When the Garden Was Eden (31 page)

The subject would always be a sore one, especially for Green-Monroe, who couldn’t help but launch into an occasional diatribe, after which her husband would invariably tell her, “Move on, Marita. Move on.” When asked how
he
reconciled his decision, and if he truly did regret becoming a Knick, Monroe smiled and more or less considered it life imitating art, making it up as he went along, of going in whatever direction his creative impulses led.

“One thing about me: I’ve always been adaptable,” he said. “I don’t make a big deal about myself. It’s what happens, the course of life. Some guys get the better road, some guys don’t. You still have to live your life, and that’s kind of how I’ve always taken all of this. Going from Baltimore to New York was the road I was taking. It’s like when you think about the most successful guys, whether they know it or not, are out in front, seeing the game before it happens. You see where everybody is, and you see in your head where they are going to be. And that’s the way I’ve tried to live my life: looking ahead. The way I always felt in the end about leaving the Bullets for the Knicks. I knew what it was going to be like, and I wasn’t surprised.”

He went to New York, found himself an apartment in an old brownstone on a quiet Manhattan street near Central Park West. He bought himself a silver Rolls-Royce (same model as Frazier’s), to which he later affixed the black-gloved clenched-fist sticker. Later, when he finally stepped into the Knicks’ starting lineup, the Pearl-and-Clyde partnership would be known in some quarters as the Rolls-Royce backcourt.

“The best of all time,” Monroe said.

Just not necessarily the best time for him.

WALT FRAZIER LIVED IN AN OFF-CAMPUS TRAILER AT SOUTHERN ILLINOIS
, with his wife and their baby son, Walt III. He kept to himself. The man who would be Clyde hadn’t yet developed an affinity for expensive clothes, fast cars, overhead bedroom mirrors, or after-hours parties. “He was the quietest guy on the team,” said Clarence Smith, Frazier’s college teammate. “You weren’t going to see him at fraternity parties or even in the student union.” Incubating beneath Frazier’s reserved exterior was someone else entirely, a character—or some would say caricature—known as Clyde. According to Frazier, the trainer Danny Whelan gave him the nickname after seeing Warren Beatty in
Bonnie and Clyde
. During his rookie year, when minutes were hard to come by but the money wasn’t, Frazier would occupy himself sartorially. “I wasn’t playing well, and in order to pacify myself I’d go buy clothes,” he said.

A short man with a long needle, Whelan was unsparing in his ridicule when Frazier walked into the locker room one night with a brown velour hat. “Get a load of Clyde,” he cracked. Everyone laughed, but Frazier was, as usual, unruffled. He was sure he looked good. He had never been one to fear standing apart. “I was never afraid of being an individual,” he said. “Even if it meant I was going to be ostracized for it.”

Clyde was more suited to the constant scrutiny and adulation of big-city sports fans than Walt; he was a mask that alleviated the off-court performance anxiety and allowed Frazier to quiet the part of him that preferred being alone. In the intimidating limelight of Manhattan celebrity, he could be someone he wasn’t—even his old teammates from the Midwest didn’t recognize him. “We could never figure the whole Clyde thing out,” Smith said, noting that when Frazier returned to Southern Illinois for a team or school reunion, he was the same old Walt, pulling vitamins out of his pocket and excusing himself early to go get some sleep. Then he would return to New York and Clyde would take over. The development of the persona and the nickname were one thing. The branding of Clyde was another. Here Frazier needed some help.

“Walt used to come into my office all the time,” said the Garden photographer George Kalinsky, fondly recalling a time when the Knicks’ administrative offices had open doors for everyone, even reporters. “So he comes in one day and he’s wearing a green suit, green vest, green hat, and matching green alligator shoes. I look at the outfit and I say, ‘Let’s go take a photo.’ ” Kalinsky posed Frazier outside the Garden, near a lamppost, and loved the result so much that he submitted it to
Newsweek
. “It gets into the magazine and we get about 200 letters from women wanting a copy,” he said. Frazier later autographed the photo—“Thanks for making me Clyde”—and sent it to Kalinsky. The Frazier endorsement was all the validation he needed. “I didn’t create the nickname,” Kalinsky said. “But I felt I created the aura.”

The rest of the Clyde legend remains shrouded in ambiguity, largely recounted in impressionistic sound bites that only heighten the historical mystique.

“I think a lot of the Clyde stuff was for the public, but it wasn’t who the real person was,” said Dick Garrett. “He was a more subdued guy, not a heavy partier. How could he be? He cared more about his body than anything. He would never abuse himself. I think the legend of Clyde started in the media and he just played along.”

Whatever the time frame from origin to sensation, Clyde Frazier needed time to cultivate his cool, erase the misperception of himself as detached and indifferent. For that to happen, though, he had to become something special on the court. The trade of Butch Komives to Detroit in the DeBusschere deal opened the door to more minutes. And with the increased time, Frazier drew ever closer to Red Holzman, who would often make him sit next to him on the bench and fill his young guard’s head with ongoing observation and, of course, criticism.

Relaxing on the terrace of one of his St. Croix houses, Frazier could laugh about the latter part and throw in a punch line. “There were times Red made me so mad I was tempted to do a Sprewell,” he said, referring to the 1997 incident in which the Golden State guard, first name Latrell, attacked and choked his coach, P. J. Carlesimo (which brought him eternal infamy and a trade to the Knicks the following season).

With Holzman giving him more and more freedom, Frazier’s game picked up fast and the statistics reflected his progress. From averaging about 21 minutes, 9 points, and 4 assists as a rookie, he was at almost 40 minutes, 20.9 points, and 8.2 assists during the championship season two years later. Like the Old Knicks, Frazier had been a work in progress, unlike the city’s other master of suave, Joe Willie Namath.

Namath had hit New York with a massive contract and was immediately considered the savior of an upstart league. Even when Frazier’s performance soared, he still had to toil within the Holzman democracy, sharing the ball (and the attention) with a disparate band of emerging media darlings. Namath had no such impediments, given the costumed anonymity of his Jets teammates and most football players. Beyond the dimpled smile, the twinkling blue eyes, and the glorious nickname, Broadway Joe, Namath had the winning personality of a Midtown saloonkeeper. “I used to hang around with Joe and Mickey Mantle a lot,” George Lois said. “Mickey was a nasty guy; everybody knew that, especially when he was drinking. But around Joe he’d be different. Joe would say, ‘Mick, stay and sign a few autographs,’ and, goddammit, Mickey would listen, only for Joe. Frazier was a star, but there was nobody like Joe.”

Namath was big enough not only to open his own club, Bachelors III, but to push back when Pete Rozelle ordered him to divest his interest because the club was attracting what the NFL commissioner determined to be the wrong clientele. Instead, Namath called a press conference and tearfully announced he was quitting football. Cooler heads prevailed, but Namath was bigger than ever: James Dean in white football cleats. Even Frazier was impressed. “Joe was such a nice guy, nothing like his image,” he said, having run into the quarterback at other East Side haunts. Frazier wore mink, like Namath, but he had a different, less gregarious personality. Even as Clyde, he tended to hang back, coolly observant. But being a Knicks star on a championship team was often all the introduction he needed.

While many of Frazier’s teammates were handed ringside tickets for the Fight of the Century, the first of three bouts between Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier, on March 9, 1971, at the Garden, it was Clyde Frazier who was included in the celebrity sightings in the next day’s reports. There he was in the same news columns as Frank Sinatra, Norman Mailer, Ted Kennedy, and Diana Ross. “You name them, they were there,” Frazier said, recalling the experience, in part as an affirmation of his own rise to full-blown star. “Sinatra was taking pictures. And then the mink coats—everybody had a mink coat. And that was just the guys.” He laughed and added, “And diamonds, too.”

He remembered seeing himself on the news the next day, strolling into the Garden in his own full-length mink, not quite sure if he was in the Ali camp along with the majority of the glitterati. As much of a stylist as Ali was, in the mold of Clyde, there was something about the no-nonsense Smokin’ Joe that indisputably appealed to Walt’s working-class southern roots.

“I was kind of in between, but when Frazier hit him with that left hook in the last round, it kind of hit me: ‘Oh, yeah, I guess I’m rooting for Frazier.’ But we all knew that we were witnessing something special, man. Nobody left when the fight was over, just standing there. And then when you went outside, there were limousines all around this place, triple-parked. And all the celebrities, every celebrity in the world.”

Or so it seemed to the Knicks superstar, who began to feel as if the world were waiting for him every time he stepped out on the Upper East Side and on up into Harlem.

Frazier—as Walt or Clyde—was never much of a drinker. He didn’t have a sip in high school and didn’t know what to do all those years later when gratis alcohol came his way at famed hangouts like P.J. Clarke’s, Jimmy Weston’s, and Elaine’s. “At first I would say, ‘Hey, man, I didn’t want a drink,’ ” he said. “But then a guy I knew told me, ‘Don’t ever turn one down, because these people will think you’re not a good guy.’ ” Bartenders caught on and kept his alcohol intake next to nothing, though Clyde bent his own rules when it came to entertaining the opposite sex. Divorced not long after he joined the Knicks, Frazier created a new ethos. “Clyde was wine, clothes, song, and a different woman each night,” he said. Pressed for a statistical estimate of his scoring totals, he joked that he was nowhere close to Wilt Chamberlain (who, in a 1991 autobiography, claimed to have slept with 20,000 women). One road roommate of Frazier’s said the hotel telephone seldom stopped ringing. “Women calling day and night, wanting tickets, wanting a piece of him,” the roommate said.

“If they want to see Clyde tonight,” he’d say, “they got to pay.” He meant for the tickets, his trademark frugality being a habit he was never eager to break.

Few, if any, got too close to Clyde, who was clearly shielding Walt from the superficialities of fame. He understood that self-promotion required only a mastery of commercial invention. Image was everything. Hence, Clyde never had to work too hard for the attention he received, never had to make a spectacle of himself. Walt was always at the controls, behind the curtain, manipulating his wizard of ah’s.

A fawning woman might be at his side in a club, and suddenly he would announce he was leaving—with her number in his pocket, of course—to have a bowl of granola and go to sleep. Sometimes it was an opposing player, out on the town on the night before a game at the Garden, who would unwittingly prompt Frazier to call it a night, lest he be more sleep-deprived than the man he might have to guard.

“We didn’t have a curfew,” Frazier said. “But if I saw someone like Oscar leave at a certain time, that was my cue to get out of there, too.”

Once the media were playing ball, all he had to do in order to be Clyde was let people have a glimpse into his material world, allow the occasional photographer access to the bedroom of his East Side high-rise, where the closets were jammed with velour suits and flowing capes and his $5,000 black ranch mink coat. All he had to do was grow the muttonchops, then the beard, and hit the town in his 1965 Rolls. He purchased the car gray but had it painted burgundy and beige before adding the coup de grâce, his gangster whitewalls. “The Clydemobile.”

Nobody appreciated Frazier’s theatrical pose and natural stage presence more than the emerging director Woody Allen. “He’d come into Elaine’s,” Allen said of his longtime Second Avenue hangout. “There was this amazing aura about him when he’d step into a room.”

Allen was, in effect, the perfect Clyde audience. He only wanted to observe the splendor of the man, not impose on him or so much as chat. When Ira Berkow was co-writing Frazier’s book
Rockin’ Steady
, in the early seventies, they went out to lunch one day at P.J. Clarke’s, settling in at a backroom table on a slow late afternoon. There was one other patron nearby, reading a newspaper but stealing the occasional glance over the top of it. Every time Berkow looked over, the guy would defensively pull the paper up. This went on for a while, Berkow humored by the game of Clyde-and-mouse, until the fellow got up to leave. Only then did he realize it was Woody Allen. As long as he could maintain his distance, Frazier enjoyed the attention, and grew adept at eliciting more of it.

“My first game in New York, he gets knocked down and he’s laying there like he’s dead,” said Butch Beard, who joined the Knicks after the championship years, in 1975. “I rush over there, thinking, Oh my God, he’s really hurt.” Frazier looked up at his teammate without cracking a smile. “Beard,” he said, “how’re my fans taking it?” “Fuck you,” Beard said. Beard was no NBA star, just an acerbic, tough-minded guard on a variety of teams, including the 1975 champion Golden State Warriors. Frazier had respected Beard after the classic games Southern Illinois had played against Louisville. In New York, Frazier showed Beard around, gave him rides in his Rolls from the team’s new downtown gym at Pace College. He got him hooked on yoga. On the road, they were occasional dinner companions, including one night in Chicago when Frazier carried in a bag that he set on the table and left there until the waiter brought over a glass of wine.