When the Garden Was Eden (46 page)

Frustrated by ownership, Walsh soon after announced that he would not return as the Knicks’ president in 2011–12. No matter who headed the front office, there would always be deep corporate pockets—Dolan’s being the latest—to provide purchasing power. And while the prospect of a hard salary cap in looming labor negotiations sent shivers through the building, the Knicks went into the summer of 2011 with the belief they would eventually have salary-cap flexibility to land a third star—perhaps one of the emerging young guards who seemed to be taking over the sport—to compete with the Miami triumvirate that came up small in the Finals against Dallas.

The party line was that the Knicks would be challenging for a title soon enough, but Bill Bradley, keeping an eye on his old team from a distance, was skeptical of the methodology of the eternal star quest. Granted, times had dramatically changed from the early seventies, when there was no free agency and no possibility of microwaving a contender by writing a few large checks. But Bradley argued that championship chemistry was not a commodity that was available on the open market.

“There’s always the illusion that one more player actually will make it all work,” he said.

But hadn’t that been the case with the acquisition of DeBusschere? Hadn’t one player put the Old Knicks over the top?

“In a sense, yes,” Bradley said. But he added that the foundation of success was already in place, it was years in the making, and from the moment DeBusschere arrived he fit into the puzzle as if he had been there all along.

WILLIS REED COULD
well remember the growing pains of his early Knicks days, when he wondered if the losing would ever end. Looking back, he believed the tough times were necessary to build the team’s character and became an important part of its legacy and special relationship with New York. Yes, things had changed a whole lot since then, and the younger fan, living in a world of iPad pleasures and immediate gratification, was conditioned to the free-agent madness. But if character and commitment were the most unifying threads across the decades, then identifying those who in the end mattered most was nothing you could declare during a one-hour special on ESPN. The most important traits were demonstrated over time, with actions or sacrifices that were plainly transferrable into everyday life.

Almost four decades after Zero Mostel stood up at Leone’s and wished for a day when a man like Willis Reed could become the so-called Leader of the Free World, a tall, slender African American known to have hoisted a few jump shots in his time did step onto a Chicago stage late on a November night in 2008 as the president-elect of the United States. Barack Obama knew his basketball, and his Old Knicks. In the spring of 2009, when he attended a Washington Nationals game to see sensational rookie Stephen Strasburg pitch against his hometown White Sox, Obama was introduced to my former
Times
colleague Ira Berkow. “You’re the guy who wrote the book with Clyde,” Obama told the startled scribe, a native Chicagoan. “I bought that book when I was twelve.”

Like Frazier, Obama often struck people as aloof but was also blessed with a classy, eye-catching style. Like Reed, he hailed from modest but proud beginnings. Like Bradley, he was an intellectual with liberal leanings, but liberals considered him more of a centrist. Like DeBusschere, he had blue-collar values, eschewing the moneyed track after Harvard Law School to work as a community organizer. Like the Old Knicks, Barack Obama was a proud mixing of black and white, and rose to prominence at the end of a turbulent decade, making a powerful statement to all Americans—including the many millions who opposed, feared, or loathed him—about what was possible in their country.

“There’s a big difference between someone who is president of the United States and somebody who wins the championship,” said Bradley. “But I do think that was one of the things the Obama campaign elicited in people—I mean, his selling of the word
hope
was really one of the geniuses of his effort because that did and still does make you feel that there are possibilities that didn’t exist and now exist—though he was dealt an extremely difficult hand with the economy, two wars, and unfinished business at home with health care, education, pensions, energy, and the environment.

“But during the campaign he convinced people that they couldn’t imagine having a better person there and those were like the feelings that were created in New York around the Knicks, especially when we won that first championship—and there was that moment when people felt like,
we did it
! The collective did it. Well, Obama won the election but we—meaning the people—did it together, with him and for him. The Knicks won but we—the people, the fans—did it, too. And I think what in our best moments we reveal is a kind of ideal and a realization of that ideal, whether it’s brotherhood, cooperation, excellence, teamwork, joy, self-fulfillment, however you want to say it, probably a little bit of all of those, that’s what we represented. And the fans really did feel they were a part of it, because we engaged them at a very deep level. And that kind of engagement, I think, has for so many people lasted a lifetime.”

WEEKS AFTER LEBRON JAMES MADE THE MOST GRANDIOSE SHOW OF FREE
agency of any professional athlete in history, turning a simple declarative sentence (“I’m going to take my talents to South Beach and join the Miami Heat”) into his all-about-me hour on ESPN, the sport presented its softer, adult-driven side when the Naismith Memorial Hall of Fame held its 2010 inductions in Springfield, Massachusetts. Among the honorees were Scottie Pippen, a six-time champion, and Karl Malone, who never did win a ring but was considered the prototype power forward of his time and arguably of all time.

Malone grew up in Summerfield, Louisiana, a tiny, unincorporated town of about 250, with a red light and a grocery store at its crossroads, about a ten-mile drive on Highway 2 from Bernice in the heart of what was—back in the late sixties and early seventies—Willis Reed country.

In the late seventies, Reed had seen Malone play in high school when Bernice—with its star Benny Anders, soon to team up with Hakeem Olajuwon at the University of Houston—met and defeated its Summerfield rival. Malone never forgot the night Reed stepped into the gym.

It meant something in those parts—especially to the black folks—that Reed had stayed home to play college ball, and black and white alike swelled with pride when their guy went on to become the star center for the professional team in New York City. Two decades later, Malone would follow Reed’s lead, though in the post-integration years he earned a scholarship to what had once been all-white Louisiana Tech in nearby Ruston on the way to becoming a famous—and much wealthier—NBA star.

Teaming with the point guard John Stockton for the Utah Jazz for 18 of his 19 NBA seasons, Malone became a rare leveraged black man in Mormon-dominated Salt Lake City. The Mountain West suited him more than Los Angeles or New York. Like Reed, the Mailman, as he was known, preferred the woods to the city, a hot truck to a fast car. Malone was certainly no choirboy, dogged through his NBA years by unflattering tales of out-of-wedlock children. For better or worse, he was also an outspoken force of nature against a tide of sound-bite sophistry.

In the fall of 1992, Malone handed me a national scoop after the Summer Olympics in Barcelona by asserting that Magic Johnson’s intention to return to the NBA while HIV-positive was not necessarily good for the game if it meant that players would shy away from contact with him. Dribbling against the swell of support for Magic, Malone (much to my relief, as I had written his quotes down instead of taping him) did not make any attempt to deny what he’d said or claim that the quotes had been presented out of context.

An unconventional man, Malone had one last surprise in him on the night of his induction. It had already been announced that Pippen, not surprisingly, had chosen Michael Jordan, who joined the Hall the previous year, as his presenter. Most people assumed Malone would want Stockton, who was also inducted in 2009 (along with their longtime Jazz coach, Jerry Sloan) and had assisted Malone countless times on the Mailman’s way to becoming the league’s all-time second-leading scorer behind Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.

Reed, in fact, watching from his den in Grambling, wondered why the Hall hadn’t waited on Stockton and Sloan an extra year—Malone, having opted to play a 19th season with the Lakers, would not be eligible until then—and inducted all three of them together.

When the Naismith people pressed Malone to name his presenter, he hesitated; yes, Stockton or Sloan or both would have made perfect sense. But the more Malone sorted through his feelings—recalled how much another Hall of Famer had impacted his life—the more the decision came to him as naturally as a rebound. It was less about basketball than it was about roots, about home, about honoring one’s past. Malone never forgot how Willis Reed had taken the time to attend the funeral of his mother, Shirley, in 2003.

And so, on a fishing trip to Alaska, Malone acted on the impulse and made a telephone call beginning with the familiar area code 318.

“Mr. Willis?” he said when the line picked up.

“This is not Mr. Willis; this is Willis Reed.”

“I know who this is, and what I need to know is, will you present me at the Hall of Fame?”

“Me?”
Reed said. “You don’t want
me
.”

“Of course I want you. You were the first basketball player I knew.”

“Well, okay, but you’ll change your mind before then.”

Not a chance, Malone told him. With his cell phone signal wavering, he laughed and said, “I’m just like you: once I decide something, I’m not changing my mind.”

On the night of August 13, 2010, the two hardheaded outdoorsmen of north-central Louisiana climbed a stage together, with Reed taking his assigned place slightly behind Malone and to his right. They looked out into the most credentialed congregation of basketball talent since the NBA had brought together 47 of the players voted to the league’s all-time Top 50 team in October 1996, at the ’97 All-Star Game in Cleveland. (Pete Maravich had died, while Shaquille O’Neal and Jerry West were unable to attend.)

In Springfield, every member of the freshly inducted ’92 Dream Team was present, including Michael Jordan, Magic Johnson, and Larry Bird. Ditto the 1960 gold-medal Olympic team starring West, Oscar Robertson, Jerry Lucas, Walt Bellamy, and even Bob Boozer, still a Knick when Reed had first arrived in New York, the big brother who showed him where to get a haircut, and a good steak, when he and Emmette Bryant moved into a Midtown hotel.

Abdul-Jabbar was in town as a presenter for the longtime Lakers owner Dr. Jerry Buss. Earl Monroe and Wes Unseld did likewise for the posthumously inducted Gus Johnson. For Reed, it felt like a high school reunion, except that, Monroe and Lucas aside, his most intimate old friends were missing. He couldn’t help but wish that Clyde and Bradley, Barnett and DeBusschere, Action Jackson and his coaching mentor, Red Holzman, could have all been there, together once more.

For those wondering why Reed was even up on the stage, Malone explained how humbled he was to have his boyhood hero as his presenter. You see, little Karl was just weeks shy of his seventh birthday on May 8, 1970, when Reed walked out of the Madison Square Garden tunnel, into a storybook, and won the first of two championship rings he never bothered to wear. (“I don’t wear rings. I’m an outdoorsman,” he explained.)

On the stage, it occurred to Reed that while he had two championships he wouldn’t trade for anything, the ringless Malone had two Olympic gold medals, having played for the ’92 and ’96 USA teams—and that was something Reed did not have. And there was a lesson in there somewhere, he was sure.

“I was up there thinking about how in the end, very few people can get everything from the game or from life,” Reed said. “People talk about how many rings Jordan has, or Magic, and how that made them greater than this guy or that guy, but then you could look out in the audience and see West and Oscar sitting there, guys who were only fortunate enough to win one, but who were two of the greatest players in the history of the game. So you’re thinking, ‘Be grateful for what you’ve got, for the memories you have.’ ”

Be content, he was thinking, with the belief that if the effort was made, if the game and your team—especially your team—were not cheated, neither were you. This was what Reed would have told Karl Malone if Malone didn’t already seem to know it—in no small part because that is what he had learned from watching Reed, 40 years earlier on a small black-and-white television screen, in a selfless act that would come to be the industry standard for courage and commitment.

An emotional man, overcome by the occasion, Malone wore his tears with a blue-collar pride, an unabashed joy. After acknowledging Reed, among others, he looked into the audience and the cable television camera and said: “I hope I did it in the way my peers did it before me.”

The gray-haired Reed, class of ’82, Captain of the Old Knicks, clenched his lips and gently nodded his approval.

The endearing subject of the Old Knicks invokes memories of a carefree youth. Whether arguing profanely with badly outnumbered Celtics or Bullets fans in the high school cafeteria, or dribbling—back to the basket, like Walt Frazier—on outdoor cement courts or indoors at the Staten Island JCC, my childhood has always seemed bound with the Knicks.

From the occasional live game at the Garden, to the hundreds watched on television or brought to life by the mesmeric radio voice of Marv Abert, I suppose it’s no surprise that the Knicks forged many lasting connections for me: the late Isaac Allen, Bob Baer, Emmett Berg, Ira Bistreich, Robert Busan, Tony Carter, the Edlebaum brothers, Mark and Ira, Chet Heald, Dennis Flanagan, Billy Fried, Mitch Gordon, Stephen Jackel, Andy Rothstein, Dave Seidenberg, Lenny Stanley, and my forever friend, Lloyd Stone. To those who might have cared about the Old Knicks on a more casual basis—Sharon Pearl-mutter Grossman and Robbie Hollender Levinson among them—sorry for tuning you out when the game was on the line. I was an addict; it couldn’t be helped.