Whatever Happened to Frankie King?
ON A COOL, EARLY SUMMER evening in June 2015, I was at the Friars Club in midtown Manhattan to celebrate my friend Talia Carner’s new novel, Hotel Moscow. I started talking with Talia’s husband, Ron Carner, and we quickly realized that we’d gone to rival Brooklyn public high schools—he to James Madison and I to Erasmus—and as soon as we discovered our mutual love of basketball, we did what aging Brooklyn hoop junkies usually do when they get together: we exchanged tales of local ballplayers we’d seen and played against—All-City and All-American players who had gone on to celebrated college and pro careers. And when we started naming players from our schools who played in the NBA—Rudy LaRusso from Madison, Billy Cunningham and Doug Moe from Erasmus—Ron stopped suddenly and asked if I’d ever seen Frankie King play.
“See him play?” I said. “He was the most exciting ballplayer I ever saw back then.” I added that I could still picture him clearly: a lefty, a shade under six feet tall. When he drove to the basket, nobody could stop him.
Ron said he was asking if I’d seen Frankie King play because King had passed away only a few weeks before—his family had placed an obituary in The New York Times. “For more than half a century,” Ron said, “we’ve all been wondering what happened to him, because Frankie just seemed to have fallen off the face of the earth.”
King had gone to Madison, and at the age of 15, he became the youngest player ever to make first-team All-City—and this at a time when New York, and Brooklyn in particular, was the basketball capital of the world. In those days, sportswriters were comparing King to some of the greatest college and pro players of all time, and every college in the country had been after him. The University of North Carolina recruited him to be a starting guard on a team that would eventually beat Wilt Chamberlain’s Kansas Jayhawks for the national championship. “But Frankie left North Carolina after only a few days—he never played a game,” Ron said. “The last I’d heard—this goes back a few years—somebody spotted him panhandling on the Bowery. Other guys told me they heard he’d enlisted in the Army, was put in the stockade, tried to escape, and was shot and killed. There were also rumors that he’d shot an M.P., and that he’d been Jimmy Hoffa’s bodyguard and was buried with Hoffa. And some guys heard that he’d been an enforcer for John Gotti.” In recent days, Ron and his friends had been calling one another, astonished to learn the truth: that for the past 60 years, Frankie King had been in New York, hiding out in plain sight.
Later that night, I found the obituary and learned something even more astonishing: King had been the author of more than 40 novels. That one of the greatest ballplayers of my generation had also been a prolific novelist sent me tumbling back to the years following World War II when the two great passions of my life were novels and sports. When I was nine years old, I wrote a 60-page novel that my mother typed out for me, and I would read it aloud, chapter by chapter, to my fourth-grade class at P.S. 246. When I wasn’t reading or writing stories, I was playing ball in schoolyards and
