When the Garden Was Eden (12 page)

Barnett sought out the advice of socially minded athletes he admired: Bill Russell, Jim Brown, and others. He forged a relationship with Eugene Callender, the Urban League leader who by then had gone to work for the Lindsay administration. He began browsing brochures for graduate school programs. By the early seventies he was ready to take the plunge, settling on an urban affairs program at New York University. He went to class with men and women a dozen years younger, most of them doing double takes when Dick Barnett, graduate student, walked into the room. He became immersed in the work, packing his texts when the Knicks hit the road. He earned his master’s while playing, and after retiring from the game he went on to a doctorate program in urban and international affairs at Fordham.

In 1974, with input from Bradley and Jackson, Barnett launched a group called the Athletes for a Better Urban Society, to develop community-minded pros. He took it upon himself to set up meetings with New York’s other professional sports teams to pitch his ideas for a greater social commitment. Much later, done with basketball, he would teach sports management at St. John’s University. With the help of the activist Dr. Harry Edwards, he moved on to a similar adjunct post at the University of San Francisco. The man who had regularly dispensed profane pearls of wisdom during his playing days had become downright professorial.

He had long ceased measuring life by the number of points scored or dollars earned. He had little interest in rehashing or reliving the glory days, or distinguishing one clutch jumper from another game-winning drive. He was content to just say he had been there, done that. Rising from the ghetto, and that Nashville lunch counter, Barnett was a proud black man with championship rings and academic degrees. Nobody could diminish or take them away.

When I pointedly asked whether he ever felt overlooked as a basketball player and, more specifically, as an Old Knick, Barnett, barely missing a beat, startled me by responding in verse. It was from one of the many poems he had taken to writing over the previous decade, scribbling them during idle moments on a plane, on a porch, on a lake. He hoped to publish them, perhaps under the same umbrella—Fall Back Baby Productions Inc.—from which he had self-published his book
The Athlete Negro
in 2007:

After the cheering has ended

And the accolades begin descending,

What now, my brother?

Tell me, what happens to the hangers-on?

Did they leave you for another?

What now, my brother?

When the media and fans turn to others,

For their dose of entertainment,

When no one notices what happens to you,

And life turns real,

What now, my brother?

DAVID ALBERT DEBUSSCHERE WAS BUILT LIKE A CHRYSLER 300C
. A rugged 6'6", 250-pound forward cast in the image of his blue-collar family, he starred in basketball and baseball at Austin Catholic Preparatory High School and the University of Detroit, commuting from home and working weekends in the family business. His father, Peter Marcel, had delivered beer during the Depression and later bought his own distributorship and a bar, the Lycaste, which sat on Jefferson Avenue in the shadow of a Chrysler plant’s smokestacks.

DeBusschere signed a pitching contract with the Chicago White Sox in 1962, the same year he was drafted by the Pistons with a territorial pick. He pitched in 24 games in 1963, started 10, and went 3–4 with an excellent 3.09 earned run average. The next year he was sent down to the minors once hitters figured out he couldn’t get them out with a curve ball, and after two more seasons he quit altogether, in favor of basketball. The Pistons kept him close to home, near his family, and he had come to prefer the physicality of the court to the solitude of the pitcher’s mound.

“To be honest, it made life a lot easier for Dave to play one sport,” his wife, Geri, said. “For the couple of years he did both, he would finish a basketball season totally exhausted because of how hard he played. He would have no time to relax, just pick up and get back to baseball. It was a crazy life. He told me that it just came down to picking the sport he believed he was better at and the one that he just enjoyed more because it was more of a team game. Pitching felt like an individual game for him.”

By choosing basketball, he committed himself to a lousy team, but he was a big crowd favorite in Detroit, where the notion of the young DeBusschere as Old Reliable, as the ultimate guy’s guy. “There was always something about Dave—the sort of easygoing nature—that made him appealing to men on a social basis,” said John Andariese, the longtime Knicks announcer who also worked with DeBusschere in the communications business. “Everybody wanted to be his friend, have a drink with him.”

The attraction, many believed, was less about celebrity than it was about DeBusschere’s equanimity. “He always believed that if he hadn’t played basketball, he would have been just another guy, walking down the street, going to work,” his son, Peter, said. “He didn’t think of himself as this special person and never really got the fuss people made over athletes. He never gloated about his accomplishments.”

In 1965, after losing nine of their first eleven games, the Pistons fired Charles Wolf as their head coach and turned to their homegrown 24-year-old star.

“Dave would tell you he may have been one of the worst coaches of all time,” said Bill Goldman, the Oscar-winning screenwriter who became a close friend of DeBusschere’s during his Knick years. “He used to tell me all the time he had no control of the team, had one or two guys with guns in the locker room.”

DeBusschere lasted three forgettable seasons in the dual role, wondering how to motivate men mostly older than him, never really understanding why he had been chosen in the first place. “He always thought the perception of him that people had was that he was older or more accomplished than he really was,” Peter said. “When they wanted him to be coach, his attitude was, ‘Why me?’ ”

As a player, DeBusschere was averaging a double double—points and rebounds—but as a coach he’d taken a .400 team and made it worse. Well into his third season, with an overall record of 79–143, DeBusschere gave up the coaching reins. In New York, GM Eddie Donovan, who always liked DeBusschere and had been monitoring his situation from a distance, wondered if the Pistons might be thinking of completely rebuilding their roster.

Born and raised in Elizabeth, New Jersey, Donovan had been a college coach at St. Bonaventure in upstate New York from 1953 to 1961. From there he made the jump to the pros as the Knicks’ head coach, where he lasted for three-plus seasons that produced a sickly winning percentage of .302. In a demonstration that Ned Irish’s decision making could occasionally defy logic, Donovan was rewarded with what appeared to be a promotion, moving up to the general manager’s office while Harry Gallatin and, soon after, Dick McGuire took over on the bench.

AFTER THE KNICKS’ RUN
to the playoffs under Holzman in 1968, Donovan began the following season with elevated expectations for his team. But as he stood in Lost Battalion Hall one day in November—the Knicks’ practice site on Queens Boulevard in Rego Park—he shouted at the top of his lungs that the Knicks were “a fucking embarrassment.” Supposed contenders in the Eastern Division, they had stumbled out of the gate, dropping home games to the Bulls and Lakers in mid-October and continuing their lackluster play right into that month. They were limping along at 5–11 when Donovan burst into Holzman’s practice.

Lost Battalion Hall was a brick-faced building named for the 77th Division of the U.S. Army, which had fought the Battle of the Argonne Forest in World War I. The court had wooden backboards and a dull floor full of dead spots that could stop a ball just where it bounced. The players wore their practice gear under their coats when they arrived. “Guys would come in and just throw their stuff on the floor in the corner,” said Mike Riordan, a rookie that season who was getting little time off Holzman’s bench. “I never showered there. For the few guys who did, it was a race to get there, because there was only enough hot water for one or two guys.”

Riordan chuckled at the memory of the dump, especially compared with the state-of-the-art facilities of the modern NBA. “On a scale of one to ten, that place might have gotten a one,” he said.

Riordan had been drafted the previous year but was cut by McGuire and spent the season toiling in the Eastern League at Allentown. He’d made the team on his second try—not all that surprising, since it was Holzman who recommended drafting him—after staying connected to the team with a summer job barnstorming Catskills resorts and sleepaway camps with the Knicks. On those trips upstate—where he joined his idol Willis Reed, Butch Komives, and sometimes even Walt Frazier—Riordan would scrimmage overmatched kitchen staffers and pimple-faced camp counselors.

Holzman was convinced that Riordan, from a blue-collar Long Island family, was tough enough to play in the NBA. At the very least, he could be a dogged practice player, and a bench specialist who might simply check into a game for the purpose of fouling an opponent. Riordan embraced the cameo role; he was thrilled just to be at the Garden, where he had played in several high school games. He wasn’t too proud to give a foul. “I would have jumped in the East River if Red had asked me to,” he said.

But to Donovan’s (and no doubt Holzman’s) dismay, there were still players on the team not quite as committed or combative as Riordan who had personal agendas that both Donovan and Holzman believed were getting in the way of the team. The inability, for example, of Butch Komives and Cazzie Russell to get along on the court. Meanwhile, the big man known as Bells, Walter Bellamy, wasn’t making Holzman swoon with his defensive effort in the newly installed team approach. So Donovan’s tirade was clearly targeted, and the longer he went on, the redder his ruddy Irish mug got. “His speech was like something from Hollywood,” Riordan said. “There was spittle coming out of his mouth.”

When he finished, Donovan asked: “Any questions?”

Bellamy raised a hand.

Donovan glared at him.

“Yeah?” he snorted.

“What are we gonna do about the damn hot water in the shower?”

That’s when Donovan really let loose, dropping F-bombs all over the place. A little more than a month later, Bellamy and Komives were gone from Lost Battalion Hall and Madison Square Garden. Less than a week before Christmas, they were traded to Detroit for the player who would complete the championship puzzle in New York. David DeBusschere became a Knick.

“I’ve never seen Red so happy as the day they made that trade,” said Larry Pearlstein, Holzman’s old friend from the Long Beach handball courts. “He used to say, ‘Nobody realizes how good that DeBusschere is.’ They’d been trying to get him for a while. I remember Red saying, ‘We finally did it; I’m going home to get drunk.’ ”

The least Holzman could do was raise a glass to the Pistons’ GM, Ed Coil, and his coach, Paul Seymour, for sending DeBusschere to New York. Or go to the nearest synagogue and thank the Lord for a deal that was simply divine. For if DeBusschere’s losing coin toss in the flip for Cazzie Russell wasn’t enough of an omen in that it provided the Knicks a building block, consider what he was doing at the precise moment the telephone rang with news of the deal from Coil. As DeBusschere wrote in
The Open Man
, his book-form diary of the 1969–70 season:

“I was in my living room, hanging a painting, a gift from one of my fans. The painting showed me, in my Detroit uniform, driving toward the basket, and it showed me being guarded by a New York Knick wearing the number 8, their center, Walt Bellamy.” The painting would always remind DeBusschere of the thrilling turn his life took at the mature basketball age of 28.

Quietly, DeBusschere had been hoping for a trade. He was tired of playing in a chaotic environment, of losing year in and year out, with a hapless cast of characters he was asked to coach (and play among, simultaneously). The chance to go to a developing, defensive-oriented team like the Knicks, in a basketball city like New York, represented a career rebirth. To make it sweeter, his wife, Geri, had grown up on Long Island—a cheerleader at Garden City High School, and a Knicks fan—and always hoped they might find a way back east.

They’d met when she was working in the sales department at American Airlines and DeBusschere came in for a promotional event. “He came over to me and started talking—about basketball, where I was from, just small talk,” Geri DeBusschere told me. “He told me how much he always loved going to New York to play, because the fans really knew the game. I just think it was meant to be, but you know what? Happy as I was for him, I cried like a baby when the trade was made. I’d made a lot of friends in Detroit. It wasn’t easy to leave. It should have been harder for Dave—he’d spent his whole life there. He was a part of that city.”

Don May, a Knicks rookie swingman when DeBusschere joined the team, said he wished he were “half the man Dave was. I adored him. He was what I always wanted to be—a good Catholic boy from the Midwest, with that can-do mentality and that winning smile.”

Ditto Bill Hosket. “When he joined the team, it was like I got another coach,” Hosket said. “Red was coaching the team, and Dave was coaching me. He’d prep me for everything, especially defense, because he didn’t want a guy like Chet Walker scoring a quick ten on me after he’d held him to two or four. All I can tell you is Dave DeBusschere was born a man. From the minute he joined us, it was if he’d been there all along.”