When the Garden Was Eden (42 page)

Sowing my tabloid oats, I took to playfully attributing sensitive material to a loquacious and quasi-fictitious character named “One Knick.” Many players said things they didn’t want their names attached to, but Holzman, unaccustomed to the muckraking, became convinced that One Knick was just one Knick: he suspected it was Mike Glenn, an unthreatening but chatty shooting guard. While the team and traveling party sat on a bus one day, Glenn was outside with the coach, vigorously denying that he was Deep Throat.

The anonymous nitpicking intensified during a miserable 1981–82 season, undercut by rampant womanizing and drug use during the height of the NBA’s cocaine era. On the way down, Richardson uttered his famous line “The ship be sinking.” And when Nat Gottlieb of the Newark
Star-Ledger
asked how low it could go, Richardson marvelously reasoned, “Sky’s the limit.”

Through it all, Holzman coached and comported himself as he always had. He never confronted reporters, as he had John Nucatola before Game 7 in Boston. Never got too high or too low, responding to our declarations of doom by reminding us that he was going home to have a scotch and dinner with Selma. By early spring of ’82 he knew that Werblin was going to make another coaching change. In Boston (where else?) for his final game, I asked him if he wished to comment on his players’ effort that season.

“Maybe I’ll say something soon,” he said. He looked away, then back with a trademark sly grin that told me I should have known better. “Probably not.”

STILL TAKING ADVICE FROM HOWARD COSELL,
Werblin replaced Holzman with the rising coaching star (and unabashed know-it-all) Hubie Brown, while also bringing home Dave DeBusschere to direct the organization. While not quite persona non grata, DeBusschere had not been the most welcome Old Knicks legend during his time with the Nets and a subsequent stint as ABA commissioner. In fact, the Knicks waited seven years to retire DeBusschere’s number 22, loath to honor him while he was working for a local competitor.

His professional marriage to the combustible but always entertaining Brown was of the shotgun variety, as Werblin, in trying to replicate his magic with Joe Namath’s Jets, was more enamored of marquee names and less interested in allowing the president of basketball operations to select his own coach and create a unified partnership. Though the Knicks had some modest success after DeBusschere landed the high-scoring Brooklynite Bernard King—they went seven games in the second round of the 1984 playoffs with Larry Bird and the Celtics—Brown was never a DeBusschere ally, complaining about his work ethic to every reporter who would keep his name out of the paper.

The relationship still might have worked out had King not torn up his knee months before DeBusschere’s most memorable coup—which, granted, was attributable to the cooperative Ping-Pong ball that brought Patrick Ewing to New York via the inaugural NBA draft lottery in 1985. Brown proceeded to alienate his prize rookie by playing Bill Cartwright at center and Ewing at power forward, making him defend quicker opponents much too far from the basket and stressing his tender knees. When the team collapsed under an avalanche of injuries, DeBusschere was fired, and Brown tumbled down soon after. The franchise moved into a period of continuous ownership and administrative transition.

Not the type to whine to reporters, DeBusschere would express his frustrations to confidants—the broadcaster John Andariese, his old pal Bradley, and his wife. “Dave never really enjoyed his time in the front office because it was run by a corporation and he always felt hampered,” Geri DeBusschere said. He would hash out a deal with another team and have to run it through an unresponsive chain of command. He would fume. The deal would die. And then Brown would blame DeBusschere for being inactive and lazy.

DeBusschere grew wary of the media responsibilities, calling one reporter back when a story was developing and saying, “Just tell the other guys what I told you.” When the ax fell, he was relieved to exit the basketball stage, once and for all. He would be fine, he said. Two things DeBusschere never lacked: employment suitors and drinking buddies.

But the organizational infighting didn’t end with DeBusschere and Brown. Werblin’s celebrity matchmaking established a haunting precedent. Front-office conflict became a way of Garden life: Al Bianchi versus Rick Pitino, Ernie Grunfeld versus Jeff Van Gundy, Isiah Thomas versus anyone perceived to be in his way, even after he was replaced by Donnie Walsh (thanks to Thomas’s strangely symbiotic relationship with the congenitally contentious Garden strongman James Dolan). While the intramural contests played out endlessly on the back pages, the team struggled for traction and the years without a third championship turned into decades.

Even when the Knicks were a conference power and NBA finalist in 1994 and 1999, the Garden was a Midtown shark tank. In 1995, after captivating the city, Pat Riley made an inside move for more power in personnel matters. Dave Checketts, who had hired Riley and restored competitive order to the franchise, resisted the coup. Riley responded by faxing in his resignation and signing a sweeter deal giving him total control of basketball operations with the Miami Heat.

Checketts, a devout Mormon from Utah who was recommended to the Knicks by David Stern, was a brilliant front man for the organization, a quick study of the New York fan. “Everywhere you went around town, you could still feel a love for those championship teams,” Checketts said. “They were the standard for everything we did. And though we started having success pretty soon after Pat came in, I didn’t want to distance ourselves from that. I wanted to embrace it. The bar was set really high, but that’s what I wanted our goal to be.”

Checketts brought Holzman back into the fold, made him part of the organizational process. Holzman would sit in on draft meetings and admit he didn’t know who the hell the others were talking about. But that wasn’t the point, as far as Checketts was concerned. He wanted Holzman around for the legacy he represented, for who he was.

When the Knicks flew to Houston for the first two games of the 1994 Finals, they threw a big party between games at a ranch outside the city with a rodeo theme, called it the Knicks Lone Star Hoedown. It was there that I experienced one of the great moments of my sports journalism life: the sight of Holzman and Spike Lee, two famously hardnosed Brooklynites, chatting away in tall cowboy hats.

About ten days later, back in Houston for Game 6, the Knicks led the series 3–2 and were trailing the Rockets 86–84, with the ball in the final seconds. The star-crossed Ewing—obscured in college and in the pros by Michael Jordan, who that season had taken leave of the Bulls—set a high screen for John Starks, the streaky shooting guard. Starks was freed momentarily on the left wing, behind the three-point line. But Hakeem Olajuwon switched off Ewing, in pursuit of Starks—just the way Wes Unseld had chased Bill Bradley at the conclusion of Game 7, 1971. It was the same area of the floor and the same result. Olajuwon deflected Starks’s jumper, the Rockets went on to win Game 7, and Holzman never saw his beloved Knicks get that close to a championship again.

Days after he died in November 1998, in the funeral chapel on Queens Boulevard, not far from the old training site, Lost Battalion Hall, Checketts eulogized Holzman in a quavering voice, calling him the “patriarch of the Knicks … a great coach who forced his will on a group of players.” As he spoke those words, he nodded to those players, who would carry their old coach in his coffin, to the hearse, on the way to his eternal rest.

IN THE SPRING OF 2003,
in the 30th year of the Knicks’ championship drought, a celebration of better times was planned for June 6 at the NBA Store on Fifth Avenue, open to a limited number of fans. It was to be the first reunion of the championship cast since the death of Holzman, and the guys eagerly anticipated standing tall for the man who had given them the confidence and license to, in effect, coach themselves.

But three weeks before the gathering, on May 14, news arrived that was both shocking and devastating: DeBusschere, 62, had suffered a heart attack during a workday on a lower Manhattan street and died at New York University Hospital.

“If you told me cancer, I’d say okay,” Geri DeBusschere said. “But the heart? I mean, he was so strong.” Her husband had had no diagnosed history of heart disease, though maybe there were clues that went unheeded, going all the way back to the night of the first championship in 1970. On the way home DeBusschere had thought he was having a heart attack and had Geri rush him to the hospital. Palpitations, he was told; too much excitement, a few too many drinks.

“Then the year before he died, we were in Florida and Dave was playing golf with Billy Cunningham,” she said. “Billy said, ‘Dave didn’t look too good; he didn’t finish.’ And then he told someone else he felt shortness of breath.” Athletes are commended for soldiering on in spite of the pain, and nobody was better at dismissing his own discomforts than DeBusschere. When Bill Bradley eulogized him at his funeral, he said: “If I had $100 for every night Dave played hurt, I could buy a nice car.”

If not for Bradley, DeBusschere would have been mourned without fanfare. Several times, he had told his wife that if anything were to happen to him, “I don’t want anything, no big deal, just bury me with the family.”

“What are you going to do?” Bradley asked Geri DeBusschere on the phone, calling as soon as he’d heard that his old roommate—who had proudly watched from the gallery when Bradley was sworn in to the Senate—was gone. His voice was choked with emotion. She could tell he’d been crying.

“Dave doesn’t want anything,” she said. “I’ll just get a cemetery plot.”

“Oh, no, Geri, you can’t do that,” Bradley said. “Too many people loved Dave.”

He talked her into a public funeral and then took it upon himself to make all the arrangements. On May 19, 2003, mourners filled the pews of the St. Joseph Roman Catholic Church in Garden City. They included DeBusschere’s core teammates, though Earl Monroe said he had gone as friend and foe, as Old Knick and Baltimore Bullet. Someone, he said, had to represent Gus Johnson, who had died 16 years earlier of brain cancer in Akron, Ohio. “Dave respected Gus so much; he always told me that,” Monroe told me that day outside the church. “He always respected the opponents.”

The feelings were mutual. John Havlicek—whose shoulder was separated in the ’73 series by a DeBusschere screen—was among the speakers and pallbearers. His son had called with the news, to spare him the shock of hearing it from a television talking head. “I was devastated,” he said. “Dave had become like a brother.” Dave Cowens was another Celtic who came to pay his respects, along with Dave Bing of the Pistons, Cunningham of the 76ers, Oscar Robertson of the Royals and Bucks—every franchise from the Eastern Conference of 1970, present and accounted for.

Too distraught to speak at the funeral, Reed asked Bradley to represent the team. Bradley spoke lovingly and irreverently of his six-year roommate. DeBusschere may have been an incorrigible snorer, he said, but there was no more loyal friend or less pretentious man once he was awake, no one prouder to be an Old Knick.

“Championship teams share a moment that few other people know,” Bradley said. “The overwhelming emotion derives from more than pride. Your devotion to your teammates, the depth of your sense of belonging, is something like blood kinship, but without the complications. Rarely can words express it. In the nonverbal world of basketball, it’s like grace and beauty and ease, and it spills into all areas of your life.”

If only legislative bodies could be so committed to the cause, Bradley mused. But Harry Reid—his friend in the Senate from Nevada who would become majority leader—was so moved when he read Bradley’s eulogy that he placed it into the
Congressional Record
and sent Bradley a copy of the document. Bradley hung it on a wall in his office, never second-guessing himself for refusing to honor DeBusschere’s request.

“I felt that whatever Dave would say about the funeral—‘I don’t want it’—that it was a matter of people being given the chance to pay their respects,” he said. “I thought he deserved that and the family deserved it, too.”

Even with the media coverage, it was difficult to rationalize and accept the loss of Dave DeBusschere. As time passed, some would even forget he was gone. “It’s hard for me, you know?” Geri DeBusschere said in early summer 2009. “It’s an unusual name, so people make the connection when they meet me and you’d be amazed by how many say, ‘Oh, what’s he doing now?’ ”

Her voice seized, tears flowed. Six years had passed, four grandchildren born to her three children, starting with Peter DeBusschere’s first of two. When Peter’s wife, Kristin, an Upper East Side physician, got pregnant several months after his father’s death, the baby was born a full week after the due date in a bittersweet twist of fate.

Little David was born on November 22. “Dave’s uniform number,” Geri DeBusschere said, her face brightening even as tears still flowed. “We felt like he was sending us a message that everything was okay.”

A COUPLE OF MONTHS AFTER MY INTERVIEW
with Geri DeBusschere, Bradley called and said that she wanted to speak with me again. I had heard through the Knicks’ grapevine that she had suddenly turned ill and had undergone surgery, and I didn’t wish to impose. “No, she wants to get on with her life,” Bradley said. “She has a funny story to tell you.”

So I called, and she talked about how DeBusschere, during the 1970 playoff run, had gone out with Reed to a shooting range on Long Island and returned with a deep and ugly-looking gash, still bleeding. DeBusschere’s gun had kicked back and taken a chunk of his forehead. “Dave didn’t want to go to the hospital because he was embarrassed,” she said. “He kept saying, ‘What the hell am I going to tell everyone?’ Finally, we got the bleeding to stop and I said, ‘Tell them Michelle cracked you with her bottle.’ So that’s what he did—the big, tough Dave DeBusschere assaulted by his 18-month-old daughter.”