Q&A with NBA Great Bill Cartwright

Portrait by Max Whittaker

You’ve made a career out of being a particularly hard-working basketball player. Can you talk a little bit about your childhood and how that shaped your strong work ethic?

I grew up on Bean Ranch [which was about 1,600 acres of farmland near the Cosumnes River Preserve]. So we were kind of in the middle of nowhere, and when we weren’t going to school, we worked. When I was young, as a family, we picked tomatoes. As I got a little bit older, it was sugar beets. That was just normal—getting up at 5 in the morning, heading out there and going to work. And growing up in a two-bedroom house on the ranch, there was no air conditioner, and no heating system outside of the heater set in the middle of the room. There were also seven kids in one bedroom. [Cartwright shared a room with his six sisters.]

Then in 1970, when you were 13, your family moved to the Valley Hi neighborhood in south Sacramento, right? 

Yeah, thank goodness. It was [also] a farming community, but now I could ride my bike and go to the park. I had people to play baseball and basketball with, and there was a 7-Eleven. [Laughs] It was like, civilization.

You’ve said how much you liked playing all different sports as a kid. Do you think that playing multiple sports benefitted you as a basketball player? Most kids now tend to get siloed into focusing on a single sport.

I’m not a big fan of [the single-sport approach]. I thought it was fun, at a young age, to be able to play especially baseball because that had its own set of fundamentals. I played a couple years of football, and that’s a sport where you learn to be aggressive, you learn to hit. So all of that was a carryover to basketball. And also, we didn’t have all those [repetitive stress] injuries that kids are having nowadays because they’re playing the same sport.

You spend a good deal of time in your new memoir discussing your years at Elk Grove High and the fun you had playing there, including winning the NorCal championship your senior year in 1975. I know you guys had some legendarily tough basketball practices.

Well, to be sure, all that work was not always fun. The fun was in winning. Our coach, Dan Risley, held up some really high standards. We’d have three-hour practices. So it was a lot of repetition—the really hard play, tons of shots—and learning how to play together. And I was fortunate that I had teammates that were pretty darn good too, and we were able to win. [The team went undefeated in the 1973-74 season.]

You have remained close with Coach Risley throughout your life.

He’s a smart guy. He used to torture us in practice, but then he’d feed us at his house. He wanted to have the best team not only in Sacramento, but in the entire state, and ultimately, we were able to do that.

I take it that Elk Grove was a different place then. Your high school was the only high school in that neighborhood when you were there. Now there are 14 in the district. 

Everything grows, everything changes. I think the only fast food in town was A&W. There was like one doughnut shop in town, two grocery stores, and one dentist that we knew of.

It was a blend of a lot of different nationalities, and the only really common denominator is that everybody worked.

There was no real wealth, or at least outwardly. We were all in the same boat, trying to just move forward. So, I think that bonded us more than anything. We all worked super hard and we all had similar goals. It was a great time.

Bill Cartwright is flanked by teammates Michael Jordan and Scottie Pippen—each is holding one of the Bulls’ championship trophies—during a celebration rally in Chicago on June 22, 1993, after the team won its third NBA title in a row. (Photo by Mark Elias/AP Photo)

I noticed that when you write about a team in your book, whether it was high school, college or the NBA, you always mention every single player on the roster. What made you want to do that?

Well, those guys were important. We couldn’t have won without them. We’re not playing golf, we’re not playing tennis, we’re not swimming. We’re a team, and that’s how you win.

You don’t hear that said a lot today, even though it’s still obviously true.

I know it’s trendy now when people say it’s LeBron and the Lakers or Curry and the Warriors, and it’s ridiculous. Are those guys playing by themselves? My team was always really important. Those are the guys you lived with every day and they were friends. I still see my high school teammates now. The same for college.

People think of you as part of those great Bulls teams of the ’90s, but you started out with the New York Knicks and played for them for almost a decade.

With the Knicks, we had such a big turnover of coaches, GMs, players. Each coach has their own vision of you. I had four coaches over nine years in New York, so you’re just learning constantly. And then when I got traded to the Bulls, after playing in New York, you can handle pretty much anything because New York is going to test your character. Your face could be on the back page of the New York Post  [which always features a sports story there] and it was either “We like him” or “Get him out of Dodge.”

You were an NBA player for 16 years. Do a couple of memories jump out at you when you look back?

My first year in the league. One of my teammates was Marvin Webster, and I also had Earl Monroe on my team and my coach was Red Holzman. And all of a sudden, you’re playing against Darryl Dawkins, and you’re playing against Artis Gilmore, you’re playing against Kareem [Abdul-Jabbar], and then you’ve got Bob Lanier and you’ve got Dave Cowens. You’ve got Moses Malone, and on and on. Every single night was a challenge. And as a rookie, you’re just learning how to play. Travel back then was commercial. So you were flying out in the afternoons, going to the game [that night], then going to the next city, or if it’s a back-to-back, you’re flying out that morning at 6 o’clock, so you’re tired. And it’s learning everything—learning how to be in the league and how to play against other NBA players, trying to get better. When I got in the league, I was a scorer, but I couldn’t guard anybody, so it took a while to learn different players and how to defend them.

When I got traded to the Bulls [in 1988], that was another big thing. Everybody wants to know about [playing with] Michael Jordan and they’re like, “What was it like?” Look, I’m an old-school guy. When I grew up, Kareem was on my wall. Wilt [Chamberlain]. Jerry West. The guys before me were the guys that I really admired. When I got to the Bulls, I was the old guy—like 31, 32. Really old. [Laughs] So to me, those guys were like young punk kids. So, I wasn’t a fan  of those guys—they were all younger than me.

You didn’t worship at the altar of Jordan.

Even though God decided to give him more talent than anybody else—he was still a young guy. I didn’t follow his lead. But we had other guys too. John Paxson was a veteran. Horace Grant. We had Craig Hodges on the team—best shooter on the planet. And every year, we added guys—Scott Williams, Stacey King and B.J. Armstrong, who became an All-Star.

As you mentioned, you were a big scorer early in your career. But by the time you played on those Bulls teams, you were really a defender first, weren’t you? It seems like there’s a lesson in there somewhere.

That’s at every level. Playing a role is really important for the team, and that’s what hurts a lot of athletes. You may be a really good scorer, but your best job [for the team] is being a defender. If you have a good coach who can convince you of that, and you’re being acknowledged for that—which I think is a major key—that’s  how you win.

You had that in Chicago?

We had a blend of young and old guys. The older guys get that that’s how you win. The younger guys are looking to establish themselves. They want to score. They want to be on the All-Star team. They want all the things that go with being the star of a team. But once you’ve been in the league long enough, and you’ve had those accolades, you have a better understanding of what it takes to win.

That is a delicate tightrope for a coach to walk. Did a couple of your coaches really succeed at it?

Yeah, my high school coach for sure. And my college coach, Bob Gaillard. And the Bulls with Phil [Jackson]. Once he took over, we changed everything, from our offense to our defense, and putting guys in their roles to perform. But I can’t emphasize enough the acknowledgement that you have to be able to give to guys who can sacrifice themselves. I think that’s the key.

The former NBA player and coach with his wife, Sheri, in their Gold River home on March 14 (Photo by Max Whittaker)

And speaking of young and old players, it’s almost as if you played in a different league than the one we’re watching today. When you look at the game today, do you like the product that you see on the NBA floor?

Well, it’s a different game. There’s not going to be anybody in my era who likes the way the teams play now. That’s the best way of describing it. Because it looks irresponsible to us—the shooting one-on-three, a transition three with nobody underneath [to rebound]? There are drives to the basket and there’s nobody there to contest it. With us, if you gave up a layup [to the other team], you were probably coming out of the game.

The guys playing today are also built differently, with different skills.

It’s just different rules and different ideas about play. These guys are amazing athletes. They work really hard, and they’re super-duper fast. But nobody wants to see that irresponsible crap go up. Let me give an example: It used to be if you missed three straight jump shots, that next [offensive] opportunity, you had to go to the basket or post up, and that was automatic. Now, they can miss 10 straight shots, and it doesn’t matter. It is what it is.

When you were playing or coaching in the NBA, is it true that after every season, whether you were in New York or Chicago, you and your wife, Sheri, and your kids would come back to Sacramento? [Bill and Sheri—who met at Joseph Kerr Middle School and started dating in high school—maintained homes in Folsom and El Dorado Hills during much of Bill’s NBA career.]

Yeah, it was a good trip back home. As the family got bigger, I think at one point in time we had a van, so we would just drive home and enjoy the summer here. The kids would play sports. I’d work out. That’s not a bad drive, especially coming from Chicago.

You still make Sacramento your home, now in Gold River. What is it that keeps you drawn to the area?

Where am I going to go? [Laughs] I’m not a humidity guy, so that takes out three-quarters of the country. I’m not a rain guy during the summer, so that takes care of the other part. This is where my family is—my sisters and cousins. And Sheri and I do stay busy. In addition to San Francisco, we go to Chicago at least once a month. We have six grandkids there, and we still have our restaurant Froggy’s [French Cafe] there. But this is where I grew up. This is it—this is the place to be.

This interview has been edited for length, flow and clarity. Living Life at the Center is available at Underground Books in Oak Park or at bill-cartwright.com.

You Might Also Like

The Heart of a Giant – Former outfielder and Giants manager Dusty Baker

Spirit Chaser – 10,000-meter Gold medalist Billy Mills