When the Garden Was Eden (43 page)

It was a sweet story from a courageous woman, who weeks after her husband’s death had gone to the NBA Store for the ’73 team’s reunion and received the biggest ovation of all. Sadly, Geri DeBusschere would not get the chance for a repeat performance when the Old Knicks gathered for the 40th anniversary of the 1970 title, as she succumbed to liver cancer weeks after we last spoke. Months later, Dick McGuire died of a brain aneurysm, casting yet another pall over the franchise and leaving the extended family that remained to wonder if the Garden would, in our remaining years, ever be Eden again.

MAKING THE COURTSIDE ROUNDS IN ORLANDO BEFORE THE LAKERS
took on the Magic in Game 3 of the 2009 NBA Finals, Spike Lee became engaged in a feisty discussion with Mark Jackson. The ABC analyst from St. Albans, Queens, got under the skin of the director from Fort Greene, Brooklyn, by making the sacrilegious claim that the Knicks’ teams of the late eighties, featuring Patrick Ewing at center and Jackson himself playing the point, would have handled the Old Knicks, their titles notwithstanding.

Jackson argued that each succeeding generation is athletically enhanced and therefore superior to the previous one—somewhat out of character for a guy who compiled 10,334 career assists primarily with guile and vision (and who in 2011 would become the head coach of Golden State). Ally and supporter of the modern superstar, Lee nonetheless countered by saying that the Old Knicks’ level of collective excellence in most cases far exceeded that of contemporary teams and would compensate for an inability to play on a high wire. Then Lee excused himself, walked across the court, and bumped right into Cazzie Russell.

For Lee, the chance encounter felt like an act of providence, akin to a hilarious scene in Woody Allen’s
Annie Hall
, where Allen’s character, Alvy, complains to Diane Keaton’s Annie, while standing in a Manhattan movie line, about a Columbia professor pontificating on the work of the Canadian media theorist Marshall McLuhan—whom Allen proceeds to pull out of thin air to question how the professor ever got to teach at Columbia in the first place.

Lights, camera, satisfaction! Lee caught Jackson’s attention, while pointing to Russell, who yelled out, “Mark, you better stop smoking whatever it is you’re smoking.”

Months later, back at the Garden for the 40th reunion of the 1970 team, Russell could laugh off the slander. “No one will ever know, right?” he said. “But I will say this: we had a pretty decent center, didn’t we? We had a couple of great guards and a power forward who wasn’t backing down from nobody.” Old wounds being better left unopened, Russell didn’t get into the other forward position, which, of course, would have been Bradley starting ahead of him.

Granted, it is difficult, especially for young people, to watch NBA footage predating the Jordan era and not be amused by the tight shorts, with far less use of the three-point line or no line at all, fewer blow-by dribbles and ESPN-worthy highlights. The rare video preserved from the seventies can look as ancient as Egypt.

Conversely, the old-timers watch the predictable exhibitions and shake their heads at the bastardized product that seems to mimic a video game—so many mad dashes to the rim and low-percentage shots. “I once asked Oscar, ‘What do you think of the modern player?’ and he said, ‘Other than the fact that he can’t dribble, shoot, or pass, he’s okay,’ ” said Bill Bradley, who didn’t agree with the Big O and believed the talent of twenty-first-century players to be jaw-dropping, in many cases.

“But the point is that the game changes, so the criteria you used before to determine who’s good, or best, can’t be used,” he said. “If we were playing by the rules of the sixties and seventies, when we played with our feet and with finesse, well, that’s very different than the rules of today, where’s there’s not a premium put on movement, where the game is played with upper-body strength, there’s a lot more intentional contact, and the three-point rule changes the flow. I’ve had people who were major Knicks fans tell me that they’ve stopped watching the games, partly because the game changed.”

Vintage political Bradley: liberal Democrat straddling the pragmatic center. But his generational rival John Havlicek shifted from his right-side leanings (driving to the basket, that is) for a more radical assertion. “I certainly think we could compete, and, given the same latitude—wraparound dribbles, three or four steps to the rim—we would be even better,” he said. “For every dunk they’d get on us, we’d probably get two backdoor layups on them.”

Still a respected and unbiased analyst of the modern game as an octogenarian, Jack Ramsay said it was also wrong to assume that players of 40 years ago would be grossly outclassed athletically in an open-court game with—for argument’s sake—Steve Nash and the Suns. After all, he said, there was something called the ABA, the renegade NBA rival, which had its share of flamboyant sky walkers and three-point bombers. It wasn’t as if the more grounded players of the Old Knicks’ era never had to face players who were more athletic.

“I have no doubt that teams like the Knicks of the seventies, my Portland team, the old Celtics, would adapt and still be very good,” Ramsay said. “I always hear things—like Bill Russell would be overpowered today by bigger, stronger guys—and I always say: absolute nonsense.”

I’ve always believed the best NBA decade to be the eighties—as epitomized by Magic Johnson and Larry Bird. These were big men with little-man skills, heralding a new-age athlete still equipped with old-school fundamentals and imbued with team-first values. Asked during an ESPN Classic taping to choose my greatest team of all time, I picked the 1984–85 Lakers—still with a potent Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, the young veterans Magic and James Worthy, and the likes of Bob McAdoo, Jamaal Wilkes, and Michael Cooper off the bench.

But I also try not to gush too much about one decade or era, because they all come with qualitative extremes. During a college panel discussion in Boston in 2006, a reporter from a local newspaper rambled on about how amazing the eighties were while blasting the contemporary players as essentially uncommitted and clueless. Much as I agreed that the Bird-Magic rivalry was the best NBA story line ever, I had to point out that the eighties had its share of very bad basketball, and we watched more than enough of it in New York.

As much as the NBA’s reputation sank after embarrassing losses by the American national team in the 2002 World Championship and 2004 Olympics, Phil Jackson told me that his Shaq-and-Kobe Lakers team that won three straight titles starting in 2000 reached a point where it was as cohesive as any team he’d ever coached, including Jordan’s Bulls, or played on, including the Old Knicks. “The first year was a test pattern,” he said. “But the middle years they swamped teams for about 150 games, went 15–1 in the playoffs. They really knew how to play together.”

I would also maintain that the Spurs, my favorite team of the early twenty-first century, would have been recognizable and formidable in any NBA decade. Yes, league officials cringed whenever they made a run to the Finals, because it augured a television ratings nosedive for the lack of a sexy, shoe-company-hyped superstar. The numbers were irrefutable, but they reflected more on our celebrity-driven culture of superficiality and a sport dumbed down for teenage consumption than on the brilliant San Antonio team foolishly typecast as a collection of boring South Texas hicks.

Had that team been transported to Madison Square Garden or assembled in New York, it would no doubt have been characterized very differently. In the nation’s media capital, Tim Duncan would have been cast as the second coming of the Captain, celebrated for his quiet leadership, his fundamental purity. The Spurs would have been a proud reflection of the great melting pot, with their rich blend of international stars: Duncan of the U.S. Virgin Islands, Manu Ginóbili of Argentina, and Tony Parker of France. With their beautiful pick-and-roll passing game, they would have been hailed for reinventing basketball as an art form, just as the Old Knicks had been.

Like Red Holzman, Gregg Popovich effectively deployed players who, when judged individually, were unimposing, especially by the measure of modern metrics. Bruce Bowen was an earthbound career journeyman, a scratch-and-claw midsize defender with the ability to knock down an open three. After David Robinson retired, the Spurs used a rotation of ordinary role players at power forward or center, depending on how you preferred to define Duncan. But as a unit, they were brilliant at maximizing their strengths, spreading the floor, running their half-court offense through the multi-skilled and exceedingly unselfish Duncan. In other words, the team’s whole was significantly greater than the sum of its parts.

According to Mike Riordan, that was precisely how the Old Knicks would have imposed themselves on the best teams, regardless of when they played. “You see all the double-teaming they do now?” he said. “We would have welcomed that, because we were a great—not good, but great—passing and jump-shooting team.”

Months after the Phil Jackson—coached Lakers won the ’09 title by defeating Orlando, Riordan used the Magic to make his case that the ’70 Knicks would have matched up favorably against an elite modern-day squad. “The Magic are a light-it-up team, without great size except for their presence in the middle, kind of like we were,” he said.

Asked if he thought Willis Reed could contain the chiseled man-child Dwight Howard, Riordan said, “Are you kidding me? Willis stood in there against Wilt Chamberlain! He was a lot better than people give him credit for. He was strong enough to play center, but he had the skills of a forward. You think Dwight Howard would like having to go out and defend against that lefty jumper?”

With good reason, Riordan also liked his guys’ chances in the backcourt, with Hall of Famer Walt Frazier matched up against Jameer Nelson and Dick Barnett against Courtney Lee. At forward, he was certain that Dave DeBusschere, while surrendering a few inches, would kick the jump-shooting derriere of the one-dimensional Rashard Lewis, while Bradley would hold his own against the streaky Frenchman Mickael Pietrus.

Riordan’s point was well taken: for all the assumption that the athlete of old would be in over his head, the Magic would hardly have been a physically intimidating opponent for the Old Knicks. “How many games did they win against the Lakers, one?” Riordan said. Yes, one, though had the rookie Lee converted a lob to the rim at the end of regulation in Game 2, the series would have gone longer. “Okay, maybe they get one against us, too,” Riordan said.

In the aftermath of those ’09 Finals, one coronation indisputably affirmed Old Knicks eminence—Phil Jackson’s tenth coaching title, breaking a deadlock with Red Auerbach. One of the purest joys for Jackson was in establishing the new mark (which he improved on a year later against the Celtics), one not likely to be broken in his or perhaps anyone else’s lifetime.

“He is the reason why I am a coach, obviously,” Jackson said of Holzman, who always told him to not make the game more complicated than it was. “It’s not rocket science, Phil,” Holzman would say. “It’s see the ball on defense, hit the open man on offense.” But while Jackson’s X’s and O’s strategy, his celebrated use of the triangle offense, came from another old lifer, Tex Winter, his best coaching trait was in knowing how to handle people. Zen philosophy stripped away, Jackson was much like Holzman: he allowed his players to succeed through self-discovery.

Never was this more evident than after Game 3 of the 1994 Eastern Conference semifinals, when the Bulls—having found a way to flourish without the baseball wannabe Michael Jordan, winning a stunning 55 regular-season games—found themselves in a deadlocked battle for survival, already down 2–0 in the series, at home against Patrick Ewing and the Knicks with 1.8 seconds left.

Jackson called a play for Toni Kukoc, the Croatian star, whom Jerry Krause, the GM, had pursued faithfully, even as his team was in the midst of winning three consecutive titles, rankling Jordan and his wingman, Scottie Pippen.

Ninety-nine times out of 100, the ball would have gone to Jordan, but he wasn’t around, and Pippen was furious that Jackson would dare nominate Kukoc, an NBA rookie, over him. Pippen sat down during the time-out and refused to get up. Kukoc, the better shooter, proceeded to drain the game-winning jumper from straight out.

In the locker room, the players were stunned by what had occurred. Given Pippen’s standing, it was a pivotal moment for Jackson, not all that different from the one Holzman had faced when Russell took his racial-profiling anger out on white teammates and Reed. Holding back deliberately, Jackson watched Bill Cartwright, the respected veteran center, stand up to tearfully confront Pippen. “Scottie, how could you?” he said.

Chastened by a colleague, not his coach, Pippen apologized. Jackson never had to say a word to exert his authority, much less berate Pippen in the way the media would in the aftermath of the Sitting Bull episode. His teams policed themselves and as a result were stronger for it.

“A lot of people thought the 1.8-second denial would define Scottie’s career, but it was a learning moment in his life,” Jackson said on the eve of Pippen’s 2010 induction into the Naismith Hall of Fame. “He came back as the leader of teams for another decade.”

Jordan’s return helped, of course, but so did Jackson’s willingness to loosen up on the reins and allow Cartwright to make it easier for Pippen to express his remorse, just as Holzman had done through Reed. Pippen’s reputation as one of the great multipurpose players in NBA history actually grew when Jordan returned for the Bulls’ second three-peat, extending Jackson’s ring collection to a second hand.