When the Garden Was Eden (23 page)

As in most NBA cases pitting coach against star, Chamberlain outlasted van Breda Kolff. But here he was, one year later, facing yet another left-handed Louisianan, another smaller man who, like Bill Russell, was celebrated for his big heart—in this case for just walking onto the floor. The circumstances surrounding Reed were enough to test the most resolute of players—and Chamberlain was not that. From the moment he stationed himself near the court to observe Reed warming up, Chamberlain’s body language seemed to ask: Could a basketball game really be this important?

Consider the plight of the Stilt: he’d made his own accelerated and thoroughly commendable rehabilitation and comeback from the torn knee tendons, working hard at the end of the regular season to get into game shape for the playoffs. But who would extol him now for beating up a virtual cripple? It was another in a career of no-win situations. Chamberlain was always supposed to win it all but most often didn’t, even back when he centered a Kansas team that was considered a sure national champion—until Chamberlain and the Jayhawks were edged by North Carolina in the 1957 title game. For much of his career, Wilt seemed trapped in a basketball purgatory between the roles of unstoppable force and committed—or Russellesque—team player.

Chamberlain intensely disliked mind games within the game and especially what he considered to be simplistic media typecasting of him as Goliath in short pants. Many people who knew him and were genuinely fond of him believed that his boastful side had more to do with deep-seated insecurities than self-confidence. He was sensitive and quixotic and disinclined to appear consumed by basketball. He wanted to be where the action was. The day before Martin Luther King’s August 28, 1963, speech at the Lincoln Memorial, he called his friend Cal Ramsey. “We’ve got to go to Washington tomorrow,” he said, and so they did, with Chamberlain rising above 200,000 civil rights supporters, while Mahalia Jackson and Joan Baez, unmistakable to the masses, sang songs of peace and love.

Unable to string titles together like his rival, Chamberlain went out of his way to convince people that basketball did not define him. He took the opportunity to lecture reporters on the dangers of fueling America’s obsession with winning at all costs—a worthy discussion, then and now, but made at a rather questionable juncture: soon after his 45-point, 27-rebound performance in Game 6. Teammates rolled their eyes, chagrined at the latest iteration of Wilt being Wilt. Was he already making excuses for what he feared or expected would happen in New York? One of his teammates told
Sports Illustrated
: “You play the whole season to win, don’t you? Isn’t that what competition is all about?” Another one, requesting anonymity for fear of coming off disrespectful to a deceased man, told me, “We were dumbfounded. For the second year in a row, it was as if he was saying, ‘It doesn’t really matter.’ After we all—Wilt included—had worked so damn hard to get there.”

LONG BEFORE THERE WAS MARS BLACKMON
or Reggie Miller, before he commanded a row of seats priced by the thousands, Spike Lee, at the age of 13, had the most prized Knicks ticket ever … and it was free.

“My father’s lawyer—a Mr. Eichelberry—lived down the street from us in Fort Greene and he had season tickets,” Lee said. “He knew how much I loved the Knicks, and he promised me that if there was a Game 7, I would get one.”

Shelton Jackson Lee was born in Atlanta but moved to Brooklyn as a young child. His mother, a teacher, nicknamed him Spike. His father, a jazz bassist who played for the likes of Bob Dylan and Aretha Franklin, got him his first autograph when Walt Frazier wandered into a club he was performing in. “You’re my son’s favorite,” Bill Lee told the Knicks’ stylish guard.

Mr. Eichelberry’s tickets were in the yellow section, third level, a marked improvement from the nosebleed seats of blue, where the young Spike typically sat after scraping together the money for a student-discounted ticket.

“At that age I’d go to about ten games a year,” Lee said. He would continue going into adolescence, often showing up alone as a teenager and endearing himself to Holzman’s secretary, Gwynne Bloomfield. “He’d literally be the first one in the building when the doors opened, this sweet skinny kid who kept talking about how much he loved the Knicks,” she said. “After a while, we’d try to find him a seat downstairs, give him the stats. He’d be sitting there an hour before the game and Red would come out and say, ‘Who the hell is this kid?’ I’d say, ‘He’s okay, he’s here every night.’ ”

Getting to courtside became more difficult as he got older, when a determined and already media-savvy Lee would work his way down to the baseline during warm-ups and shout out to the likes of Bernard King and the young Patrick Ewing. He’d chat up reporters before being shooed away by security personnel. He came to the next home game and the one after that, promoting himself as a New York University—trained film student, soon to debut his first full-length feature.

Walking down Broadway on the Upper West Side with my wife one afternoon in 1986, there it was:
She’s Gotta Have It
, by that Spike guy from the Garden. We joined the line that had formed outside.

Within the movie, the world was introduced to the Mars Blackmon character, soon to be Michael Jordan’s commercial foil in a series of Nike commercials. Several years after attaching himself to His Airness, Lee would become ingloriously entangled with the mouthy Miller. During an unforgettable playoff night in 1994, Indiana Bones erupted for 25 fourth-quarter points and turned on Lee, his courtside tormentor, in demonstrative and vulgar retribution. Lee instantly replaced the Lakers loyalist Jack Nicholson as the nation’s most conspicuously famous hoops fan.

But he swears he would trade all the notoriety and perhaps the courtside proximity for another Knicks championship sometime in his adult lifetime, though he believes nothing will ever match Game 7.

“I’ve only been to one other game like that—the first one in New Orleans after Katrina, Saints versus Falcons,” he said. “It’s one of those things where you can see it in the body language of a team: ‘Why do we have to be the one scheduled to play here this game? Why us?’ That’s where the Lakers were that night. They knew there was no way they were going to beat the Knicks in the Garden.”

Lee was one of the many who claimed to have “instinctively turned” to look at the Lakers and seen them transfixed, with expressions of despair, after Reed walked on. How that was possible from the yellow seats or any beyond those in the first few rows is another story, one about the repetitive and hypnotic powers of legend.

While Lee’s films have often brazenly confronted race in America, he said it wasn’t a black-white thing that night, even though West had largely been the media’s sole focus. Rooting for the Old Knicks was, for Lee, largely a color-blind experience (though don’t get him started on how the Knicks organization and the basketball world at large shortchanged Dick Barnett).

“In Fort Greene, most of the kids thought that Cazzie should start over Bradley,” he said. “I used to argue with them that Bradley deserved to start because he fit in better and that Cazzie was better coming off the bench. I love Bill Bradley. He’s my man. I had a fund-raiser for him at my house. But I loved Walt Frazier more. I mean, I don’t care who the Lakers put on him that night: no one was going to stop him.”

Also a Mets fan back in the day, Lee said he ran onto the field in celebration three times during the 1969 season and that he skipped school three days in a row to attend Games 3, 4, and 5 of the World Series. He relished Joe Namath and the Jets. But in terms of shaping his lifelong sports addiction and his willingness to go anywhere for a fix, nothing made an impression on him like those Knicks, and especially Game 7.

“Of all the sports teams in New York, they may be the most beloved, the one we can be most proud of,” he said. “I mean, look at the kind of game they played—it was great to have that kind of sharing, especially in those days. But it wasn’t just how they played; it was who they were, all the things they all went on to do.

“That whole year or so seemed like a dream, and by the time we got to the Knicks, you just believed they had to win, that it was fate. That night, it was pandemonium. And I think it meant something more than it would now, because in those days you were a fan of your home team. Today, you see every team on television every night. You can follow any team or player. It’s just different.”

Not for him, he said, though the sight of Lee fraternizing with visiting superstars, the shoe-company chosen ones, has become part of the Garden scenery and show—and a self-promotional career score. But when we spoke during the 2009–10 season—another miserable one for the Knicks—Lee was still ruing the missed opportunities of the Patrick Ewing era, when he had to watch Hakeem Olajuwon and the Houston Rockets snatch a championship away in Houston (he was there) and the San Antonio Spurs win their first NBA title on the Garden floor five years later.

By the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century, Lee had already spent a not-so-small fortune on his two Knicks season tickets but come away with little more than an aching heart. He was still waiting for another night like the one with Mr. Eichelberry.

“When you’re a kid and something like that happens,” he said, “you really think life is always going to be that good.”

THERE IS A CLASSIC SHOT
of Reed’s dramatic appearance, striding toward his teammates before they have even looked up to see him coming. You can see it blown up in the Garden lobby, on a wall of its chosen “Great Moments.” Just like the Game 5 shot of him stretched out in agony, the photograph was taken by the persistent George Kalinsky, who never strayed from his pregame post and trailed Reed as he made his way onto the floor.

Once again, thanks to judicious positioning, Kalinsky’s photo was a gem, an angle all his own. “I walked out behind him—never heard such passion in a crowd,” Kalinsky said. “Of course, I didn’t know what the photo would mean in terms of the game and history, because if the Knicks had lost, it wouldn’t have meant as much.”

Still, he’d had the presence of mind to wide-frame the shot to show Reed on the way to joining his teammates as they were getting on with their business—without him, for all they knew. In Kalinsky’s photo were other photographers in their conventional positions on the baseline, shooting Reed straight-on but failing to capture the profound symbolism of Reed to the rescue. And of course, Kalinsky’s photo included the fans, most on their feet, a roaring welcoming committee that included a dark-haired boy near the basket, in a white shirt, hands spread apart in mid-clap. Little Harry Lois.

Familiar with many of the courtside regulars and naturally those more full-throated and famous, Kalinsky had previously shot George Lois and sons—Luke was the younger one, seven years old at the time and, for reasons neither he nor his father could recall or explain, not present for Game 7. When Kalinsky developed his photo of Reed’s entrance, he recognized the very conspicuous Harry, made a copy, and gave it to Lois, who took the photo home. It rests quietly now in the drawers of family lore, a keepsake from one of the most famous sports occasions in the history of the city.

Eight years later, it would come to represent something else entirely, a tribute to a life tragically cut short.

Harry Lois went on from Game 7 to become an excellent basketball player in his own right at the McBurney School on the Upper West Side. He left Franklin & Marshall after a year to pursue his dream of producing in television shows and movies. He was 16 days past his 20th birthday when his heart gave out, a victim of arrhythmia, on September 21, 1978.

“He was gone before he hit the floor,” Luke Lois said. In the conventional mold, his big brother had been his “abuser and protector … but we had also reached the point where we had found things in common—and going to the Knicks games was one of them. We’d become really good friends. Then, boom, everything was destroyed. It was devastating.”

“It was like the Hank Gathers thing,” George Lois said, referring to the Loyola Marymount basketball player who collapsed and died during a 1990 game. “But how do you make any fucking sense of it?”

Who so cruelly fated to lose a child ever has? But the cliché born of fact is that life goes on, grief wanes, and it becomes possible to smile again while gazing at a snapshot of long-lost boy in a state of unadulterated and unchanged joy.

“I have this photo,” George Lois says. “And all you can see is this young kid clapping as Willis comes out, the happiest fucking guy in the world.”

WHILE THE CROWD WENT BANANAS
, Reed was dealing with his own anxieties. “I’m trying to play against the greatest big man, only guy to score 100, average 50,” he said. “I’m playing on one leg.” As he warmed up, he refused to look at the Lakers, because he didn’t want to share his emotions or doubts. He already knew how limited he would be when he’d warmed up with May. While his teammates fired up practice jumpers, he flexed his right leg, and soon went to the bench for the player introductions. When he followed DeBusschere and Bradley, the fans stood and cheered for about a minute while John Condon on the public address mic had the strategic good sense to let the ovation build while the Lakers fidgeted on the other side of the floor.

Surrounded by his teammates, Reed trudged to center court for the opening tap and shook hands with Chamberlain. Game 7 began with Reed conceding the game’s first possession, too tender to jump.

Chamberlain sent the ball to Baylor, who found himself open at the free-throw line. Air ball. The action moved to the other end, with Bradley giving to Frazier, who spotted Reed just inside the key, about 18 feet out. In the lane, Chamberlain made no attempt to move out and contest the jump shot, even after Joe Mullaney had begged him beforehand to not give Reed the room to do the one thing at the offensive end he still could. Reed’s quick release gave the Knicks a 2–0 lead, but more important, the basket gave everyone in the building more reason to believe something special was playing out before them. “Look at him limp,” Chris Schenkel told the national audience, playing up the angle of the wounded warrior as Reed moved back on defense with a wooden-legged gait.