The Boston Globe from Boston, Massachusetts • 242

L10. THE BOSTON SUNDAY GLOBE JUNE 20, 1999 CHAPTER 5 I A sporting chance 'Dad, why don't you ever play soccer with me like the other topic became the exploitation of student athletes, ard watched his father cry as Joe confided that he had discovered his basketball players at St. John were re ceiving passing grades even though they had not at- jj tended classes. wS Richard responded to his father's focus on educa-" 1 tion by bringing home straight A's. And he did little tjrj Ju disappoint his parents other than to tumble into a sejjj- Jj by Bob Hohler Globe Staff LAKE BUENA VISTA, Fla.

Deep within Disney World, beyond the perky smiles and the storybook facade, Richard E. Lapchick sits amid glossy photos of himself with world leaders and the giants of sport, and faces the painful, private paradox of his public campaign to turn boys into men. The pictures capture only Lapchick's glory days. Glistening on the walls of his back-lot office at the Disney complex are images of Bill Clinton, Nelson Mandela, and Kofi Annan honoring Lapchick for his work on behalf of youth, education, and social justice. There's Lapchick with Muhammad Ali.

And there's Arthur Ashe. lies ui ujeiiage romances uiai prompieu ma mouiei lem's Renaissance Five. As coach of the Knicks in 1950, Lapchick helped to integrate the National Basketball Association by signing a black player, Nat "Sweetwater" Clifton, just as Red Auerbach, that same year, drafted the league's first black player, Charles Cooper, for the Boston Celtics. So it was that Richard, at age 5, glanced out his bedroom window in Yonkers, N.Y., and saw protestors marching beneath a sprawling tree in his front yard, with his father hanging in effigy above them. The scene is Richard's earliest memory.

"My mother whisked me away," he says, "so I only saw it for a moment." A But Richard remembers picking up the telephone and hearing anonymous voices calling his father a "nigger lover." The memories later inspired his work fnr social iustiffi. as did a Elizabeth, and his father to warn him he was "too young to be in love." Richard's basketball career ended after his fresh1 man season at St. John's, when he realized his heighgjj 5-foot-ll and skills would not suffice to make his fa- ther's varsity team. But he continued to flourish in the classroom, and again later through a doctoral program in international studies at the University of Denver. In Richard's youth, Joe spent much ol his 4:.

visit to the Nazi concen- I tration camp at Dachau 1 time on the road with the teams he coached. But Richard says he never i -l It 1 A 17 1 Jr sunerea tne ami acne oi" longing for his father. I Richard's heart, his fa- ther was always with him And when Richard launched the Northeast ern program in 1984, haw said his mission was rood! ed in sharing the lessonSw-he learned from his fa-ther. "I only hope," he wrote in the New York Times, "we can give to other athletes the gift rtZ when he was 14. But as a child, Richard wanted nothing more than to follow his father to basketball fame.

Even before he developed enough talent as a teenager to play summer basketball with future Hall of Famer Lew Alcindor, later known as Kareem Ab-dul-Jabbar, Richard's friends and neighbors told him he was bound for stardom, that he would be the next Joe Lapchick. When Richard contracted polio a week before his eighth birthday, the only question one adult neighbor asked his father gave to me so lorig; I ago." me for a loop." At 26, Joe Lapchick has overcome the obstacles. Recently graduated from Johnson Wales University in Providence, he expresses deep love and respect for his father and sees no benefit in assigning blame for the tumult of his youth. Indeed, Joe balked for days at publicly telling his story. Two months ago, he stood with his father at the FleetCenter as the Boston Celtics honored Richard as "a hero among us." The last thing Joe wants to do, he says is tarnish his father's reputation or scar the legacy of his grandfather, whose death in 1970 was marked by headlines across the country.

"I was always so honored that I could share the name of such an incredible man," Joe says of his grandfather. "I've met so many people who were in awe of him. But I'm more impressedtby what people think of my dad and all the work he does to improve other people's lives." After Richard expressed a willingness to share his and Joe's experience so others might learn from their odyssey, Joe reluctantly agreed to retrace the course of his troubled youth, through the fear, the anger, the resentment, the confusion, the drinking, the drugs, the guns, the confrontations and, finally, to the peace he -found with the support of his father, a man he hardly knew for much of his life. The story begins a generation ago, in the warm glow of Richard's bond with his father, who was no ordinary man, on or off the basketball court The son of Czechoslovak immigrants, Joe Lapchick was born in 1900, nine years after basketball was invented. As the game's original "big man," Lapchick, at 6-foot-5, dominated the professional game for much of the early 20th century.

A ninth-grade dropout who pursued a paycheck in basketball so he could escape a life of factory work, he died as a respected educator and advocate for racial justice. In the 1920s, Lapchick helped break basketball's color barrier, setting off race riots, as the all-white Celtics of New York became the first pro team to play exhibitions against the nation's top black team, Har But mostly there are photos of Lapchick's father, Joe Lapchick, the basketball Hall of Famer who starred for the original Celtics from New York and later coached the New York Knicks and the men's team at St. John's University. Grainy, black-and-white snapshots trace Joe Lapchick's legendary career, from his White House visit with the New York Celtics of the American Basketball League in 1925, to his coaching triumph with St. John's in the National Invitational Tournament in 1965, the last hurrah of his 50 years in basketball.

By all accounts, Joe Lapchick was as gifted a father as he was a coach and athlete. He nurtured his son, spared him from the agony of unmet expectations that living in a legend's shadow can breed, and watched him thrive. In turn, Richard Lapchick, as a teacher, author, human rights activist, and director of Northeastern University's Center for the Study of Sport in Society, has spent much of his life promoting better parenting by sharing the lessons he learned from his father. "Joe Lapchick was my hero," says Lapchick, who runs the Disney-supported Northeastern program out of offices in Boston and Disney World. But some of the hero's lessons in life and fatherhood may have been lost on his son.

And other images of the Lapchick story defy heroism, like the days and nights when Richard was busy building better men and women while his only son, named for the famed Joe Lapchick, languished. While Richard, now 53, traveled prodigiously to improve the lives of children from the back streets of North America to the shanty towns of South Africa, his son endured a youth of inner turmoil, substance abuse, and indifference to the pursuit Richard implored other young men and women to exalt: education. There were no wonder years for this Joe Lapchick, who struggled with his father's absenteeism, his parents' failing marriage, and the aftershocks of a chilling attack on his father when Joe was only five. "I had a hard time with it all when I was younger," Joe says in a recent interview in Providence. "It obviously threw Richard Lapchick, at 14, with his parents, Joe and Elizabeth.

"Joe Lapchick was my hero," says Richard. By then, though, Richard's private strugj gle, with the hazards ol his chosen life and with fatherhood, had long been rag Inrr dtn Trw knm nl It.W-lislnir in Q79 lllg. XllO OKJlly (IUC, JJ1 11 VIL XfcllllOl Ull bituaj 111 it was only five when the first trauma struck. Richard, then 32, was teaching political science ai Virginia Wesleyan College, and was emerging as a leader of the movement in the United States to rid South Africa of apartheid. S2S On Valentine's Day, Richard had just returned t(CS Virginia Wesleyan from Nashville, where he had beeJ I organizing protests against South Africa's scheduleoHp father at the hospital was, "Do the doctors think Richie will ever be able to play basketball again?" His father cared little about Richard's future in basketball, though he knew by then that his son would fully recover from the polio.

In Richard's eyes, his father was the only one who did not push him to excel in sports. Joe Lapchick, the dropout, raised his son to be a scholar. "My father freed me from the pressure that so many other young athletes have faced," he says. Though Richard played basketball year-round, in school leagues, at the Jewish Community Center in Yonkers, at the blacktop courts in Harlem, his father almost never saw him play. His father rarely initiated a discussion of basketball.

Instead, Richard's father talked to him about politics, poverty, the war in Vietnam. Together, they read "The Autobiography of Malcolm And when the appearance in the Davis Cup tennis championships. That mVht he said, two masked intruders burst into' his office, used metal file drawers to bludgeon him, carved a racial epithet niger (sic) into his belly. Hospitalized for several days, Richard was reluc-- 1 tant to tell his young son what had happened. But Joe -4c had heard others talk about it, and he twisted the ac- counts into a five-year-old's fantasy.

"I know you weSC attacked by bank robbers and they cut your heart ouSJ 1 a Jx i a Will ana put in your siomacn, joe roia nis iauier. j. In the nightmarish aftermath, local police sugges2J ed to reporters that Lapchick had staged the assaults! as a cheap publicity stunt, which Richard later rebut ted by submitting to a polygraph test and a physical exam by the New York medical examiner. Then came a telephone threat against Joe and his younger sister, Elisa, who had just returned home from a visit with their grandparents. "It must be good to have the kids home," a man on the telephone told Richard at his office.

"It may not be for long." Richard called home and discovered that Joe sud- 3 denly was missing. As the police searched, Richard and Sandy, his wife at the time, waited helplessly until a neighboring family brought Joe home more than two hours later. The neighbors said they had taken Joe to see their new home. "It was the most terrifying experience of my life," Richard says. The episode left him feeling so vulnerable that -Richard took a job the next day as a United Nations K-' aison officer and moved his family to New York There, Joe was in trouble from the start, repeatedly picking fights with other children.

When a child psychiatrist examined Joe, the doctor said the boy felt guilty because he had not protected Richard from the attack and was fearful that one day he would be assaulted like his father had been. The psychiatrist said Joe, in his young child's mind, was physically preparing himself for the confrontation. A year of psychiatric therapy curbed the fighting, but Joe continued to seethe beneath the surface. "I don't think I grasped that there was still a lot of tur-moil going on inside Richard says. The trouble was, Richard was not home much to assess Joe's crisis.

Driven both by a passion for his work and the coolness of his strained naarriage, Richard was away nearly nine months a year. Joe played an entire youth soccer season and half the next season before Richard showed up to watch him play. And as they walked away from the field, Joe asked, "Dad, why dont you ever play soccer with me like the other fa- thersr Richard thought he was helping Joe, as his father rT in Joe Lapchick (right) expresses deep love and respect for his father, Richard, and sees no benefit in assigning blame for the tumult of his youth. When 1 ,500 CEOs and human resource directors were asked how much leave is reasonable for a father to take after the birth of a i L'CY.