When the Garden Was Eden (2 page)

“I bet my husband knows who you are,” the night manager assured Reed. Then she asked for an autograph, which seemed like the polite thing to do.

IF WILLIS REED HAD INSTEAD RETIRED
to a high-rise perch in Manhattan, maybe his fame would still precede him every time he stepped out the door. Whenever he got a hankering to aim his gun or cast his rod, he might have simply trekked upstate (just as he used to blow off practice—with Red Holzman’s permission—on opening day of hunting season).

In some ways, remaining in New York would have been the easier life. He would have spared himself the discomfort of climbing aboard prop jets designed for Lilliputians when flying out of small airports in Shreveport or Monroe, on his way to Montana to hunt or to New York City whenever the Knicks or the NBA called. But the perks of celebrity were never his guiding aim. What mattered to him was this: “I just wanted some quiet, to be able to get in my car without worrying about traffic and being able to walk outside on my property and take a piss without worrying about my neighbors.”

He knew himself well enough to know that he didn’t need strangers to remind him of who he’d once been. For Reed, basketball was about the competition, the wins, and, because he’s a practical man, the financial windfalls. Basketball was a life primarily defined by lessons gleaned from his parents and coaches—even from a few people he was once forbidden to so much as sit next to on the local bus.

“If you’re going up to Bernice,” Reed told me, “then you’ve got to go see Harry Cook.” We were sitting in the den of the modern home he had built in 1989, on the property scouted for him by Howard Brown. Here, in an otherwise bland rural expanse off the Grambling I-20 exit, the roadside dotted with tired wooden houses and a low-slung Baptist church, was where Reed envisioned and developed his gated dream palace on a rolling landscape with three specially designed ponds he stocked himself with fish.

Three Ponds Road: the retirement address of Willis Reed and his second wife, Gail.

Mounted on the walls of the den were his beloved hunting prizes—the stuffed heads of a bison and a mountain lion killed in Montana, a moose bagged in the Yukon, and an elk felled with his arrow, among other stuffed heads and … a basketball trophy, an MVP award.

Nodding, Reed added: “Harry is a character, a great talker, and he can tell you everything about Bernice.”

HARRY COOK IS A RETIRED BIOLOGIST
who used to work for the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries. For years, Inell Reed, Willis’s mother, worked as a domestic for Cook’s family, among others. When Reed called Cook to tell him of my visit, Cook’s wife answered. Reed addressed her as Miss Alice, and, in keeping with the theme of country quaint, he told her he’d been meaning to drop by anyway because he and Gail were all out of Miss Alice’s delicious mayhaw jelly and they were craving a fresh jar. (Eventually, Cook would send me off with two—one for the Reeds, one for myself.)

“Willis was a big boy, but Inell, she called the shots,” Cook was quick to say as we settled down in his living room with glasses of fresh lemonade. “She kept him on the straight and narrow. I’ve pretty much known Willis all his life. Yes, we were segregated in those days, but we all came up together, black and white. It was without conflict. When you’re living in a town with 1,500 people, everybody’s on a first-name basis.”

Later, I asked Reed if he’d sent me to Cook, a white man, in part to dispel whatever preconceived notions that I, a lifelong New Yorker, might have had about the rural South—and by extension his childhood. The question made him chuckle. “I always said that about Bernice—people did get along,” he said. “I mean, I knew there were things I didn’t have. Didn’t have the kind of houses the white folks had; didn’t have a car. The situation was what it was. But you know what? We all made the best of it in Bernice until it changed.”

Founded in 1899 as a stop on Captain C. C. Henderson’s Arkansas Southern Railroad, Bernice was created to give Henderson an industrial foothold in an area known as the Big Woods, due to its huge virgin pines. In the days of Cook’s and Reed’s youth, the town, all of three square miles, was a thriving lumber-and-agricultural center, its two-light downtown a vibrant shopping district with a movie theater. Strategically placed were the warehouses—more than you would expect in a town that size, and owned by the man who employed most of Bernice’s working-class members, including Willis Reed Sr. and, for one unforgettable summer, his strapping teenage son.

“Mr. Donald Lindsay,” Reed said. “My dad worked for him, building the warehouses to store cotton for the government. I had a chance one summer to work at my dad’s job, the summer before my senior year in high school. So I was at these warehouses, with the scaffolding and all. Worked all summer in the heat for 75 cents an hour. Had these big old calluses on my hands and, man, that whole experience was life-changing for me.

“After the summer, my dad said, ‘Well, you don’t have to go to college; you can stay here and work for Mr. Lindsay.’ Now, it wasn’t like today, where a kid who’s a basketball star is thinking he is going to play in the NBA someday. When I was in Bernice and even at Grambling, there were only maybe eight NBA teams. So what did I want to do? Well, after that summer working for Mr. Lindsay, I would see my dad coming home with sweat down to his knees, and, having been there with him, I knew why. And then I went back to school and there was Coach Stone, wearing a jacket and tie to school, nice car, much nicer house. So my real dream was about being a high school coach and a teacher like Coach Stone. I said, Boy, I want to be like him—I’m going to college.”

He majored in physical education and minored in biology at historically black Grambling State. Beyond rooming with his friend, Reed had been drawn to a place where there were many role models like Coach Stone, and where his new mentor, Hobdy, would teach him not just the fundamentals of the game but how to cope with the degradations of the day.

“He used to say to us, ‘Listen, you guys are athletes, and you don’t need to be out there demonstrating and all that,’ ” Reed said. “The best thing you can do is do what you do best. Become as good a player and as good a team, and all of that is going to be a good example.”

This was hardly black militancy, or even the kind of nonviolent protest that Martin Luther King was championing then, at the start of the civil rights movement. By nature, Reed was no iconoclast. At least not like his idol, Bill Russell, whose family fled Louisiana for the California Bay Area, settling in Oakland when he was 12. Reed wasn’t blind to the fact that there had been only one car, in the rear, in which he was allowed to ride on the train from Bernice to Ruston, and he knew why the white kids like Harry Cook could enjoy their burgers and fries in “the real nice part” of the café on Fourth Street while he and his black friends were relegated to the counter in the back. All these years later, a smirk creased his face when he said, “Separate but equal,” recounting the segregationist mantra that had prevented him from formally competing against white players until 1961, his freshman season at Grambling, in the NAIA basketball tournament.

What, then, could he—or any athlete—do for the Cause without involving himself directly in the struggle? He could win. He could show what black ballplayers brought to the court in direct competition with whites. Decades after the NAIA semifinals in Kansas City, where he had done exactly that, Reed could still summon the satisfaction of the tight game, his jumper on the baseline that gave Grambling a late 45–44 lead, and then the horror of watching a Westminster, Pennsylvania, shooter—the same one who had nipped Winston-Salem State in the Elite Eight—coming off a screen, wide-open for another buzzer beater.

“I jumped out at him and he missed the shot, ball hit the front of the rim,” Reed said. He himself had missed only one shot the entire game, free throws included. Grambling won the title by blowing out Georgetown of Kentucky in the final. For Reed, the execution of Hobdy’s strategy—social change via on-court performance—was another example of what had made Grambling the right choice for him. “For me, as a kid growing up in the segregated South, certain things were probably not as tough as for other people in areas where they were integrated but more exposed to those hard feelings,” he said.

He believed this based not only on his own experiences but on what he had observed in some black teammates and opponents from the northern states: a lingering bitterness that at times prevented them from putting aside the past and focusing on the tasks at hand. He had come to believe there were some unintended advantages to having grown up in a malevolent system set up by whites. As one historian, Jennifer Ritterhouse, author of a book about the social implications of Jim Crow, told me, “Many people have argued that growing up black in the South was less segregated than your urban housing project in the North, which was so isolating, not only from the white world but from the middle-class black community that could separate itself from that environment.”

Reed came to believe that
separate but equal
gave him one benefit that a young African American male living in an urban northern ghetto was not guaranteed: the proximity of the upwardly mobile black role model, the man in a suit with a college degree. With regard to race and class in 1960s America, perhaps that was the starkest antidote to a hard day’s work—
sweat down to his knees
—that represented the status quo.

“I always said that Mr. Lindsay was very inspirational to me and he didn’t even know it,” Reed said. When he referred to his father’s employer as “Mister,” he was not as much making a point about southern manners as showing respect to a man who had helped make Bernice a working town and something of a destination within Union Parish. However abhorrent the domestic hierarchies may have seemed to outsiders—especially northerners who never lived through Jim Crow—there was a personal history in these relationships that was complicated, lasting, and real.

To elaborate on this point, Reed told me about an invitation he’d received to speak at a Kiwanis Club luncheon from an insurance guy on June 25, 2009, a few weeks before my visit. As that happened to be his 67th birthday, he’d hedged, asking the guy to call him back at a later date, but he finally decided, What the heck? It was for a good civic cause. He put some notes together for a speech about his life as a young man and included his summer of hard labor working with his father for Lindsay.

“I give the speech, and afterward this guy comes up, looks a little younger than me, had glasses on, a little pot belly, and says, ‘Do you know who I am?’ Reed recalled. “I look at him, and I look closer at him, and I say, ‘Yeah, I do. You’re Robert Albritton. Donald Lindsay’s your uncle.’ He was amazed that I recognized him. He told me that he always remembered the time we went bullfrog hunting and I was paddling the boat on Mr. Lindsay’s pond and a big moccasin snake was laying up there by the side. I pulled over too close, almost got my head bit off. We laughed about that. He invited me over to see his mounts, said he’s got four alone of African game.”

As a proud hunter himself, Reed said he might have to go have himself a look, if only because it would be the neighborly thing to do. And here was the essence of Willis Reed, a man who had long ago discovered that there was currency in overcoming differences, building bridges, and cultivating relationships.

That I—the writer of a story that had contributed to his being fired by the only organization he ever wanted to work for—was sitting in his den, still apparently welcome in his life, was a testament to that very fact.

IN APRIL 2007, REED RETIRED FROM BASKETBALL
, concluding a four-year stay in the front office of the New Orleans Hornets. He had taken the job in part because he was bored with the ceremonial position he had with his bedraggled Knicks, but even more so to be closer to his ailing mother. Dutifully, Reed went home to his native state in July 2003. Mother and son, long the essence of mutual devotion, had those summer weeks in closer proximity before Inell Reed, almost 80, died that October. To Reed, it seemed that God’s plan had brought him home to see her to the end and finish his working days; but two years later, with a biblical vengeance, there came a hurricane named Katrina that—perhaps least among its consequences—forced a relocation of the Hornets to Oklahoma City.

Nearing 65 years in a life that conditioned him to believe that fate is more than a four-letter word, Reed decided to quit just as the Hornets were returning to New Orleans. I called him to do a tribute column in the
New York Times
, and of course it couldn’t be done without reminiscing about a certain May 1970 night, the most memorable of his long and hardworking life.

As for the most forgettable?

“Well,” he said, “you can guess that one.”

There was no retreating from the unsavory subject and from my role in what was another infamous walk by Reed, this time out of Madison Square Garden and into the chilly New York City night: when he was fired as coach of the Knicks only 14 games into his second season.

November 1978. I was 26 years old, the new beat reporter for the
New York Post
, not so far removed from a Staten Island housing project and from hero worship of the man and his team.

The
Post
at that time was an afternoon newspaper with a long tradition of cagey sportswriting, but was being remade by Rupert Murdoch into the country’s most sensational daily. Reed was beginning his second season as the Knicks’ head coach after replacing Red Holzman, maestro of the franchise’s only championships. He was learning on the job, mainly how to deal with players whose work ethic fell far short of his own. Reed made the playoffs as a rookie coach but the team began the 1978–79 season slowly; as they pulled into Seattle, the word was that David “Sonny” Werblin, the new Garden president, was eager to make a move.