Game 38: Swen Nater - Nater's Taters
This Is Your Life was one weird ass show. Hosted by creator Ralph Edwards, each episode showcased the a brief live biography of the life of one individual, some famous (Milton Berle, Bette Davis), some regular Joes who went through some kind of trauma (a WWII soldier or Holocaust survivor). Like a bizarre mix of Punk’d, Candid Camera, and E!’s True Hollywood Stories, the subject of each episode had no idea they were about to be ambushed by a television host, a camera crew, a live studio audience, and surprise guests ranging from childhood friends to showbiz pals/enemies. Like I said, this was a really odd show.
Several years later, Edwards created a new show, It Could Be You, that resembled This Is Your Life but with a bigger focus on hardships and prizes and winning prizes based off your hardships. In September 1959, It Could Be You aired an episode featuring a woman who had immigrated from the Netherlands. Earlier that decade, she divorced her husband and left for Arizona with her new husband and youngest son. She promised to bring them with her one day, but never did. Her ex-husband dumped off their two remaining kids at a Dutch orphanage. They were the only children there whose parents were still alive. After several years, the mother moved to Long Beach and her friends in Arizona contacted It Could Be You to set the wheels in motion for a televised reunion of the children and their mother.
Soon enough, a nine year old Swen Nater -- future UCLA Bruin and Los Angeles Laker -- and his sister were met by a couple of American producers at their orphanage. They were flown (kidnapped?) to Los Angeles, put up in a Beverly Hills hotel, and then driven to a Hollywood studio. There, they stepped inside a miniature Dutch windmill as their mother and stepfather were brought on stage as “random” contestants chosen to play in a game for cash prizes. Minutes later, Swen and his sister stepped out of a miniature windmill and tearfully embraced their mother for the first time in years. Even by 1950s showbiz standards, the pretense for this reunion was beyond crass. When the big SURPRISE! moment happened in each episode of It Could Be You or This Is Your Life occurred, reactions ranged from confusion to denial to joy to annoyance.
The reaction by Swen’s stepfather was much more sinister. He had never planned for the kids to rejoin their mother. As punishment, he spent the next 10 years torturing Swen, who arrived in American with no knowledge of basketball or the English language. He beat him, forced him to only take cold showers, locked him in his room when he wasn’t at school, barred him from making friends, and refused to take him to the dentist, even though his molars were fully decayed. But as Swen grew to 6’11” and learned English with the help of Lakers games called by Chick Hearn, the one thing Swen’s stepfather couldn’t take away from him was also the one thing that served as his spiritual and financial escape: Basketball.
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Swen only played one season for the Lakers, as Kareem Abdul-Jabbar’s back-up during the 1983-1984 season. Ironically, Kareem was the reason Swen got a late start in the NBA. After getting drafted by the Milwaukee Bucks in 1973, Swen elected to play in the ABA because the Bucks already had a starting center: Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. It also didn’t hurt that the ABA offered him more money. But Swen wanted to “show what he could do.” He never got a chance to do that at UCLA because of another legendary Bruin center ahead of him in the depth chart: Bill Walton. But a giant, stoned redhead was nothing compared to the adversity he faced in his teen years.
Swen tried out for his high school team a decade earlier, but didn’t make it on the freshman team. The reason? His lack of shoes. The poor kid from Long Beach tried out shoeless and was sent home by the coach, even though he was already a towering figure. After high school, Swen tried out for the Cypress Junior College’s team and only made it because of his size. Swen’s guardian angel, the team’s assistant coach, not only convinced his stepfather to allow him to play, but he nudged the cruel man into driving Swen into L.A.’s rougher neighborhoods so that Swen could, essentially, get his ass kicked in the paint every Saturday. It worked. Swen got good enough that colleges across the nation recruited him. But when the greatest college coach of all time, John Wooden, asked him to join UCLA, the choice was easy.
Swen never started a game at UCLA. And when he was drafted by the Bucks, he became the first college player drafted in the first round despite never having started a game. But he did start two lifelong relationships with Walton and Wooden that lasted for decades. At a 2004 brunch for retired NBA players, Walton gave a hilarious speech about Swen’s life that included describing Jerry West -- a man who grew up impoverished in a West Virginia coal mining town -- as born with a “silver spoon in his mouth.” His long friendship with Wooden, who died in 2010, included multiple books co-authored by the coach and player, most notably a book of poems that Swen had written to his mentor.
After an 11 year career that included winning the ABA Rookie of the Year and joining the NBA’s 30-30 club -- 30 points & 30 rebounds in one game -- Nater retired from playing, but didn’t stop working within the game of basketball. He founded the basketball program at San Diego’s Christian Heritage College, serving as its athletic director, coach, and algebra teacher from 1985-1995. After leaving that job, he went to work for Costco as an assistant buyer in the sporting good’s section. And given his incredible life story, it should come as no surprise that he works the motivational speakers lecture circuit, giving speeches on how he escaped his abandonment by his parents and the cruelty of his stepfather to become not just a great basketball player, but a well-adjusted, kind, generous person.
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As I mentioned earlier, This Is Your Life would feature surprise guests from the lifetime of that episode’s subject’s existence. A similar thing happened to Swen, not on It Could Be You, but in the comments section of a Blogspot entry he wrote in 2014. After enrolling in Cypress Junior College, Swen’s stepfather eventually got fed up and demanded he drop basketball. Swen refused and moved in with the family of one of his teammates. That teammate, Mark Crossley, wrote the following message in 2018:
Swen lived with our family for a little over a year. Most definitely, he was like my big brother (tall), but I remember his kindness to this nerdy kid, I remember all of us going to his graduation and later his wedding. And I remember how proud my folks were for Swen's accomplishments in spite of the difficulties of his childhood. My son played street ball and daughter played high school basketball, motivated by Swen's story. -- Mark Crossley (Cowan Family, Cypress, Calif).
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Nater’s Taters
8 medium-large potatoes
2 sticks butter
Beau Monde seasoning (see replacement)
Pepper
Parmesan Cheese
Preheat oven to 450 degrees. Wash potatoes and slice (with skin on) ¼” to ½” thick. Arrange potato slices in a shallow baking pan. Melt butter and drizzle over potato slices. Sprinkle Beau Monde and pepper over slice to taste. Sprinkle generously with Parmesan cheese. Bake for 30 minutes or until tops of potatoes turn golden in color (longer for crisper potatoes). Remove from oven and transfer to serving platter.
Just like Monty Bancroft’s salmon, I don’t understand how something can have so many ingredients and then taste like none of the ingredients. For the Beau Monde seasoning, I mixed a substitute containing salt, pepper, onion powder, white pepper, ground cloves, ground bay leaf, nutmeg, allspice, and celery seed. But even though I covered the sliced potatoes in this mixture + fresh Parmesan and essentially fried it in butter for 35 minutes, the slices just tasted like potato. It had a great texture, slightly crunchy on the outside and fluffy in the middle. But how did it end up just tasting like potato? Anyway, we dipped it in Trader Joe’s fondue cheese for a New Year’s Day snack.
