There was a time, not long before Michael Jordan, when Norm Van Lier was the best guard who’d ever played for the Bulls and was worshiped by basketball fans all over Chicago.
Some might see a contradiction between what he’s practiced and what he preaches, but he’s really quite consistent. He runs from no argument, he hides nothing of his past. He’s the freshest, most original voice in local sports broadcasting, the envy of the opposition, the only sports-talk host around with something interesting and entertaining to say. He’s got his own unique style, his own worldview. When he revs up, and he revs up a lot, he has a rollicking singsongy rhythm that’s contagious. Callers and sidekicks can’t help but imitate his punch-punch patter or adopt such Van Lierisms as “but, hey, that’s just me.”
It’s important to mention all of this, as stereotypical as it sounds, because Van Lier mentions it so much himself. “It was the upbringing that made me who I am,” he says. “I take crap from no one. Yet I respect you. I respect tradition. I was raised in the kind of family where they expected us to come home from school on time and eat dinner together, respect your elders and don’t talk back. No matter what kind of foolishness I did, I told my father the truth. I’ve never run from what I’ve done. That’s a code I live by and I learned it in Midland.”
Now, I must admit I’m not unbiased in this account. When Van Lier joined the team I was an awkward adolescent at Evanston Township High School, and Bulls basketball was my escape. Van Lier was my favorite. I wrote about him in my diary. I got a friend, Josh, to drive me to the Stadium on picture day and I waited in line for my chance to be photographed with Van Lier. I still have that photo–me looking over his shoulder as he autographs a Bulls team poster, which I hung on my bedroom wall.
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Van Lier’s greatest moment came in the 1973 playoffs against the defending world champion Los Angeles Lakers. In game six, down three games to two, facing elimination, with Walker out with an injured leg and Love saddled with fouls, and the Stadium rocking, Van Lier outplayed them all. “Stormin’ Norman came up with more loose balls than the rackman in a billiard academy, finishing with 10 steals,” wrote Bob Logan of the Tribune. “Afterwards, as Motta noted, ‘you saw the Van Lier we’ve been watching all season.’ And in between dashes down the floor to set up the offense, he put the clamps on the Lakers’ Gail Goodrich, limiting him to two baskets in 11 shots and four points.”
The Bulls won 101-93, and back they went to LA for game seven, a game still painful to recall. They led by six points with three minutes left, and then they fell apart. It came down to one play with seconds remaining and their lead sliced to one. The only Bull not afraid to shoot, Van Lier drove the lane, but his shot was blocked by Wilt Chamberlain, who scooped up the loose ball and hit Goodrich for a game-winning layup. In his account of the game, Logan called that play “the cruelest blow of all.” But he didn’t blame Van Lier, who scored 28 points, grabbed 14 rebounds, and “did everything humanly possible to carry the Bulls thru in a tremendous performance. Everywhere the ball was, there was Van Lier. It seemed he had turned things around in the greatest one-man show since Horatius did his stuff at that bridge, but it was not to be.”
On and off the court he defied the racial stereotypes of his day. Basketball was just starting to define itself as the black man’s game. Dr. J., Jordan’s precursor, was emerging as the paramount star. As for Van Lier, he was–in the words of an Ebony article written by Bill Rhoden, “an anachronism and a ‘white sheep’ in the milieu of pro basketball, a sport which boasts as its most prized characteristics, silky smoothness, grace, economy of movement and, of course, ‘cool.’
