In the summer of 1981, on a basketball barnstorming trip through parts of northern Michigan and deep into the American South, George Gervin was wearing out Isiah Thomas.
Sometimes with his lightning-quick dribbling, other times with that goddamned finger roll that helped him win four NBA scoring titles, and then those trick bank shots. Mind you, this was all done in sweltering-hot gyms in Battle Creek and Kalamazoo, Mich., in Memphis and Birmingham, Ala., and places in between. Now, some 39 years later, Thomas recalls it didn’t help that Magic Johnson, who was on those trips, too, would always get the first pick over Thomas when assembling teams and would always take Gervin at the onset.
“Come on, man, that ain’t fair, you and George Gervin in the back court,” Thomas would complain.
But what Thomas was really getting tired of was The Iceman’s stories about this “cracker box” of a gym on Detroit’s west side,…
