When the Garden Was Eden (36 page)

But with the Bucks under intensified defensive pressure and Reed leaning on Abdul-Jabbar, forcing him a step farther from his preferred post-up position, the feel and tempo of the game changed quickly. The lead was down to 11 when Robertson drove against Frazier, thinking one measly basket would put an end to whatever fantasies the Knicks were entertaining. He went up for a jumper near the right baseline. The ball bounded off the rim, right into Abdul-Jabbar’s hands for a put-back from close range—a gift of a shot he would probably make nine of ten times. Not this one. Dave DeBusschere’s outlet found Bradley, who hit Monroe for a left-baseline jumper, 86–77. Murmurs of hope became spasms of excitement.

Meanwhile, a sense of uneasiness permeated the Milwaukee side. Better than most, Robertson knew how these Knicks had a knack for the momentous occasion, for outright thievery, though his Cousy-in-Cleveland nightmare in 1969 had been more of a shocking left-right combination in the final minute of the game and before his Royals knew what hit them. What was developing now was different, a slow, cinematic build to disaster. When Monroe up-faked his man and maneuvered for a right-side jumper, the Knicks were within seven points, 86–79 with 3:10 remaining. Abdul-Jabbar missed another sky hook, DeBusschere took a handoff from Monroe and buried a long jumper to make it a 5-point game. Bradley found Monroe again for another open right-side look that took the lead down to three. Frazier was fouled, went to the line, and—just as he had in Cleveland three years earlier, in the comeback against the Royals—calmly sank two free throws. Now the Knicks were somehow down by one, 86–85, with 47 seconds left. The Bucks called time. Their coaches—Larry Costello and a young, acerbic assistant named Hubie Brown—put the ball in Robertson’s hands to inbound at midcourt with instructions to run off some clock and get the ball to Abdul-Jabbar.

“The fans were making so much noise that you swore the basket and backboard were moving every time we shot,” Brown said. “The noise was such that you couldn’t hear yourself think in the huddle.”

At this point, the Bucks were handed another chance to avoid infamy when Monroe was whistled for tripping the guard (and former UCLA teammate of Abdul-Jabbar’s) Lucius Allen before the ball was inbounded—an automatic two-shot foul. But Allen’s first attempt hit the back rim and rolled off the front. His second missed, too. Reed rebounded and passed to Frazier, who dribbled upcourt against Allen. “Most coaches in that situation would have called time-out. Not Red,” Frazier said. “What was he going to tell me in that situation—get a good shot? They were reeling, man, back on their heels. You didn’t want to give them a chance to regroup.”

Frazier attacked Allen, spinning left at the free-throw line, creating just enough space to rise for the jumper. But Monroe had drifted out to the left of the lane, clear of Robertson, who had hesitated in following, believing Frazier was going to shoot. In the moment that would symbolically cement their unlikely partnership, Frazier followed the blueprint and hit the open man. “Walt had a decent shot, but mine was better,” Monroe said. “He knew I would make it.” From 16 feet out, Monroe buried the uncontested look of his life for his 21st and 22nd points of the game, 11 of them scored during the incredible 19-point run that had given the Knicks an 87–86 lead with 36 seconds remaining.

Abdul-Jabbar would get two more cracks—the first a makeable sky hook from the baseline, the second a buzzer-challenging turnaround from deep on the other side of the basket. (A brain cramp by Bradley had led to a Knicks 24-second violation and given the Bucks the ball with two seconds remaining.) He missed the first, air-balled the second. The buzzer sounded as Frazier grabbed the ball and carried it like a newborn toward the tunnel. His teammates followed, somewhat stunned themselves. “I don’t think we realized what we had done until we got inside,” Frazier said. Staying off the floor, the fans cheered madly for several minutes before carrying their exuberance into the street.

George Lois’s wife turned to him and said, “That was exciting.” He thought, You just watched the greatest fucking comeback ever, and all you can say is, “That was exciting”? But he also knew that it took night after regular-season night to truly appreciate what seemed like only one of 82 meaningless games before the playoffs. Abstractly, Marv Albert agreed that the Knicks’ 16th win of that season “epitomized the greatness” of the era perhaps more than any other game. Playoff success and championships won would of course remain history’s tried and true barometer of achievement. But scoring the last 19 points and silencing the league’s reigning MVP (and ultimately the leading scorer in NBA history) would never be forgotten as a hallmark of the Old Knicks.

“I don’t think anything could top that game, not even winning the championship, because that was just something you knew you would never see again,” said Woody Allen. Abdul-Jabbar now had more reason to despise the Garden, while Robertson could only console himself with the satisfaction of having predicted, in the first place, that Frazier and Monroe would successfully coexist.

But the real story—or the moral of the story—was how Holzman’s coalition of the willing could incorporate even the most flamboyant of scorers while continuing to make sure that the basketball was the team’s most cherished star. In twenty-first-century terms, the open man was the franchise or go-to player. Frazier to Monroe for the game winner on November 18, 1972, was not only Monroe’s Garden baptism in the home-team uniform; it was affirmation that the team was still collectively capable of greatness. “When that happened, we almost felt invincible,” DeBusschere would say years later. “That was when we felt we could do this again.”

THE KNICKS’ 57 WINS AGAINST 25 LOSSES
that season would represent the fourth-best record in the league. Out west, the Lakers and Bucks each won 60. In the Knicks’ own division, the Celtics put even more distance between the teams than during the previous regular season, crafting a 68–14 record, one win shy of the Lakers’ 1971–72 record. But history had also shown that veteran teams with championship timber could have priorities beyond driving themselves for an extra home game in a seven-game series. Russell’s Celtics had powerfully demonstrated the art of lying in the weeds in 1969. The Knicks’ first title team had needed the emotional cushion of home-court advantage, but the second one needed to fine-tune, pace, and heal itself. Those 57 wins were achieved while completing the assimilation of Monroe and incorporating Reed back into the frontcourt rotation. Reed, in particular, was a work in progress, averaging career lows in points (11) and dipping under 30 minutes a game (to 27.2) for the first time in his career.

“I was struggling for a lot of that season,” he said. “But I started to feel pretty good going into the playoffs.” In the blue seats for the first-round opener in the now annual conflagration with the Bullets, someone in my row made that very observation during a third-quarter burst in which the Knicks took over the game. I remember it vividly: Monroe picking up a loose ball off a Bullets turnover, looking up, and, seeing a white uniform streaking ahead, leading him with a perfectly timed pass. Running like a guard—or a 22-year-old rookie—Reed turned it up a gear, beat the Bullet to the ball, cradled it on a bounce, and continued to the rim for a lay-in. Three years after the legendary limp, a year after he’d been shut down for the season, Reed on the run was a rousing sight, in itself enough to make an entire fan base believe.

PHIL CHENIER HEARD THE QUESTION
a little too often early in his NBA career, even in the Baltimore-Washington area, where he was starting for the Bullets. There would be stares. There would be whispers. Finally someone would summon the nerve, step forward to ask:

“Are you Clyde?”

“No, sir,” he would say. “I am not Walt Frazier.”

Chenier didn’t really get the whole body-double thing that would shadow him for years. Frazier was bigger, by at least an inch, and outweighed him by 15 pounds. Yes, he, too, had the wide sideburns extending due south, but he didn’t move like Clyde, cool and deliberate. He had more pep in his step, like the man he had studied growing up in the Bay Area of California, Jerry West.

But—still—there had to be some resemblance for so many people to have mistaken him for the imperturbable Knick. “Maybe around the eyes, Walt and I were similar,” Chenier conceded. His reluctance was understandable. Chenier was a very good pro guard with five consecutive seasons averaging between 19.7 and 21.9 points. But he was not at Frazier’s Hall of Fame level, and the comparisons only played to a larger characterization that delighted New Yorkers: namely, casting the Bullets individually and collectively as Knicks Lite.

Chenier was in college at Cal Berkeley when the Knicks came of age. He was riveted by their early series with the Bullets, and especially the backcourt duels between Frazier and Monroe. He was ecstatic when he was drafted by the Bullets in 1971, and chagrined when Monroe left abruptly to join the Knicks, even if the roster upheaval meant instant playing time. After ten years in the NBA, Chenier, like Frazier, went on to a long broadcasting afterlife, with the Bullets-turned-Wizards. With all he had witnessed from backcourt to broadcast booth—from Russell’s Celtics to Kobe’s Lakers—he still considered the core Old Knicks to be the best team he ever laid eyes on.

“Many personalities, but somehow no egos,” he said. Chenier also knew something about the challenges of heterogeneous bonding. Before attending college at Cal, he’d grown up in a modest but diverse Berkeley neighborhood during times of political and social dissent that engulfed the city in the late sixties. As a teenager, he’d witnessed a few things, including his high school gymnasium being taken over by the National Guard after the assassination of Martin Luther King.

“Riots, demonstrations—you name it, we had it,” Chenier said. “One day it was about the war, the next day it was about poverty, and the day after that it was about race. For me, basketball was the place you went to get away from it all, where people could actually get along.”

How ironic, then, that Chenier, one of the more well-liked NBA lifers, is best remembered in New York for one behavioral misstep, one retaliatory slip. In what may have been the fiercest Knicks-Bullets playoff game of all, bodies flew, whistles blew, and the referees, Earl Strom and Bob Rakel, were abused by both benches and from all sides of the Garden crowd. The players—even the former Minuteman Mike Riordan—were pawing and yapping at one another. Most antagonized was Chenier. Bradley was a master at knocking opponents off stride and getting into their heads. That night, Bradley’s elbows seemed to be targeting Chenier whenever they passed in the lane. “That was Bill: every trick in the book,” Chenier said. “I was sick of it and made a mental note that I wasn’t going to put up with it anymore. So we’re in the third quarter, and I go through the lane and he hits me with a forearm. I stop. I’m stupefied. And the next thing I know I’m swinging.”

Chenier missed his target, instead hitting the man he was guarding in the back of the neck. Frazier, stumbling in an entanglement of humanity, was somehow whistled for a foul. Chenier went to the line, glancing at his disbelieving look-alike, trying to focus on his free throws while fighting off pangs of guilt. From a distance, he really respected Frazier. Years later, the two broadcasters would pose for a photo with a Garden fan during a Bullets visit, and Frazier would make him laugh by bringing up the tomahawk chop, telling him, “I still don’t know how I got the foul.” But to Chenier, the most amazing and telling aspect of the incident was that Frazier, who had every right to be furious, did not mouth off or get hit with a technical foul. The man was beyond cool. And then, with the basketball in his hands, he got hot.

“He comes down on the next play and he makes a jumper,” Chenier said. “Then he made another shot, then another. I’m thinking, ‘Oh, shit, I’m in trouble.’ Next time, he pump-fakes, drives around me, uses the left hand, and puts in a reverse. The crowd is going crazy. And let me tell you something: 25 years later, people were still coming up to me and saying, ‘I remember when you hit Clyde in the head and he busted your ass after that.’ ”

Off the top of
his
head, Chenier couldn’t pinpoint in which playoff game the punch had occurred, only that it was during his second year in the league—1972–73. In his 2006 book
The Game Within the Game
, Frazier concurred, pinpointing Game 2 of the conference semifinal. But a check of the clippings revealed that it was actually the following year, spring of ’74, in Game 5 of the first round. In that game, Frazier’s response indeed was spectacular. He led the Knicks to a one-point victory in overtime with 38 points, making eight of nine fourth-quarter shots. For both men, the memory lapse was understandable, given the passage of time, the blur of six consecutive playoffs series between the teams.

THE BULLETS BEGAN THE ’73 SERIES
with a renewed taste for the rivalry after capturing another Central Division title, this time with a robust 52 wins, 14 more than the previous season. To his credit, Abe Pollin didn’t stop competing after the Monroe fiasco, dealing for the talented but enigmatic Elvin Hayes to replace Gus Johnson, who had gone to Phoenix and then to Indiana, of the ABA, for his last season. Chenier grew up fast, averaging 19.7 points. But the most pleasant surprise—again, to Pollin’s credit—was the emergence of Riordan, who thrived at the Bullets’ faster pace, averaging 18.1 points and leading the team in minutes played.

After the Knicks won the opener, they were engaged in a tight second game at the Garden before pulling away behind Frazier and Monroe, who combined for 61 points. Frazier added 13 assists and 9 rebounds, barely missing a triple double. With Reed in decline, Frazier, at 28 and the height of his prime and fame, was the team’s most potent two-way player. Making life easier—especially in the absence of a consistent low-post threat—was Monroe, the kind of bailout option the Knicks had never had.