When the Garden Was Eden (8 page)

Very few weaknesses… Good size, strength and weight for guard position … good jumper and rebounder for his position… Hands and ball-handling steady… Gets the big basket and steal… Good leader… Team goes to him in the clutch… Seems to have good knowledge of the game… Might even be tougher in the freelance game… Could be great defensive man in NBA.

Thanks largely to Frazier, the 1967 draft would turn out to be Donovan and Holzman’s most propitious, the growth spurt the Knicks desperately needed. In the second round, they took a gangly big man, Phil Jackson, out of North Dakota. Holzman had watched Jackson stumble around in a tournament game, only to miss his 50-point explosion the next night in a consolation effort. But he liked Jackson’s length and unorthodoxy, which seemed to speak well of his defensive potential.

Now the Knicks had Reed, Barnett, Frazier, Russell, and Jackson, with Bradley in their purview and prayers. From the ’67 draft, they also gained the rights to a guard from Great Neck, Long Island, named Mike Riordan, chosen in the 12th round (or, as Riordan liked to say, “the 127th pick of the first round”)—a position typically reserved for selecting somebody’s nephew.

No one had paid Riordan any mind at Providence College, where he partnered in the backcourt with Jimmy Walker. But there was something about Riordan’s classic Irish mug and southpaw, working-class game that resonated within Holzman, reminded him a little bit of himself. His report on Riordan labeled him a sleeper, a guy you would want on your NBA bench.

Riordan at the very least would fit right in with the team’s developing mix of eclectic upstarts and outsiders from schools historically black, bookishly white, or categorically remote. Only Cazzie Russell, the Michigan Wolverine, was from what could be considered a traditional college sports power. With representation from Grambling to Southern Illinois to North Dakota, the roster was shaping up as a cross-section of Americana. On Broadway, in the midst of America’s most violent political and social storms, which were threatening to tear the country apart, the Old Knicks were gradually coming together.

STRAIGHT BETWEEN THE EYES
. Young Bill Hosket, just 21 and spending his first day in New York, sat down for an introductory interview as a member of the New York Knicks, and Howard Cosell fired him a question as if by slingshot:

“Your thoughts … in a nutshell … on the black boycott … of the ’68 Games.”

Hours off a plane from Mexico City after the Summer Games ended that September, his Olympic gold medal in hand for what he believed would be a pleasant exchange of show-and-tell, Hosket felt his cheeks, already of rosy Midwestern vintage, begin to blush.

Hosket had arrived late at the ABC radio studio, rushed from his contract signing at Madison Square Garden (a team ritual) and into a taxi by the Knicks’ public relations man, Frankie Blauschild. When the two of them arrived, Cosell was irate, screaming at Blauschild for the delay and turning all of a sudden to Hosket: “Hey, kid, you got the medal? Gimme the medal.”

Just like that, the interview began:

“This is Howard Cosell, speaking of sports. In my hand, a gold medal from the Summer Olympics… And to my right, the young man who was the recipient of that medal… Bill Hosket.”

Then the question dropped.

What did Hosket have to say about the African American 200-meter medalists, Tommie Smith (gold) and John Carlos (bronze), raising a Black Power salute from the podium? Not much. Something quickly manufactured about how Hosket and his teammates were focused on what they had to do, nothing more or less.

When the interview concluded, Hosket stared at Cosell in total disbelief. Cosell ignored him, exulting in his ability to make another member of the jockocracy—an institution he both promoted and railed against—squirm. He looked over at Blauschild and chuckled in that macabre Cosellian way.

“Threw the farmer a hanging curve and he singled up the middle,” he said.

Hosket wasn’t too insulted. At least he had mustered some response. He recounted the story to me as he no doubt had to friends and associates in the years since he had returned to Ohio and gone into the insurance business—with an enduring appreciation for what he called “the fun part of being in New York.” But there had been a larger lesson in Cosell’s presumptuous query, a new paradigm for reporter-athlete protocol, based on the politics and social upheaval that were crashing through the once heavily fortified boundaries of sport.

“It was a tumultuous time and the first time that it seemed the outside world had invaded ballparks and arenas,” said Larry Merchant, who at the time wrote a critically acclaimed sports column for the
New York Post
, a destination read during my teenage years the minute my father walked through the door before dinner, the afternoon paper rolled up in his back pants pocket. With a literate, acerbic touch and an eye for the offbeat, the column was called Fun ’n Games. But now, all of a sudden, the questions being asked and the answers given were not always fun and were about much more than games.

“It wasn’t just the [Vietnam] war; it was the social upheaval, the civil rights, women’s rights, who stood up and who didn’t,” Merchant said. “So many issues that were controversial, to the extent where a number of the athletes decided they could not avoid it. What had always been a sanctuary began to reflect the outside world.”

Wilmer (Bill) Hosket Jr. was the Knicks’ first-round draft pick in 1968, a 6'8" forward/center out of Ohio State, the tenth player chosen overall. In Mexico City, his Olympic teammates had included some famous names (Jo Jo White, Charlie Scott, Spencer Heywood) and others (Calvin Fowler, Don Dee, John Clawson) already retreating into obscurity. Hosket would fall somewhere in between as he embarked on a short four-year NBA career, two with a rising Knicks team.

That first visit of his to New York, though, came four years after the Civil Rights Act of 1964, after Martin Luther King Jr. had electrified the nation with his “I Have a Dream” speech in Washington, D.C., and three years after black players in the upstart American Football League’s All-Star game were turned away by New Orleans hotels and businesses, leading to a boycott that forced the game to be moved elsewhere. Sixteen months had lapsed since Muhammad Ali refused to join the Army, famously explaining, “I ain’t got no quarrel with them Viet Cong.” The unsavory tensions of the real world had intruded resolutely upon athletics. Smith and Carlos had used the international Olympic stage to condemn the ongoing oppression of their people, Carlos unzipping his track jacket in a show of solidarity with American blue-collar workers because, he said, it wasn’t just African Americans who were being held down by the rich American establishment.

The country was choosing sides, and many sportswriters were beginning to ask the players they covered, “For or against?” In the Knicks’ locker room, many of the players with serious points of view were initially reticent to answer. “The players were very outspoken about their sentiments among each other but were private in public,” Phil Jackson said. “We did have a few guys serving their country.” The counterculture maverick in Jackson, camped somewhere within the graying boomer who in 2010 would opine that the controversial Arizona immigration policies were not the NBA’s business, couldn’t resist accentuating the word
serving
.

Measuring in under the 80-inch disqualification height, Cazzie Russell was one of them. For the first three years of his career, Russell was on a plane many weekends, heading back and forth to the Illinois National Guard. “I would fly to Chicago on a Friday afternoon, attend a Saturday meeting, fly back to New York for a Saturday-night game,” he said. “Then back to Chicago for Sunday duty and rejoin the team for the week.” He cackled at the thought of LeBron James, Nike’s current major general, having to do his duty as a weekend warrior, tweeting his displeasure while his private jet was de-iced for takeoff.

Russell, an infantryman, saw live action during the summer of 1968 when he was assigned to scan and patrol Chicago rooftops for snipers during the infamous Democratic National Convention that embroiled student demonstrators, protesters, and a massive police presence fortified by the National Guard. The explosion of violence was a reflection of the tensions and frustrations in a country that was reeling from unspeakable tragedy and festering wounds: the assassinations that spring, two and a half months apart, of King and Robert F. Kennedy.

“They mobilized us because they knew there was going to be trouble,” Russell said. “I saw it all—the protests, the police brutality, the craziness in the streets. It made you sad. It made you think about a lot of things that were a lot more important than basketball.”

That year, 1968, New York had its own reverberating conflict. In the Brownsville section of Brooklyn—a neighborhood that was of particular interest to me, since I had lived there between the ages of five and ten before moving with my family to Staten Island in 1962—the community was given control of its schools in a decentralization test case. It responded by attempting to rid itself of white teachers. New York’s teachers’ union moved swiftly to defend its members and authorized a citywide strike. The strife between the black community and the union was a window into a city teeming with racial tensions. But it was merely one of many fiscal and social issues that plagued John V. Lindsay from the very first day of his mayoralty, which included a strike by the Transport Workers Union of America that shut down mass transit for twelve crippling days and a nine-day sanitation walkout in 1968 that turned the city into a mountain of reeking, burning garbage.

That same year, a young Queens attorney who would later become a political force in his own right was amazed by what he saw in his beloved native New York. “It was a crazy, crazy time, but very different from what would come later, the hangover from the seventies, the crack epidemic and HIV and on into the twenty-first century, when the problems would become much, much greater because the world has gotten so much smaller and what happens in Iran is as important as what happens in Chicago,” said Mario Cuomo, the future governor of New York and father of Andrew, who in 2010 would ascend to the same Albany office that Mario had occupied from 1983 through 1994. “In the sixties, Vietnam was driving people crazy and brought all the drugs, and then the political violence and assassinations. But because we were fighting for all kinds of freedoms, it was also a time that you could shape an ideology, an identity.”

When Cuomo was growing up in the South Jamaica section of Queens in the 1940s, playing baseball (seriously enough to land a minor league deal with Pittsburgh) and throwing elbows in school-yard pickup and church league hoop games, pro basketball had no real identity to speak of. It was an inelegant game, the domain of whites and fittingly confined mostly to small, industrial cities. The Knicks might as well have been in one, too. They played many home games at the 69th Regiment Armory, where Jimmy Wergeles, the public relations man, would steer people in from outside for free. “To fill it up a little bit upstairs,” he said.

But by the summer of ’68, the infusion of black talent was lifting the pro game to higher athletic and cultural levels. It could be argued that the metaphorical curtain was raised on this sport—destined to soar in the American social arena—by one little-known or long-forgotten exhibition on August 16, 1968. The site was the 15,000-seat outdoor Singer Bowl on the site of the 1964 World’s Fair in Flushing Meadows, Queens. Underwriting the event was the F. & M. Schaefer Brewing Company. Televising it in the New York area was WPIX (Channel 11). Tickets were scaled at $5, $3, and $2, with 350 VIP seats selling at $25.

The goal, said the game’s celebrity organizer, Oscar Robertson, was to memorialize Dr. King and raise money for his Southern Christian Leadership Conference. “A quarter million dollars would be a nice round figure for us to raise,” Robertson, the president of the National Basketball Players Association, was quoted as saying in the
New York Times
on the morning of the game.

At a time when pro basketball was no main attraction, only 7,500 people cheered the talents of Robertson, Wilt Chamberlain, Willis Reed, Walt Bellamy, Dave DeBusschere, and Earl Monroe. Hindsight tells us that the size of the crowd or the proceeds from the gate weren’t really the point. When asked about the game, Robertson had scant memory of where it was played and who had shown up to participate, or that he had appeared the following morning in a
Times
photograph, shaking hands with the dapper Mayor Lindsay, who had to be thrilled to be attending an event that united people instead of inciting them to general mayhem.

Time has a way of blurring the details of even the most worthy endeavors, but what Robertson would never forget was the profound grief he felt that summer, the consuming need for him and his colleagues to collectively cry out. “It was a depressing time for blacks in America,” he said. “If you grew up as an African American, with the poverty and despair, I always said it was almost like being a nurse in a hospital, where you see blood and suffering all the time but eventually you get used to it. But when Dr. King was killed, a man who was showing us a way out, it was almost too much to bear. It was a terrible time, but I wanted us to stand up and say something, even though you had to be careful what you said if you were black, because you could lose what you had.”

The man who never once slammed a ball through the hoop in an NBA game because he believed it was an inelegant act seldom had to be prodded to belittle the diminished state of fundamentals in the modern game. To the chagrin of David Stern and other league officials, Robertson rightly linked the lack of movement and teamwork to the dunk-and-pony shows that were seemingly designed to suit the pyrotechnic NBA arena experience. In other words, Robertson had made it his life’s calling to speak his piece, whether people wanted to hear it or not, on subjects related to what happened inside the lines or out.