7
COURTSIDE PERSONAE
NEW YORK WAS ON A HOT STREAK. TWO DAYS AFTER THE KNICKS OPENED the 1969–70 NBA season with a 25-point drubbing of Seattle at home, the Amazin’ Mets won the World Series by polishing off the heavily favored Orioles. It was the second major sports championship of the calendar year. In the nine months after the Jets (then of the AFL) had won Super Bowl III, New York had attracted the eyes and ears of what seemed like every sports fan in the country. Beneath the celebration, though, the city was divided. Yankees fans, myself included, were humbled.
As a young child in the early sixties, I had rather enjoyed the Mets as cute expansionist puppies who couldn’t stop peeing on the carpet and chasing their own tails. It was easy to fancy them as hopeless wonders while counting on my beloved Yankees to play baseball as God and Joe DiMaggio had intended. But by 1969 the Bronx Bombers were has-beens of the highest order and I was sick to my stomach watching this tinker-toy team ascend the throne typically occupied by my pre-adolescent heroes, Mickey Mantle and Whitey Ford.
Somewhat paradoxically, I had by then developed a boy crush on the inimitable Joe Willie Namath, who had pulled the toupee off the figurative head of the avuncular NFL, as he had famously predicted. In the case of the Jets, I believe my aversion to change was mitigated by the cultural divide between the two sports. Still in its formative years, not yet America’s hierarchal kingpin with its original social networking system known as the tailgate, pro football did not unpack for an annual months-long residence in my brain. It was never a constant of daily life; the NFL Giants had no emotional hold on me.
Only the Knicks could unite the metropolis. Only the Knicks, with their home games limited to the earliest cable subscribers, could create their own buzz in bars all over Manhattan. Only they could link the lunch-pail commuters of the outer boroughs with downtown’s wealthiest power brokers, the denizens of Harlem with those made famous by Hollywood.
As Bill Bradley pointed out to me, few Mets were seen around town once their season ended. Besides Namath, the Jets were largely unrecognizable, like most fully costumed football players. And the American Basketball Association’s Nets (so named to rhyme with the Jets and Mets) weren’t exactly the picture of glamour amid the flies and mice of Long Island. Phil Jackson, a Manhattan scene regular, argued that the Old Knicks were more visible, more tangible. “We had more personalities,” he said, adding that they were city dwellers who took the train to work and interacted with fans in ways that today’s NBA stars would not comprehend, or dare to mimic without HBO-worthy entourages.
“There were times I would get on the Long Island Rail Road at my stop in Little Neck in the morning and save seats for Phil, who lived in Bayside, and for Mike Riordan, who lived in Flushing,” said Gwynne Bloomfield, Red Holzman’s secretary. “People would say, ‘You can’t hold seats,’ and I would tell them, ‘But it’s for Phil Jackson and Mike Riordan.’ They’d say, ‘Yeah, right,’ but then they’d get on and you’d see their jaws just drop. Back then, it was so different. Those guys were really part of the community.”
Rich, middle class, or poor, there wasn’t a Manhattan neighborhood that wouldn’t welcome the Old Knicks. Long before ’69–70, Reed would take the subway up to Harlem and put his reputation on the line against Rucker League legends like Earl “the Goat” Manigault and other school-yard rats eager to dunk in the face of the Knicks’ main man. Bradley, too, hustled into the park on the occasional steamy summer evening, slipping into his basketball gear behind a tree, ready to risk being undressed as the foolhardy paleface.
On any court, and especially under the hot Madison Square Garden lights, these were grown-ups in skimpy shorts, playing with a raw competitiveness and without worry of injury. “What we were doing was taking place in the heart of the city, Midtown Manhattan,” Dick Barnett said. “It felt like more of a cultural experience than the other sports. Basketball players are much closer to the fans. Because you can see the sweat coming off them, the expressions on their face, it was more of a personal experience.”
More than most, Stanley Asofsky and Freddy Klein could vouch for how up close those player-fan relationships could become with the right connection or karma. The two basketball-mad New Yorkers, whose decades-long relationship began with a fistfight during a pickup game, had enjoyed the view from courtside at the Garden since the mid-sixties, retaining their seats with a written appeal to Ned Irish when the team switched from the old Garden to the new. It’s likely that nobody has seen more Knicks games than Asofsky, at the time an inventory control executive for a CBS publishing division, or Klein, a Manhattan restaurateur.
“It all started with Cazzie Russell at the 92nd Street Y, early in his career,” Asofsky said. “He wasn’t getting enough minutes, and he wanted the workout. The guy was a workout freak. So I said, ‘Come to our Y.’ He said, ‘Are there ballplayers there?’ ”
Mostly there were young and middle-age wannabes who were thrilled to have a professional athlete in their midst. “I used to feed Cazzie for jumpers,” Asofsky said. “He was crazy about working on his shot. We’d go into the small gym at the 92nd Street Y and he’d hit 20 in a row. I’d tell him, ‘That’s bullshit, you’re standing still.’ So we’d go full-court, I’d hit him on the run, and he’d make another 20 in a row.”
Before long, Asofsky had made himself a new friend. After the workout they would shower and walk down to Papaya King on 86th and Third, talking sports and life, even women. Asofsky likes telling the story of setting Russell up with a “gorgeous receptionist” who had been distracting the guys at the office.
“Cazzie was not only a very religious guy but a nut about his health and body,” Asofsky said. Three weeks after he introduced them, the receptionist barged into his office. She told him she was willing to sleep with Russell but that he’d told her he couldn’t waste energy during the season. “I think your friend must be crazy,” she told him. Having had a daily look at the receptionist, Asofsky pretty much agreed.
But that was Cazzie, Asofsky said: a walking enigma, endearing but strange. Then his even stranger teammate started coming around. “Cazzie must have told Barnett about the Y, because after a while Dick showed up,” Asofsky said. Freddy Klein remembered the workouts with Barnett being more like wrestling than basketball, with a drill that would make today’s coaches, general managers, and owners apoplectic. “Barnett would get the ball and he’d want three guys around him,” Klein said. “He’d count down—five, four, three, two, one—and then we were supposed to hit him. On the arm, the shoulder, wherever. He’d still make the shots.”
How great a percentage Barnett really made was beside the point; it was the memory of the interaction that hit nothing but net. Asofsky, Klein, and the others believed they were doing their share as committed loyalists, as ultimate fans. They were pushing Barnett for those tense playoff battles when he would have to drive in heavy NBA traffic with the game and maybe the season on the line. They felt like Knicks themselves.
BACK IN THE LATE SIXTIES, a young attorney named David Stern, just a few years out of Columbia Law School, was working for a giant of the profession named George Gallantz at the New York firm Proskauer Rose. Among other clients, Gallantz had maintained a long association as outside general counsel of the NBA. It was a role that had originated in the late fifties when Gallantz represented the league in a $3 million suit filed by Jack Molinas, a onetime Columbia star banned by the NBA for betting on games when he played for the Fort Wayne Pistons. Stern idolized Gallantz and loved pro basketball. Within a few years, in the early seventies, he put up his hand when Gallantz needed someone to work exclusively on the struggling league’s account. At the time, the players’ union was mounting legal challenges to the league’s labor practices. More than anything, the NBA commissioner, Larry O’Brien, needed a good lawyer.
But in the fall of 1969, with Stern still convinced that a partnership in a reputable New York firm was his life’s ambition, his connection to basketball was m
ore as a fan, an Old Knicks fan. Long before he would become commissioner (in 1984), Stern settled in at night with his young family, flipped on the television in his Teaneck, New Jersey, home, and witnessed Red Holzman’s team ambling onto the floor, care of Channel 9.
On occasion he went to the Garden, which was filling up as never before. Before the ’68–69 season, the Knicks had sold out their building a grand total of six times in 22 years. They packed the new Garden 14 times on the way to losing the division final to the Celtics. In 1969–70, that number almost doubled, to 26. Granted, that was no great achievement by contemporary measures: in the nineties, the Knicks would sell every Garden seat for nine consecutive seasons.
Even during our modern recessions, some NBA teams can count on regular capacity. But the sports ethos was very different in the late sixties. There was passion for sports, but not the rampant consumerism—triggered by the proliferation of 24-hour television coverage—that would create a wide-reaching industry boom.
Stern, who eventually made a career of studying the sports phenomenon, said:
We’ve built that Knicks era up over the decades to be something like the Jordan phenomenon, but it was all so New York. The NBA at the time was this tiny little league. The Knicks created a personality on and off the court and connected with a city in a way that professional basketball really hadn’t seen before—not even with Boston, which had ownership changes and all those racial issues. I don’t know exactly what was going on at the Fabulous Forum in those days, because I didn’t live in Los Angeles. You certainly had great charismatic players out there, too, and having that on both coasts created early melodies for the symphony that hadn’t been written.
It was one thing to inflame the passions of basketball junkies like Asofsky and Klein. Getting the attention of the Madison Avenue crowd, the people with the power to recast basketball’s image from blue collar to white, amounted to a Jordanesque leap across the socioeconomic divide. That was the beauty of a potential powerhouse in New York City: all the corporate heavyweights were within walking distance or a short cab ride away.
“What happened with the Knicks was great for the NBA, because when the biggest media town in the country gets hot for a sport, that sends a message to the rest of the country,” said George Lois, one of that generation’s most celebrated mythmakers, a man who understood the art of selling better than anyone, David Stern included.
Long before he sprouted to an athletic 6'3", Lois played the city game. A Manhattan native and Bronx resident, he was enough of a prep standout while attending the High School of Music and Art to earn a basketball scholarship to Syracuse—which he promptly rejected to attend the Pratt Institute. He lasted a year, dropped out to work, and soon after, in the early fifties, took his New York—honed skills to the heartland after being drafted into the Army. He starred on a team that barnstormed through Texas and Louisiana and “beat the living shit” out of other Armed Forces clubs and even some college teams with a front line that averaged 6'5", or one inch below the cutoff for service.
The company team was so good, Lois said, that it kept him in Texas and out of harm’s way in Korea—at least until he refused to play in a game at LSU in support of his lone black teammate, forbidden by the university to suit up. Lois took a stand by taking a seat next to his teammate in the bleachers. He was shipped out soon after. “I got back to the fort, and the sergeant walks up to me and tells me I’m going to fucking Korea,” he said.
Lois survived a war he considered “almost as dumb as Vietnam,” and returned home to New York to launch a storied career as an advertising and art director, a real-life Mad Man. He became an industry legend for his pithy television campaigns and for his groundbreaking conceptual Esquire magazine covers, which frequently featured popular and controversial athletes. In 1963, Lois put the fearsome Sonny Liston in a Santa hat. Five years later, he depicted Muhammad Ali as a crucified Saint Sebastian. For an August 1972 cover story on the 10 Best-Dressed Jocks, Lois photographed the most stylish Knick, Walt Frazier, in a white suit and a wide-brimmed Clyde Barrow hat, hovering over the palest white player Lois could find, Philadelphia 76er Kevin Loughery.
This social statement apparently went over better with the hip magazine audience than it had with his Army superiors.
“Frazier was up in the air, literally hung on wires,” Lois said. “And you know what? We did the shoot on the day before they were flying to the West Coast to play the Lakers in a playoff game that spring. He’s hanging in the air and I’m thinking, If this guy ever falls and even stubs his toe, I’m totally fucked. People in this town will want to kill me.”
Lois’s use of athletes in commercials, like his “I Want My Maypo” cereal campaign, was an early harbinger of Nike Nation, laying the groundwork for what ultimately would become a jackpot for celebrity jocks. He hired the likes of Mickey Mantle, Johnny Unitas, and Oscar Robertson. He had Yogi Berra talk to a cat, whose voice, unbeknownst to Yogi, happened to be Whitey Ford’s.
“Do you recognize that voice?” Lois asked Berra.
“No, who is it?” Berra said.
“It’s the Chairman of the Board.”
Berra replied, “What company?”
AWAY FROM THE OFFICE, Lois was friendly with the biggest names in sports, Mantle and Namath, to name New York’s top two. It made perfect sense to him to use them in campaigns, most of all because he got them dirt cheap. “Holy shit, I’ve got the most famous guys of the time and they’re getting $100 apiece,” he said. “They just wanted to do it for the fun of it. Wilt was in my office one day for some reason and I showed him a Mantle spot. He said, ‘Man, I’d love to do that.’ I said, ‘I can only give you $100.’ He said, ‘I don’t care about the money.’ ”
Lois was a fan of several sports, but he said there was nothing, ever, like experiencing the Old Knicks as they came of age. “Of course, we had all been jealous of the Celtics and couldn’t even imagine that kind of team in New York,” he said. “But all of a sudden, there they were, above and beyond basketball intelligence.”
In 1969, with the championship cast assembled and rolling, Lois got a call from a friend who worked at the Garden as the head of ticket sales, asking if he might want a full-season plan. Lois rushed to the box office and asked for four seats on the baseline. “The guy says, ‘On the baseline? Are you sure?’ I said, ‘Yeah, baseline. Half the game is right in your lap.’ ”
He was close to the action but would get even closer by befriending several players through Larry Fleisher, the agent and players’ union power broker. Soon enough, some of the players were dropping by Lois’s regular pickup game at the 23rd Street Y (which later moved to 14th Street, where Lois was still getting in a run at age 78). This was the downtown version of what Asofsky and Klein had going on 92nd Street.
“We’d play eight-basket games,” said Lois, “and usually, when those guys first came, they tended not to play very hard.” But these were also hard-core competitors, unaccustomed to being embarrassed, even when no one was watching. “Bill Bradley’s playing against this guy, who’s a really good jump shooter, and I’m screening him,” Lois said. “The guy hits one from 17 or 18 feet, then another, and before Bradley knows what’s going on, the guy’s hit five in a row. Oh, shit. Suddenly Bill’s climbing over me, hitting me in the face with his elbow. It was so fucking great.”
Back at the Garden, Lois brought the same profane intensity to rooting, accompanied by three equally crazed ref-baiters in the seats next to him. He seldom wasted his tickets on clients or people who didn’t have a similar passion for the game. “I gave the tickets to the guys I played ball with,” he said. “We’d bust balls the entire game, get all over the refs.” Mendy Rudolph, one of the hard-bitten vets, would give Lois and his buddies the once-over during time-outs, occasionally with his hand over his crotch. The byplay with the refs would reach the point where the Knicks regulars would look at Lois and friends in disbelief while the other guys were shooting their free throws. “We were real N
ew York assholes,” Lois said with pride.
Dick Schaap, one of the city’s leading print and broadcasting sports journalists, anointed Lois “Super Fan” as the crescendo of Knicks coverage grew during the ’69–70 season. Schaap would stop by his seat from time to time for a few colorful quotes, which Lois was always willing to produce. No doubt Asofsky and Klein would have fought for the title; Klein, in fact, insisted that he’d once tangled with Lois in a pickup game and, when Uptown met Downtown, had “knocked him on his ass.” But all internecine hostilities ceased once the Old Knicks hit the floor, making comrades of all. And as they reached full-blown championship contention, the Garden became the hottest hangout in town.
ADAM CLAYTON POWELL JR., who represented Harlem in the House of Representatives from 1945 until shortly before his death in 1972, appointed himself the team’s unofficial chaplain. He had access, and he wasn’t the only mover and shaker who wanted to get inside the emerging New York phenomenon. Ira Berkow, my friend and former Times colleague, recalled sitting in Red Holzman’s office one night before a game that season, conducting an interview, when the coach was distracted by a commotion inside the locker room.
“What the hell’s going on in there?” Holzman asked his trusty aide, Frankie Blauschild.
“Oh, Sargent Shriver stopped in,” Blauschild said, referring to the Kennedy family loyalist and activist, who wound up as the Democratic candidate for vice president in the doomed 1972 bid to remove Richard Nixon from the White House.
Holzman’s face reddened. “I don’t care if it’s fucking General Shriver: no one in the locker room before a game!”
Besides being politically ignorant, Holzman apparently wasn’t too sure how to deal with the sudden fuss people were making over his team, the likes of which he had never seen at the basketball backwaters in Rochester, Milwaukee, and St. Louis. But there was no turning back, no stopping the stampede of stars.
When the Garden Was Eden Page 11
