When the Garden Was Eden (5 page)

In the fall of 1959, Levane’s early-season roster included a rugged 6'4" forward out of New York University named Cal Ramsey, who began his rookie season in St. Louis but quickly became an ex-Hawk after appearing in only four games. In New York, he lasted just seven, despite averaging an eye-opening 22.9 minutes, 11.4 points, and 6.7 rebounds as Levane’s first man off the bench. Levane liked Ramsey; he believed the Knicks had found themselves a solid rotation player, and a homegrown one at that.

“Cal and I had something pretty good going,” Levane said. “But we already had three other black guys on the roster: Willie Naulls, Johnny Green, and Ray Felix. So I get a call from Irish, who says that’s too many, I have to get rid of one.” Levane complied, reluctantly. Ramsey went to Syracuse, where he roomed briefly with a young, flamboyant shooting guard named Dick Barnett. Then he injured his knee and drifted, like many a deserving black player, into the Eastern League, more or less playing for carfare.

Levane wasn’t on the Knicks’ bench much longer, either. After an 8–19 start, he was replaced by Carl Braun. By then he had made his most significant contribution, throwing yet another career lifeline to Holzman, convincing Irish to bring him on as a scout in 1959.

Fate would much later allow Holzman to repay Levane, or at least lend him a hand when the Garden’s corporate bean counters cut Fuzzy loose as a scout in the 1980s, forcing him to live on Social Security benefits. As company legend has it, Holzman successfully lobbied the new regime of Al Bianchi and Rick Pitino to return Levane to the payroll, where he remained long after his scouting days were over. Always mindful of how Levane never did make any real money in the game, Holzman also left his friend a nice piece of change in his will.

Strange how these things work out.

IN 1959, UPON BUYING A STURDY SUITCASE
and a couple of suits to dress the part of the distinguished scout, Holzman would tell anyone within earshot that he had no desire to return to the bench. He was content to hit the road and scour remote college towns across the country.

“When I was coaching with Frank McGuire at South Carolina in the sixties, I remember Red coming down and actually getting on the court and doing some workouts with us,” said Donnie Walsh, the longtime NBA executive who returned to his native New York to run the Knicks in 2008. “Frank knew him from New York and really liked him. He was this tough little guy, spinning these two-hand set shots off the backboard from all over.”

All over. That was the story of Holzman’s itinerant life for almost a decade. During the college season, he packed a suitcase and hit the road, a man in his forties logging too many miles for not enough money.

Jerry Krause—a young scout for the Baltimore Bullets, who much later would fit all the right pieces around Michael Jordan for the Bulls’ six-title dynasty—remembered meeting Holzman for the first time. Krause had just disembarked from a flight on a Saturday morning in St. Louis—like Red, a travel-weary soul in need of a week’s worth of sleep.

“You’re Krause, aren’t you?” Holzman said. “I hear you work hard. Where you been?”

Krause was flattered that someone as experienced in the business as Holzman knew who he was, but he wasn’t keen on sharing trade secrets.

“Oh, up the road,” Krause said. Holzman shot him a don’t-shit-a-shitter look.

“Now listen, Krause,” he said. “I know for certain you were in Oklahoma City last night, because there were only two games worth seeing, and I was at the one in Wichita. Secondly, I know you’re going to scout the Van Arsdale boys tonight, because that plane over there is to Indianapolis and I know they’re the only ones worth seeing up there. So don’t try to lie to old Red again and maybe I’ll let you drive with me.”

Holzman even imparted some road wisdom, telling Krause how to maximize his time in a town by spending the afternoon before a night game at the school, watching tapes of earlier games, instead of wasting time watching television in a cheap hotel room.

Beyond the car and the counsel, Holzman didn’t reveal much, saving whatever he knew about the players for the detailed scouting reports he prepared for the Knicks’ front office. On those pages was evidence that he had even more of an impact on those two Knicks championships than is commonly known.

Not all the reports were saved. Some have inevitably been lost in the shuffle of lives lived. But a couple of bound volumes went into the back of Holzman’s closet with the rest of the keepsakes he never displayed at his modest Cedarhurst home in the Five Towns area of Long Island (where the Holzmans resided with a listed telephone number). His daughter and son-in-law would have other ideas. After Holzman’s death, in the finished basement of their Westchester townhome, Gail and Charles Papelian created a display of photos and memorabilia. There was the framed, player-autographed photo of the Rochester Royals’ 1951 NBA championship team, the net Holzman had worn around his neck after Game 7 of the 1970 Finals; even one of Selma’s old scorecards was framed and mounted on the wall. But the scouting reports were kept out of sight, delicate and protected like expensive family heirlooms.

When I spent time with Gail and Charles in their basement, talking about the qualities that can lead one to success, she posed a question that sounded right from the Holzman lexicon: “Doesn’t it always come down to character?” She seemed to have inherited her father’s personality, private and modest and unwilling under any conditions to publicly share anything that might be construed as negative. I could peruse the reports as long as I didn’t share some of what I saw—the various critical appraisals of players long retired and, in some cases, dead. Her father would not have approved.

She explained to me that it wasn’t as if she and her husband had created a shrine for mass consumption. It was their way of paying private tribute to a man who loved the game, and who proved it with a decade’s worth of oppressive travel and toil for $5,000 a year well into the sixties.

Born to Eastern European immigrants on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, Red moved to a tenement in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn when he was four. His early life was focused resolutely on the school yard and its games—basketball and handball—and his daughter figures he would have been a basketball lifer, one way or another. Just like his lifelong friend Fuzzy.

“Red didn’t mind scouting; he just wanted a job,” Levane said. “Me, I always wanted to coach. So what happens? I end up as a scout and he winds up coaching the perfect basketball team.” Not the best team, Levane would have to admit, in deference to Russell, Sam and K. C. Jones, and, yes, even that other, less likable Red. But take it from a guy who had been around long enough to have seen every NBA season from day one: “As far as five men working together, the Knicks were the perfect team.”

A DECADE AFTER RED WAS BURIED
, I called Fuzzy at his daughter’s home in South Carolina during the summer of 2009, unaware that his wife, Kay, had recently passed away. Quick to offer condolences, I said I would call back another time, but, no, the 89-year-old Levane insisted he didn’t want to hang up. He wanted to talk about basketball, the other great love of his life—a welcome distraction from yet another season of grief.

Death had been too much a mainstay since he’d lost his sister, Marie, in the late nineties, followed by a couple of close friends and finally his best friends, Selma and Red. The sadness sent him into an emotional tailspin, in part because he just couldn’t figure out how he had outlasted all of them after his own near-death experience in 1991. Driving home with his wife after his induction into the New York City Basketball Hall of Fame, Levane suffered a ruptured aortic aneurysm. Had it occurred an hour later, he would have died of internal bleeding in his sleep, doctors later told him. Instead he was rushed to St. Francis Hospital in Roslyn, Long Island, where he needed a minor miracle to survive the next 72 hours in a coma. Holzman visited him every day for two weeks, until he was out of danger.

Beyond all the ribbing, Holzman and Levane had deep and abiding respect for each other. However famous or successful Holzman would become, he never forgot to credit Levane. “He always said that Fuzzy paved the way for him, every step of the way,” Gail told me.

When Holzman died, in 1998, Levane felt as if doctors had excavated a chunk of his heart. He especially missed him when the Knicks made a shocking run to the NBA Finals the following spring with a socially dysfunctional team that had finished eighth in the Eastern Conference during a season shortened by a lockout.

After they eliminated the Larry Bird—coached Indiana Pacers in the Eastern Conference finals, I was working my way through the crowd in the lower stands of the Garden when I bumped into Levane near his seat behind the Knicks’ bench, tears streaming down his face. I asked him about that. The emotional unburdening was part joy, he said, but also the result of all the funerals and wakes, the post-traumatic stress his doctor had explained to him. Despite the Knicks’ success, he was still hurting, most of all when he looked across the court to where Red once sat, Selma faithfully keeping score by his side, as she had ever since Holzman was on the bench, leaning forward, immersed in his work.

If only Red could have lived to see the Knicks back in the NBA Finals—Levane couldn’t let go of the thought. Maybe it would have given him more incentive to fight, kept him going after Selma was gone. Basketball had always meant that much to both of them. He admitted to compulsively dialing Holzman’s number throughout the stunning playoff run before hanging up, embarrassed and heartbroken all over again. He would think to himself: What the hell am I doing?

FIFTEEN YEARS BEFORE MAGIC AND LARRY, THERE WERE CAZZIE AND BILL
. Like Magic Johnson and Larry Bird, who all but created March Madness with their epic 1979 final, Cazzie Russell (Chicago) and Bill Bradley (Crystal City, Missouri) were native sons of the Midwest. Like Magic, Russell played for a traditional sports power, the Michigan Wolverines. And Bradley, for his part, was largely responsible for lifting Ivy League Princeton into the national championship discussion, just as Bird would later do with a motley collection of Indiana State Sycamores. And then there was the unmistakable color of their skin: Russell was black, Bradley was white.

But unlike Bird and Magic, their teams met twice during the 1964–65 season, including a semifinal Michigan blowout of Princeton in the Final Four. It’s difficult to imagine, in an age of “one-and-done” college prospects, that a matchup akin to Bradley versus Russell (or, for that matter, Lew Alcindor versus Elvin Hayes, which played out on January 20, 1968, in front of 52,693 fans at the Houston Astrodome and has been billed ever since as the Game of the Century) will ever happen again.

The use of the college game as a one-year springboard to the NBA, the lusting after network television money, and the obsession with postseason tournaments have long reduced the college regular season to a drone of revenue-generating exhibitions, nightly cable filler. But on December 30, 1964, at Madison Square Garden, Michigan-Princeton not only captivated the city; it helped restore college basketball’s reputation after the 1951 point-shaving scandals had implicated four New York schools and brought disrepute to the basketball world in general.

The game was especially gratifying for Ned Irish, who had watched the Garden’s reputation crumble along with the sport it showcased. The first college basketball game he promoted—a doubleheader in which NYU defeated Notre Dame and Westminster beat St. John’s—had drawn 16,180 fans on December 29, 1934. He bragged that he didn’t have to put up a cent, the Garden demanding only that its percentage of the gate offset the $4,000 cost of renting the building. “Don’t forget, it was the Depression, and the Garden was dark a lot of nights,” Irish said. Under Irish, attendance for college basketball peaked at an average of 18,196 in 1946, when the pro leagues were in diapers. Five years later came the scandals; Irish watched helplessly as his gold mine collapsed, as the NCAA tournament made sure to steer clear of bookie-infested New York, and as the renowned CCNY program downscaled its involvement in the sport.

With the Michigan-Princeton matchup, the wounds seemed finally to heal. Michigan was ranked number one, with Russell leading its freewheeling offense. Playing for the first time in the Garden, Bradley was up from New Jersey, having months earlier captained the gold-medal-winning Olympic team in Rome, one of three Americans to average double figures in points. But he was still carrying the predictable Ivy stigma. Was he a dominant force because he had primarily been measured against scholarly white boys with secure futures in banking or law? “That was the number-one question: Is he playing against the kind of competition we were?” said Gail Goodrich, an All-American guard that season at UCLA. “I remember we played Yale and beat them by 40, so my first take was, well, probably not.”

More than 40 years after being shuttered and demolished, the old Garden survives only in New York’s collective memory, romanticized in photographs of an era gone by: outside, the landmark Nedick’s sign, where they served up hot dogs and drinks, the ritual snack on the way in or at halftime; inside, the sorely missed voice of the public address announcer, John F. X. Condon, launching the night with his elegant opening: “Good evening, everybody. Welcome to Madison Square Garden.” The court itself was buried beneath a gray, smoky haze that grew thicker and thicker among the arena’s steel girders as the night progressed. Balconies hovered over the court as if the Garden were an opera house, one filled with vociferous fans whose rooting interests often had more to do with the point spread than with home-team fidelity.