When the Garden Was Eden (27 page)

Marin admitted that it was never easy to walk onto the Garden floor, where it always seemed to take two baskets for every one New York made. “Some guys in the locker room would say, ‘Let’s go out and have fun tonight,’ ” he said. “For me, it was never fun. It was going to be work. Bradley was the most dedicated player I matched up against—well, he and Havlicek. He wasn’t all that gifted, but he was always there. His feet literally came down on your feet. I’d have to run him off six picks to get one shot. You’d finish the game with scratch marks all over you.”

The subject of those long, grueling nights reminded him of a letter he’d sent to Bradley when the senator had finished his third and last term in Washington, thanking him for his service. Marin wrote: “You were a far dirtier basketball player than you were a politician.”

From a distance of decades, the praise for Bradley and the Knicks flowed freely. The nation had survived their uprising, along with their crazed leftist fans. “Now they’re all teaching on college campuses or making all kinds of money,” he dryly noted. Marin couldn’t resist invoking one very rich Old Knick in particular. “Phil Jackson would use the word
establishment
like it was a profanity when he was playing,” he said. “But he’s turned out to be among the wealthiest people in the sport of the non-owners. I guess the establishment wasn’t such a bad thing.”

Marin let the thought of Jackson’s long, strange trip marinate for a moment—from admitted user of hallucinogenic drugs during the Knicks’ glory years to earning $12 million a year by the time he’d won his 11th championship with the Lakers in 2010. “But what do I know?” he said, laughing. “Maybe Phil is giving away a lot of his money these days.”

PHIL JACKSON’S RETURN
to active playing duty in the fall of 1970 was gradual, with limited minutes and returns. Red Holzman didn’t want to push him too hard and risk reinjury, and anyway, roles had been established during the championship run. At 6'8", with his long arms and freakish reach, Jackson was a first-rate disruptor on defense. But Holzman cringed whenever he would dare put the ball on the floor; the coach went so far as to establish a two-dribble limit for Jackson and was constantly on his case about it. While Jackson scrimmaged with the second team against Reed, he was more of a multipurpose frontcourt man than a backup center—which was indisputably the team’s crying need with Nate Bowman gone to Buffalo and with Reed’s chronically bad left knee.

While the Knicks’ principal players remained the same, the end of the bench underwent a forced makeover. Don May and Bill Hosket had also relocated to Buffalo with Eddie Donovan in the expansion draft, while John Warren was lost to the new Cleveland team. The college draft brought new faces but failed to yield serviceable talent. The departure of Donovan seemed to have disrupted the organizational flow. The jobs of GM and coach might have been too much for one man.

Holzman’s first-round pick, the Illinois guard Mike Price, was a mistake, considering that a pair of future stars, Calvin Murphy and Nate (Tiny) Archibald, were left on the board. Eddie Mast, a third-round pick from Temple, a free-spirited 6'9" forward, made the team and became fast friends with Jackson. Greg Fillmore, a 7'1" center taken in the eighth round out of little Cheyney University of Pennsylvania, stuck because of his size and the hope that he might be a project. At best, he was a poor man’s Nate Bowman.

Jackson officially joined the Minutemen, thrilled to be back in uniform, though he eventually considered the back injury to be one of those opportunistic and even fortunate life detours. Though he had been inactive for the historic season, Jackson’s inner coach stirred for the first time, and Holzman occasionally gave him small tasks, such as the breakdown of a scouting report, with which to keep busy when he wasn’t taking photographs.

He believes that he owes much to Holzman, who had twice made the grueling journey to Grand Forks, North Dakota—scouting Jackson and then showing up a second time to sign him in his dorm room on the same day that John Lindsay, the mayor of New York, happened to be in town for an event. What were the odds? Jackson had wondered. Listen, Holzman groused, the mayor’s trip could not have been as circuitous as his had been.

There was something about the sarcastic Jewish man that Jackson connected to immediately. He didn’t try too hard, didn’t mince or waste words. “Kind words when they were needed, but mostly a matter-of-fact guy,” Jackson said. “It was the middle of the road—not too high, not too low.”

Tightening the bond they had formed in Grand Forks, Holzman picked Jackson up at the airport on his first visit to New York on the Friday of Memorial Day weekend 1967. Holzman was at the wheel of a Chevy Impala convertible with his wife, Selma, in the backseat, along with a lamp she had brought along from their home in Cedarhurst. “So we’re on the Van Wyck Expressway and some kid leans over the bypass and chucks a stone right down onto the windshield and cracks it,” Jackson said. Holzman barely shook his head and kept driving—all the way into Manhattan, double-parking on Eighth Avenue, where the lamp was dropped off for repair. Finally, he turned to Jackson. “In New York, you get tested every day,” he said. “It takes a special kind of patience—you think you could live here?”

Jackson suddenly wasn’t too sure. He was the son of Charles and Elisabeth Jackson, Assemblies of God ministers of the Pentecostal faith. After marrying, the couple moved around Montana and North Dakota, starting ministries wherever they went. Jackson’s fundamentalist childhood was rural and religious to the point that he was allowed only herbal remedies for illness. He wasn’t permitted an injection of penicillin until he was 14. He played basketball and baseball and, though he was a strong pitching prospect, he abandoned the sport at 16, already 6'5" and part of a high school basketball team in Williston, North Dakota, that was heralded throughout the state.

At first glance, New York seemed and sounded like a foreign country to him. When he and Holzman sat down with Donovan at the Garden, Jackson mentioned that he had never even seen a live NBA game. “No kidding,” Donovan said, looking at Holzman as if to say, “This kid’s gonna play here?” Soon Jackson was holding a 16-millimeter film and was told to go ahead, take it back to school, have a look at what the pro game’s all about.

First he had his New York weekend, staying in a hotel nearby on Eighth Avenue. He was given some meal money and a player escort, Neil Johnson, who had just finished his rookie season. They went to dinner and hit a pool hall before Johnson wished Jackson well and went on his way, leaving him to explore.

“I had Saturday to myself before leaving on Sunday,” Jackson said. “I was wandering around and walked right into thousands and thousands of people marching in favor of the Vietnam War. There were policemen, firemen, sanitation workers, city workers, all over the streets. There were soapbox speakers, literally, in Times Square.” Jackson had been under the impression that only liberals and radicals lived in New York. As a budding peacenik, he was disappointed to discover that wasn’t the case.

Not sure what to make of the place, he returned to North Dakota the next day, thinking he had seen everything. Then he found a projector, loaded the refrigerator with beer, and summoned his Fighting Sioux teammates. They sat down to watch the game film Donovan and Holzman had chosen for Jackson. It was dated October 18, 1966—the night Willis Reed obliterated Rudy LaRusso and every other Laker who had dared to confront him.

“Nice intro, huh?” Jackson said, recalling that for a few moments he wondered why he had rejected a competitive financial offer from the Minnesota Muskies of the brand-new ABA, which would have kept him much closer to home. But Reed proved advertisement enough.

Jackson reported to training camp the following September and matched his relatively scrawny upper body against the muscular and hardworking Reed. Though it was an unenviable chore, they never scuffled or so much as exchanged a bad word. The raging bull he’d watched in grainy black-and-white was indeed a fierce competitor, but a gentleman of the highest order. Jackson also found himself rooming with fellow rookie Walt Frazier, and that, too, was an education he could never have gotten in lily-white North Dakota. He began making friends, falling in with the antiwar crowd and becoming immersed in the political debate.

It wasn’t long before he knew that his decision to sign with the Knicks and come to New York City was going to be the smartest one he would make in his life.

WE MIGHT HAVE KNOWN
something bad was brewing when the Orioles won the 1970 World Series over Cincinnati in five games and, a little more than two months later, Jim O’Brien kicked a 32-yard field goal to lift the Colts to a 16–13 victory over the Dallas Cowboys in Super Bowl V. While not directly at the expense of New York, Baltimore was suddenly the reigning champion in baseball and football (where the Mets and Jets had stood the year before), a compelling narrative turnaround that, if nothing else, underscored the fundamental and irresistible appeal of sports.

I actually rooted for both Baltimore teams, being a sworn National League hater, miserable when the American League so much as fell behind in an All-Star Game. And I didn’t care for the Cowboys, considering that Dallas in those days still reminded me of Kennedy’s assassination. Naively comfortable on my high horse, I failed to comprehend what Baltimore’s athletic vindication was portending for my defending champion Knicks.

The
season after
felt lacking in comparative drama, but how could it not? We seemed to have contracted the malaise known as Who Cares About Anything But the Playoffs? In an expanded league split for the first time into four divisions, the Knicks coasted to the Atlantic title but dropped from 60 wins to 52, losing four times to second-place Philadelphia. They were even beaten twice in Buffalo, where, given major minutes, Don May averaged an eye-opening 20.2 points. The Knicks could have used some of that marksmanship as their bench play declined. Cazzie Russell broke his wrist, missed 25 games, and shot a career-low 42.9 percent. Mike Riordan’s numbers uniformly sagged.

The lack of a backup center forced Reed to average a career-high 39.1 minutes—while shooting less than 50 percent for the first time in three years—when his load should have been lightened. In Jackson’s opinion, the championship had come at a high cost. “After the torn hip in the ’70 series, Willis would never again play at the level he had shown,” he said. “The wheels started to fall off.”

And yet Frazier’s career was still in ascension as he narrowly replaced Reed as the team’s scoring leader. DeBusschere was only 30, Bradley 27. Better yet, expansion had removed the gravest threat to a Finals return as Milwaukee shifted to the Western Conference. With Oscar Robertson joining Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and a talented young forward, Bobby Dandridge, the Bucks were now the Lakers’ problem, as evidenced by the conference finals. Playing without the injured Elgin Baylor, the Lakers were hammered in five games, their four defeats coming by an average of a whopping 20 points. For a change, Jerry West had no what-ifs with which to torture himself—only a blizzard of Kareem’s sky hooks.

Back east, in the first round, the Knicks faced an entertaining but hardly formidable Atlanta Hawks team that featured the estimable jump shooter Lou Hudson and the floppy-haired and droopy-socked rookie Pistol Pete Maravich. The Hawks slipped into the playoffs with a 36–46 record but stunned New York by winning Game 2 in the Garden. Their alarm rung, the Knicks went down to Atlanta, won the next two games, and finished off the Hawks in five. Not their most impressive effort.

On the other hand, Baltimore, their conference finals opponent, had needed seven games to eliminate Philadelphia. The Bullets were banged up and missing Gus Johnson, who was out with an injured left knee. Without Johnson for the last month of the season, the Bullets had staggered to a 42–40 finish. The Knicks again had home-court advantage, not to mention a 21–9 record against the Bullets over the past three seasons.

Following a narrow escape by the Knicks in Game 1 and a blowout in Game 2, the gap was 23–9 and seemed in no danger of shrinking. Reed was struggling with his health again. In addition to his knee, he had sprained a shoulder in the Atlanta series—colliding with Bellamy, who was still getting in his way—but the Merchant hypothesis seemed to be holding. After the Bullets enjoyed consecutive blowouts in Baltimore, the Knicks pulled out Game 5 at the Garden, a game that I—now a Brooklyn College freshman—attended in all my full-throated and foulmouthed glory after an all-night wait for tickets outside the Garden.

Up in the blue seats, we loved abusing the hapless Bullets, not that they could hear us the way they did the courtside denizens. We called Unseld “Younseld” and “Fucking Fat Man.” We ridiculed Marin for his birthmark. No aficionados or Woody Allens among us, we couldn’t wait for Monroe to misfire—to let loose on him, too.

The Bullets were understandably contemptuous of the whole New York experience by this point. They were tired of the courtside hazing from the likes of Lois and friends and sick to death of reading in the New York papers about Reed’s pain and sacrifice. After 94 games, they had their own ailments up and down the roster. Loughery, who ripped off a protective vest he wore after damaging his ribs and suffering a collapsed lung late in the season, was also playing with a painful heel. With knees that already looked held together by pipe cleaners, Monroe twisted an ankle early in the series and initially feared he might have to sit out a game or two.

On top of that, Gus Johnson’s absence could not be understated. At 32, he was no longer the 6'6", 235-pound high-flier, the open-court terror who broke backboards with thunderous dunks. But the man known as Honeycomb—“the best all-around player I’d ever seen,” Monroe said, with more sentiment than common sense—was the Bullets’ veteran rock, their Dave DeBusschere.