When the Garden Was Eden (15 page)

But in the fall of 1969, with Stern still convinced that a partnership in a reputable New York firm was his life’s ambition, his connection to basketball was more as a fan, an Old Knicks fan. Long before he would become commissioner (in 1984), Stern settled in at night with his young family, flipped on the television in his Teaneck, New Jersey, home, and witnessed Red Holzman’s team ambling onto the floor, care of Channel 9.

On occasion he went to the Garden, which was filling up as never before. Before the ’68–69 season, the Knicks had sold out their building a grand total of six times in 22 years. They packed the new Garden 14 times on the way to losing the division final to the Celtics. In 1969–70, that number almost doubled, to 26. Granted, that was no great achievement by contemporary measures: in the nineties, the Knicks would sell every Garden seat for nine consecutive seasons.

Even during our modern recessions, some NBA teams can count on regular capacity. But the sports ethos was very different in the late sixties. There was passion for sports, but not the rampant consumerism—triggered by the proliferation of 24-hour television coverage—that would create a wide-reaching industry boom.

Stern, who eventually made a career of studying the sports phenomenon, said:

We’ve built that Knicks era up over the decades to be something like the Jordan phenomenon, but it was all so New York. The NBA at the time was this tiny little league. The Knicks created a personality on and off the court and connected with a city in a way that professional basketball really hadn’t seen before—not even with Boston, which had ownership changes and all those racial issues. I don’t know exactly what was going on at the Fabulous Forum in those days, because I didn’t live in Los Angeles. You certainly had great charismatic players out there, too, and having that on both coasts created early melodies for the symphony that hadn’t been written.

It was one thing to inflame the passions of basketball junkies like Asofsky and Klein. Getting the attention of the Madison Avenue crowd, the people with the power to recast basketball’s image from blue collar to white, amounted to a Jordanesque leap across the socioeconomic divide. That was the beauty of a potential powerhouse in New York City: all the corporate heavyweights were within walking distance or a short cab ride away.

“What happened with the Knicks was great for the NBA, because when the biggest media town in the country gets hot for a sport, that sends a message to the rest of the country,” said George Lois, one of that generation’s most celebrated mythmakers, a man who understood the art of selling better than anyone, David Stern included.

Long before he sprouted to an athletic 6'3", Lois played the city game. A Manhattan native and Bronx resident, he was enough of a prep standout while attending the High School of Music and Art to earn a basketball scholarship to Syracuse—which he promptly rejected to attend the Pratt Institute. He lasted a year, dropped out to work, and soon after, in the early fifties, took his New York—honed skills to the heartland after being drafted into the Army. He starred on a team that barnstormed through Texas and Louisiana and “beat the living shit” out of other Armed Forces clubs and even some college teams with a front line that averaged 6'5", or one inch below the cutoff for service.

The company team was so good, Lois said, that it kept him in Texas and out of harm’s way in Korea—at least until he refused to play in a game at LSU in support of his lone black teammate, forbidden by the university to suit up. Lois took a stand by taking a seat next to his teammate in the bleachers. He was shipped out soon after. “I got back to the fort, and the sergeant walks up to me and tells me I’m going to fucking Korea,” he said.

Lois survived a war he considered “almost as dumb as Vietnam,” and returned home to New York to launch a storied career as an advertising and art director, a real-life Mad Man. He became an industry legend for his pithy television campaigns and for his groundbreaking conceptual
Esquire
magazine covers, which frequently featured popular and controversial athletes. In 1963, Lois put the fearsome Sonny Liston in a Santa hat. Five years later, he depicted Muhammad Ali as a crucified Saint Sebastian. For an August 1972 cover story on the 10 Best-Dressed Jocks, Lois photographed the most stylish Knick, Walt Frazier, in a white suit and a wide-brimmed Clyde Barrow hat, hovering over the palest white player Lois could find, Philadelphia 76er Kevin Loughery.

This social statement apparently went over better with the hip magazine audience than it had with his Army superiors.

“Frazier was up in the air, literally hung on wires,” Lois said. “And you know what? We did the shoot on the day before they were flying to the West Coast to play the Lakers in a playoff game that spring. He’s hanging in the air and I’m thinking, If this guy ever falls and even stubs his toe, I’m totally fucked. People in this town will want to kill me.”

Lois’s use of athletes in commercials, like his “I Want My Maypo” cereal campaign, was an early harbinger of Nike Nation, laying the groundwork for what ultimately would become a jackpot for celebrity jocks. He hired the likes of Mickey Mantle, Johnny Unitas, and Oscar Robertson. He had Yogi Berra talk to a cat, whose voice, unbeknownst to Yogi, happened to be Whitey Ford’s.

“Do you recognize that voice?” Lois asked Berra.

“No, who is it?” Berra said.

“It’s the Chairman of the Board.”

Berra replied, “What company?”

AWAY FROM THE OFFICE
, Lois was friendly with the biggest names in sports, Mantle and Namath, to name New York’s top two. It made perfect sense to him to use them in campaigns, most of all because he got them dirt cheap. “Holy shit, I’ve got the most famous guys of the time and they’re getting $100 apiece,” he said. “They just wanted to do it for the fun of it. Wilt was in my office one day for some reason and I showed him a Mantle spot. He said, ‘Man, I’d love to do that.’ I said, ‘I can only give you $100.’ He said, ‘I don’t care about the money.’ ”

Lois was a fan of several sports, but he said there was nothing, ever, like experiencing the Old Knicks as they came of age. “Of course, we had all been jealous of the Celtics and couldn’t even imagine that kind of team in New York,” he said. “But all of a sudden, there they were, above and beyond basketball intelligence.”

In 1969, with the championship cast assembled and rolling, Lois got a call from a friend who worked at the Garden as the head of ticket sales, asking if he might want a full-season plan. Lois rushed to the box office and asked for four seats on the baseline. “The guy says, ‘On the baseline? Are you sure?’ I said, ‘Yeah, baseline. Half the game is right in your lap.’ ”

He was close to the action but would get even closer by befriending several players through Larry Fleisher, the agent and players’ union power broker. Soon enough, some of the players were dropping by Lois’s regular pickup game at the 23rd Street Y (which later moved to 14th Street, where Lois was still getting in a run at age 78). This was the downtown version of what Asofsky and Klein had going on 92nd Street.

“We’d play eight-basket games,” said Lois, “and usually, when those guys first came, they tended not to play very hard.” But these were also hard-core competitors, unaccustomed to being embarrassed, even when no one was watching. “Bill Bradley’s playing against this guy, who’s a really good jump shooter, and I’m screening him,” Lois said. “The guy hits one from 17 or 18 feet, then another, and before Bradley knows what’s going on, the guy’s hit five in a row. Oh, shit. Suddenly Bill’s climbing over me, hitting me in the face with his elbow. It was so fucking great.”

Back at the Garden, Lois brought the same profane intensity to rooting, accompanied by three equally crazed ref-baiters in the seats next to him. He seldom wasted his tickets on clients or people who didn’t have a similar passion for the game. “I gave the tickets to the guys I played ball with,” he said. “We’d bust balls the entire game, get all over the refs.” Mendy Rudolph, one of the hard-bitten vets, would give Lois and his buddies the once-over during time-outs, occasionally with his hand over his crotch. The byplay with the refs would reach the point where the Knicks regulars would look at Lois and friends in disbelief while the other guys were shooting their free throws. “We were real New York assholes,” Lois said with pride.

Dick Schaap, one of the city’s leading print and broadcasting sports journalists, anointed Lois “Super Fan” as the crescendo of Knicks coverage grew during the ’69–70 season. Schaap would stop by his seat from time to time for a few colorful quotes, which Lois was always willing to produce. No doubt Asofsky and Klein would have fought for the title; Klein, in fact, insisted that he’d once tangled with Lois in a pickup game and, when Uptown met Downtown, had “knocked him on his ass.” But all internecine hostilities ceased once the Old Knicks hit the floor, making comrades of all. And as they reached full-blown championship contention, the Garden became the hottest hangout in town.

ADAM CLAYTON POWELL JR
., who represented Harlem in the House of Representatives from 1945 until shortly before his death in 1972, appointed himself the team’s unofficial chaplain. He had access, and he wasn’t the only mover and shaker who wanted to get inside the emerging New York phenomenon. Ira Berkow, my friend and former
Times
colleague, recalled sitting in Red Holzman’s office one night before a game that season, conducting an interview, when the coach was distracted by a commotion inside the locker room.

“What the hell’s going on in there?” Holzman asked his trusty aide, Frankie Blauschild.

“Oh, Sargent Shriver stopped in,” Blauschild said, referring to the Kennedy family loyalist and activist, who wound up as the Democratic candidate for vice president in the doomed 1972 bid to remove Richard Nixon from the White House.

Holzman’s face reddened. “I don’t care if it’s fucking General Shriver: no one in the locker room before a game!”

Besides being politically ignorant, Holzman apparently wasn’t too sure how to deal with the sudden fuss people were making over his team, the likes of which he had never seen at the basketball backwaters in Rochester, Milwaukee, and St. Louis. But there was no turning back, no stopping the stampede of stars.

George Lois was soon bumping into Zero Mostel near the concession stand before games, neither one wanting to go to his seat for the national anthem. (Mostel was one of many entertainers who were suspected of being Communists during the fifties and blacklisted.) They would talk the game, Mostel arguing that Russell should be starting over Bradley and Lois telling him he was seriously full of shit.

On the other baseline, Asofsky was amazed by the transformation the courtside neighborhood was undergoing as the Knicks appeared to be revving up for a championship run. Steve Lawrence and Eydie Gormé. The radio personality William B. Williams. Jerry Stiller and Anne Meara would score different seats around the lower bowl and occasionally leave little Ben on Freddy Klein’s lap so the future comic actor could get the premier courtside view. Dustin Hoffman had a fairly regular perch behind the Knicks’ bench, where the players—having seen
Midnight Cowboy
, like most people in the country—would address him as Ratso.

Stern was right: here were the earliest indicators that professional basketball players could actually blur the lines between athlete and entertainer, become crossover celebrities and walk alongside America’s most popular.

“They had that quality because of how unique they were as individuals but also because of what they were doing as a team,” Bill Goldman, another regular, told me. Goldman grew up in Chicago, a diehard Bears fan, before moving to New York to meet the everlasting love of his sports life, the Knicks. After the trade for Dave DeBusschere, he fell so hard that he took an entire West Coast road trip with the team during the ’69–70 season, following the guys from city to city like the most devout groupie. He claimed that he didn’t attend the Academy Awards during the playoffs that season—where he won Best Original Screenplay for
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
—because it interfered with the Knicks’ playoff schedule.

Goldman and his wife dined frequently with the DeBusscheres, forever arguing that his good friend was the one player the team could not do without. Robert Redford, who would ring Lois for a ticket when he was in town, had DeBusschere and Bradley to his place in Park City, Utah, for a little snowmobiling during the ’69–70 season—though Bradley would tell me that the notion of the Knicks forwards taking a wild ride was way overblown. “We went about 25 to 50 feet, that was about it,” he said. “We were in the middle of a season and we weren’t going to take any risks.”

The actor Elliott Gould—who by 1970 had risen to stardom in
The Night They Raided Minsky
’s (1968) and
Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice
(1969) and could have made the case for being more famous than anyone—tried to get Dick Barnett a cameo role in his 1971 film
Little Murders
. The film’s director, Alan Arkin, nixed the casting idea because the only acting Barnett had ever done was flopping for the refs in the act of taking a charge.

“I once asked him, ‘What do you do when you’re not playing basketball?’ ” Gould said. “He told me, ‘I’m in public relations without a telethon.’ I didn’t know what the hell he was talking about. But I thought, ‘This guy’s a real character.’ ” Gould, a character in his own right, was another celebrity friend of the Knicks. At various times he hosted Bradley and Phil Jackson at his Greenwich Village apartment. He played Frazier one-on-one at the Garden and would boast for decades that he had managed to pick Clyde’s pocket and lost only 10–7.