When the Garden Was Eden

by Harvey Araton

  His seats were on the east end of the arena, first-row courtside, where the Knicks were warming up, the crowd already on the verge of a nervous breakdown. As young fans gifted with tickets in the lower bowl often do, Harry Lois wandered away from his seat and stood inches from the court, watching, waiting, and all wide-eyed as the Knicks shot around.

  JIM MCMILLIAN WAS A BASKETBALL CHILD of New York City by way of rural North Carolina. “It’s not where you’re born, it’s where you learn the game,” he said, proud of where and how he cut his teeth—on the cement playgrounds of East New York, Brooklyn. “I started playing in the eighth grade,” he said. “In those days, when you grew up in Brooklyn, you didn’t have to leave to go very far to find great competition.”

  In the early sixties, the neighborhood was a middle- and working-class melting pot. Racially speaking, the basketball courts were a harbinger of the area’s rapidly developing white flight, the proprietary sanctuary of the rising black player.

  Before long, the new kid from Carolina, Jimmy Mac, was running full-court with the budding playground legends Rodney Parker and James “Fly” Williams, along with a future St. John’s star and Knick, Mel “Killer” Davis. McMillian became a court and classroom star at Thomas Jefferson High. He rejected a scholarship offer to play with Lew Alcindor at UCLA and even spurned the University of North Carolina and its impressive young coach, Dean Smith. All to embrace his adopted city and to play Ivy League ball at Columbia University.

  “Being in the city, being near Harlem, you could really pick up a tremendous education that goes way beyond your years here in college,” he said. That was never more the case than in 1968, when the campus was roiled by war protests and racial strife ignited by the university’s expansion plans, and basketball games became a de facto demilitarized zone. Fortuitously, the ’67–68 season, McMillian’s sophomore year, happened to be the best in Columbia’s history.

  A 6'5" forward with a jump shot to die for, he teamed with Heyward Dotson, a Staten Islander out of Stuyvesant High, who, like Bill Bradley, would become a Rhodes scholar. Columbia went 23–5 and was one missed free throw from the regional final.

  “Fucking Bruce Metz,” I said to McMillian when he picked up the phone, back in his native Carolina, in the Greensboro area.

  “You remember that?” he said. “You know, it happened right down here in Raleigh.”

  “Vividly,” I said. Heyward Dotson had come from my West Brighton neighborhood on Staten Island. His sister was in my high school class. Before the Old Knicks, Columbia was the first basketball team we all lived and died with, perishing most painfully in the ’68 NCAA tournament when Metz, a guard, missed a free throw against Lefty Driesell’s Davidson team in a 55–55 game with two seconds left in regulation. On a transistor radio, I listened disconsolately as the Lions lost in overtime before spanking a very good St. Bonaventure team with Bob Lanier in the regional consolation game.

  Still, Columbia finished the season as the sixth-ranked team in America, far and away the number-one basketball story in town. But the Knicks were a playoff team that spring, too, and McMillian occasionally would ride the subway from Morningside Heights to check them out. He was intrigued. “I liked the way they played the game, as a team, because that’s the way I learned it—moving without the ball, backdoor, setting screens,” he said.

  Team player that he was, McMillian was also a three-time winner of the Haggerty Award—given annually to the best college player in New York—and one of three Ivy Leaguers destined for the pros via the first round. (Princeton’s John Hummer and Geoff Petrie were the others.)

  On March 23, 1970, the Lakers took McMillian with the 13th pick of the NBA draft, which was then held right after the college season and before the professional season had ended. The next day, he attended a banquet to receive his third Haggerty, on the same day the New York Nets of the ABA acquired his rights in a trade after that league’s own draft.

  Willis Reed, also being honored as the pro player of the year, chatted with McMillian, wondering which league he was leaning toward. McMillian wasn’t sure. He thought of himself as an NBA player, but the Nets offered an opportunity to play pro ball in New York. Reed told him—just his opinion—that there was only one place to play, and that was with the best, against the best.

  The following week, McMillian signed a three-year deal with the Lakers and was heralded as Elgin Baylor’s eventual heir.

  As he concluded his senior year, earning his degree, McMillian suddenly had NBA rooting interests on two coasts. “I had been a Knicks fan from the time I started playing,” he said. “But now I was a member of the Lakers.” To make matters worse, he met Chamberlain, West, and Baylor and they all treated him like a kid brother.

  By the time the Finals began, McMillian was on a figurative fence, invested in both teams. By the night of Game 7, he had a ticket that had been provided by the Lakers and a sick feeling in the pit of his stomach. “Who am I rooting for?” he asked himself. He went to the Garden without a clue.

  He sat in the lower stands and watched the Lakers jog out, followed by the Knicks, without Reed. The tension was building, along with his discomfort. His head told him that he was an L.A. man now. His heart bled for New York. He reasoned that if the Lakers won the title, he would be joining the NBA champions in the fall, a much healthier environment—he assumed—than the aftermath of another agonizing finish for West and Baylor.

  Then Reed appeared.

  THE FANS ON THE OPPOSITE SIDE of the court spotted him coming through the tunnel and rose as if it were the Messiah himself. “It felt like the building rose off the ground 20 feet,” George Lois said. “It was like an out-of-body experience.”

  The line that would be repeated ad infinitum across the decades—the night Willis limped onto the court—was a distortion. He didn’t limp. Just past the press table, a step onto the court, he brushed past a man in a burgundy sport coat—Sam Goldaper of the New York Times. Feeling playful, in control of his emotions, he bumped Goldaper deliberately as the exhilarated crowd came unhinged.

  When John Warren turned and saw his roommate seemingly propelled by the roar of the crowd, tears filled his eyes. Chills washed over Bill Bradley. Bill Hosket’s heart beat so fast he feared he might have a stroke. Ever pragmatic, emotions in check, DeBusschere sidled up to Russell and casually thrust his chin toward the other side of the floor. “Watch those guys,” DeBusschere said. Russell gazed at the Lakers’ faces, specifically those of Chamberlain, Baylor, and West. He saw what DeBusschere saw. DeBusschere laughed and said: “We got ’em.”

  Fans with the benefit of a courtside view would swear on a stack of 1969–70 Knicks yearbooks that they also had turned instinctively to look at the Lakers’ side as Reed came out. They would make the same claim as Russell, Frazier, and the others: the Lakers were mesmerized. Chamberlain was stricken. Knicks loyalists would never believe that Chamberlain might merely have been stretching his legs when he took his little stroll. The Lakers were simply whipped by the magnitude of the moment. This aspect of the night would become as much a part of the legend as Willis limping out.

  Yet Dick Garrett protested, “I didn’t even see him. That stuff was so overrated.”

  The mere thought was insulting, West said. “I never believed that for a second,” he told me. “I actually felt we had an advantage against an injured player. I knew he would play, and I wanted him to.” His longtime teammate Elgin Baylor would have no doubt agreed.

  THE BALLAD OF WEST AND BAYLOR begins with an interlude of loss. By 1970 they had suffered through a total of seven different NBA Finals (six of them together) that all had one thing in common. As a rookie averaging almost 25 points a game, Baylor’s Minneapolis Lakers were swept by Bill Russell’s Celtics in the 1959 Finals. After the team moved to Los Angeles and West joined, they did the same dance six more times through the 1960s, the last of which brought the additional ignominy of an MVP trophy granted in a staggering home defeat in Game 7, balloons tied to the rafters
above. “You think, By God, will it ever work out?” said West. “It’s too painful; I can’t go through this again.”

  While Baylor was in career twilight, West had grown into a giant of the game. Sports pages around the country hailed him as Mr. Clutch (imagine that, without a ring), and the attention only soured him. All he could show for six championship series was “a lot of scar tissue.”

  And then there was the enigmatic Chamberlain, who was acquired for the ’68–69 season to neutralize Russell and instead finished the Finals on the bench, feuding with the coach, Butch van Breda Kolff. Chamberlain had asked out of the final minutes, with the Celtics comfortably ahead, claiming to be in some form of physical discomfort. The Lakers rallied, only to fall excruciatingly short when Don Nelson made a jump shot off a broken play late in the shot clock that bounced high off the rim and back through—“the luckiest shot of my life,” he said.

  As in most NBA cases pitting coach against star, Chamberlain outlasted van Breda Kolff. But here he was, one year later, facing yet another left-handed Louisianan, another smaller man who, like Bill Russell, was celebrated for his big heart—in this case for just walking onto the floor. The circumstances surrounding Reed were enough to test the most resolute of players—and Chamberlain was not that. From the moment he stationed himself near the court to observe Reed warming up, Chamberlain’s body language seemed to ask: Could a basketball game really be this important?

  Consider the plight of the Stilt: he’d made his own accelerated and thoroughly commendable rehabilitation and comeback from the torn knee tendons, working hard at the end of the regular season to get into game shape for the playoffs. But who would extol him now for beating up a virtual cripple? It was another in a career of no-win situations. Chamberlain was always supposed to win it all but most often didn’t, even back when he centered a Kansas team that was considered a sure national champion—until Chamberlain and the Jayhawks were edged by North Carolina in the 1957 title game. For much of his career, Wilt seemed trapped in a basketball purgatory between the roles of unstoppable force and committed—or Russellesque—team player.

  Chamberlain intensely disliked mind games within the game and especially what he considered to be simplistic media typecasting of him as Goliath in short pants. Many people who knew him and were genuinely fond of him believed that his boastful side had more to do with deep-seated insecurities than self-confidence. He was sensitive and quixotic and disinclined to appear consumed by basketball. He wanted to be where the action was. The day before Martin Luther King’s August 28, 1963, speech at the Lincoln Memorial, he called his friend Cal Ramsey. “We’ve got to go to Washington tomorrow,” he said, and so they did, with Chamberlain rising above 200,000 civil rights supporters, while Mahalia Jackson and Joan Baez, unmistakable to the masses, sang songs of peace and love.

  Unable to string titles together like his rival, Chamberlain went out of his way to convince people that basketball did not define him. He took the opportunity to lecture reporters on the dangers of fueling America’s obsession with winning at all costs—a worthy discussion, then and now, but made at a rather questionable juncture: soon after his 45-point, 27-rebound performance in Game 6. Teammates rolled their eyes, chagrined at the latest iteration of Wilt being Wilt. Was he already making excuses for what he feared or expected would happen in New York? One of his teammates told Sports Illustrated: “You play the whole season to win, don’t you? Isn’t that what competition is all about?” Another one, requesting anonymity for fear of coming off disrespectful to a deceased man, told me, “We were dumbfounded. For the second year in a row, it was as if he was saying, ‘It doesn’t really matter.’ After we all—Wilt included—had worked so damn hard to get there.”

  LONG BEFORE THERE WAS MARS BLACKMON or Reggie Miller, before he commanded a row of seats priced by the thousands, Spike Lee, at the age of 13, had the most prized Knicks ticket ever … and it was free.

  “My father’s lawyer—a Mr. Eichelberry—lived down the street from us in Fort Greene and he had season tickets,” Lee said. “He knew how much I loved the Knicks, and he promised me that if there was a Game 7, I would get one.”

  Shelton Jackson Lee was born in Atlanta but moved to Brooklyn as a young child. His mother, a teacher, nicknamed him Spike. His father, a jazz bassist who played for the likes of Bob Dylan and Aretha Franklin, got him his first autograph when Walt Frazier wandered into a club he was performing in. “You’re my son’s favorite,” Bill Lee told the Knicks’ stylish guard.

  Mr. Eichelberry’s tickets were in the yellow section, third level, a marked improvement from the nosebleed seats of blue, where the young Spike typically sat after scraping together the money for a student-discounted ticket.

  “At that age I’d go to about ten games a year,” Lee said. He would continue going into adolescence, often showing up alone as a teenager and endearing himself to Holzman’s secretary, Gwynne Bloomfield. “He’d literally be the first one in the building when the doors opened, this sweet skinny kid who kept talking about how much he loved the Knicks,” she said. “After a while, we’d try to find him a seat downstairs, give him the stats. He’d be sitting there an hour before the game and Red would come out and say, ‘Who the hell is this kid?’ I’d say, ‘He’s okay, he’s here every night.’ ”

  Getting to courtside became more difficult as he got older, when a determined and already media-savvy Lee would work his way down to the baseline during warm-ups and shout out to the likes of Bernard King and the young Patrick Ewing. He’d chat up reporters before being shooed away by security personnel. He came to the next home game and the one after that, promoting himself as a New York University—trained film student, soon to debut his first full-length feature.

  Walking down Broadway on the Upper West Side with my wife one afternoon in 1986, there it was: She’s Gotta Have It, by that Spike guy from the Garden. We joined the line that had formed outside.

  Within the movie, the world was introduced to the Mars Blackmon character, soon to be Michael Jordan’s commercial foil in a series of Nike commercials. Several years after attaching himself to His Airness, Lee would become ingloriously entangled with the mouthy Miller. During an unforgettable playoff night in 1994, Indiana Bones erupted for 25 fourth-quarter points and turned on Lee, his courtside tormentor, in demonstrative and vulgar retribution. Lee instantly replaced the Lakers loyalist Jack Nicholson as the nation’s most conspicuously famous hoops fan.

  But he swears he would trade all the notoriety and perhaps the courtside proximity for another Knicks championship sometime in his adult lifetime, though he believes nothing will ever match Game 7.

  “I’ve only been to one other game like that—the first one in New Orleans after Katrina, Saints versus Falcons,” he said. “It’s one of those things where you can see it in the body language of a team: ‘Why do we have to be the one scheduled to play here this game? Why us?’ That’s where the Lakers were that night. They knew there was no way they were going to beat the Knicks in the Garden.”

  Lee was one of the many who claimed to have “instinctively turned” to look at the Lakers and seen them transfixed, with expressions of despair, after Reed walked on. How that was possible from the yellow seats or any beyond those in the first few rows is another story, one about the repetitive and hypnotic powers of legend.

  While Lee’s films have often brazenly confronted race in America, he said it wasn’t a black-white thing that night, even though West had largely been the media’s sole focus. Rooting for the Old Knicks was, for Lee, largely a color-blind experience (though don’t get him started on how the Knicks organization and the basketball world at large shortchanged Dick Barnett).

  “In Fort Greene, most of the kids thought that Cazzie should start over Bradley,” he said. “I used to argue with them that Bradley deserved to start because he fit in better and that Cazzie was better coming off the bench. I love Bill Bradley. He’s my man. I had a fund-raiser for him at my house. But I loved Walt Frazier m
ore. I mean, I don’t care who the Lakers put on him that night: no one was going to stop him.”

  Also a Mets fan back in the day, Lee said he ran onto the field in celebration three times during the 1969 season and that he skipped school three days in a row to attend Games 3, 4, and 5 of the World Series. He relished Joe Namath and the Jets. But in terms of shaping his lifelong sports addiction and his willingness to go anywhere for a fix, nothing made an impression on him like those Knicks, and especially Game 7.

  “Of all the sports teams in New York, they may be the most beloved, the one we can be most proud of,” he said. “I mean, look at the kind of game they played—it was great to have that kind of sharing, especially in those days. But it wasn’t just how they played; it was who they were, all the things they all went on to do.

  “That whole year or so seemed like a dream, and by the time we got to the Knicks, you just believed they had to win, that it was fate. That night, it was pandemonium. And I think it meant something more than it would now, because in those days you were a fan of your home team. Today, you see every team on television every night. You can follow any team or player. It’s just different.”

  Not for him, he said, though the sight of Lee fraternizing with visiting superstars, the shoe-company chosen ones, has become part of the Garden scenery and show—and a self-promotional career score. But when we spoke during the 2009–10 season—another miserable one for the Knicks—Lee was still ruing the missed opportunities of the Patrick Ewing era, when he had to watch Hakeem Olajuwon and the Houston Rockets snatch a championship away in Houston (he was there) and the San Antonio Spurs win their first NBA title on the Garden floor five years later.

  By the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century, Lee had already spent a not-so-small fortune on his two Knicks season tickets but come away with little more than an aching heart. He was still waiting for another night like the one with Mr. Eichelberry.

  “When you’re a kid and something like that happens,” he said, “you really think life is always going to be that good.”