Basketball’s legendary bad-ass went missing in Africa and was declared dead. He couldn’t have gone out quietly.
By G.B. Joyce
John Brisker didn’t take shit from anyone.
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.
The 1967-68 Pittsburgh Pipers, the ABA’s first championship team.
1
“I killed John Brisker,” Donnelly told her. He could have said more. He went with an admission that was easy and fast, as easy and fast as the killing itself.
Could have tagged on a postscript, he thought. For a guy who lived tough, it was remarkably peaceful. For a guy who lived dirty, it was remarkably clean. Donnelly didn’t think it was appropriate.
Could have improvised a eulogy. He was a man of enemies and no real friends. He had no one he could trust to protect him, only a succession of accomplices who were bound to sell him out. Donnelly didn’t want to sit in judgment of Brisker’s life even though he might have known about it as much as anyone.
Donnelly could have put the killing of John Brisker into context. Others wanted to kill him and many had a lot of experience. I had none. He was the only man I ever killed and the only one I had cause to. He could have used shrouding euphemisms, standard practice for his old colleagues at The Company. Liquidate. Eliminate. Erase. He could have drained all of the blood out of it. Duty. Assignment. Mission.
There’s clarity and dignity in simplicity, though.
What he did was kill John Brisker.
He left it at that.
She wanted more. Needed more.
2
“I bet you did,” Hines said. “I bet you had to. Somebody had to kill him.”
She knew half of John Brisker’s life, or maybe not that much—all of it secondhand, all of it just beyond the front fringe of her memory.
Hines doubted that anyone knew the whole story. Even if Brisker were alive, he wouldn’t remember it. There would be stuff he wanted to forget. Once forgotten it’s all easy to deny. Yeah, there would have been plenty of stuff like that. There was no scrapbook to recover. He had family but they hadn’t seen him in almost forty years.
She just wanted to know as much as there was to know.
Hines had spent years looking, longing. Not 24/7, but not out of her thoughts for more than a day at a time. If she wasn’t focused on something in front of her, her thoughts drifted to her father. Even as far back as high school, when she only had suspicions. Hundreds of times she had dropped his name to total strangers in the hope that maybe they knew him, maybe they could fill in one little detail, maybe add one more pixel to this faint picture.
She never met him. Supposedly he knew about her. That’s what she heard. She took that on faith. She wanted to believe it to be true.
She had seen him in pictures in magazines and newspapers. She had never heard his voice, though supposedly there was film or video of him filed away in a television affiliate’s archive. The stuff of her life, just gathering dust and fading with years.
But now this white man in a bright yellow golf shirt sits across the table, drinking ice tea and telling Hines that her father is dead and that he was the one who killed him. She had heard and read about the rumors of his death were a fiction, that he had been in hiding all those years. She didn’t invest any hope in it. She didn’t let herself. She had steeled herself for a moment when someone would tell her with awful certainty that her father was dead and, yes, that he had come to a fittingly violent end. Still, this knocked her off balance. She hadn’t imagined that she would talk to the man who killed him and that he could talk about it almost as casually as he would talk about the weather.
She took a deep breath. Donnelly waited for her to burst into tears, but it didn’t happen. She had never cried, not since she was a child. Donnelly waited for her to blow up, to shout, maybe even come across the table and try to scratch his eyes out. He braced for it, but none of it was going to come to pass.
“I believe you,” she told him.
3
“Gee-dee traffic,” R.E. complained to the steering wheel and the Christmas-tree air freshener hanging from the rearview mirror. “This road isn’t ever gonna get fixed, our tax dollars hard at work.”
He was annoyed at having to pick up Donnelly at Starbucks. Every other day he had picked up Donnelly at his home. R.E. would pull up and Donnelly would be sitting on his porch, watching the odd car passing by, neighbors walking dogs, palms swaying. Today, Starbucks. What the hell, he thought. He had never known Donnelly to drink coffee or tea, but then again R.E. had only known him forty-something years.
Indignation gave way to indignation when a rental car cut in front of him without signaling. He heard his golf bag tumble in the back, like expensive and faithless wind chimes. “Fuckin’ tourist,” he yelled. “Do they have to fail a driver’s test to get a rental car?”
4
“John Brisker,” Donnelly said to her. “You’re John Brisker’s girl. I can see that. You’ll have to forgive me. This is coming out of the blue.”
She seemed impatient, thought he was dissembling, but it was all true.
“I’m an old man, now. Old before my time, you might say. All of this happened so long ago.”
Brisker. Donnelly mind raced. He had never thought of Brisker as a father or a husband, though he had known that a wife called a congressman who in turn called The Company to initiate the search. No, when Donnelly thought of Brisker, he thought of him as a basketball player and a menace. He had first thought of him as a basketball player who was a menace. Later, as a menace who had played basketball.
Memories flooded back, a few seconds crossing decades, a few seconds more containing hours and days. Brisker. The last time his name actually creased Donnelly’s lips was at Thanksgiving dinner twenty years ago, his father’s last. The patriarch mentioned the Pipers and the Condors. He reminisced about taking Donnelly and his brothers to games at the Civic Arena. “Always courtside,” Donnelly Sr. had said, as if this was somehow remarkable. It wasn’t. ABA games were hardly a tough ticket to land, and whenever Donnelly Sr. took his sons to games, whether it was the Pirates, Steelers, DU or even the Hornets, he’d only settle for the best seats in the house. Hell, for the Steelers all the Donnelly men stood on the sidelines. Donnelly Sr. got his sons into the Pirates’ dressing room and introduced them to Bing Crosby, who was a partner in the team and of course an American Catholic icon ranking just below JFK. Universal VIP status bought that sort of access, the shiny upside of all the billable hours Donnelly Sr. had put in for the pillars of the Pittsburgh establishment. His position as chief potentate of the Duquesne law school alumni association had been just so much more clout.
The old man started with Game 7. The New Orleans Buccaneers. The ABA finals. May 4, ’68. A red-letter day for Donnelly father and son, but barely a footnote in Pittsburgh lore.
“They were real yeomen,” Sr. had said. “God, I thought we were going to win that thing every year. Do you remember Connie Hawkins?”
“The Hawk,” Donnelly had said back. He was 17 all over again, like he could get the keys to the car if he buzzed in with the right answer on the GE College Bowl. Donnelly was in his fifties at this Thanksgiving sitting and still desperate to please or at least comfort Sr., who had been disappointed in him over the years. Donnelly knew he couldn’t make up for all those times he had gone out of his way to disappoint his father or all those times he did things that would have disappointed his father if he had ever found out.
Just the thought of Connie Hawkins had lit up the old man and he had held court, like he was rid of the awful, chronic pain for as long as he mined the good old days. “That guy might have been the best player in the world, dammit,” he had said. “Awful how the NBA wouldn’t let him play because of that point-shaving thing at Iowa. There’s a boy who needed a lawyer if there ever was one. I guarantee he’d have had nothing to do with it. God he was such a beautiful ballplayer. Those hands were so big, the ball practically disappeared in them.”
The rhapsody went on and on, but the old man’s memory was going at that point. By Game 7 of the final in the ABA’s first season, the Hawk was half his regular self, hobbling around on a knee he had torn up in Game 4. Donnelly didn’t bother telling his father that it was Charlie Williams who lit up New Orleans. The old man was enjoying history his way. And it wasn’t all foggy.
“I introduced you to Gabe Rubin, didn’t I?” Sr. said.
“Yup,” Donnelly said. “I remember he lived in the penthouse at the Carlton Hotel. He told me he got started as an usher and worked his way up to running the theatre and bringing in the shows. And then he told me I could do the same. Asked me if I wanted to push a broom at the Pipers games. Here I am All-City and I’m going to push a broom? The guys at Central Catholic would have busted my chops.”
“Maybe it would have worked out for you,” Sr. said, a last mocking grievance with his oldest boy’s career choices, a refreshing change of pace from his real grievances, too many well founded.
“Yeah, I could have gone a long way, working my way up from bucket boy in a league that lasted five seasons,” Donnelly said. “Might have worked my way all the way up to manager of concessions.”
“You’ve done worse,” Sr. said.
“Things couldn’t have gone much worse for Rubin, though,” Donnelly said, nudging the old man’s sights toward city history and away from family history. “How much money did he lose?”
“If he had taken my advice, we never would have had that team in the city at all,” Sr. said, between small mouthfuls of a tiny portion of turkey that had no flavor he could taste and that he’d leave unfinished. “Told him it was a loser. And it was. Won on the court but lost money that year and every year. Screwball outfit. What was the name of that coach? He quit after the championship team. Quit.”
Donnelly felt obliged to explain to his brothers who were in the dark and the women at the table who were rolling their eyes. “Rubin sold the team to the guy in Minneapolis and he was moving it there,” he said. “Rubin wouldn’t pay for the coach’s moving expenses. Told him that he’d rent him a U-Haul.
Sr. jumped back in. “And then that guy in Minnesota realized it was a loser and defaults and poor Gabe is stuck with it again. And they weren’t that good again. Not once they lost the Hawk to the NBA.”
Donnelly’s brothers hadn’t been in the arena that night or any night that first season. It would have been past their bedtime. At the table, as they took turns carving, they tried to perk the old man up by talking about the times he took them to see the team in later seasons.
“They did get John Brisker,” Peter said.
“Wasn’t the Hawk,” the old man said—correctly.
“He was tough, though,” Patrick said. “Seriously tough.”
“He could go for 30, 40 or 50 any time.”
At this point Donnelly’s sisters-in-law were rolling their eyes, exchanging impatient looks and turning their attention to their kids, the real adolescents at the table.
The old man let the air out of Donnelly’s brothers. “Brisker could score because everybody was scared shitless of him,” he said. “He’d drive to the basket and defenders parted like the Red Sea.”
“Brisker was tough,” Donnelly said, one of the rare occasions he backed up his father. “It’s easy to be tough when you carry a gun around in your gym bag. On the court, no, no, I don’t think he was really that tough. Not when someone stood up to him.”
“And your brother would know,” Sr. said to Peter and Patrick. “He was there when Brisker blinked.”
“It was just a game and not like I had much to do with,” Donnelly said.
And that was it. Brisker blew into the Donnellys’ dining room and was gone before dessert.
In the years since, no one on this continent had raised the subject of John Brisker around Donnelly and he had no reason to do it himself. He was the last guy to trot out old war stories. He didn’t even like to talk about what he did yesterday, never mind thirty, forty years ago. He was happy when his pension from The Company went to automatic deposit, one less regular reminder of his work in the field.
Donnelly wasn’t sure but it might have been five or ten years ago that he had heard Brisker’s name on television. A game. Would have had to have been the Supersonics. When Seattle still had a team. He’d lost the announcer’s name, the network, the Supersonics’ opposition, where he was and what the hell he was doing, but he still could visualize Seattle’s green uniforms and hear the play-by-play man saying something to the effect of “Jones is probably the toughest guy the team has had since John Brisker bought his one-way ticket to Africa.” Still, Brisker’s name came up and Donnelly did a quick pan of the room to make sure that no one was even glancing at him, that no one was going to pick up a tell.
Brisker never really went away. He’ll always be there. Donnelly had thought of Brisker a thousand times. Ten thousand times. Every day. Sometimes sleepless at 1 a.m.
Just like he drifted away, Donnelly drifted back. He hit refresh. “John Brisker,” he said. A realization: All of those years and ruminations and yet Donnelly had never said his name out loud, not until this woman claiming to be Brisker’s daughter found him and cornered him in this goddamn coffee shop, thankfully just about empty.
“I was the last one to see him alive,” Donnelly said. That he was the first one to see him dead was a conclusion that he left Hines to draw on her own.
Donnelly expected a stunned silence to follow, one that she would break with her volunteering just how the hell she found him here in St Pete.
She didn’t even blink.
She heard the skinny kid behind the huge espresso machine call her name, misspelled on her cup and mispronounced, She excused herself, pushing back her chair. She picked up her drink, stirred it with her straw, rattling the ice while Strange Fruit played in the background.
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Check back to Sportsnet.ca next week for the second instalment of Detroit Mercy.