When the Garden Was Eden (19 page)

After two Final Four appearances, Russell and Michigan were beaten that year by Kentucky in the regional final. He had come to believe that this was all part of some master plan from the head coach upstairs. Adolph Rupp’s team was in the national spotlight and in the NCAA title game against Texas Western’s all-black starting five, so the country could witness the deconstruction of the white superiority myth. Unwittingly and involuntarily, Russell considered himself an agent of change.

“It would have been nice to have gone back to the Final Four again, but then what Pat Riley always calls basketball’s Emancipation Proclamation wouldn’t have happened,” Russell said. “So I’m happy to have taken part, done my share, in that piece of history.”

The racial climate and profiling did not excuse “the worst thing that had ever come out” of his mouth, he said. He was ashamed and worried about what his teammates would think going forward. He had never had problems with white players or white people at large; he had taken several white Michigan students home with him to Chicago on school breaks, to sample his mother’s southern-style cooking. But above all, Russell had to square things with the Captain. He apologized and asked Reed’s forgiveness, and not just once.

“It was something I learned from,” Russell said. “I came to see it as a character-building situation, not just for me but for us as a team. No matter what I had personally experienced, I think we all understood how important it was to keep a situation, and especially one like that, from getting in the way—to keep things in perspective, focused on our job.”

He couldn’t say whether Reed, at the height of the fast-moving drama, really had had enough time to ponder the best way to defuse it. As much as he’d replayed it all in his mind, Russell had long ago settled on the belief that the right thing to say had just come naturally to Reed. It was just who he was, a natural-born leader.

“Willis Reed,” Russell said, “is an amazing man.”

THE MOST UNCONVENTIONAL LOSS
the Knicks suffered during the 1969–70 season was not a game. Before the playoffs, Eddie Donovan, their general manager, departed the organization for a similar position in Buffalo, where the expansion Braves would debut the following season, along with teams in Cleveland and Portland. Donovan’s departure left Holzman pretty much in charge to make a shrewd personnel decision: a recovered Phil Jackson was kept inactive to protect him from the expansion draft—and in all likelihood Donovan. Based on the regular season, Holzman determined that he had enough talent to win it all.

Despite a late-season swoon in which the Knicks lost their focus and dropped seven of their last ten, they finished with a 60–22 record, best in the league and four games ahead of Milwaukee in the East. Reed was the league’s Most Valuable Player, despite being its 15th-highest scorer (21.7) and fifth-best rebounder (13.9). He was joined on the all-NBA first team by Frazier. Holzman was named Coach of the Year, but most gratifying to him was the inclusion of three Knicks—Reed, Frazier, and DeBusschere—on the All-Defensive first team. The Knicks played the stingiest D in the league (at a time when allowing 105.0 points per game counted as such). Their point differential was 9.1, almost five full points better than anyone else.

They began the playoffs against a Baltimore Bullets team they seemed to own, having won nine of the past ten games, including the playoff sweep the year before. Their five regular-season victories came by an average margin of 19 points. But like all of Baltimore, the Bullets were tired of being a piñata for New York. They came into the Garden for Game 1 with a chip on their shoulder the size of Wes Unseld’s biceps. With the improving Unseld grabbing 31 rebounds and Earl Monroe scoring 39 points, the Bullets pushed the Knicks into a second overtime before losing, 120–117, in Game 1 at the Garden. “You could see a difference in them, like they knew they belonged,” Frazier said.

Reed had to play 54 of the 58 minutes, about 10 more than Holzman would have preferred and way too many for a man with barking knees matched against a younger opponent, Unseld, who was built like a brick shithouse. Reed’s performance was uneven as the series dragged up and down the coast, on the way to a nerve-racking seventh game. On the night of April 6, 19,500 packed the Garden, wondering for the first time if the Knicks really were of championship timber. But the Knicks took charge early behind DeBusschere and Barnett. They built a 62–47 halftime lead. And when the Bullets made a run to within 88–82 after three quarters, the Knicks had a none-too-secret weapon to unleash. They had Cazzie Russell.

With Bradley in foul trouble and the Bullets forcing the Knicks to play at Baltimore’s freewheeling pace, Holzman turned to his most explosive and highest-paid Minuteman. And here, with the magnificent season hanging in the balance, Russell came on to play the role he so dearly wanted. He hit clutch fourth-quarter shots, the kind that halt rallies and break spirits. In January, Reed had given Russell seconds to compose himself, and he had. In Game 7, Holzman gave him 21 minutes to redeem himself, and he did. On the strength of his 18 points overall, the Knicks won by 13, a sweet epilogue to the saga of Cazzie and the Captain and a buoyant prologue of better things to come.

WILLIS REED SAT PEACEFULLY IN THE GREAT ROOM OF HIS GRAMBLING
home. After a morning of chores outside, or fishing with a pal, he loved cracking open a grape soda and settling into the recliner in the middle of the room, in front of his flat-screen television and surrounded by the vacant stares of his hunting conquests. But at age 68, lowering himself into his easy chair was no effortless exercise. The maneuver unfolded in stages, like a sequence of snapshots. Knees too acquainted with the touch of a scalpel do not bend as they once could.

“This one’s been replaced,” he said, tapping the right one, safely ensconced. We had just finished touring the property during my visit in the steamy summer of 2009, concluding the walkabout in a garage filled with every fishing tool imaginable.

The left knee, stretched out, was also going to need a replacement, Reed said, but doctors had advised him to hold out for as long as possible because surgical techniques were constantly improving. In the meantime, he took a daily anti-inflammatory pill and tried not to put undue stress on the leg.

Funny, he said, but that was exactly how the whole storied medical drama of 1970 had begun.

The minutes had piled up in the opening playoff series with the Bullets, and then came the ballyhooed challenge of the Milwaukee Bucks and Lew Alcindor (who wouldn’t change his name to Kareem Abdul-Jabbar until 1971) in the division finals. The rookie from New York (a high school legend at Power Memorial on 61st Street) was already a handful in the post. He possessed an unstoppable sky hook, but Reed was much stronger and could muscle him just enough to disrupt his flow. Making Alcindor’s playoff homecoming even worse was the booing he endured at the Garden. Maybe the city’s basketball fans still harbored a civic contempt for Alcindor’s attending UCLA instead of staying home and making St. John’s an instant title contender. Stanley Asofsky called that theory “a lot of bullshit.” The razzing, he said, was more about the young Alcindor being the enemy of the Old Knicks, plain and simple.

“I don’t think he ever liked playing in New York, and it probably was because the fans gave him such a hard time that first year,” Reed said. “He was just young, and we were really good.”

Offensively, Reed was a nightmare for the UCLA grad. The young Alcindor was loath to switch on screens, and against a team with as many shooters and willing passers as the Knicks, that sort of immobility amounted to playing too long on the railroad tracks. Reed would step outside for jumpers, and when Alcindor deigned to challenge him, he would fake the jumper and go hard to his left.

New York won in five unremarkable games, a welcome breather after the close encounter with mortality in the Bullets series.

Reed’s approach against the young Kareem—camp out on the perimeter and dare him to come out—would go double for Wilt Chamberlain in the Finals. After playing in only 12 regular-season games, the man known as Wilt the Stilt or the Big Dipper had made a surprisingly effective recovery from his own knee injury. He had helped the Lakers survive a seven-game challenge from Phoenix in the first round and to sweep Atlanta in the second.

And—unlike the Bucks—the Lakers had superstars in the backcourt and on the front line to offer Chamberlain support. Nearing his 32nd birthday, Jerry West averaged 31.2 points that season while Elgin Baylor, though no longer the NBA’s preeminent high-flier at 35 years old, was still good for 24 points and 10 rebounds a game. They also had abundant NBA Finals experience, having played all seven games the previous spring, in Russell’s farewell with the Celtics. But in contrast to the Knicks, the Lakers were not the purest blend of personality and talent. With their top-heavy star system of West, Chamberlain, and Baylor, they more resembled a twenty-first-century NBA team: big names in an uneasy and sometimes fragile coexistence. Production-wise, there was a yawning gap between the haves and have-nots. A rookie guard—Dick Garrett, Frazier’s college teammate at Southern Illinois—started alongside West in the backcourt.

In Game 1, for reasons that were related to his health, his head, or both, Chamberlain refused to move away from the basket to contest Reed’s midrange jump shot. Reed scored 25 points—in the first half.

The teams split the first two games in New York, but Reed erupted again for 38 points in Game 3, the majority of which put the Knicks in position to win on a possession with the score knotted at 100. They ran one of their staple half-court sets, Bradley on the baseline, moving right to left around screens set by DeBusschere and Reed. It was the play they called 2-3-F, with DeBusschere drifting out to the free-throw line as a second option while Reed positioned himself in the lane for a rebound.

“Nine out of ten times, Bill would be open, but for some reason, both guys went with Bill and they left Dave alone,” Reed said.

Baylor was just a second late hustling after DeBusschere, who caught a pass from Frazier at the free-throw line. He had just enough space to rise and can a 16-foot jumper. Three seconds remained. Joe Mullaney, the Lakers’ coach, was out of time-outs.

Chamberlain inbounded to West, not even bothering to make sure both feet were out of bounds. West took three dribbles in the backcourt and, with Reed in his shadow, launched a running one-hander that swished cleanly through the net, sending the L.A. fans into spasms of delirium. Under the basket, a disbelieving DeBusschere put his hands on his head. Chamberlain, heading toward the locker room, apparently thinking the Lakers had won, had to be called back.

A decade later, that shot would have been worth three points, a game winner (though Reed argues that the Knicks’ long-range marksmen would have been comfortably ahead had the three-point rule been in effect back then). In 1970, the 55-foot shot simply spelled overtime. The Knicks had to gather themselves for another five wrenching minutes.

“Most teams in that situation, you’d have bet anything they’d lose in the OT. We killed them,” DeBusschere would say years later, with imprecise recall. Reed had to break a tie at 108 with a free throw. Dick Barnett, the former Laker, had to pump in the clincher with four seconds left. But DeBusschere’s point is well taken. The Knicks defied the natural tendency in that situation to deflate, especially on the road. By winning, they further convinced themselves and their followers that Destiny—having already urged the Jets and Mets to victory—was indeed a New York fan.

West’s 37-point, 18-assist masterpiece two nights later evened the series in another overtime classic, though both games in Los Angeles were historically diminished due to the lateness back east; this was long before the NBA fixed Finals start times. The Game 4 loss did not dampen New York’s conviction. Nothing could, except one nagging caveat: Willis Reed’s health.

The Knicks all knew that the Captain’s left knee was barking as the team returned to New York for Game 5. It had been an issue for months and was aggravated earlier in the series when Reed was accidentally kicked there, suffering a bruise.

The team doctor asked him if he wanted a shot to dull the pain.

“No,” came the reply. Reed had already taken his share of cortisone and had been warned that the pain-numbing drug could soften the tissue and lead to permanent damage. Reed’s threshold was high to begin with, and he figured, or hoped, that the adrenaline of a crucial game would see him through. But with his declining the injection, unseen forces were set in motion, creating a narrative that would stretch the realm of plausibility and define Reed as an exemplar of athletic heroism, the one-legged wonder who stared down the goliath named Wilt.

EVEN BEFORE THE SELLOUT CROWD
of 19,500 filed into the Garden for Game 5, that day—May 4, 1970—had already become a historic day in America; that is, historically bleak. Hours earlier, the National Guard had fired on Kent State University students after several tense days of protest in the Ohio college town. During an afternoon rally on the school’s Commons against a Vietnam War that had just been expanded into Cambodia by President Nixon, a multitude of National Guardsmen unleashed 67 rounds into a crowd of students. Four were killed, including two who were merely walking to class.

The tragedy was a defining moment for the antiwar movement and a disaster for America’s war hawks. The loss of innocent life could not be ignored, even by professional athletes in the middle of the most important games they’d ever played.