CALVIN AND THE KIDDIE CORPS
Kids like to talk to me," says the San Diego Rockets' 5'9" rookie, Calvin Murphy (see cover). "They don't feel out of it standing next to me. Of course I feel out of it, standing next to an 11-year-old boy my height."
But Murphy looked far from out of it against Los Angeles one recent night when he tied up the Lakers' 6'7" John Tresvant—who is more than 11 years old—and then outjumped him. And while Murphy may be the springiest of the bunch ("One of his handicaps," says San Diego Coach Alex Hannum, "is it takes him too long to come down"), he is only one of five guards under 6 feet who are very much a part of professional basketball this year. Both coaches and fans have been sitting around foreseeing the day when an NBA forward would have to be 6'8", a guard 6'4" and a ball boy at least 6'2", and yet the Little Man has returned.
Two of the five are in the NBA. In addition to Murphy, who is averaging 13 points while playing only 19 minutes a game, there is Cincinnati's Nate Archibald, also in his first professional season. Archibald has come into his own as the zippiest man in Bob Cousy's new ultra-fast-break offense. He is listed at 6'1", but standing next to his 6'1" backcourt mate, Norm Van Lier, he couldn't be more than 5'11", and he weighs in at 156 pounds. Against New York recently, Archibald took the ball away from the Knicks' illustrious backcourt three times and never lost possession himself to Walt Frazier, although that 6'4" defensive demon harassed him most of the night. Archibald has been playing more than 40 minutes and scoring 15.5 points a game, as well as driving blithely on men whose uniforms alone are taller than he is.
The ABA has always been more of a guard's league, with the three-point outside shot and a shortage of 7-footers, but never have sub-6-footers shown up so well. The Floridians' Mack Calvin, a 5'11" second-year man, is leading the league with a 29-point average. Indiana's Billy Keller, 5'10", is averaging 14 points with a high game of 32 and has earned a new nickname, Indianapolis Shortie, which pleases him no end; he hated being called Mickey Mouse. And Virginia's Larry Brown, 5'9", was pursuing his fourth straight assist championship in his fourth year as a pro until he decided last week to have a minor operation that will sideline him for several weeks.
There is no doubt that the little man's emergence can be traced to the game's expansion. As Keller's coach, Bob Leonard, says, "When you had 12 pro teams, there were 48 good big guards. There aren't 112 good big guards now." But that is a point in favor of expansion, because in some ways the little guards are better, or at least more exciting, than the big ones. "People like to see speed...speed in any sport," says Leonard. "They like to see the little man take advantage of the big man." Furthermore, the little men have to be defter at outside shooting and creative passing and dribbling, and above all they have to show several inches worth of compensatory fight and quickness. It was not out of charity that a Knicks-loving Madison Square Garden crowd all but transferred its affections to Murphy in a tense fourth quarter two weeks ago when he scored 23 points in 25 minutes and sparked San Diego to a rally that almost upset the home team.
Shortness, in fact, has some advantages on offense: the little man needs less of an opening, in space and time, to squeeze past a defender, and the little man and his dribble are close to the ground together. It is on defense, when he is matched up with a guard six inches taller, that the short man is vulnerable. "The way to play a small guard," says Red Auerbach, "is to back him into the pivot and roll right over him." "You've got to think that you can take them inside and shoot over them," says Frazier.
But the little men and their coaches feel this handicap need not be a disqualifying liability. "It could hurt if you get down to the point where the other team needs a basket to win and wants to set up a specific play," says Cousy. "But if they gear their offense to taking the small men low, they've got their own men out of position." Larry Brown says other teams sometimes switch from "what they do best to attacking the small guard. They can make him look bad, but I don't believe it helps them because they're going away from their normal pattern and they lose continuity."
What the little man must do is make sure that if opposing guards take him underneath, it will not be without considerable extra effort. The way to make sure of that, Cousy says, is to "pick them up at full court and make them work all the way down. That's the worst thing that can happen to a backcourt man. Slater Martin [the last 5'9" man in the NBA before Murphy] used to do that to me. It's agonizing."
Hannum says that Murphy can probably jump well enough to block a much taller man's shot occasionally (he was called for goaltending a number of times in college), but the time for him to play defense is before his man gets within shooting range. Murphy understands this and is in constant motion between his opponent and the basket, scrambling, crowding, using his hands, like a man trying against all the odds to keep a bull away from a cow. Such tenacity gets him into foul trouble (he is averaging a personal foul every 5.7 minutes), and against the Atlanta Hawks the other night, when he took it upon himself to scramble all up and down the front side of a forward—6'6" 235-pound Bill Bridges—it almost got him a severe reprimand, i.e., a punch in the mouth. But it also has enabled the rookie they call Little Bit or Midget Man to hold his own on defense.
"There was a time," says Hannum, "when they thought the age of even the 6'2" guard was over. Why, when I came to St. Louis in 1957 they were trying to make a guard out of Cliff Hagan. I told Hagan he'd played his last game as a guard, he was a forward. It's a particular position and calls for particular skills, not the tallest man you can work in. With two short guards, you'd get hurt on defense, because a Jerry West, an Oscar Robertson or a Frazier can take even a great little man into the corner and shoot over him. But no team has more than one star like that, and I can always put my other guard on him.
"The problems Calvin's been having are the normal problems of a rookie coming into the NBA. In college he was a wild card on defense and he dominated the offense, he free-lanced. When the floor is spread, that's his meat—when he's coming up the floor like a halfback through a broken field. Now he's got to develop conceptions of team offense and team defense. So far he's been the worst on the team at executing set plays. But there are a lot of 5'9" athletes around, so why is Calvin going to make it? He's got intelligence and character. He has strength, both physically and socially—he's a good citizen on the team. People like him. He's a good person. He loves his family [that would be three-month-old Tiffani Dawn and 4'11" Vernetta—'we must be the shortest couple in either league,' Murphy says] and wants to do something in life."
Although family man Murphy doesn't do much cooking or make his own clothes, he does twirl a baton. That is one reason his wrists, arms and shoulders are so strong. Says Hannum, "The nurse who gave him a shot during the last team physical said she had only encountered one other man whose arm was so hard to get a needle into, and that was a tough old prizefighter."
When he stands perfectly relaxed in the dressing room, Murphy and his twirler's muscles look flexed all over. "One day my Aunt Frieda decided she was going to dress me up and make me mascot of the band," Murphy says. "I was 5 or 6, and I've been twirling ever since. At the World's Fair in 1964 I won the military marching division—like leading a band—and I finished second in the two-baton and third in the solo. I was show twirler for three years with the high school band, and while I was in college I was show twirler for the Buffalo Bills. I'd take some digs from the fellows—but they knew that when push came to shove and we had to go to blows, we were going to go to blows. Now and then, at home, I'll go out in the backyard and twirl. If nothing else, it's good for my reflexes—a lot of times I've had to get out of the way of that thing."
When he was a boy people must have thought Murphy's career should be twirling, not basketball. "They said I was too short to play in high school," he says. "I was 5'7" when I tried out as a sophomore. But I could dunk the ball, and I did all right." He became a high school All-America, throwing in 50 and 60 points a game, but he didn't grow much. "My mother was 6 feet. She and her six sisters and Althea Gibson played on a basketball team, the Bomberettes. Boys' rules. She was a fairly good dribbler for a woman, and she had a nice little push shot from the outside. I must have taken after my father, who was 5'10". In a way I was fortunate. I knew that I was always going to have to be a guard, so I concentrated on that position and never had to switch."
More than 200 colleges thought he was plenty tall enough, and he proved them right by going to Niagara and averaging 33 points a game for three years. But he was the only All-America not chosen in the first round of either the ABA or the NBA draft last year. This was almost enough to make Murphy turn his back on the pros and sign on with the Harlem Magicians.
"I gave the Magicians great consideration," he says. "I discussed it with Marques Haynes quite a bit. But Willis Reed talked me into signing with the NBA. He said I had worked so long I shouldn't pass up the chance to play against the best in basketball. The NBA is serious business, and that's what I've always believed that basketball was."
The Rockets were not too serious-minded, however, to "horse around," as Hannum puts it, "with a little pregame routine with Calvin. We did it before a couple of exhibition games this year—Calvin at the high post, with two lines cutting at him and a little Globetrotter ball handling. We played some Sweet Georgia Brown. You know, from what I've seen him do, I'd bet on Calvin dribbling two basketballs the length of the floor faster than any other player in the league can go with one."
With the start of the regular season such diversions as the pregame show were shelved. "In a league game we've got just one job," says Hannum. That is, to win—which is fine with Murphy. He "pats that rock," as he says, in a naturally jazzy manner, and he dribbles between his legs occasionally as a matter of course, but he is not about to set himself up as a show-time artist, a la Pete Maravich.
Hannum has been bringing Murphy along slowly, taking an obvious interest in him (Larry Brown, who played under Hannum at Oakland in 1968-69, says, "Alex has been a champion of the little man") but praising even such performances as a 29-point total in 29 minutes against Phoenix with judicious moderation. One of the advantages of such caution is that Calvin has not been under the kind of pressure that Maravich faces. "People say I can't make it, I'm too little," says Murphy, "so whatever I do, it's a plus for me."
None of which means Murphy is a self-deprecating man. He has gotten off more shots per minute of playing time than anyone on the Rockets except Elvin Hayes—who is the big man the little men are supposed to feed—and his points-per-minute average is higher than that of even the Big E. Hayes has generally been considered a hard man to share laurels with—Don Kojis was traded to Seattle for that reason—but Murphy seems to get along with him well. And Calvin gives ample credit to the Big E's shot-blocking presence. But there also was the time, as Hannum tells it, when "Hayes came back into a huddle after just losing the ball, and he thought it was Calvin's fault. Elvin told him about it on the floor. Calvin said, 'Listen big boy, you're wrong.' Whether it was Elvin Hayes or anyone, Calvin wasn't going to back down."
Being short has neither discouraged Murphy nor put a chip on his shoulder. "It's just like I'm a little spectator following the crowd, to see what's going on," he says. "I've been walking places with the team and had people come up and ask me, 'Are those pro basketball players?' It's an ideal situation. I can blend in with the crowd. On the floor, I don't think about my size. If I did I might faint. But I'm not always going to be a basketball player, and I'm happy being five-nine. I've lived short all this time, I don't know whether I could handle it if I got tall."
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Climbing all over Dick Barnett, Nate Archibald shows the small man's defensive style.
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The ABA's top scorer, Mack Calvin, gets off his shot over Bob Netolicky, who is 6'9".
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Strong, stocky Bill Keller flips a long pass.