When the Garden Was Eden (24 page)

After Chamberlain tied the game with a put-back basket and Bradley hit a free throw, the Knicks again moved into a half-court set. Frazier passed to DeBusschere out front. On the right side this time, Reed again was open, and Chamberlain was too late stepping forward. With the familiar follow-through of the left hand, Reed launched his second shot and hit nothing but net. The fans were beside themselves, standing, jumping, stamping their feet. “You’re five stories above the ground and I swear you could feel the vibrations,” Reed said. “For a minute I thought, This is what an earthquake must feel like.”

FORTY YEARS LATER
, watching Reed come out again, Frazier was still amazed by how the scene played like a Hollywood script, except that it was perfectly real.

“It was like a giant wave that came out of nowhere,” he said. “We always believed Willis would play, but until he was out there…”

On the screen, Reed was crossing the press table, bumping the
Times
reporter Goldaper. “You get goose bumps, even though you know what’s going to happen,” Frazier said. Years of reflection and the maturity of a man nearing his 65th birthday had also given him a clearer picture, a greater perspective. Reed, Frazier could admit now, had to be the MVP.

“He made it all happen by setting the atmosphere, the ambience,” Frazier said. “I watch this now and I see that if Willis didn’t do what he did, I would never have had the kind of game I had. When he made those shots, there was no way we were going to lose. For me, it was as if a veil was removed and everything in front of me was crystal clear. I became the open man.”

A COUPLE OF MONTHS EARLIER
, I had tracked down Dick Garrett at his Milwaukee home, called, and said that I wanted to talk about Frazier and Southern Illinois and, inevitably, Game 7. He laughed and said, with no detectable ruefulness, “Oh,
that
game. Yeah, I remember that one.”

Through the years, when Garrett wanted to relive his days at Southern Illinois, educate his now grown sons on the marvel that was Walt Frazier, his teammate, he would turn to a VHS tape of their double-overtime victory at Louisville with its All-Americans Wes Unseld and Butch Beard. “There’s the point in that game when we just give the ball to Walt and get out of the way,” Garrett said. “A beautiful thing to watch.”

But that was college ball. As a second-round draft pick who wound up starting alongside West, Garrett quickly developed an appreciation for what it took to be an NBA superstar. West was a different breed from Frazier, he said, more self-made, a striver. “I never saw a guy with the drive that Jerry had. Never took a day off. He made a young guy like me work so much harder.” Years later, trying to instill that ethic in his sons, Garrett would explain to them how, in following the West Virginian’s lead, he would run so hard that he’d eventually have to make a mad dash to the bathroom to throw up.

Frazier took an antithetical approach, his intensity locked away in a biological vault to rival Tim Duncan’s. But as much as anyone, Garrett could speak to the presence Frazier had just by stepping onto the floor and going about his business with the gliding grace of a dancer.

“Back then, it was cool to be cool,” Garrett said. “With Walt, there was no rah-rah, no trash talk. He just played.” Garrett, a loyalist, considers Frazier to have been every bit as good as Oscar and West on any given night, even if his career statistics suggested otherwise. “You don’t think Walt could have scored 30 points a game if he’d needed to or wanted to?” Garrett said.

In the first six games of the ’70 Finals, Frazier averaged less than half that, 14.5, a shade better than Garrett’s 13.8, while heeding Holzman’s wishes. “Hit the open man, Clyde,” the coach had reminded him throughout the playoffs, and especially during the Finals. The game plan had been to spread the floor, make everyone on the Lakers labor defensively, and exploit Chamberlain’s unwillingness to move out of the lane. Forced to tail Frazier one-on-one, Garrett took pride in the fact that Frazier, to that point, hadn’t broken loose.

“Going into the seventh game, I thought I’d had pretty good success, held my own,” Garrett said. In fact, at the top of the ABC telecast, Twyman noted that Garrett’s perfect first-quarter shooting had been the key to the Lakers’ Game 6 blowout. With Dick Barnett on West, he said, Frazier probably believed he could roam free for steals with impunity, but the rookie had made him pay.

Frazier had a slight size advantage on Garrett, an inch taller at 6'4" and 15 extra pounds at 200. “But he was really strong,” Garrett said. “The last thing you wanted to let him do was back you down. I was trying to pick him up full-court, just be in his jock as much as possible. A lot of times he wouldn’t start off trying to score. But in Game 7, I knew when he began hitting jump shots and looking for the basket it would be a long night. With Willis hurt, it was as if he came out with the idea of saying, ‘Here is the true Walt Frazier.’ ”

FRAZIER, MEANWHILE, HATED THAT A FRIEND
stood in the way of his championship ring. He never wanted to like anyone he was playing against. He preferred being matched up with West (who would eventually take a turn guarding him that night to no avail).

“Dick was one of the nicest guys you’d ever want on your team,” Frazier said as the action picked up following Reed’s game-opening jumpers. “When things started going my way, I really had to concentrate on not thinking about what I was doing to him. That’s why I never wanted to be friends with any of our opponents, because stuff like that can get inside your head.”

Early on, Frazier used the move he’d copied from Barnett, up-faking Keith Erickson in transition, then timing his own leap to get the shot off while trying to draw a foul. He nailed a jumper for a 7–2 lead. Next he went to the defensive glass, dribbled out of the pack, and hit DeBusschere, who in turn found Bradley for a 15-footer. It was 9–2 Knicks, and the Lakers called time-out.

Switching to his commentator persona, it struck Frazier that we were watching a game largely antithetical to the one he would be covering from his broadcasting chair later that night. “The first thing you notice right away is the ball movement—much more dishing before the swishing,” he said. “I mean, we’re not doing anything out there that’s so complicated: screen, backdoor, move the ball, look for some options if they overplay.” But something else was about to become clear. As well as the Knicks had collectively started the game, Frazier was on fire, in all facets.

His two free throws gave the Knicks a 13–6 lead. A left-side jumper was followed by a spin move on Garrett, who fouled him: basket good, 3-point play, 24–14. He dribbled behind a DeBusschere screen and hit another jumper, 28–15. With the Knicks leading 32–23, Reed set a high screen. Frazier took one dribble and pulled up behind it.

“See there?” he said. “Garrett went under.” And, predictably, Chamberlain made no effort to help. So Frazier calmly stepped back and sank another jumper. When the first quarter ended—38–24, New York—Frazier had 15 points on 5-for-5 shooting from the floor, 4 rebounds, and 4 assists. Twyman was no longer raving about the Dick Garrett effect.

For his part, Frazier insisted that he made no conscious decision to dominate the ball or the game. “By this point I was just happy that everyone was into it and we didn’t feel like we had to bug Willis anymore about how he felt,” he said. “Red kept asking, but that was just to see how much he could play.”

Reed was persevering, not scoring after those first two baskets, shooting only three more times in the game, but contributing with rebounds and picks and by willing his numbing hip to move laterally as a defensive shield. After his Game 6 eruption, Chamberlain’s meager 21 points in Game 7 would baffle historians. In our telephone conversation, even Garrett wondered why the Lakers hadn’t gone to him more. But a close inspection of the video suggested that they did run much of their offense through the low post—17 times in the first half alone.

The problem was that Chamberlain wasn’t doing much of anything with the ball, not that the Knicks were making that great a collective effort to stop him. “We weren’t doubling him,” Frazier said. “Red kept telling us, ‘Stick with your man.’ If he got hot, yeah, but Wilt hadn’t done anything.” With Reed pressing him, a strangely reticent Chamberlain would take a dribble or two into the paint before turning back, looking to pass, or settling for a contested finger roll. On nine first-half shot attempts, he scored the grand total of two field goals.

Did Chamberlain’s lack of aggression have anything to do with his pregame preoccupation with Reed? Garrett recalled Mullaney exhorting his big man during time-outs to pick up the pace before it was too late. But, as Frazier said, he was feeling it now, on a fantasy roll. For the Lakers, it already
was
too late.

Early in the second quarter, in a free-flowing and gambling mood, Frazier swiped a pass headed for Chamberlain, broke upcourt, and fed Bradley for a layup. Twyman noted that the Knicks, now leading 42–25, were shooting 72 percent. “They had to be thinking that wouldn’t last,” Frazier drolly noted. But Mike Riordan came off the bench to bang home a long jumper, and then came a virtual backbreaker, a microcosm of the Lakers’ game-long misery.

West was dribbling at midcourt, guarded by Riordan, when Frazier suddenly appeared like a thief on a darkened street. He poked a hand into West’s midsection and pried the ball loose, and went on his way. Red-faced, West gave chase. Frazier went in from the left side and up with the right hand. West raked him across the shoulder. The ball rolled in. With the free throw, the lead reached 20, 51–31. “Don’t even know how I got that one,” Frazier said, marveling at himself.

Pressured by Riordan, again at midcourt, West turned the ball over yet again, stepping back across the line. “See how tentative they are?” Frazier said, pointing to the Lakers on the screen. “That’s where I knew we had them. West was out of it, all discombobulated. They had no leader. And the rest of them are just standing around, watching West and Wilt. It looks like Baylor’s not even out there. Wilt killed him, man, clogging up the lane. You could feel the tension between them.”

The performance by West was particularly baffling, with most of his 28 points and 6 assists coming after the Knicks’ early deluge. “I don’t know, it looks like kind of a halfhearted effort, like he already knew they were going to lose,” Frazier said. When he followed up a jumper with another smooth drive to the rim just before the half, Frazier had 23 of his eventual 36 points in what would become, with 19 assists and 5 steals when it was all over, arguably the greatest Finals Game 7 performance ever.

Now the lead was 67–38, and then 69–42 as the teams left for intermission. You didn’t have to be Walt Frazier—or a basketball history buff—to know the Lakers were whipped. “I’ve seen enough,” Frazier said. Work beckoned, but he still managed a parting shot: “It’s amazing: when they got Wilt, I remember thinking, How will they ever lose a game? You watch this and think, How the heck did they ever win one?”

ON THE NIGHT OF GAME 7
, ABC delayed its telecast in the New York City area until after the late-night news, as part of an agreement with the NBA. These were the embryonic days of cable television, and the deal was mainly a concession to the league’s big-market owners—especially Jack Kent Cooke of the Lakers—who were already afraid that television broadcasts would hinder their attendance. So it was that the eyes that bore witness to the championship for most Knicks fans in the New York metropolitan area belonged to Marv Albert, who was calling the game on the radio.

Born Marvin Philip Aufrichtig in 1941, Albert was the oldest of three brothers growing up in Brooklyn’s Manhattan Beach section. By the time he attended Lincoln High School and Syracuse University, he had already glimpsed his future, having served as a Knicks ball boy while spending hours in his bedroom filling tapes with play-by-play calls of imaginary games and those he watched on television with the sound turned down.

He knew the game, having played some as a kid. He honed his skills with a microphone under the tutelage of Marty Glickman, the onetime track star and Albert’s predecessor on Knicks radiocasts for 21 years. The timing of his career could not have been better. By 1970, Albert’s most famous call—“Yes!” for a basket—was a school-yard staple all over New York, but he had lifted it from a ref. “There was an official in the NBA in the fifties named Sid Borgia,” he told me. “He was very animated and would go through gyrations when someone scored a basket. He would say, ‘Yes!’ and if a guy was fouled, ‘And it counts.’ ” Early in his Knicks broadcasting career, during a playoff game, Dick Barnett hit one of his patented fallback jumpers that banked in at the end of a quarter. Excited, Albert blurted out, “Yes!” It seemed like a natural call for such a moment. He incorporated it into his repertoire, and soon people began acknowledging him as the Knicks’ Yes Man. Later, he would add “And it counts” to his call of a basket and a foul. Albert became a New York institution destined for national network popularity.

“Game 7 was the largest radio audience at the time for a sports event,” he said. “People were sitting around their kitchen table, listening to the radio, just like the old days.”

Nervous, biting my nails, and unwilling to deal with even the most serious familial interruptions, I locked myself in my 1961 Mercury Comet, purchased the previous summer for $500 and parked in the resident lot of the West Brighton Houses on Staten Island’s north shore, waiting for word on Willis. If I could relive the experience, I wouldn’t want it any other way. Wouldn’t want the 24-hour
SportsCenter
updates, the continuous sports-radio white noise, the Twitter updates from the sportswriters camped out in the locker room corridor. Just Marv and me, with my chips and Royal Crown cola, the engine not running to save the little gas I had in the tank.