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wears a long red gown, while a second Confederate officer awaits his lady as she descends a sweeping staircase. These scenes, with all their assumptions about power and position in the Old South, are the past of Atlanta’s new look, progressivism.
    Inside the chambers of Marriott modernity Bill Anderson’s words clash with these scenes from the aristocratic past. Atlanta styles itself as leader of the “New South.” Hank Aaron’s marriage to a civil rights activist makes the society columns of the newspapers. The Marriott, opening its doors to anyone who has money, the great American leveler, fills its ballrooms with black cotillions and its banquet rooms with black businessmen’s luncheons. Never mind that white lawyers and real estate tycoons still control much of Atlanta’s future. The opinion leaders of the city see Atlanta as cosmopolitan, prosperous, black and beautiful, aristocratic, powerful, and most of all, in the vanguard of progressivism. Atlanta, the capital of the Confederacy, is the home of Martin Luther King, Julian Bond, Lester Maddox, and Rhett Butler. Atlanta sells its municipal bonds easily while mayoral candidates make crime the number one issue of a campaign. Atlanta is a deceptive study in contrasts.
    Around 5 P.M ., I take a 45-minute nap and then board the game bus two minutes late.
    “That’ll be a five dollar fine,” Holzman says.
    An elaborate structure of fines punishes tardiness: a five dollar fine for arriving from ten seconds to five minutes late, a ten dollar fine for being up to ten minutes late, and five dollars for each additional minute over ten. Holzman established the fine system with approval from the team. The money collected goes into a pot that is used for a team party at the end of the year. Therefore, it is to everyone’s advantage for Holzman to fine.
    “Boo-ay-ay,” shout the fellows in the back of the bus.
    “On behalf of the team I want to thank you for the contribution, Bill,” says Phil Jackson.
    We wind through the residential streets of Atlanta to the Omni (as in omnipotent or omniscient), the new home of the Atlanta Hawks. The Hawks, formerly in St. Louis, were the team of my childhood fantasies. Bob Pettit, Cliff Hagen, Clyde Lovellette—they made my interest in the game burn. They provided examples of individual moves to develop. During high school summers in my home town of Crystal City, Missouri, I would drive sixty miles a day to play in pick-up games against the best players in the St. Louis area. One night I hit a hook shot against Cliff Hagen, and another night a Hawk rookie, Zelmo Beaty, split my face with an elbow under the eye, which the Hawk doctor had to stitch up. Every other Saturday night during my grade school years my friends and I would go to a pro game in St. Louis, and the Boston Celtics became our bitterest rival. Those were my days as a fan. Sunday afternoons we watched the Hawks on TV and later tried to imitate them in backyard games. The high point of those years came when Pettit scored 52 points and the Hawks won the world championship. The low point came a year later when the Celtics regained the title.
    In many ways I will never be as much from anywhere as from Crystal City—that small cluster of houses tucked between two limestone bluffs on the banks of the Mississippi River. When I was growing up, it was a town dominated by the Pittsburgh Plate Glass Co. and populated by workers of many ethnic backgrounds, melding together in the heartland of America.
    The mythic hero of my youth was Ozark Ike, the funny-paper athlete with one enormous blond curl and the Daisy Mae girlfriend, and a tantalizing penchant for making last-second shots, scoring touchdowns, and hitting home runs. Then there were the real-life heroes with less fantasy and more flesh—like Basil, Perry, Cook, Hicks, LaRose, Carter, King, and the Jennings brothers, all of them high school basketball players in a factory town.
    I was an only child born to an energetic