, she could have handed the search off to a private investigator, someone who specialized in tracking down people who wanted to get lost. On a teacher’s salary that wasn’t an option. She would have to find her own way, and she would go forward as orderly as ever. She tracked her search in a series of notebooks, a page a day. She had always kept a diary, every mark and every game, every hope and dream and promise she allowed herself—her way of keeping honest, of reminding herself exactly who she was and where she came from. For her search for her father she kept a binder sorted by research subject. She kept the larger online documents in her Dropbox, along with a directory of phone numbers and email addresses that she backed up in hard copy in a little black book. She logged every fruitless call. Likewise, she kept a wish list of numbers and addresses she hoped to find in that little black book as well.

Family or friends might have told her she was going too far, but she had no family left, no connection to Hamtramck, no connection to Mercy. Her friends dated back only as far as her first day in Slippery Rock, and she had fallen out of touch with most of them by the time she landed in Grove City. Five people made up her whole circle—a couple of women from the Rock who were looking for work teaching, a prof there, plus two teachers in Grove City, a lesbian and a gay man who each, like her, feared the outing that would instantly end their employment. No one asked how Hines spent her nights and weekends. No one would be trying to call while she was dialing the dozens of numbers that went unanswered or rang through to voicemail or were out of service. She had time and space. There were limits to everything but her privacy.

She started with nothing to work with other than her father’s surname. She would see obits for any newly deceased named Brisker. Most of them were listed in the South, in Arkansas, Alabama and Florida—nothing drivable from Pennsylvania. Funeral homes wouldn’t give out relatives’ numbers, instead offering unconvincing promises to pass on messages. The dawn of social media allowed her to get messages out to any and all Briskers she could find. Ninety-eight percent didn’t reply and the rest told her she had the wrong person, they couldn’t help. No surprise that she came away with nothing to show for these coldest of cold calls.

She made a list of every teammate of Brisker’s in college and the pros, along with coaches and anyone who covered the teams for newspapers and radio. Some of the names were a mouthful and relatively easy to source out—a Melchiorre or a Szczerbiak were lay-ups—but a Thompson, a Taylor, a Johnson, a Jones or a Smith were nigh on impossible. When lucky, it took less than five minutes to go from a Google search to a voice on the phone. Melchiorre, a trainer, was still working at a private prep and his office number was listed on the school’s web page. Szczerbiak had the same name as his son, who played a decade in the NBA, and there’d been a property dispute he had to take to town council on Long Island that made the local weekly and included his address. Again, though, anyone she did run down offered a few words of possibly feigned sympathy and couldn’t get off the phone fast enough.

She still tried the Smiths and Joneses and Johnsons—most of them anyway. With the players there were colleges and alumni associations that might have a lead—though Mercy wouldn’t have had a clue if someone called looking for Hines. And since some had been known in their day, there were a few Where Is He Now stories. And of course there were a lot of obits. It was a generational thing. Every death notice reminded her she was on the clock.

She searched out her father’s last coach, Bill Russell, the Hall of Famer who won a bunch of NBA titles and coached the Supersonics for a while in the ‘70s, including the two seasons her father was in Seattle. Russell hated Brisker and hated talking even more. She didn’t know any of this going in, so she was disappointed when her emails to the Celtics and the NBA wound up being a dead end, not even a word in reply.

She called the King’s County courthouse where her father, then missing for seven years, had been declared dead in 1985 and asked for a copy of the judge’s ruling. A clerk told her that he couldn’t find any record of the case at all. “Some archived material was damaged and lost a few years back,” the clerk told her. Hines had the name of the judge from the Google news search and the clerk confirmed that the judge had served in the county but that he’d died a few years back. She pressed the clerk for more help and he put her on hold. She gave up waiting for him after 25 minutes.

King County courthouse.

Gabe Rubin collected friends. By collecting friends he wound up collecting a lot of other things. Donnelly Sr. wouldn’t have cut a deal for his best friend, but he’d done work for Rubin for years and there was no way he hadn’t agreed to some sort of arrangement—something the first exit north of pro bono. Didn’t even do that with his doctor, his dentist or his accountant.

It wasn’t just that Rubin could cast a spell that rendered professionals incapable of requesting fair compensation. No, he held a similar sway over institutions. For years he had a penthouse suite at the Carlton, the best hotel in the city, beating heart of the Golden Triangle. The head of the chambermaids took care of his laundry and dry cleaning and delivered his imported Italian shoes down to the shine stand. He lived on room service. He had an open and never-paid tab at the bar. Not that he drank much, it was just a convenience when he had to work on someone who did. If he needed a haircut, he went downstairs; never shaved himself, claiming the barber’s razor gave his skin a nice shine. If he needed to travel in the city, he phoned down for a cab and a concierge passed him two chits—one for a comp ride to his destination, the other for the return. The manicurist came up from the salon to do his nails because Rubin was worried about seeming unmanly in public.

From his suite Rubin could look down 23 floors onto the Pennsylvania Club, which he could not enter even as a guest of Donnelly Sr. He seemed more than content to have his likeness hanging on the walls of the Carlton beside the rest of the city’s hoi polloi.

“I’m not all-knowing, kid,” Rubin told Donnelly without getting up from his desk or offering a handshake, even though they were meeting formally for the first time. “Don’t believe anyone who tells you he is. I can only tell you how the people who cash a cheque from me think. And if it’s hard, cold cash—I’m not talking about tipping the bellman, but those types that want significant sums counted out, up front—I can break them down into tiny pieces, every moving part. That’s all that really matters, isn’t it?

“Thing is, they’re needy. I mean desperately unhappy. F—in’ miserable. They try to bury themselves in a song they’re singing or some role they’re playing and the applause is just reinforcing the whole delusion that this, that moment of adoration, is the real them.

“Look at Sinatra, how many times have I brought him to town and he’s up there singing “Strangers in the Dark”? Who’s the guy who’d look at Frank Sinatra and say ‘Who are you?’? Everybody knows he’s Frank Sinatra. Just being a stranger would be a good time for a while. And ‘My kind of town, Chicago is.’ I mean, what the hell? Frank is from Hoboken. Then he’s California, then he’s Vegas, or the other way around. But one thing he isn’t is Chicago. No more than he’s Pittsburgh.”

Donnelly wasn’t about to question Rubin on Sinatra or any other stars. The office in the suite was lined with photos of them standing to his right, so the photographer got his good side. Donnelly did ask him about the Pipers, though.

“It’s not your usual, is it? I mean, it’s not show biz. The game’s a real thing…”

Donnelly was going to go on about how it isn’t scripted but in the moment. How it’s all about ability and not character as some sort of confection. Maybe Rubin punched a hole simply because Donnelly had the impunity to express an opinion.

“These basketball guys are no different. Look at Connie Hawkins. The Hawk. A character. And on the court he does all these beautiful things. It’s ballet without the girl in the tutu, right? Up way in the air like he’s never gonna come down. Well, that’s a character. That’s a performer as much as Sinatra. I can tell you what he is because I know exactly how we were able to get him. He was a kid who didn’t know better, probably could read or write a little bit, fell in with the wrong people, got himself banned by the only basketball league that paid real money. And so next he’s playing for the Globetrotters, which is like Tony Bennett going table to table singing for his dinner. Years he’s outta the game, any real game. We got him because he had no place to go and he played like hell for us because it was a way to escape all the awful stuff in his life—stuff you can’t even imagine. If he grew up in Mount Lebanon, nice family, gets his degree, you know who he is? Not a goddamn Hawk that’s for sure. He’s a character. He’s a story. Like all the performers.”

Donnelly wanted to head off any other tangents so he skipped ahead to the last, or at least the latest, act. “And now he’s in the NBA making a hundred grand a year.”

“My point exactly,” Rubin said. “It was an act too good to play Off Broadway. Destined for the bright lights. But I want to get him back—whatever it costs. He’s worth four, five times what this team is. We get maybe the second or third best player in the world. We beat the NBA for him. He’s back to bring another championship to the city. Show biz.”

Rubin fancied himself a great business philosopher. Donnelly thought that was comical but, then again, the man got results. Three decades later, Donnelly would think that if Gabe Rubin’d come along in the ‘80s or ‘90s he’d have made millions with late-night infomercials telling insomniacs how to make it rich in real estate with someone else’s money.

Donnelly sat in on a meeting with Rubin and Mark Binstein—one that Binstein had been trying to get for weeks. Ninety-nine times out of 100 an owner would want to keep close tabs on his team, especially one bleeding tens of thousands every game. Only years after the fact did it come to light that Rubin had hired a friend’s son as vice-president in charge of subscriptions sales at a salary of $25,000—and in five months the kid had sold only twenty-three season tickets. Donnelly Sr’s accounted for four of them and the VP had never met him. Despite Rubin’s financial losses—or maybe because of them—he didn’t want to see Binstein, and the younger Donnelly’s failure to block the GM at the door would have been a firable offence if he weren’t his father’s son and working for nothing.

Binstein was as dour as you’d expect a West Point grad from the ‘50s to be in a milieu surrounded by black guys with Afros and plentiful marijuana and white guys with sideburns and drinking problems. Some part of Binstein wanted to see the whole league fold and every player declared 1A and then shipped off to Vietnam as the tallest unit in the Army’s history. The ABA had certainly cornered the market on malcontents and f—ups.

“We have a problem, Gabe,” Binstein said.

“Life is dealing with problems,” Rubin answered without looking up from the Pittsburgh Press he’d opened across his desk but not invested any effort toward reading. “Your job is dealing with problems. Your place on the payroll is to keep the team’s problems from becoming my problems.”

That might have worked with others, but Binstein had come to get his meeting and wasn’t leaving until he had it.

“I want to release Brisker,” he said.

“So release him. Get an understudy.”

“His contract is guaranteed. We’d have to buy him out.”

Rubin at last looked up from the Press.

“I’d have to buy him out,” Rubin said. “And what kind of haircut are you expecting me to take? What would it cost to make him go away?”

“He’s going to want every cent,” Binstein said. “If he thinks he has an offer from another team, from the NBA, maybe he’ll take less—60 cents on the dollar. But that’s a big maybe.”

“How many dollars?”

“Sixty-five grand.”

Rubin did the math automatically and involuntarily and instantly became president, secretary and lone voting member of the John Brisker Fan Club.

“And why is it that all of a sudden you want to get rid of this guy who people tell me is our best player, one of the best players in the league? A league all-star isn’t he? What could be so bad?”

“You ever been held up?” Binstein asked

“Lately, yeah. I was held up by that bastard in Minneapolis who was going to buy this goddamn team and then reneged on the f—ing contract. Held up? I’m in show business. Hold-ups are standard business practice.”

“Well, if Brisker doesn’t have another offer and I try to sell him on the idea of taking 95 cents on the dollar, he’s going to walk in this room and wave a great fat gun in your face. And I won’t be around for it. As for you…”

Binstein looked at Donnelly and pointed.

“…I’d give my notice now, kid. You don’t want to get caught in the crossfire.”

Rubin dialed it back. “Okay, but you haven’t answered my question. Why is it that I should want to get rid of my best player. I mean, when this goddamn show plays in other cities, it’s his name at the top of the billboard, right? John Brisker and the Pittsburgh Condors. Like Smokey Robinson and the Miracles.”

Binstein was up to a boil. “There’s no mistaking this guy for Smokey Robinson, and the only miracle would be if we get through the season without someone on the team getting killed.”

“And why would you say that?”

“Look, I’ve been in the game for 20 years. I thought I’d seen it all. But this is a guy bringing a gun to practice,” Binstein said. “Waving it around. Point it at teammates. At the goddamn coach. I’m not waiting until he waves it at me. I want to be pragmatic about this while we’re all drawing breath.”

Binstein balled his hands into fists, spread them double-shoulder width and pressed them knuckles down halfway across Rubin’s desk as he leaned into his boss’ face. An antique ashtray hit the floor and a desk light almost went with it. Rubin was about to say something about scuffing the mahogany but he was more concerned about Binstein vaulting right over the desk at him. It wouldn’t have been the first time a team employee got physical with him.

“Let me tell you something,” Rubin said, his way of starting one of his life lessons, pulled straight out of his reading of the Second Amendment. “If we got rid of everybody who carries a gun, Frank Sinatra would travel alone. They’re safety blankets, aren’t they? Some people need ‘em. I mean, consider who this guy is. I’m sure where he comes from, that would pass for nothing. Protection. And these guys do make an amazing amount of my money, after all. If I was them, walking around, exposed to rougher elements, well, I think it’d be completely reasonable to be carrying a gun around.”

“The man’s a menace to society,” Binstein said. “You can’t sell the game in this city that way. People want heroes. They want Roberto Clemente. Maz. Honus Wagner. They don’t want someone who goes to a World Series game and ends up beating a couple of cops half to death.”

Rubin reburied his head in the Press.

“You did hear about that?” Binstein continued. “It was in the papers. Here we have the most popular team in the city. National television. Can’t get a ticket to a game even though they play in that godforsaken stadium on plastic grass. It’s hard enough to compete to get into the sports section against that. Them and the Steelers. And what do we have? Only story in the paper is about Brisker beating up a cab driver at Three Rivers and having eight cops hold him down and haul his ass off. Check out the sports section you’re not reading.”

“Are you saying it’s him or you?” Rubin said. “Because if you’re quitting then my problem is solved. Your salary is off my books, wherever I keep them, and nobody else has an issue with this guy.”

“I’m not quitting and you’ve still got a problem. If not with me, then the rest of the team. Every other player in that room can’t live with Brisker and we can’t win that way.”

“Win, lose, what does it matter? I’d rather lose with a full house than win in an empty room. And from what I hear this guy is the closest thing we have to a headliner. Make it work. Until his contract runs out at the end of the season.”

Binstein walked out of the office without another word. Rubin was quiet for a few minutes. He didn’t give away the fact that he was rattled by the story Binstein’d told.

“Why don’t you go down there and find out what the hell is going on?” Rubin told Donnelly.

Donnelly looked around, in disbelief. Yes, he was the only one in the room.

“What are you asking me to do?”

“What I’m asking you to do is to check out what Binstein is saying. I’ll make you the assistant travel secretary. Go print up some business cards. Use Donvale printers. Tell them you’re working for me and they’ll print’em up. Then you just go and tell Fred Cranwell that you’re training for the travel job, helping out. And while you’re down there, making coffee runs or whatever, talk to the players and coaches and whomever. But whatever you do, don’t talk to Brisker or do anything that gets back to him. Your father is a good friend of mine and I’m not having anything happen to you.”

Rubin had no compunction about sending an intern in to do a SWAT team’s job. Donnelly got the idea that Rubin was more worried about something happening to him, like Brisker walking into the Carlton with a full clip and reducing his office to a war zone. Donnelly decided not to bring it up with his father and he never did.

Privacy Policy Terms of Service © 2001-2015 Rogers Communications. All rights reserved.