The Big E Wants An Mvp

"It was 69-69 and I got the ball down low on the left side," he says. "I was going to shoot my turnaround when I was fouled by Jim Nielsen. A lot of people thought I was going to miss because I was a 60% foul shooter. I didn't even think about being nervous because I had the game right in my hands—swish, swish, 71-69. And then, in the last seconds, I acted like a guard, dribbling around and then passing off. I completely outplayed Kareem. I scored 39, he scored 15. I had 15 rebounds and he had 12. And then he tried to make a big deal out of some eye injury. But I know that it wasn't the eye that was bothering him."

Hayes' rookie season with the San Diego Rockets was like an extension of his college career. He was the Western Division starting center in the NBA All-Star game, ahead of Chamberlain. He led the league in scoring, finished fourth in rebounding and carried the Rockets, a 15-67 expansion team the year before, into the playoffs. He had come out of his shell and was running around Hollywood and Las Vegas with movie stars and appearing on television shows. Everything was beautiful.

The next year things changed drastically. Some of his teammates, particularly Forward Don Kojis, Hayes believes, became jealous of his celebrity, his money and his special relationship with owner Bob Breitbard. Kojis demanded a trade and dissension grew. Coach Jack McMahon, now the assistant at Philadelphia, was caught in the middle. When the team's record was 9-17, McMahon was fired. Hayes was blamed. Into the breach came Hannum, a caustic drill-sergeant type, who had had successful NBA coaching stints in St. Louis, Philadelphia and San Francisco.

"His thing was 'I'm gonna break him'—like I'm a horse," Hayes says. "So every little thing I do, he jumps on me. He's going to make me an example. He would holler and curse at me all the time. It was 'Hayes this' and 'Hayes that.' Hayes! Hayes! Hayes!"

"He was spoiled," says Hannum, now in the construction business in California. "Because of his relationship with the owner, I had no authority with him. I guess the climate in pro sports was changing and I was not willing to change with it. Hayes was exactly the kind of player I did not want. He's a front-runner. Put him in a situation where there's tension and he does not face it with courage. Give him a challenge and he'll always find some excuse to fold. I still believe it. Even last year, the Bullets won despite him rather than because of him."

The following year the Rockets were 40-42 and missed the playoffs by one game. Hannum wanted Hayes gone, but Breitbard refused. When Hannum quit to join Denver in the ABA, it was widely assumed and reported that Hayes got him fired. "It was always, 'Hayes got the coach fired,' " says Hayes. "They used to say the same thing about Wilt. Well, Wilt used to say, 'Oh yeah? Well how many did I hire?' "

Hayes was miserable in his second and third seasons in San Diego. Newspapers regularly blasted him when the Rockets lost. It was then he made the mistake of engaging in a running battle with a San Diego Union reporter. "Every morning he would have written something else about me," Hayes says, "and every night I would be on radio or TV saying something about him. Every day, he and I. It got ridiculous. It was the ultimate sin. I should have known then I couldn't win. Now I do know, so I keep quiet.

"All of a sudden the thing that's been my only joy in my whole life—going to the gym, playing ball, exploding, setting myself free—had become an agony. I was totally unhappy, disgusted with it all. I was taking stomach pills, sleeping pills, I lived on Alka-Seltzer, Turns, Rolaids. I always had a pocketful of them. I used to wake up in the middle of the night and think I was dying. One day I read one of those stories about me and I said to myself, 'Wow, where does it all end? The best thing to do is kill myself.' I lived up in the hills of La Jolla and I'd be driving home late at night—I had this fast car—and the thought of just running it off the road was always with me."

It seemed as if Hayes' problems were over during the summer of 1971 when he learned that the Rockets were moving to his beloved Houston. But the relief was short-lived. His new coach was Tex Winter, an NBA rookie who had spent the previous 24 years coaching at Marquette, Kansas State and the University of Washington. "He was a very nice man," says Hayes, "but he treated the players like they were on scholarship."

"It was as much my fault as it was his," says Winter. "I really thought I could coach the same way as I did in college. That didn't work with Elvin." Winter's idea was to convert Hayes, one of the greatest scoring machines ever to play the game, into a passing center. And he would have Hayes pass off to such luminaries as Cliff Meely, Stu Lantz and Dick Gibbs.