Basketball

‘There’s No Playbook’: Recalling the Pain of Lost Teammates


LOS ANGELES — For Jim Kaat, the hours after his teammate’s death were filled with questions that had no answers.

When Kaat returned home from a walk around his neighborhood in New York City on Aug. 2, 1979, he flipped on his television to see the breaking news that Thurman Munson, his fellow Yankee, had died in a plane crash.

“Who do you call? What do you do?” Kaat said in a telephone interview on Tuesday, recalling the questions that went through his head. “It’s just a horrible experience that you have to go through.”

Many of those feelings came flooding back for Kaat on Sunday when he learned that Kobe Bryant, the retired Lakers star, and eight others, including Bryant’s 13-year-old daughter, Gianna, had died in a helicopter crash near Los Angeles. Kaat could not help but associate the tragedy with his own experience.

“You’re just stunned,” Kaat said. “You start thinking, ‘This can’t be real, can it?’”

Unlike Munson, who was an active player when he died at age 32, and Roberto Clemente, whose death at 38 in a 1972 plane crash also shocked the sports world, Bryant had been retired for nearly four years. But he was still a regular presence around the Lakers, a mentor to younger players and an iconic figure for longtime employees of the organization who suddenly found themselves mourning his loss in the middle of their season.

At the Lakers’ request, the N.B.A. canceled the team’s game against the Clippers that had been scheduled for Tuesday night. Instead, the Lakers gathered at their practice facility for lunch. The organization made grief counselors available to players and other team employees, and former Lakers, such as Metta World Peace, visited.

“This is a very difficult time for all of us,” the team said in a statement.

The tragedy came amid a buoyant season for the Lakers, who have championship aspirations for the first time in years, and even their loss to the Philadelphia 76ers on Saturday night brought some cause for celebration: Bryant had called LeBron James after the game with congratulations for passing him on the N.B.A.’s career scoring list.

The following morning, the Lakers were flying back to Los Angeles when Coach Frank Vogel informed his players that Bryant, who was 41, had died.

“Everybody became inconsolable,” John Ireland, the radio play-by-play broadcaster for the Lakers, said on his show on 710 AM in Los Angeles.

James was weeping when the plane landed. On Monday night, he posted an emotional message on his Instagram account, pledging to continue Bryant’s legacy. “I’m not ready but here I go,” James’s post began.

“There’s no playbook for this sort of thing,” Kaat said.

The day after Munson died, Kaat and his teammates gathered at Yankee Stadium for the start of a four-game series against the Baltimore Orioles. George Steinbrenner, the Yankees’ owner, addressed the players before the game, and there was an outpouring of emotion.

Having teammates around helped, Kaat said, because at least no one had to suffer alone. After a pregame ceremony — during which the catcher’s box, where Munson was usually positioned, was left empty — the Yankees played through a daze and lost, 1-0.

“Your mind wanders,” Kaat said. “I’m sure the Lakers will go through the same type of thing.”

The Yankees traveled to Ohio a few days later to attend Munson’s funeral, then immediately flew back to New York for a game that night, the finale of their series against the Orioles. The Yankees won, 5-4, when Bobby Murcer, one of Munson’s closest friends, hit a two-run single in the bottom of the ninth.

“But we really kind of played the rest of the season in a state of numbness, if that’s a good word,” Kaat said. “It just felt like the games weren’t that important.”

Steve Blass, a former pitcher for the Pittsburgh Pirates, thought back this week to the 4 a.m. phone call that awakened him on New Year’s Day in 1973. Bill Guilfoyle, the team’s public relations director, told Blass that there was an unconfirmed report of a plane crash in Puerto Rico, and that Clemente, the team’s star right fielder, may have been on board.

“There was no sleeping after that,” Blass said in a telephone interview on Tuesday.

Clemente, one of the best players in baseball history, had been on a cargo plane that was attempting to deliver aid to earthquake victims in Nicaragua.

Blass and Dave Giusti, one of his teammates, went to General Manager Joe Brown’s home. The players eventually began congregating at first baseman Willie Stargell’s house.

“As the morning unfolded, it was if the shoulders of the city of Pittsburgh slumped,” Blass said.

The news also felt overwhelmingly sudden, Blass said, as everyone was forced to reckon with what he described as an “absolute, nonnegotiable finality.”

There were no grief counselors then, Blass said, so Clemente’s teammates had to handle their emotions as best they could. The team chartered a plane to a memorial service in Puerto Rico, where Clemente grew up. Blass delivered one of the eulogies.

But over the coming months, he recalled, the sadness continued to come in waves: during the first spring training without Clemente, the first opening day without him, the first wins and the first losses.

“The grieving is universal, but it’s also so personal,” Blass said. “It’s all of those things.”

The crash that killed Bryant affected several other communities in Southern California and beyond, including those close to John Altobelli, the longtime baseball coach at Orange Coast College. Altobelli, 56, died in the accident along with his wife, Keri, and a daughter, Alyssa.

On Sunday, more than 300 people — current and former players, students and colleagues — gathered at the school’s baseball field to mourn, according to The Los Angeles Times. When the team practiced on Monday, ahead of Tuesday’s scheduled season opener, the school made several grief counselors and therapy dogs available to the players as they embarked on a long season with a lingering, painful absence.





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