What was a Chicago doctor from Houston doing soaked in Champagne in the Bulls locker room? Read his book.
It was a phone call impossible to forget.
It took place at 4:10 p.m. on August 26, 1996. Michael Lewis was on the Illinois Tollway, traveling north and 10 minutes away from his suburban home. On his car radio was Waylon Jennings, singing, “Mammas, Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to be Cowboys.” On his phone was Jerry Krause, the general manager of the Chicago Bulls, saying, “You’re it. You’re my choice.”
What that meant was that Lewis would become, along with colleague Ira Kornblatt, the orthopedic consultants for the Bulls, and be “given complete autonomy in diagnosing and treating injuries sustained by the athletes … available for each home game during the regular season, as well as all playoff games.”
That phone call, he writes in his lively and engaging new book, “The Ball’s in Your Court” (Four Colour Print Group, 2020), changed his life, as he writes, “from that moment, life would never be the same.” He had by then already worked for the White Sox and he would work with the Bulls for two seasons. Those were, of course, the Jordan Bulls, the team that was in the midst of its championship years.
It is understandable why Jordan’s name and photo are on the cover of the book. Jordan is, well, Jordan and in the same dominating fashion that he bestrode the team, the NBA, the recent documentary “The Last Dance” and even reviews of teammate Scottie Pippen’s recent and rather snippy book, “Unguarded,” so he is a major draw here.
But Jordan shares the book’s pages with a marvelously colorful and vivid cast of characters because Lewis’s life has been a charmed trip. And he appreciates it fully. In part, this book was born of a late-in-life health scare, which he details here. “That’s right,” he says. “My near-death experience reaffirmed for me how precious every moment in life is.”
In this book, he has attempted to write his life story “as painstakingly and as honestly as possible, to follow poet Mary Oliver’s dictum: ‘Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it.’”
He does so compelling, taking us from his early years growing up in Houston, with a colorful, loving and talented Jewish family; through his college years at Brandeis University, where his classmates called him “Tex”; medical school back in Texas; an internship in San Francisco, where he lived with another student and a pet spider monkey named Fang; residency in New York City; a stint in the U.S. Air Force in England; marriage to Valerie Dewar Searle Lewis who, after nearly 50 years together, he still continues to “strive to be worthy of”; and, finally, to Chicago, where he would work for the Sox and Bulls, be orthopedic surgeon at the Illinois Bone and Joint Institute, chief of staff at NorthShore University HealthSystem at Skokie Hospital and teacher of the year at Rush University Medical Center.
This path is peppered, understandably, with prominent names. There’s Jordan and Dennis Rodman and Phil Jackson; White Sox players Carlton Fisk, Wilbur Wood and Greg Luzinski, announcers/characters Jimmy Piersall and Harry Caray, and the towering owner Bill Veeck, about whom Lewis writes, calling him unforgettable, “no one was more multifaceted and captivating.”
One of the lesser-known people you’ll meet is Abraham Maslow, one of Lewis’ his professors at Brandeis, a charismatic and influential psychologist and a huge influence on Lewis. As he writes, “Maslow continues to capture my imagination. On some level I’m still trying to fulfill the promise he saw in me, and this book is part of that attempt.”
It is successful. A Kirkus Review called it “A lively and inviting look at wisdom gained over a lifetime.”
That “wisdom,” whether homegrown or from others such as George Bernard Shaw, Oprah Winfrey, Bob Feller, Oliver Wendell Holmes (Lewis is widely and eclectically well read, as this book’s bibliography attests), peppers the book’s pages. There’s this, “The best moments in our lives are not passive, relaxing times. They usually occur if a person’s body or mind is stretched to its limits to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile.”
OK, then, I know what you are thinking and so here’s some more Jordan, even as Lewis writes, “What was Michael Jordan really like? That was far and away the most often-asked question during my time with the Bulls. The answer is not simple.”
There are these passages:
“Michael was once asked if he had bought a gift for Dennis Rodman’s upcoming birthday. Given Dennis’s rather bawdy reputation, Michael replied, ‘I didn’t think I could go into places from where Dennis would want a birthday present.’”
“Michael helped to broaden my definition of creativity. … He would change his game nightly, adopting his own play to meet the needs of the team.”
“Michael was controlling, demanding, and difficult. At the same time, he was dramatic, daring, courageous, joyous, and able to fly.”
From a moment during a Bulls championship, ““I scooped up some confetti … to save as a memento and headed for the locker room. … Champagne was being sprayed everywhere and on everyone. … It was a full-fledged mob scene.”
On the page, Lewis comes off as ever-curious, energetic and admirable self-effacing. In person he is charming and chatty. He’s a stylish and honest writer: “With his children (my father) wasn’t overly demonstrative. … He was part of a generation of men who felt that it was unmanly to directly express love.”
This is not his first book. He has a handsome pile of them, consisting of “Invitation to Joy: Viewing Birds on Seven Continents,” “Seeing More Colors: A Guide to a Richer Life” and “One World: A View of Seven Continents.” These are packed with photos, for having learned to use a camera in the Air Force, photography became one of his passions. The late, esteemed photographer Art Shay once called Lewis “a gifted artist who was born with a true photographer’s eye — a rarity artist in anyone, much less a celebrated pro in another field.”
Lewis’ medical practice is on hold, curtailed in large part by COVID’s many restrictions. “But I will never think of myself as retired but rather just transitioning to other meaningful endeavors,” he says.
He goes on to mention some adult education classes he attends, mentions the many people he talks to every day, and the book club of which he has been a member for 50 years. He is, naturally, at work on a new book. “It’s a gathering of one page life lessons,” he says. “Just as this book was, this new one is cathartic. All of us, I suppose, want to leave our mark in some way.”
When that book is published, its profits, like those of all his previous works, will be donated to the Himalayan Cataract Project, an effort to eradicating unnecessary blindness, cofounded by Geoffrey Tabin who is, naturally, Lewis’s longtime friend.
