A New World

[Way Of The Ray <wayray@ix.netcom.com>]

  Amid NBA's hard times, a new World                      

  Free: Finds new life in reaching out to youths       
                                                         
  Saturday, December 26, 1998                           

  WORLD B. FREE                                          
                                                       
  Lancaster Intelligencer Journal                                 
                                                          
  The NBA's windows have been dark since July,           
  billionaires and millionaires having picked a fight     
  over how to divvy up the league's loot (and no doubt      
  gouge the rest of us in the process).                      
                                                       
  The 76ers had hoped to ride the ripple of momentum    
  they created late last year, the first sign of         
  progress in a decade. Instead, nothing. No games.    
  Probably no season.                                    
                                                         
  Nothing.                                                
                                                     
  All there is, is World B. Free.                     
                                                   
  There's World, in his guise as the Sixers' director of 
  community relations, working camps and clinics.           
  Venturing into neighborhoods where even the cops don't    
  go anymore. Talking to kids about dreams and             
  possibilities and going to school and staying off     
  drugs.                                                   
                                                         
  Every now and then he gives out his beeper number and 
  tells the ones ready to teeter over the edge to call    
  him whenever they have "a little problem." Maybe he   
  can find them a job. Maybe he will be able to tell     
  them something, anything, to keep them out of trouble. 
                                                          
  "You can't save the world," he said, "but you can help
  someone."                                               
                                                   
  The irony is thick: He had been wing gunner for a         
  flying circus of a team when he played for the Sixers    
  two decades ago; now he hands out assists. And if the 
  team couldn't get him out of town fast enough before,   
  it now pushes him to the forefront, holds him up as a   
  paragon of all that is right and good about the NBA.  

  It really is a New World.

  "I'm impressed with what he's doing," said Orlando
  Magic executive vice president Pat Williams, who as
  the Sixers' gen eral manager way back when had been
  only too happy to trade Free.

  "He says all the right things," said Jack Jensen, who
  coached World at Guilford College, a small school in
  Greensboro, N.C. "He knows how to talk to (kids) in
  his language and their language, which is separate and
  distinct. You and I cannot tell how many lives he's
  saving every year. It's a lot. What he's doing is
  monumental."

  We remember Free _ then Lloyd _ as a brash young
  guard, as a guy who griped about a lack of playing
  time, lack of shots, lack of everything when he first
  came to Philadelphia. We remember him being part of a
  team of me-firsters that had to be stripped down to
  the chassis before it was rebuilt as the '83
  championship club.

  He drove coaches crazy, but just about everybody else
  tended to like World, and they tend to like him now.
  He has a certain roguish charm about him, and whatever
  edge there once might have been has been eroded by
  time. By personal crises. By spending the vast
  majority of his 13-year career playing for bad teams
  in nice places (San Diego, Golden State) and a bad
  team in a not-so-nice place (Cleveland), after the
  Sixers shipped him out of town.

  So yeah, that probably is a New World out there on the
  streets.

  By his own estimate, the 45-year-old Free has made
  well over 300 appearances the last three years. He
  says he meets kids in blighted neighborhoods and they
  tell him how much they appreciate him coming, and
  coming back. Certainly nobody else does. Not anybody
  with good intentions, anyway.

  "There's one thing about these kids: They can tell if
  you're out there just to be there, and they can tell
  if you're out there because you love to be there,"
  Free said. "When I go out there, they can tell that I
  love to be there. They smile. They laugh. They talk.
  They communicate back. I communicate with them. I'm
  not too far from where they're from and what they do."

  He grew up poor in the Brownsville section of
  Brooklyn, one of 11 children. His father was Charles,
  a longshoreman. His mom was Earlene.

  "She was my hero," World said. "Still is my hero."

  She would try to keep the family clothed and bathed
  and happy. Especially that. When Lloyd was cut from
  the Canarsie High basketball team his sophomore year,
  for instance, he was disconsolate.

  "I needed a rubber band to keep my head up," he said.

  So she told him to keep working at it, and he kept
  going back to 66 Park, sometimes to play, sometimes to
  shoot by himself. Before long he had built up a
  sizable reputation. Somebody saw him play _ either saw
  him soar or uncork that rainbow jumper of his _ and
  labeled him "All-World," right on the spot. It stuck,
  and years later, while with the Warriors, he had his
  name legally changed to World.

  He made the varsity as a junior, won a city title as a
  senior, and was going to go to the University of
  Arkansas. But that fell through at the last minute,
  and he wound up at Guilford, then an NAIA school. Won
  a national championship his freshman year while
  playing with a friend from the 'hood, a guard named
  Greg Jackson, and future pro M.L. Carr.

  Two years later, World went hardship. The Sixers had a
  handle on him, in part because Jack McMahon, the late
  superscout, had been beating the bushes, in part
  because Williams and Jensen, roommates years earlier
  at Wake Forest, had stayed in touch.

  The team nonetheless took Dar ryl Dawkins in the first
  round of the 1975 draft, and were fully prepared to
  take another high school player, Bill Willoughby, on
  the second. But Atlanta chose Willoughby, and the
  Sixers went to Plan B.

  Lloyd Free.

  Besides Free and Dawkins, that was also the year
  George McGinnis came to town. And Joe Bryant.

  It was, Williams remembered, "not only a bushel of
  unbridled talent, but strong personalities to boot.
  ... That's what set up that traveling road show."

  The arrival of Julius Erving a year later finished off
  a volatile package, one that was long on talent but
  short on chemistry. Free was largely unhappy coming
  off the bench behind Doug Collins, and he didn't
  hesitate to let people know about it.

  But he did have his moments, like the time he rained
  27 on Boston in Game Seven of the '77 Eastern
  Conference finals.

  "That was one of my brightest moments," he said. "I
  was still a little kid, but looking at these guys I'm
  like, "I'm going to make a name for myself.' "

  He did _ the Boston Strangler.

  "Nobody remembers that," Free said. "All the time
  they'll be like, "Andrew Toney, the original Boston
  Strangler.' But the people that played with me, they
  know who the original Boston Strangler was."

  Free's other nom de hoop was the Prince of Midair. He
  would elevate, legs splayed, and either drain the
  shot, draw the foul or both.

  But gifted as he was, the team tired of him. Billy
  Cunningham had succeeded Gene Shue as coach early in
  '77-78, after the We-Owe-You-One flameout against
  Portland in the '77 Finals. Cunningham wanted to
  reshape the team, to make it more cohesive, more
  defensive-minded, more Erving-oriented. And according
  to Williams, the new coach "did not think (Free) was
  going to fit into a championship ef fort. He was a
  great individual talent, but you weren't going to win
  big with him."

  So Williams shopped World around prior to the '78-79
  season.

  "There was no market for him," Williams said.

  The Clippers finally offered a No. 1 pick the day
  before the opener. A No. 1 pick in '84.

  Sold. It became a great trade for all concerned. The
  Sixers turned that pick into Charles Barkley. And
  World was, well, free.

  He finished second in the league in scoring the next
  two years, behind George Gervin, and was among the top
  15 each of the next eight. By the time he finished his
  career _ with an out-of-shape cameo in Philadelphia in
  '86-87 and another with Houston a year later _ he had
  piled up 17,955 points, 40th all-time.

  "I did what I said I could do, as far as being out
  there," he said. "I knew I belonged and deserved to be
  out there on that basketball court with those
  players."

  He won his share of supporters along the way. There
  are those in Cleveland, for instance, who said he
  saved the franchise in the days after bumbling owner
  Ted Stepien departed, that without World, there really
  was no reason to watch those Cavaliers. These pro-Free
  forces would like to see his No. 21 retired in that
  city, but it hasn't happened yet, and probably won't.

  That's no doubt because of the prevailing notion that
  Free was just out for himself. That he didn't make a
  team better. That nobody ever won with him in their
  backcourt.

  World, naturally, has an answer for such criticism.

  "You have to know your personnel," he said, not a bit
  perturbed. "Why throw the ball to somebody who
  couldn't shoot the ball rather than take that shot
  yourself? I just kind of took those shots myself.

  "That's what hang time was about, so I can have the
  opportuni ty to look at you and say, "Ah, don't think
  so.' I'm doing you a favor. I keep you around the
  league a long time. If you start shooting and you
  can't shoot ... A lot of guys should have thanked me
  for that."

  Somewhere in there _ World won't say when, because of
  the heartache it causes his mother _ he was back in
  Brownsville, driving one of his brothers somewhere. He
  won't reveal the brother's name, either.

  World stopped at a grocery store, and while inside
  heard gunfire. Rushing outside, he found his brother.
  He was gone, the victim of a drive-by shooting.

  The story has become a staple of Free's playground
  presentation, even without the details.

  "They get the message, though," he said.

  He doesn't mind talking about how he got bilked out of
  a pile of money early in his career by his agent,
  money he claims he later recovered through legal
  action.

  Or about how when he asked John Lucas, then the
  Sixers' coach/general manager, about a job with the
  team a few years back, Lucas didn't recognize him at
  first. World had ballooned from the 190 pounds he
  weighed as a rookie, past what he calls his "mature
  weight" of 215, all the way to 260.

  Lose some weight, Lucas told him, and we'll talk.

  Thirty pounds later, there was a New World.

  And once again, he has made a name for himself.
  ------------------------------------------------------------------------