The Book of Basketball (75 page)

Frazier was the most infamous crowd-killer of his generation and, taking it in a slightly different direction, the master of the impact play—whether it was stripping someone at midcourt when the Knicks needed a hoop, dramatically setting up and draining a high-post jumper or whatever. You always hear about guys like Gervin or English who finished with a “quiet” 39; Clyde routinely finished with a loud 25 and four deafening steals. His relationship with the MSG faithful ranked among the most unique in sports; they appreciated him to the fullest, understood exactly what he brought to the table and connected to him spiritually in an atypical way. When the Knicks struggled after Reed and DeBusschere retired, those same fans took out their frustrations by turning on Frazier as if he were to blame. Eventually they gave him away as compensation for signing free agent Jim Cleamons in 1977, an ignominious end to a particularly dignified career. Clyde was a lightning rod in every respect: he carried himself with particular style during a fairly bland era, became an iconic
Manhattan personality because of his muttonchop sideburns, mink coats, Rolls-Royces, swank apartments, stamp-of-approval party appearances and enviable bachelor life,
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and on top of that, he stood out for the way he connected with those MSG crowds. So maybe it made sense that his career ended in such a messy, ugly fashion; if you connect with a crowd positively when things are going well, maybe you connect negatively when everything is falling apart. Fans are fickle and that’s just the way it is.

Two lingering questions about Frazier. First, his career ended so abruptly that it’s hard to make sense of it. He played nine good years and then was cooked without a drug problem or major injury to blame. Bizarre. And second, he peaked during the best possible era for his specific gifts—no three-point line, no slash-and-kick, no complex defensive strategies, mostly physical guards imposing their will and playing that high-post game. Not until the merger did NBA teams start differentiating between point guards and shooting guards. Before that? You were just a guard. Nobody cared who brought the ball up. Was it a coincidence that Frazier lost his fastball immediately after the merger, when the sport became faster and speedy point guards such as John Lucas, Norm Nixon, Gus Williams, Kevin Porter and Johnny Davis became all the rage?
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Hard to say. Had Frazier come along ten years later, maybe he would have been a hybrid guard like Dennis Johnson … and maybe he wouldn’t have been as effective. Again, we don’t know.
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But we do know that an inordinate number of fans from Frazier’s generation—including a few that influenced me over the years—have Clyde ranked among the greatest ever. For instance, I always found it interesting that my father, a lifelong basketball fan and thirty-five-year NBA season ticket holder who remembers everyone from Cousy to LeBron, ranks Jordan and Frazier as his all-time back-court. So maybe I’m not old enough to remember seeing Frazier kill a
crowd, but I grew up with my father telling me, “Frazier
killed
us. He was an assassin. You didn’t want any part of him in a big game—he was always the best guy on the court. I’ve never been happier to see anyone retire.” And that’s good enough for me.

31. DAVE COWENS

Resume: 11 years, 8 quality, 7 All-Stars … ’73 MVP … ’75 MVP runner-up … ’71 Rookie of the Year … Top 10 (’73, ’75, ’76) … All-Defense (2x) … Playoffs: 14.4 RPG (5th all-time) … 4-year peak: 20–16–4, 46% FG … 4-year Playoffs peak: 21–16–4 (50 g’s) … best or 2nd-best player on 2 champs (’74, ’76 Celts), 21–15–4 (36 g’s) … starter for 68-win team (’73)

When Dad bought our second season ticket in 1977, our new section hugged one side of the player’s tunnel and the wives’ section hugged the other side.
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Hondo’s wife (or, as Brent Musburger called her, “John Havlicek’s lovely wife, Beth”) and kids sat in the parallel row to our right during that first season. I remember checking out Hondo’s daughter from ten feet away and thinking, “Someday I’ll marry her and I can spend Christmas with the Hondos!” Then Hondo retired and the wives’ section was in constant flux, a little like how the cast of
Law and Order
changes every year. When Scott Wedman joined the team in 1982, we also picked up his beautiful spouse, Kim, who easily could have passed for the hottest daughter on
Eight Is Enough.
After we traded for Bill Walton, his wife and kids crammed into that three-seat row next to the railing—like seeing five people stack into the backseat of a Volkswagen or something—only every kid had Walton’s gigantic head crammed onto a tiny body.
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You get the
idea. The wives/girlfriends/families invariably filled in the blanks with each player and strengthened opinions you already had about them. Danny Ainge’s wife couldn’t have been more cute and wholesome. Bird’s wife was unsurprisingly normal and down to earth (like the Patty Scialfa of the NBA). Reggie Lewis’s wife was brash and loud; she clearly wore the pants in the family. Dino Radja married a leggy European who carried herself like Brigitte Nielsen in
Rocky IV;
you could picture them chainsmoking after games while Dino complained about Todd Day. Sherman Douglas’ wife showed up in saggy jogging pants and ate like a Shetland pony for three hours. Dee Brown had one of those “Shit, I didn’t realize I was going to be famous when I married her” wives as a rookie, won the Dunk Contest and soon traded up for the best-looking wife of that decade.

Nobody stood out more than Robert Parish’s not-so-better half, a Gina Gershon look-alike who carried on like a profane bunshee, to the degree that she’d scream at officials as everyone else wondered, “Hey, do you think the Chief is just afraid to break up with her because he doesn’t want to wake up with his house on fire?” An aspiring singer who sang the national anthem before a few Celtics games,
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Mrs. Chief detested referee Jake O’Donnell so much that she vaulted over two other girlfriends at halftime of one game, leaned over the railing, showered him with obscenities and actually had to be held back like a hockey player. For a second, we thought she might break free, hurtle off the railing and deliver a flying elbow like Macho Man Savage … and if it happened, none of us would have been even remotely surprised. She missed her true calling by about fifteen years: reality TV. Too bad.
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What does this have to do with Dave Cowens? Near the end of his career we noticed a new lady started sitting in the wives’ section: She looked
a little like Linda Blair, only with frizzy reddish brown hair and a sane smile. She couldn’t have been more pleasant to everyone who approached her. You could have easily imagined her baking cookies every afternoon. We couldn’t figure out which player she was dating for the first few games, finally putting two and two together when Cowens was heading out to the court after halftime and stopped to talk to her for a few seconds with a big shit-eating smile on his face. I remember thinking the same thing as everyone else: “Good God, Dave Cowens has a girlfriend!” How was this possible? The guy had a competitiveness disorder, playing every game in fifth gear, berating officials like they were busboys, bellowing out instructions to teammates, diving for loose balls, crashing over three guys for rebounds, battling bigger centers game after game and getting into fights at least once a month. Whenever Cowens fouled out, he stood in disbelief with his hands stuck on his hips, staring the offending official down and hoping the guy might change his mind.
Don’t you realize what you just did? This means I can’t play anymore! Don’t you realize what you just fucking did?
The Newlin/flopping story doubled as the ultimate Cowens moment: after eight years of dealing with lousy referees and opponents who didn’t respect the sport, he finally snapped and took the law in his own hands. Even after all these years, he remains my father’s favorite Celtic—the guy who never took a night off, the guy who cared just a little bit more than everyone else.
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And now he had a girlfriend? I was totally confused by this revelation.
Does this mean they hold hands and go on dates? Do they sleep in the same bed together?
I kept picturing her forgetting to buy milk and Cowens flipping out the same way he freaked after an especially terrible call. That’s what separated Cowens from everyone else: he played with such unbridled ferocity that little kids couldn’t even
conceive
of him having a girlfriend. Imagine Jason from
Friday the 13th
heading home from a weekend of killing camp counselors, showering, changing into clean clothes, then taking his lady to Outback Steakhouse. That was Cowens with a girlfriend. I remember being even more dumbfounded when they got married.
There’s a Mrs. Dave Cowens?
Of course, marriage ended up domesticating him like Adrian Balboa softened Rocky. Within two years of getting betrothed,
a calmer Cowens had walked away from a huge paycheck on a potential championship team (the ’81 Celtics, who
did
win the title), blaming ravaged ankles, tired knees and a fire that was no longer burning inside him. And there wasn’t a Clubber Lang out there to insult his wife, kill Red Auerbach and lure him back into uniform. Too bad.

We’ll remember him for everything I already covered in the prologue, as well his ’73 MVP award (dubious, but whatever), two titles, a clutch 28–14 in Game 7 of the ’74 Finals and the quirkiest career of anyone in the Pyramid. He enrolled in mechanics school, covered the ’76 Olympics as a newspaper reporter, rode the subway to home games, bought a 30-acre Christmas tree farm in Kentucky and moonlighted as a taxi driver in downtown Boston.
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He capped off a night of celebrating the ’74 championship by sleeping on a park bench in Boston Common. When the Celtics lowballed Paul Silas and dealt him to Denver after the ’76 title season, then replaced him with anti-Celtics Curtis Rowe and Sidney Wicks, a distraught Cowens took an unpaid leave of absence for 32 games and accepted a PR job at Suffolk Downs racetrack to experience a traditional nine-to-five job. When Bob Ryan skewered him for the Newlin bullrush, Cowens wrote a rebuttal in the
Boston Globe
and railed against the evils of flopping. He became the league’s last player-coach during the ’79 season. He even refused to hang on as a much-needed bench player after the Parish/McHale trade, walking away from a giant paycheck and writing a goodbye column in the
Boston Herald
explaining his motives. By contrast, his postplaying career has been unfathomably mundane—a few coaching gigs, that’s about it—and part of me wishes he’d flamed out in dramatic style, crashing a motorcycle into a polar bear in Alaska at 130 miles an hour or something. It’s just tough for the Newlin story to have the same lasting impact when you see Cowens unassumingly holding a clipboard as a Pistons assistant and looking like he just finished your taxes. Oh, well.

One last Cowens thought: Unlike most stars from the sixties and seventies, Cowens would be just as effective today because of his durability
and athleticism.
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For the “Wine Cellar” chapter that’s coming up, I gave him strong consideration for a bench spot because of his versatility and intensity—seriously, can you think of a better guy to change the pace of a game off the bench than ’74 Dave Cowens doing his “bull in a china shop” routine?—ultimately leaving him off because of his up-and-down shooting (career: 44 percent), impeccable timing (he never faced Wilt or Shaq in their primes, both of whom would have bulldozed him) and never-ending struggles with foul trouble. You can’t watch a memorable Celtics game from the seventies without an announcer saying, “That’s the sixth on Cowens!” or “One more and he’s gone!” He couldn’t help himself. The man cared just a little
too
much. Here’s how he explained his leave of absence to
SI
in 1976: “I just lost my enthusiasm for the game. That’s all I can say. This wasn’t something sudden for me, I’d been thinking about it for three months. I even thought seriously about quitting before the season started, but I figured, aw, I’d try it and see how it was. And then I just didn’t have it. Nothing. When somebody drives right by you and you shrug your shoulders and say, ‘Aw, what the hell,’ when you go down and make a basket like a robot, when you win or lose a ballgame and it doesn’t matter either way, when you can’t even get mad at the refs, then something’s wrong. I couldn’t do anything about it. When there’s nothing left, there’s no use making believe there is. I don’t want to spoil the Celtics and I don’t want to take their money if I’m not earning it.”

In other words, Dave Cowens was turning into everyone else in the NBA. And he didn’t like it. Now that’s a guy I want in my NBA Foxhole.

30. WILLIS REED

Resume: 10 years, 7 quality, 7 All-Stars … Finals MVP: ’70, ’73 … ’70 MVP … ’65 Rookie of the Year … Top 5 (’70), Top 10 (’67, ’68, ’69, ’71) … 5-year peak: 21–14–2 … 2-year Playoffs peak: 25–14, 50% FG (28 G) … best or second-best player on 2 champs (’70, ’73 Knicks)

Hey, it’s another undersized lefty center, inspirational leader and world-class hombre who protected his teammates! Both Reed and Cowens won an MVP trophy, a Rookie of the Year trophy and two rings. They played in seven All-Star Games apiece and each took home an All-Star MVP. They played for exactly ten years and couldn’t stay healthy for the last few (although Cowens lasted better than Reed did). Their home crowds connected with them in a “Springsteen playing the Meadowlands” kind of way. They finished with nearly identical career scoring/rebounding numbers (18–14 for Cowens, 19–13 for Reed). And neither of them became a good coach for the same reason: namely, that an overcompetitive legend couldn’t possibly coach modern NBA players without going on a three-state killing spree.