My biggest win was getting the meal money bumped from $5 to $7.

The MVP award was very satisfying in terms of personal accomplishments, but the championship was the most important thing of all.

There were riots in just about every game we played with Syracuse.

I was literally fabricated over in France and born about six months after the boat landed at Ellis Island. This was the heart of the Depression. For the first 12 years of my life we lived in a terrible ghetto on the East River.

It also didn't take me long to decide that Tri-Cities wasn't for me, and that I wasn't going to go there to play basketball.

I was the original socially depraved shy ghetto kid.

These days I smile benignly at the fights that I see in NBA games. There aren't any broken noses or black eyes, which happened quite often when I played.