When the Garden Was Eden (14 page)

Sipping coffee in a quiet hotel lounge in Midtown Manhattan, Russell recounted the quip and followed up with his familiar hearty laugh. He was there to talk about his new book,
Red and Me
, while I attempted to steer the conversation toward Russell’s coaching showdown with the other Red in the 1969 division final.

That series turned out to be the biggest disappointment of Holzman’s career. “That was supposed to be our year, not theirs,” he confided to Pearlstein. In his final go-round as player-coach, Russell, not surprisingly, saw things differently. Holzman, he said, let six more regular-season victories delude him into thinking that the Knicks were the favorite. The Celtics, he argued, had merely been pacing themselves, not worried about playoff seeding; they were lying in wait among the divisional weeds.

“I think, in my mind, I outcoached the Knicks in that series,” he said, before setting out, in surprising detail, to explain how.

“First off, I had a lot of respect for those guys, but I also knew what we had done,” Russell said. “That was in the books, too. I had a team that knew how to play, okay? When people talk about the better team, they usually mean personnel, not team. I had one that knew how to play half-court, uptempo. Now, in making my plan for that series, I decided the best player they had was Walt Frazier, and I wanted to attack him. He was the only guy I thought who could guard Sam [Jones] without help. So in the first game, I looked at the stats—they had beaten us six out of seven times, and I had averaged like six points, about four or five shots. So Willis was able to help out, back up everybody. First game, I came out looking to score, not because I cared about scoring but to make Willis pay attention. I always felt that Wilt was the only guy who could guard me when I wanted to score. So Willis was over here with me, there was no trap over there. The flow of that defense was disrupted. We won the first game with relative ease, and the beauty of that today is that they still don’t know what happened.”

After so many games, so many years, and, yes, so much success, Russell could be excused if memory wasn’t serving correctly. The record shows he scored only 10 points in Game 1, though his typically suffocating interior defense did spearhead the 108–100 Celtics victory at Madison Square Garden—a victory that erased the Knicks’ hard-earned home-court advantage. But there was a strategic move by Russell that indeed made a documentable difference: inserting Emmette Bryant, the former Knick, into his starting backcourt.

The Knicks had lost Bryant to the expansion Phoenix team the previous spring, but he’d wound up in Boston after refusing to play for the Suns. Nowadays, it’s rare that a player would reject an opportunity to play in sun-splashed Arizona. Bryant expressed his displeasure in no uncertain terms. “I said, ‘The desert? Oh God, no, I’m an asphalt guy, from Chicago,’ ” he told me from his home in—where else?—Chicago. “I told them, ‘I’ll quit before I go there.’ Then that summer, Auerbach approached me at Kutsher’s [Country Club in the Catskills]. K. C. Jones had just retired. He told me, ‘We’ll try to work something out and bring you in, but you have to promise to shave off that beard.’ I told him, ‘No problem.’ Those days, everyone wanted to go to Boston because of the playoff money.”

As Bryant remembered it, Russell put him into the lineup just before the playoffs, replacing Larry Siegfried. This was a typically iconoclastic statement by Russell. Bryant, a black player, was bumping a popular white player in a city that was not exactly the stronghold of racial harmony and honor. Russell’s reward was a near triple double by Bryant in Game 1 against the Knicks: 13 points, 11 rebounds, and 8 assists. In Game 4, with the Knicks making a strong bid to reclaim the home-court edge, Bryant iced a 97–96 Celtics victory with two free throws after Reed missed a jumper with eight seconds left.

“Then we got to the sixth game in Boston,” Russell said, picking the narrative up with the Celtics leading 3–2.

Now, I watched the fifth game, and Frazier had figured it out, okay? So I watched the way he was playing Sam, the way he was moving his feet. The whole series, I had been low post. The sixth game, I went high post. All the adjustments they had made were useless to them. Every play that was for Sam, Frazier ran into three picks, and because I was a good passer, we had good prospects for a layup with Sam or John [Havlicek] or Satch [Sanders]. So Frazier says, “I’ll go behind the pick and get him as he’s coming by.” Now Sam’s catching and shooting that little bank shot. Now Frazier’s thinking, “I’ll flash and make Sam go wider.” Now I’ve got the ball, and if you remember that cover photo in
Sports Illustrated
, I’d turn and take one dribble and have a layup. Now we’re back where we started. And Sam killed them.

Jones piled up 29 points as the Celtics closed out the series with a 106–105 victory, and Boston went on to a stunning win on the Lakers’ home floor in Game 7 of the Finals. It was Russell’s 11th title in 13 years—and his last. Again, contrary to Russell’s version of events, the point must be made that Frazier was suffering from a groin pull and by Game 6 was limited to 29 minutes. “I couldn’t run, man,” he said, dismissing Russell’s claim that Holzman and the Knicks had been outfoxed.

But the tense and hard-fought series only convinced the Knicks that they really did have an opportunity to be the next big thing, Russell or no Russell. In its postgame report on the last game the following morning, the
New York Times
noted how Frazier and the Knicks had sat around the cramped Boston Garden locker room downing cans of beer. Rather than drowning their sorrows, it seemed as if they were toasting their future.

While Auerbach and Russell puffed away on victory cigars, there was at least one Celtic who wasn’t about to bluster or blow smoke in the Knicks’ faces. That was Bryant, who had more right to gloat than anyone after coming up big again in Game 6, scoring 19 points. Looking back, he said that no matter how ecstatic he was to be going to the NBA Finals, closing in on a title, he was too fond of his ex-teammates, Reed especially, not to keep his emotions in check as he made his way around their cramped, foul-smelling locker room, shaking hands, lingering finally by the dressing stall of his first pro roomie and friend.

“You guys played a beautiful series,” he said.

Reed shook his head, in mock disgust.

“Can’t believe you’re getting a championship before me,” he said.

Bryant gave the big man a hug.

“Be patient,” he said. “You guys are next.”

NEW YORK WAS ON A HOT STREAK. TWO DAYS AFTER THE KNICKS OPENED
the 1969–70 NBA season with a 25-point drubbing of Seattle at home, the Amazin’ Mets won the World Series by polishing off the heavily favored Orioles. It was the second major sports championship of the calendar year. In the nine months after the Jets (then of the AFL) had won Super Bowl III, New York had attracted the eyes and ears of what seemed like every sports fan in the country. Beneath the celebration, though, the city was divided. Yankees fans, myself included, were humbled.

As a young child in the early sixties, I had rather enjoyed the Mets as cute expansionist puppies who couldn’t stop peeing on the carpet and chasing their own tails. It was easy to fancy them as hopeless wonders while counting on my beloved Yankees to play baseball as God and Joe DiMaggio had intended. But by 1969 the Bronx Bombers were has-beens of the highest order and I was sick to my stomach watching this tinker-toy team ascend the throne typically occupied by my pre-adolescent heroes, Mickey Mantle and Whitey Ford.

Somewhat paradoxically, I had by then developed a boy crush on the inimitable Joe Willie Namath, who had pulled the toupee off the figurative head of the avuncular NFL, as he had famously predicted. In the case of the Jets, I believe my aversion to change was mitigated by the cultural divide between the two sports. Still in its formative years, not yet America’s hierarchal kingpin with its original social networking system known as the tailgate, pro football did not unpack for an annual months-long residence in my brain. It was never a constant of daily life; the NFL Giants had no emotional hold on me.

Only the Knicks could unite the metropolis. Only the Knicks, with their home games limited to the earliest cable subscribers, could create their own buzz in bars all over Manhattan. Only they could link the lunch-pail commuters of the outer boroughs with downtown’s wealthiest power brokers, the denizens of Harlem with those made famous by Hollywood.

As Bill Bradley pointed out to me, few Mets were seen around town once their season ended. Besides Namath, the Jets were largely unrecognizable, like most fully costumed football players. And the American Basketball Association’s Nets (so named to rhyme with the Jets and Mets) weren’t exactly the picture of glamour amid the flies and mice of Long Island. Phil Jackson, a Manhattan scene regular, argued that the Old Knicks were more visible, more tangible. “We had more personalities,” he said, adding that they were city dwellers who took the train to work and interacted with fans in ways that today’s NBA stars would not comprehend, or dare to mimic without HBO-worthy entourages.

“There were times I would get on the Long Island Rail Road at my stop in Little Neck in the morning and save seats for Phil, who lived in Bayside, and for Mike Riordan, who lived in Flushing,” said Gwynne Bloomfield, Red Holzman’s secretary. “People would say, ‘You can’t hold seats,’ and I would tell them, ‘But it’s for Phil Jackson and Mike Riordan.’ They’d say, ‘Yeah, right,’ but then they’d get on and you’d see their jaws just drop. Back then, it was so different. Those guys were really part of the community.”

Rich, middle class, or poor, there wasn’t a Manhattan neighborhood that wouldn’t welcome the Old Knicks. Long before ’69–70, Reed would take the subway up to Harlem and put his reputation on the line against Rucker League legends like Earl “the Goat” Manigault and other school-yard rats eager to dunk in the face of the Knicks’ main man. Bradley, too, hustled into the park on the occasional steamy summer evening, slipping into his basketball gear behind a tree, ready to risk being undressed as the foolhardy paleface.

On any court, and especially under the hot Madison Square Garden lights, these were grown-ups in skimpy shorts, playing with a raw competitiveness and without worry of injury. “What we were doing was taking place in the heart of the city, Midtown Manhattan,” Dick Barnett said. “It felt like more of a cultural experience than the other sports. Basketball players are much closer to the fans. Because you can see the sweat coming off them, the expressions on their face, it was more of a personal experience.”

More than most, Stanley Asofsky and Freddy Klein could vouch for how up close those player-fan relationships could become with the right connection or karma. The two basketball-mad New Yorkers, whose decades-long relationship began with a fistfight during a pickup game, had enjoyed the view from courtside at the Garden since the mid-sixties, retaining their seats with a written appeal to Ned Irish when the team switched from the old Garden to the new. It’s likely that nobody has seen more Knicks games than Asofsky, at the time an inventory control executive for a CBS publishing division, or Klein, a Manhattan restaurateur.

“It all started with Cazzie Russell at the 92nd Street Y, early in his career,” Asofsky said. “He wasn’t getting enough minutes, and he wanted the workout. The guy was a workout freak. So I said, ‘Come to our Y.’ He said, ‘Are there ballplayers there?’ ”

Mostly there were young and middle-age wannabes who were thrilled to have a professional athlete in their midst. “I used to feed Cazzie for jumpers,” Asofsky said. “He was crazy about working on his shot. We’d go into the small gym at the 92nd Street Y and he’d hit 20 in a row. I’d tell him, ‘That’s bullshit, you’re standing still.’ So we’d go full-court, I’d hit him on the run, and he’d make another 20 in a row.”

Before long, Asofsky had made himself a new friend. After the workout they would shower and walk down to Papaya King on 86th and Third, talking sports and life, even women. Asofsky likes telling the story of setting Russell up with a “gorgeous receptionist” who had been distracting the guys at the office.

“Cazzie was not only a very religious guy but a nut about his health and body,” Asofsky said. Three weeks after he introduced them, the receptionist barged into his office. She told him she was willing to sleep with Russell but that he’d told her he couldn’t waste energy during the season. “I think your friend must be crazy,” she told him. Having had a daily look at the receptionist, Asofsky pretty much agreed.

But that was Cazzie, Asofsky said: a walking enigma, endearing but strange. Then his even stranger teammate started coming around. “Cazzie must have told Barnett about the Y, because after a while Dick showed up,” Asofsky said. Freddy Klein remembered the workouts with Barnett being more like wrestling than basketball, with a drill that would make today’s coaches, general managers, and owners apoplectic. “Barnett would get the ball and he’d want three guys around him,” Klein said. “He’d count down—five, four, three, two, one—and then we were supposed to hit him. On the arm, the shoulder, wherever. He’d still make the shots.”

How great a percentage Barnett really made was beside the point; it was the memory of the interaction that hit nothing but net. Asofsky, Klein, and the others believed they were doing their share as committed loyalists, as ultimate fans. They were pushing Barnett for those tense playoff battles when he would have to drive in heavy NBA traffic with the game and maybe the season on the line. They felt like Knicks themselves.

BACK IN THE LATE SIXTIES
, a young attorney named David Stern, just a few years out of Columbia Law School, was working for a giant of the profession named George Gallantz at the New York firm Proskauer Rose. Among other clients, Gallantz had maintained a long association as outside general counsel of the NBA. It was a role that had originated in the late fifties when Gallantz represented the league in a $3 million suit filed by Jack Molinas, a onetime Columbia star banned by the NBA for betting on games when he played for the Fort Wayne Pistons. Stern idolized Gallantz and loved pro basketball. Within a few years, in the early seventies, he put up his hand when Gallantz needed someone to work exclusively on the struggling league’s account. At the time, the players’ union was mounting legal challenges to the league’s labor practices. More than anything, the NBA commissioner, Larry O’Brien, needed a good lawyer.