When the Garden Was Eden (10 page)

The moral from the left would have to be that the political world’s learning curve was as challenging for Bradley as the NBA’s. But as difficult as his rookie season was, 1967–68 wasn’t a total write-off, collectively speaking. It ended in a new Madison Square Garden, with a new coach, Red Holzman, and the Knicks finishing strong with 43 wins, over .500 for the first time in nine years. After losing a six-game series to the Philadelphia 76ers in the first round of the playoffs, the team nevertheless brimmed with optimism.

A sobering context would come three days after the series ended, when Dr. King was assassinated on the second-floor balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, where he had gone in support of striking black public-works employees. Riots broke out in several cities, including the nation’s capital. As spring turned to summer, and the presidential campaign of Bobby Kennedy was also struck down by an assassin’s bullet in a Los Angeles hotel kitchen, the temperature and tolerance in the country would rise to near boiling point.

There were plenty of places to howl in pain or protest, or just quietly try to help with the healing. Most days, Bradley went to Harlem to volunteer in the street academy. But as much as he felt committed to a country in chaos, so, too, was there a fire burning within him to be a better basketball player. It was the part of him he could no longer deny. Disappointed by his rookie year, he knew he needed to remake and relaunch himself. On many summer afternoons, he got in the car and headed down to Philadelphia and to another prestigious educational institution: the reputable basketball hot spot known as the Baker League.

DICK MCGUIRE MADE IT TO CHRISTMAS
. On December 27, 1967, after a year in which the Knicks struggled and stratified under lax leadership, Red Holzman was abruptly named the team’s head coach. He had, supposedly, been threatened with losing his job as a scout if he didn’t accept the offer. According to legend, and the
New York Post
’s Leonard Lewin (a close friend of Holzman’s and co-author of his autobiographical books), Holzman had wanted nothing to do with coaching ever since he’d been fired in St. Louis. He was said to be a man without grand ambitions, one who coveted attention and responsibility for wins and losses the way other men desired a root canal.

“He wanted to be left alone, and he wanted to leave you alone,” said Larry Pearlstein, another Holzman pal. Pearlstein made a living in the business world but loved the game and had cultivated enough friendships in and around the sport that he answered to a nickname befitting an entrenched insider: the Scout. He met Holzman in the early fifties on a handball court in Long Beach, Long Island, where Holzman was a regular. “He was with the Rochester Royals at the time, but I had been a big fan of his when he was at CCNY,” Pearlstein said. “We all considered him a tough guy, an overachiever. But he was almost embarrassed when I told him that. He was friendly, but he wanted to talk about handball and other things, not basketball. That was Red. He was just very uncomfortable when you praised him. He had no ego, none whatsoever.”

Rule number one for Holzman was to never glorify himself, especially at the expense of a colleague. “Red would come into your building, kick your ass, and tell the local media what a great job you were doing,” Jack Ramsay, who coached against Holzman in Philadelphia and later Portland, said. “He was always aware of the position of the other guy. He thought the scoreboard was enough; he didn’t have to gloat.”

That said, ego and pride are qualities that share an unguarded border, and Holzman, in his own quiet way, was as stubbornly proud as he was pragmatic. Pearlstein saw that side of him firsthand when the coach was inducted into the New York City Basketball Hall of Fame.

According to Pearlstein, Holzman—who had several years earlier, in 1986, been inducted into the Naismith Hall of Fame in Springfield, also as a coach—bristled that the New York voters had overlooked him as a player. Hadn’t he been a college star—a 1942 All-American at City College—in his own right? Didn’t he have an NBA championship ring, something that McGuire—inducted as a player into the Naismith Hall—did not? Characteristically, Holzman would only reveal such feelings to those in his inner circle, and even then with a temperament to suggest that the oversight was no big deal, even if his friends suspected otherwise. That was Holzman: never revealing too much, never wanting his emotions to betray his intentions or ambitions. It was a coaching strategy as much as a personality tic.

In the case of McGuire, Holzman realized that the Irishman was beloved in the New York basketball community. The pride of Rockaway’s 108th Street courts and St. John’s University, McGuire had landed in the Knicks’ backcourt in 1949, a born playmaker (or point guard, though there was no such designation yet). Before Bill Russell came along to make a champion of everyone in green, Boston had Bob Cousy—and the Knicks had McGuire, their own backcourt wizard. McGuire was such a passing genius that, deep into middle age, he could, with one adept look away, still bloody the ample nose (mine) of a sportswriter who dared put his head down in a pickup game when he should have honored the man’s peripheral vision.

During my interview with Mario Cuomo, the former governor of New York went off on an impassioned tangent raving about McGuire, his Queens homey and favorite player of all time—and a onetime opponent in a church league game. Larry Pearlstein felt the same way about McGuire, as did scores of others, no doubt. But while no one ever had a bad word to say about McGuire, neither would anyone take to the street to defend him as a coach, least of all him.

McGuire was the first to admit that his younger brother Al—the college coach and NCAA television analyst, who died in 2001—was the family orator. Known around the game as Mumbles, Dick was a man of many words—only, like an AM radio station on the fritz, you couldn’t understand any of them. He was no more a disciplinarian than he was a communicator. Improved personnel notwithstanding, his two-plus seasons coaching the Knicks produced a record of 75–102 and a me-first environment that shocked the rookie Walt Frazier.

“There was no camaraderie, a lot of selfishness, one or two guys getting back on defense,” Frazier said. “I remember at first thinking that I wished I had gone someplace else, because I had never played on a team where guys wouldn’t pass each other the ball.”

He was talking, primarily, about Cazzie Russell and Butch Komives, whose dislike for each other was widely known. But there were other distractions and dysfunctions. Bellamy and Reed, who had made the move to forward, couldn’t get out of each other’s way in the lane. Phil Jackson, a rookie when McGuire coached the first 37 games of the 1967–68 season before switching roles with Holzman, recalled ball boys being sent out to the Garden lobby at halftime for hot dog runs to Nedick’s. Others slumped in front of their lockers and fired up cigarettes. For road games—to Boston or Philadelphia, say—the players often traveled on their own. Even as a rookie, practically a deer from North Dakota caught in the bright lights of the big city, Jackson realized that any coach without leverage over his players could not last very long.

“The players were making tens of thousands, and you’re paying the coach a few thousand dollars,” Jackson said, looking back from the perch of 11 championships, the most by any coach in NBA history. The pre-Holzman days, he recalled, were chaotic and fraught with the vagaries of how money paid translates to respect earned, and McGuire didn’t help himself by avoiding confrontation. He would even apologize to the forward Dick Van Arsdale when he would sub him out of a game, because Van Arsdale was the one player he knew wouldn’t bitch.

(“I should never have been coaching, because I didn’t want to yell at anybody,” he told me in his Long Island home during the summer of 2009, with his wife, Teri, nodding nearby.)

When Holzman took over, “he changed all that loose stuff,” Jackson said. “We traveled as a team whenever possible.” He told Frazier he’d be getting more time, because he wanted “guys playing both ends,” but that he should also sit next to him whenever he was on the bench, absorb all that he could. He put an end to Bellamy’s sweetheart arrangement of having his own room on the road, telling the veteran he wasn’t earning the privilege. He implemented a fine system for rule breakers, nailing Bill Bradley for being a few minutes late to one of Holzman’s first meetings.

But while establishing order, Holzman operated without autocratic zeal and with a wry sense of humor. When Russell broke the travel edict to test-drive a new Cadillac to Philadelphia, Holzman fined him $100 but wondered how much he’d spent on tolls. Russell figured about $8. Holzman said, “Okay, I’ll only charge you $92.” Russell went away thinking he’d made out.

“That was Red: always thinking of ways he could turn a situation, good or bad, into something better,” said Jackson, who was watching closely, storing away little trade secrets he would draw on years later in Chicago and Los Angeles.

Holzman also had an indisputable and immediate impact between the lines, stylistically and statistically. “When he took over, we had like 25 practices—it felt like training camp except it was midseason—and it was always defense, defense, defense,” Bradley said. Holzman believed that effective defense—much like great offense—was a collective act, five players coordinating as one. His emphasis was on extending it full-court, forcing dribblers into vulnerable positions, rotating to areas where they would most likely be forced to pass. Stressed most of all was the concept of covering for one another, of becoming a team whose proverbial calling card would one day read, simply: Defense.

The Knicks went from 15–22 to start the season under McGuire to 28–17 under Holzman, and steamed into the 1968 playoffs against Philadelphia. It’s an established truism of sportswriting that coaches, in all sports and on every level, get too much credit and too much blame upon season’s end, but what other explanation could there be for the Knicks’ turnaround except that the right man had come at the right time? “Red was obviously the guy to coach us, because he was the one who scouted us, who knew us better than anyone,” Reed said. “He knew that. People always said he had to be ordered to do it, but I think, deep down, he knew we had a chance to be really good.”

In other words, he wanted the job. What man with Holzman’s competitive instincts (to go along with the relationships he had with the players) wouldn’t have? Of course, to admit that he desired another crack at coaching—and in his native New York—might have left the impression that he had undermined McGuire, a good man and a trusted friend. Holzman would have none of that. Hence, my theory: that he was all too willing to propagate the notion of his being forced to give up his comfy—and low-paying—scouting gig to assume the reins. Better for everyone’s sake to have people believe he was just taking orders from Irish.

HE WAS WILY IN OTHER WAYS, TOO
. On his office door at the Knicks’ administrative digs, Red had scratched out measurement markers for various heights—6'2", 6'5", and so on. Wary of players who lied about their height, Holzman instructed his secretary, Gwynne Bloomfield, to usher incoming prospects by the door. This way, when Holzman got up to greet him, his head would align with the corresponding marker. The player never knew he was literally being sized up.

But Holzman never took his due credit. He would forever deny having anything to do with the immediate turnaround. That was a blessing bestowed by his players—at that point two in particular: Reed, who may still be the greatest second-round draft pick ever, albeit in a league with fewer teams (and thus shorter rounds), and Dick Barnett, a man who arrived from the Lakers in exchange for Bob Boozer and who fit in so well, it was almost as if he had been born to be an Old Knick.

BARNETT WAS BORN AND RAISED IN GARY, INDIANA
, the youngest of three children in a close-knit family that lived in a poor neighborhood in the shadow of smoke-belching factories. His father at one time worked in a nearby steel mill but quit when he was ordered to do menial jobs that were below his skill level, and wound up being employed by the city’s parks department.

Barnett was a reticent child, never looking for acceptance in gangs or places where trouble lurked. His refuge from the darker aspects of his adolescence was always the basketball court at the local Roosevelt High School. He played half-court games but spent more hours alone, sometimes well into the night, crafting an unconventional southpaw jump shot—the ball almost shot-putted from his left shoulder, legs bent behind him, practically parallel to the ground, as he elevated for his release.

Asked about his strange form, which defined the unorthodoxy of the man and his game, the original Tricky Dick said: “It was the unintended consequences of just being on the court, without rhyme or reason, something that came naturally and worked for me. It was in the playground before I even got to high school that I learned how to execute that shot without really knowing what I was doing.”

Coaches shook their heads at Barnett’s shot, tried to get him to change, but ultimately couldn’t argue with the results: he became the best player in the city of Gary. As a high school senior, his school, Roosevelt, lost the Indiana state championship game to Oscar Robertson and Crispus Attucks High of Indianapolis. Barnett went off to college in Nashville, eager to play for John McLendon, if not as enthusiastic about going to class. McLendon took a look at his freshman grades and wanted to send him home, but school officials persuaded the coach to give Barnett time. A scholar he was not, but he did enough to “get by.”