When the Garden Was Eden (11 page)

In Nashville, during his college years in the late fifties, he experienced lawful segregation for the first time. He unknowingly sat in the front of a bus and was ordered to move, in the stark language of the times. He tried to eat at a lunch counter in a whites-only restaurant and was spat on by the attendant. But if Nashville was jarring and occasionally humiliating, Syracuse, his first NBA stop, was downright depressing. Drafted in the first round in 1959, Barnett was paid $7,500 to play behind two established guards, Hal Greer and Larry Costello. After two years, he hated the snowy upstate New York outpost so much that he jumped at the opportunity to join McLendon, who had by then become the first black pro coach, with the ABL’s Cleveland Pipers.

The Pipers were owned by the son of a rich shipbuilder, a guy named George Steinbrenner, who was every bit the madman you might imagine the young Boss would be. He threw tantrums. He drove McLendon crazy, then out of town. Worse, his checks bounced like basketballs pumped with helium. But before the ABL folded, Barnett and the Pipers won a championship under McLendon’s successor, Bill Sharman.

After the Lakers purchased his NBA rights from Syracuse, Barnett went to Los Angeles, where he became the sixth man and third-leading scorer behind Jerry West and Elgin Baylor. Barnett’s new mates appreciated his game and loved his idiosyncratic ways. He had a unique personality that brought people together. On the road, he appointed himself commissioner of late-night wagering. He summoned teammates with a typically colorful telephone greeting: “Darlin’, they are playing the national anthem.” The poker game was about to begin.

There was little that Barnett said or did that sounded or looked conventional. He brought a school yard swagger to the court, a knack for dropping back on defense after releasing his jumper and advising teammates out loud that there was no point in them waiting around for an offensive rebound, either.

The Lakers’ famed announcer Chick Hearn soon incorporated the showmanship into his game call: “Fall back, baby,” he would cry after a Barnett release. In his first season in L.A., Barnett made good on enough of his mini-prophecies to keep the coach off his back. In the twenty-first-century NBA, Barnett’s antics would no doubt have set off a national debate, countless shouting matches on ESPN about etiquette and sportsmanship. Back then, Barnett figured if the game’s most successful coach (Red Auerbach) could light up victory cigars, why couldn’t he have a little fun? As Cal Ramsey said, it was the sixties, a decade devoted to shaking things up. Reporters and fans got a kick out of the man with the sleepy eyes and the gait so deliberate that Phil Jackson would later, in New York, give him yet another nickname: Molasses.

That the Lakers wound up trading him remains one of the more painful transactions in that franchise’s history. West said the team was worried about Baylor’s knees and the number of minutes he was playing, hence the need for Boozer. But during his three seasons in L.A., Barnett had helped the Lakers reach two Finals (they lost both) and developed all the trappings of a star—with the important exceptions of promoting and paying him as one.

West took issue with Barnett’s assertions—made after he was gone—that there was no room on the team for another luminary, and especially a second black one, in addition to Baylor. He said Barnett was deployed as the sixth man because the Lakers needed a playmaker to start alongside him. “I loved Barnett,” West told me. “Everybody did. I still don’t know why we traded him. That day was one of the worst of my career.” Not so much for Barnett: he was thrilled to go to the world’s media capital. In the pre—Walt Frazier days, he was confident of becoming the Knicks’ featured guard.

Barnett fit in well with the Knicks. Reed admired him for his fearlessness on the floor, the delight he took in challenging Wilt Chamberlain, craftily floating a runner or hook shot over the giant’s high-altitude reach—and talking all the while: “Get this, you big motherfucker.”

DURING THE 2007 NBA ALL-STAR WEEKEND
in Las Vegas, Willis Reed took part in a lunchtime panel at the ESPN Zone, with Bill Walton, Greg Anthony, and Spud Webb. Most of the discussion was overwhelmed by a lively debate between Walton and Anthony about the state of the game. Both of them happened to be players whose careers had progressed from professional gaming to professional TV gabbing—Reed and Webb struggled to get a word in edgewise.

Eventually the floor was opened to the fans, and the program ended with the former players each shooting a trivia question at the crowd, with ESPN-brand prizes on hand for the winners. When Reed’s turn came, he asked: “Who was the starting backcourt for the 1969–70 champion Knicks?” Several hands shot up. Reed called on one.

“Frazier and Monroe,” the man said, proudly.

“Sorry,” Reed said, disappointed.

Immediately, the other hands were lowered, all apparently having been prepared to give the same answer. Sitting at a table in the back, where Reed and the others couldn’t see me, I gave my then—17-year-old son Alex a nudge.

“Frazier and Barnett,” I whispered.

“Young man all the way in the back,” Reed said when Alex raised a hand.

“Frazier and Barnett,” he shouted with glee.

Reed smiled, looking relieved. Someone, thankfully, had remembered Dick Barnett.

Considering the totality of his career, a strong case could be made that Barnett—one of the most overlooked and underappreciated players in the history of the sport—should be enshrined in the Naismith Hall of Fame. After all, the other four starters from the 1970 champions—Reed, Frazier, DeBusschere, and Bradley—are found in Springfield. Why not the fifth? Barnett played in five championship series, winning two rings in New York. Playing under John McLendon at Tennessee A&I, he was the star of three consecutive NAIA champions—the first time that many were claimed in succession by any college team.

Barnett was vital to the success of a system predicated on the delicate melding of unique personalities. He was its cold-blooded gunslinger, lock-down backcourt defender, and most offbeat locker-room character.

When I asked him about the Hall, the subject evoked Barnett’s typical cocksure charm and a suspicious, almost dismissive attitude about the establishment that kept the black athletes of his time way down, if not out. “Based on my ability, I know I should be in the Hall,” he told me. “Even if I didn’t play in the pros, we were the first team to win three national titles before UCLA. That whole team should be in the Hall. But now you’re getting into a whole political construct. It’s who you know. And you can say whatever you want, but what are you going to do?”

While those three NAIA titles may not sound like much based on college basketball’s contemporary classifications, those were the days before the major southern universities were desegregated. Many NAIA teams reaped the benefits of the black talent that would eventually move on to big-conference powerhouses. Knowing how strong much of his competition in college really was, Barnett never doubted that he was as talented as any nationally celebrated All-American of the late fifties.

“In my mind, it came down to answering the question, Am I as good as that player from Kentucky or UCLA, who benefited from the promulgation of the media?” he said. “Do I accept the conspiracies and stereotypes that were designed to continue a corrupt system that was going to crumble and bring about major change in American society? In the pros, it was one-on-one—can you play at this level or not? But on my college team, we always believed that we could play with anyone in the country. We had no reason not to think that, unless we wanted to accept the greater deceit that we were also lesser human beings.”

Barnett’s teammates had to lobby the Knicks organization before they would retire his No. 12 jersey, 20 years after the first title was won. On the night of March 10, 1990, Barnett at least had good company. A banner was also raised for Holzman, with the number of his Knicks regular-season victories, 613 (the same as the number of commandments in the Torah).

Other than his backcourt mate, Walt Frazier, who called Barnett “the most exciting of us to watch when he got hot,” nobody appreciated him more than Holzman, who had experienced the live phenomenon of Skull Barnett during his college career as a scout. “Red loved Barnett,” Marv Albert said. “He always thought he was one of the most underrated players in the game.”

“Barnett was a pain in the ass,” Larry Pearlstein said. “But Red considered him a great player. He used to tell me that all the time.”

When Holzman returned to the Knicks for a second coaching run, replacing Reed on the bench in 1978, he would reflect on his old guys, often with his assistant coach Butch Beard. “We’d stay up late on the road, a couple of drinks, and I’d get inside his head as a coach,” Beard said. “He wanted to talk about Barnett all the time. See, by the time Red took over as coach, Barnett didn’t care about getting his name in the paper, as long as his teammates and his coach knew what he was about.”

And yes, Barnett was flaky, occasionally a pain in the aforementioned
tuchus
, with his streetwise needling and his incessant need for “action.” During his Knicks days, he was well known for his gambling and for bumming dollar bills wherever he could get them. “Dick owed us and probably a lot of other people money,” Reed said. “But I always figured, What the hell—he was winning us a lot of money on the court.”

No one knew what value Barnett brought to the team more than Holzman. Years later, in reflective moments invariably fueled by his beloved scotch, Holzman would get misty-eyed while expressing his fondness for the old lefty. He would contend that Barnett was as much a student of the game as any Old Knick.

But even with the memory of Holzman’s sly appreciative grin, it occurs to me now that this might well have been a tacit admission that Barnett, also a child of modest urban roots, somehow reminded Holzman of himself. He was feisty and uncompromising and in no particular hurry to say or do anything for the sake of promoting himself. Known for his outrageous commentary among teammates, Barnett dialed it down considerably as soon as reporters entered the room.

At bottom, he was a team-first insider, a coach’s kind of guy. Following the second championship in 1973, Holzman made Barnett his first-ever bench assistant.

Barnett took the job to stay in the game and to keep some money coming in while he pursued his advanced degrees. He wasn’t much interested in athletic achievement anymore. Flamboyant as he was on the floor, he never much cared for the limelight.

In 1978, Barnett was cited by the New York State Attorney General’s office for “engaging in fraudulent business practices” related to monies invested in a magazine venture he had fronted. A report in the
New York Times
said that the DA’s office was unable to locate Barnett to serve a restraining order. Friends told the DA they were accustomed to going months without seeing him.

Thirty-one years later he was still mysteriously elusive. Former teammates would cackle when I mentioned that even Zelda Spoelstra, the NBA’s senior director of alumni relations, did not have a clue about how to contact Barnett. “You know, Dick’s probably staying a couple of steps ahead of the law,” Reed said jokingly. Such was the way most of Barnett’s former teammates and friends spoke of him: as the most endearing rascal they’d ever shared a locker room with—but also a consummate professional. Phil Jackson called him an “all-time teammate, great storyteller, a hustler who never drank or smoked and was always looking for an angle.”

After some old-fashioned telephone sleuthing, Cal Ramsey eventually produced a cell phone number for his onetime Syracuse Nationals roommate and Harlem running partner. Ramsey, who’d wound up broadcasting Knicks games by 1972, called Barnett on my behalf, and that initiated a series of conversations, always with me leaving a message and Barnett phoning me back minutes later.

“Barnett,” he would say when I answered.

“Dr. Barnett,” I made sure to address him.

This was no colorful sobriquet bestowed by sportswriters, no phony honorific. Cal Ramsey, for one, said the metamorphosis from Skull Barnett to Dr. Barnett had to be seen to be believed. “When I first got to know Dick up in Syracuse, everything was ‘motherfucker this, motherfucker that,’ but that all changed in New York,” he said. “Dick was still a character, but at some point he had this amazing transformation, like a light went on in his head and he thought, ‘I can be a lot more than I am.’ ”

In New York, Eddie Donovan had told Barnett that he would upgrade his paltry contract of “around $20,000” if his performance merited a raise. Donovan eventually made good on the promise, but Barnett was already 29. He rightly suspected he would never make serious money, or even what he really deserved by that era’s scale, which was notorious for paying black players less than whites of comparable ability. As the years passed and the Knicks assembled their championship cast, Barnett would come to a personal crossroads: he could be bitter about the money or he could play the hand he had been dealt.

“In New York, my vision was being altered not only as a player but as a person in a much broader sense,” he said. “Being part of that team definitely had a major impact. There were extensive communications with Bradley, with Jackson and others, with this ongoing cultural transformation, probably the most tumultuous American decade since the Civil War. For me, it was a process of self-discovery, as an adult who was having considerable thoughts about what it all meant, where this was all going, the transition that would have to take place when I left the game. I really began to think in terms of moving forward.”