When the Garden Was Eden (17 page)

It was, he said, “like fate. Like I was supposed to be back there in 1970.”

So even without Jackson, the Knicks’ bench was strong. If there was any cause for concern, it was in the middle, where Reed was showing early signs of breaking down. He didn’t like seeing Nate Bowman, Stallworth’s old teammate at Wichita State, playing in his place, and his minutes were piling up. Insiders worried that his knees were starting to go, even at what should have been the prime of his career. He was all of 27. No one wanted to think what might happen if they squandered yet another season.

ON OCTOBER 15, 1969, A WEDNESDAY
, an estimated one million antiwar protesters gathered on college campuses around the country for what was known as Vietnam Moratorium Day. Across the Atlantic, a young Rhodes scholar named Bill Clinton organized a demonstration at Oxford. The Knicks won a game against the Royals.

Before the game, Bradley talked DeBusschere into joining him at a downtown rally against the war, staged mostly by students from the University of Cincinnati and Xavier University. The two forwards had quickly become constant dinner companions on the road, dissimilar men from vastly different backgrounds who were forging a very special friendship. In Cincinnati, Bradley took the opportunity to chat up some of the students, listen to their complaints about the immorality of the war. DeBusschere wasn’t quite sure what to do. He was far less political than Bradley and not all that certain that he agreed with the protesters. But he istened to the chants and the speeches, impressed by the orderly and peaceful demonstrations.

The pacifism didn’t last. Once the game started that night, DeBusschere got into a shoving match with the Royals’ Tom Van Arsdale, a player he’d coached in Detroit and the identical twin of a former Knick, Dick. From the Royals’ bench, a rookie coach named Bob Cousy yelled to his man, “Next time DeBusschere shoves you, take his head off.”

DeBusschere shot back, “Why don’t
you
come out of retirement and try it?”

Cousy must have liked the idea. A month later, six years after quitting at the age of 41, he activated himself for spot duty just in time to try and keep New York from winning its 18th game in a row, a record held by Boston. In the
New York Times
on the morning of the game, in Cleveland, reporter Thomas Rogers noted that Cousy “was a member of Boston’s record-sharing team and having been reactivated as a player may put in some playing time in an effort to stop the New York charge.”

Cousy or no Cousy, Holzman’s team should have been stoked for the game, given its implications: the chance to snatch a line in history as if it were a cigar dangling from the jaws of Red Auerbach himself. It felt like “the seventh game of the playoffs,” Bill Bradley said.

Surprisingly, the Knicks came out flat and played what Bradley called a “lousy” first quarter, trailing by seven. DeBusschere was particularly unproductive, on the way to a 2-for-8 shooting night, the same numbers posted by Dick Barnett. Reed would take 22 shots and make only 8. Fortunately for Holzman, the Minutemen—Russell, Riordan, Stallworth, and even Nate Bowman—picked up the starters with a 32–22 second quarter. The game seesawed down the stretch, with the Royals led by Oscar Robertson’s 33 points and 10 assists and by ex-Knick Jumpin’ Johnny Green’s 19 points and 20 rebounds.

Since the last game between the two teams, Cousy had quickly recast Cincinnati from a team dominated by Robertson and Jerry Lucas into one that played tougher defense, ran a more uptempo offense, and shared the ball as though it couldn’t hit the ground. In other words, he had modeled his new team on the Celtics. But in trading Lucas, a gifted outside shooter and rebounder, to the San Francisco Warriors, Cousy had created some locker-room tension, if only because the deal didn’t sit well with Robertson. Lucas had been his costar and sidekick. Who the hell was Cousy to walk through the door
four games into the season
and send a mainstay like Lucas packing? All these Celtics acted like they had invented the damn game. Now the coach was
playing
?

Cousy spent the game in his sweat suit, for the most part letting Robertson do his thing. But with 1:49 left in the fourth quarter and the Royals clinging to a 3-point lead, Robertson fouled out. Enter the Cooz: here came the passing and ball-handling wizard to the scorer’s table, ready to roll.

“He was in his forties, hadn’t played in six years, and he put himself in—can you imagine that?” Robertson told me. He still couldn’t, bristling four decades later at the sheer audacity, waiting for the chance to sound off, if someone would just call and poke the scar from the old wound.

Cousy got to work right away. He found Norm Van Lier, a rookie guard, on the wing for a jumper. He made two free throws to give the Royals a 105–100 lead. To a man, the Knicks thought their streak and their chance to break the record were over. But the Royals gave them hope when Van Arsdale fouled Reed with 16 seconds to play, mercifully stopping the clock. Reed sank both free throws. And Coach Cousy, somewhere around midcourt, called his final time-out.

When play resumed, Cousy selected himself to inbound, hemmed in along the sideline near midcourt. “He put himself in because he didn’t trust anyone else, like he was trying to make a point: ‘I’ll show you how it’s done,’ ” Robertson said. “And then he was the one who turned the ball over—not once but twice in, like, ten seconds.”

The miracle began in Cousy’s eyes. On the inbounds play, the Knicks extended their defense to midcourt to challenge the pass—except for DeBusschere, who deliberately held back a step and a half from his man, Van Arsdale, while counting down from five. He knew Cousy had left himself without any remaining time-outs and would have to find someone open. With an instinctive feel for how much space he needed between himself and Van Arsdale, DeBusschere anticipated the release and angled his way between passer and receiver. The ball came to him like a lovesick puppy; he bounded downcourt and dropped in a layup for his second basket of the night, the biggest of the game. The score was 105–104, and those among the 10,438 fans at the Cleveland Arena who’d started moving toward the exit reconsidered.

From Robertson’s courtside view, the Royals were still in control. The NBA had no three-point line yet, so all they had to do was inbound, let the Knicks foul, and make two free throws for a 3-point lead. “Everyone knows you make the shortest pass and hold the ball,” he said. “But what does he do? He puts the ball up in the air. Man, this is a sore subject.”

Cousy risked a heave for Van Arsdale, beyond half-court. The pass was on target, but because the ball was in the air so long, the Knicks were able to swarm the receiver, like free safeties. Van Arsdale was what the Old Knicks liked to call their pigeon. He came down with Cousy’s pass, ripe to be plucked. Reed knocked the ball loose and Walt Frazier picked it up. He barreled downcourt, pulled up from about ten feet, and threw up a brick but had the presence of mind to follow his shot. At the rim, he was fouled by the hapless Van Arsdale. Under long-abandoned penalty rules on shooting fouls, Frazier had three chances to make two. He didn’t need the third.

“They never touched the net,” he said. “I had ice water in my veins.” There were two seconds left. The Royals tried another inbounds pass, but that, too, was picked off, this time by Reed. The game-ending sequence was like something out of
Hoosiers
. The Knicks triumphantly ran off, their streak having reached a record-breaking 18.

On the one-hour delayed telecast back to New York via WOR Channel 9, the broadcaster Bob Wolff, who had called Don Larsen’s perfect game in the 1956 World Series and the groundbreaking Giants-Colts sudden death overtime NFL championship game in 1958, called it “one of the miracles of basketball… Folks, I’ve never seen anything like it.”

Looking back, the gentlemanly Wolff was less critical than Robertson of Cousy’s decision to put himself in. He chalked it up to the mind-set of a man who stubbornly believed in his Hall of Fame basketball IQ. To him, the moral of the story was that five great basketball minds had outwitted one. “In my opinion, the Knicks were the smartest team ever assembled,” Wolff said. “Their ability to anticipate on the floor was amazing.”

Robertson, conversely, wondered whether Cousy was just selfish. Was he too eager to protect the Celtics’ share of the record that he had helped set? Did he have Auerbach—the mentor he always affectionately addressed by his given name, Arnold—in mind? It still annoyed Oscar that nobody back then had dared question the tactic, at least not that he recalled. “No alarm, no criticism in the media about how a guy at that age could do that,” he said.

Such was the license of a Celtic after Boston’s despotic rule, those 11 championships in 13 years. But in the end, Cousy’s comeuppance was really no more than a subplot to what had transpired in Cleveland. The real story was much bigger than one man’s hurried passes or hubris. To the Knicks and their followers, the 18th straight victory was more than a milestone or even a miracle; it was symbolic of what Holzman had been preaching—team defense—from the day he took over. “The game in Cleveland pretty much convinced us that we were capable of anything,” Frazier said.

The next night, back home against the Detroit Pistons, the Knicks were promptly outscored 35–20 in the fourth quarter and lost by 12, a measure of redemption and revenge for the departed duo of Bellamy and Komives.

It didn’t matter. The Knicks had breached the record books, and not for the last time. The team left the court while a Garden crowd stood in an uproarious ovation still echoing throughout New York City.

EASY AS IT
is
TO CHARACTERIZE
the Old Knicks as the perfect blend of basketball brainpower and abilities, even they weren’t immune to internal conflict. It is the nature of all teams to be challenged from within, said Bradley. Only the best of them can ensure that those “conflicts never turned to bitterness.”

They beat the Phoenix Suns in a neutral-site game in Salt Lake City, where DeBusschere and Bradley had done their snowmobiling with Robert Redford, then the Knicks moved on to Detroit to play the Pistons again during the second week of January. In their previous meeting, on Christmas night in New York, the Knicks had produced another of those revelatory moments. Down a point with one second left, Frazier inbounding the ball from the sideline, Dick Barnett shook Reed loose with a back screen on Bellamy, and Frazier delivered a perfect looping pass that Reed laid in off glass for the game winner.

They pulled into Detroit with a 30–10 record. With three days off between the Suns and Pistons games, the players had a chance to get away from one another, have some room to breathe. Russell spent some time in Ann Arbor, where he had attended college. On that Thursday afternoon, January 15, he barged into practice—late and full of road rage.

A few minutes outside Ann Arbor, he had been stopped by police and ordered out of the car with a gun pointed at his head. The explanation he was given—after producing a driver’s license and only then being recognized as the beloved Wolverine—was that an African American male had broken out of prison in the vicinity. There were roadblocks everywhere. All law enforcement personnel in the area were under orders to look for a black man with a mustache. Russell had a mustache.

Russell’s teammates were appalled by the blatant profiling and were naturally sympathetic when they heard his story—at least until Russell continued to vent with his elbows and forearms during a scrimmage. He especially made a target of Don May, the second-year forward and one of five white teammates (excluding the injured Phil Jackson) on the racially mixed team.

It was no secret that Russell believed he had lost his starting position unfairly to Bradley while he was injured. “I kill [that] white boy in practice,” his friend Stan Asofsky recalls him complaining. He missed the theatrical grandeur of being introduced with the starters. Sometimes he didn’t feel like much of a contributor. Asofsky and others felt for Russell but didn’t agree with him. The team was playing too well with Russell coming off the bench.

No one wanted to believe there was anything deep-seated like racial animus between Russell and Bradley—least of all Bradley.

“In that whole drama, I don’t think race was very relevant,” he said. “It was people with certain talent, and the year when Cazzie came back, he and I were in this competition that Holzman orchestrated. I always thought that Red got the best out of both of us.” Inside the locker room, Russell’s likability was evidenced by the fact that he was a constant target of teasing for his prodigious workout regimen (though Frazier dryly noted that Russell mostly worked on the one phase of his game that was already formidable: his shot). There was no discussion of the subject between Bradley and Russell, just a spirited daily competition that was fraught with implication. Perception or reality, Bradley knew it posed a threat to the team. “I always tried to never say anything or do anything that didn’t show full respect for him and his abilities and, quite frankly, for his character,” he said.

As delicate as things were in the real world, one might expect the controversy to have splintered the locker room across racial lines. But people—his teammates included—looked at Bradley differently than the average white player. No team outsider identified with and befriended the black players more than Cal Ramsey, but he also vouched wholeheartedly for Bradley, having worked with him in community service programs. He knew Bradley would show up whenever anyone asked him to spend time with at-risk kids, or to speak at a rally for their sports teams.

“One time there was a game in Philadelphia the night before and they got back about three o’clock in the morning,” Ramsey said. “I remember it vividly: the weather was bad, a big rainstorm that lasted into the next day. The rally was at eight
A.M.
at the school. I’m walking down the street on my way, thinking there is no way he’s coming, figuring out what I’m going to say at the rally.” Ramsey turned a corner and there was Bradley, tucked under an umbrella, wearing his tattered fatigues jacket. “How could anyone make a racial issue out of the thing with Cazzie when you had a guy like that?” Ramsey said.