When the Garden Was Eden (18 page)

Frazier called Bradley “the least prejudiced player I’ve ever met.” Still, there was a divide among the team, at least socially. “He seemed to be on the outside looking in,” Frazier said. Bradley didn’t disagree, saying that he never acted as if he understood the black experience and tried to make sure other white players didn’t make such pretenses, either.

“If I detected that a white player had an attitude, I would designate myself to talk to him,” he said. “I would say that we don’t do this or that on this team.” He only had to make that speech a couple of times, but he remained vigilant. “You always had to try to figure out what you could try to do on and off the court to try and help the team,” he said. “Sometimes it was in the playing of the game, sometimes it was psychological, sometimes it was who’s got what role, who’s going to talk to the press, who’s going to do this or that, so you have that meshing.”

To many around the league, especially opposing coaches, it was obvious that the Knicks were better with Bradley as the starter. “He wasn’t a great scorer or defender, but there were intangibles—especially his movement and toughness—which opened up everybody’s game,” Jack Ramsay said. “Cazzie was a great shot maker, but they had a lot of guys that could score. They needed Cazzie, but as a spark plug. Not as a guy playing 40 minutes and taking 20 shots, even though that’s what he’d always done.”

Russell’s identity had been forged from raw production. Now his minutes had dropped to 18.3 per game from 32.9 before his injury the previous season. His scoring average was down from 18.3 points a game to 11.5. In Detroit, his feelings of highway victimization crashed head-on with his frustration at playing second fiddle to Bradley. Their history was vast and tumultuous, from their college showdown at the Garden to the unequal pay upon being drafted by the Knicks to their perceived standing on a team that was soaring in the nation’s imagination.

If there was anyone on the team with a platform to speak out on sensitive racial matters, it wasn’t Russell but Dick Barnett. Everyone knew how much he had suffered and sacrificed as a player, given his age and ability and how little he’d earned in part because he was black. Barnett being Barnett, whatever he said came out in droll, often hilarious, and sometimes painfully honest sound bites of sobering reality.

“Cazzie was the better player individually, that much was obvious,” he said matter-of-factly. “The team members understood the ‘white hope’ thing was there when Bradley came in—that’s part of sports. But it’s always going to come down to the question, Can you play? Bradley proved he could, and it was up to the coach to recognize which player fit in better. In fairness to Cazzie, it wasn’t easy, that situation, and I would to a great extent call him very accommodating and diplomatic, except for that one time.”

HOLZMAN WASN’T ABOVE BARKING
at or needling players when they blew assignments or played badly. He would say to Bradley, “How the fuck did you become a Rhodes scholar?” Disgusted after a blowout loss, he would bark, “Go get laid tomorrow, don’t even come to practice.” But when he sensed the need for a tender mediation, he preferred that it come from a fellow player. When he saw Russell sulking, disconnecting, he would pull Reed aside. “Talk to Cazzie,” he would say. “See what he’s thinking.”

This time, Cazzie’s anger was obvious—he was playing like he wanted to hurt everyone around him—and Reed already had a pretty good idea what it was about. Russell had every right to be mad at the world, as long as his teammates were excluded.

He stepped toward Russell and threw up his hands.

“What the hell are you doing, throwing elbows at your teammates?” Reed said. The gym fell quiet. Reed’s expression demanded an answer. Before Russell could rewrite the thought, it spilled out, angrily and regrettably.

“Be quiet, Uncle Tom,” he snapped.

Shut the fuck up, Adolf Hitler
, would have landed better. But to say what he’d said—a black man from Chicago to another from the Jim Crow South—was a mind-bending betrayal, even if it was behind the team’s closed doors (as opposed to Muhammad Ali’s very public slandering of Joe Frazier several years later).

“I thought he was going to kill me,” Russell told a friend afterward. Those most familiar with Reed’s history had to know that the possibility of violence was not beyond the realm. As early as the start of his third pro season, Reed had demonstrated that he was no one to fool or fuck with. On October 18, 1966, in the Knicks’ home opener against the Lakers, Reed was involved in a fracas at the old Garden that was downright shocking—not so much because it broke out in the typically combative theater of an NBA game but for what transpired after the first punch was thrown.

It was the third quarter, and Elgin Baylor was at the free-throw line at the side of the court nearest to the Lakers bench. Reed had been complaining about the physical play of Rudy LaRusso, a 6'7", 220-pound All-Star-caliber forward out of Madison High School in Brooklyn and Dartmouth College. The famed refs Richie Powers and Mendy Rudolph told him to shut up and play ball. Reed decided he would have to send LaRusso his own message—and chose an elbow to the side of the head as they jockeyed for position. On his way upcourt, LaRusso threw a right cross. Everything after that was a blur of Reed beating on men in blue (the color of the Lakers’ uniforms at the time).

“It all happened fast,” said Gail Goodrich, who was in his second year with the Lakers. “Rudy threw a punch and Willis went off. Rudy backed up. Willis started swinging. It was all right in front of me on the bench, and I can tell you that Willis was a menacing-looking guy when he was mad.” Goodrich gave himself the best advice of his life: “ ‘Do not get up!’ ”

As Reed recalled, the 6'10" Darrall Imhoff tried to grab him in a bear hug—so LaRusso could nail him, or so he feared. Reed responded by sending Imhoff to the floor with a punch that drew blood from a cut above the eye. Next, a 6'9" rookie named John Block made the tactical mistake of stepping inside Reed’s punching range. He took a blow to the face that broke his nose and bloodied Reed’s fist. With Imhoff and Block stretched out, fans streamed onto the court for a closer inspection of the damage. Police scrambled to restore order.

It was a scene that, in the contemporary NBA, would have had David Stern meting out draconian suspensions and fines and holding spin-control press conferences. On multiple ESPN channels, every angle and aspect of a black man’s evisceration of three white players would have been rewound and dissected, frame by frame. But news traveled much slower in 1966, and the NBA did not have much of a national image to uphold. Reed and LaRusso were ejected but shrugged off the brawl. Reed mostly wondered where the hell his teammates had been. “Man, you were winning,” the newly acquired Dick Barnett told him.

Barnett was one of three Knicks in uniform that night who would still be around when Russell crossed a line that neither LaRusso nor any other player ever would. Dave Stallworth was another. The third was Russell, a rookie who was making his NBA debut after missing the season opener on the road with a sprained ankle and who was asked after the game where he had been while Reed was taking on all comers. “Right in the middle, observing,” he said. Hence, Russell was well aware of what the otherwise affable Reed was capable of when someone challenged him. He also knew why Reed, at 24, was named captain of the Knicks not long after the L.A. fight.

Reed had held the same title for his high school football team and for Grambling during his junior and senior years. He proudly accepted the Knicks’ honor when Dick McGuire made the announcement one day at practice that management had made the decision. He had been under the impression that captain was a position that players voted on.

“I guess I had showed them I was a guy who wasn’t going to get pushed around,” he said. Yes, Reed had demonstrated how much of a one-man wrecking crew he could be, but more important was his total commitment to doing whatever it took to make teams respect the longtime doormat Knicks. “The guy was an unbelievable teammate, the absolute best,” McGuire said, calling Reed his favorite player ever. “Winning was all he ever cared about.”

Reed did not view his position as ceremonial. He wanted his teammates to expect him to lead in every way possible. He wanted their respect. When Bradley joined the team, for instance, it troubled him that Reed, of all people, would address teammates on a first-name basis—“Hey, Cazzie,” “Hey, Dave”—except him. “I would always think: Why is he always calling me Bradley?” he said. In the Cleveland airport one day, he finally mustered up the nerve to ask, “Why don’t you call me Bill?”

Reed looked at him, considering the request.

He nodded, finally, and said: “Okay, Bradley.”

Flustered, Bradley dropped the subject but eventually caught on to the ways of the Captain.

“It was his way of saying, ‘I’m in charge,’ ” Bradley said.

There were times when Reed wanted the ball in the post and wasn’t shy with his feelings when it didn’t come. But he always gave back, in ways that were surprising and incalculable. “Willis did so many things for guys on the team that no one even knew about,” Frazier said. Sometimes the help was financial—Barnett, according to Frazier, was the biggest beneficiary—and sometimes it took other forms, like when Reed set Frazier up on his first date in New York.

By the late sixties, Reed had set a tradition of rooming with a rookie, whether white (Bill Hosket in ’68–69) or black (John Warren in ’69–70), to demonstrate firsthand how to conduct oneself as a pro. “He filled you in on all the dos and don’ts—and there were many,” said Warren, who honed his dribble and jumper on the same Far Rockaway courts at 108th Street that had produced the McGuire brothers, and, like Dick, he then went on to St. John’s.

In that one season, Reed made a lasting impact on Warren’s life, promising his parents—who were from Georgia, with deep southern roots, and could relate well to Reed—that he would look after their self-described mama’s boy. Reed did that and more, even trying his hand as an unlicensed social worker.

“At some point that season, I pissed off my girlfriend and was in a bad way,” Warren said. “We got back into Newark Airport after a game in Cincinnati the night before, and Willis says, ‘Rook, what’s wrong?’ I said, ‘Willis, you gotta help me out.’ I knew he was dead tired, but he got right in the car with me and drove out to Westbury in Long Island.” There, Reed rang the doorbell of the girlfriend’s parents’ home. Naturally, they were delighted to see him. While Reed charmed the parents, Warren slipped away to plead with his girl for forgiveness. They married and had a son, John Warren III. “Whenever we see Willis, he’ll say, ‘Hey, I put this together,’ ” Warren said. “He’s right about that. We’re like his children.”

The man from Bernice knew that the fabric of a team had to be as strong as the familial ties that bind, and especially for challenges like the one in Detroit. Russell had thrown down the existential gauntlet, from the color of Reed’s skin to his innermost core. And why? Was it because Reed was not an outspoken man on political or social matters? Was it because he roomed with a white player? Or that his most pressing cause was the behavioral well-being of his basketball team?

EVEN AS HIS TEAMMATES RECOILED
and prepared for the worst, Reed was instantly calculating his options in the line of fire: he could take the slur personally and teach Russell a lesson he would never forget, or he could put the welfare of the team first. The Knicks, he knew, could not afford to lose Russell’s concentration and offense, a distinct possibility if Reed vilified him to the point of alienation. On top of that, everything he had been taught in college by Fred Hobdy had been centered around shielding the team from the corrosive issue of race.

Reed stepped in Russell’s space, looked him in the eye.

“This Uncle Tom is gonna be whuppin’ some ass in a minute if you don’t keep quiet,” he said.

If I’m an Uncle Tom for calling you out for abusing a white teammate, so be it. We play basketball here and we play it together
.

How many men in the corner Reed was backed into would have been able to resist punching their way out? How many would have had the restraint to give Russell even five seconds to back down? How truer a test could there be of character and leadership? “I was telling him, ‘Hey, throw those damn elbows at other people, not us, and
us
includes everyone wearing the uniform,’ ” Reed explained. “I mean, basketball-wise, we’re in the same war. You can’t hurt one of our guys. You can’t hurt me. Take it out on the Pistons tomorrow.”

Of course he was hurt. But he knew he couldn’t let his teammates recognize the pain. “That story,” Bradley said, “was the essence of Willis.”

IN THE END, NOBODY APPRECIATED
Reed’s restrained leadership more than Russell. When we spoke, he had just finished a 13-year run as the head basketball coach at the Savannah College of Art and Design, which had ended its men’s and women’s programs. Was he interested in another coaching job? I asked. No, he said, he had finally moved on from basketball to his higher calling. He was the new head pastor of a 287-member nondenominational church in Savannah.

I asked the preacher about the episode with police in Michigan and those two terrible words he had spat at Reed. There was a long pause. “How do you know about that?” he asked. I said there was a very brief accounting of it—without context—in DeBusschere’s book. But it had also come up in a couple of interviews, referenced primarily as a pivotal moment for that team.

Russell took a deep breath, seemed to relax and let his guard down. Those years leading into what transpired in Detroit had been bewildering for a young black basketball star, he said. He wondered how it was that even as he was feted as college basketball’s player of the year in 1966, “those kids at Texas Western couldn’t eat in a restaurant.”