When the Garden Was Eden

by Harvey Araton

  As defending champions, the Knicks were officially the darlings of New York City, regularly drawing packed houses of 19,000-plus to Madison Square Garden. But the crowning glory of the New York franchise—what Ned Irish had strived for seemingly from the beginning of time—also unearthed an issue that would plague the NBA for decades: the profit disparity between large- and small-market teams.

  Owners like the Bullets’ Abe Pollin, a Washington builder who purchased the team with two partners for $1.1 million in 1964 and gained full control four years later, believed teams like the Knicks and Lakers should be forced by the league to share home gate receipts. (Founded in 1961 as the Chicago Packers and soon after renamed the Zephyrs, the Bullets moved to Baltimore in 1963. They played in the Baltimore Civic Center, opened in 1962—often far short of its 12,500 capacity.) That socialist notion, which had also been championed by the smaller markets when the league set sail in 1946, was quashed, largely by Irish.

  When Irish made his presentation for league membership, the first words out of his mouth were that he represented a corporation worth $3.5 million. Most of the others, virtual paupers by comparison, resented Irish and his braggadocio. But he got his way. The league would base itself in New York and be driven by large urban centers and their handsomely compensated stars, and as a result would forever be vulnerable to charges of favoritism—even conspiracy—for the sake of higher TV ratings. The notion of lucrative paydays in New York for owners like Pollin would remain a fantasy, with one conciliatory exception: in the deciding game of a playoff series, gate receipts were shared.

  But beyond the dollar signs, for a team like the Bullets, a visit to a packed Madison Square Garden was “extraordinarily charged,” as Jack Marin, the Bullets’ small forward, said. Even the hired help seemed sprinkled with stardust. “You had that great John Condon voice on the PA, a character like Feets Broudy on the clock, Marv Albert broadcasting the games. Who even knew the people who did these jobs in other places?”

  Trips to New York were also marked by an unmistakable connection to the prevailing social upheaval of the times, as the sixties gave way to the seventies. For players who didn’t quite relate, the Garden could be a bewildering, disorienting place. For his part, Marin sometimes felt as if the New York fans were rooting as much for a set of ideals as for the Knicks.

  “It was almost like a protest,” he said. “You know, I never saw the war as immoral or ignoble—maybe a bad idea, but not an immoral one. We were all aware of the political issues. But when you were in a place like New York, you could feel the anger, the rebellion. I thought it was the end of the nation.”

  Marin and the Bullets had an altogether different agenda. They didn’t necessarily want to overthrow the government. They just wanted to unseat the Knicks.

  BILL BRADLEY (PRINCETON) AND JACK MARIN (DUKE) were both jump-shooting forwards from comparable towers of ivory erudition. Their similarities as basketball players were most memorably described by George Lois as “two crazy motherfuckers chasing after each other for the whole goddamn night.” But when the buzzer sounded, when the dance ended, there was little that Bradley and Marin actually had in common.

  Marin, the left-hander, came hard from the political right, and Bradley, the right-hander, leaned to the left. Bradley was the Eddie Haskell of Rhodes scholars. No less feisty, Marin wore his red-hot emotions on his sleeve: his arm was conspicuously marked by a large crimson birthmark from shoulder to elbow that he considered part of his offensive arsenal.

  “I used to tell people that one night my shooting was so hot, I set my arm on fire,” he said, conceding that he was a bit of a hothead and something of a technical-foul machine. But he claimed that under no circumstances did he ever call Bradley a Communist cocksucker.

  “He told you that, right?” Marin said.

  “Well, yes, matter of fact, he did,” I said.

  Bradley offered his side of the story, from a game sometime during the 1970–71 season, as the Bullets’ frustration over their inability to beat the Knicks was reaching the boiling point.

  Marin was a devotee of Ayn Rand, and I was a liberal. So there were these differences, and then we’d get on the court and there were real battles. Occasionally we’d talk politics off the court, but not too much, because we were so far apart. So there was one game where he thought I hit his elbow and they didn’t call it, and we’re running down the floor and you could just see his face light up, and he goes, “You Communist cocksucker!” Thirty years later, we were at some event in Washington when I was a senator and he was with some conservative group. We went out, and I said to him, “Jack, do you remember that night when you called me a Communist?” He looked at me and said, “No, I didn’t call you a Communist; I called you a commoner.”

  That was Marin’s version, and he—a Duke-trained lawyer—was sticking to it.

  “A guy called me from GQ magazine in 2000,” he said. “He said he was working on an article about Bradley’s run for the presidency, and that he had talked about me and mentioned that because he was a liberal Democrat I had called him a Commie cocksucker. But the real story was that it came out of a golf game I was playing that summer, with Kevin Loughery and a guy from CBS. The CBS guy had a foot-and-a-half putt, missed it, and just came out with this line: ‘common cocksucker.’ The phrase somehow stuck in my head. So when we played them the next season and Bradley was hanging all over me—as usual—I turned around and used that phrase. I think I was feeling a bit humorous on the court and it just came out of my mouth.”

  Since Loughery had no recollection of what was said at the golf outing, the old rivals and ideological opposites had long since agreed to disagree, letting the difference stand as evidence of their competitive enmity. Playing as often as their teams did, six straight years in the playoffs in addition to all those nights they dragged their tired bodies up and down the East Coast during the long and winding regular season, how could it not get personal? “Those games were works of art,” Marin said.

  Earl Monroe went a step further. “I always felt that our playoff series with the Knicks were the best games I had ever seen, let alone played in,” he said. “I think because the Knicks played a lot of great series over the years against the Lakers and the Celtics, people remember them more. But because we were so closely matched up, almost interchangeable, the intensity, the whole aura, led to something that was very special.”

  Based on those classic individual match-ups—Bradley—Marin, Reed—Unseld, DeBusschere—Gus Johnson, Frazier—Monroe—people for decades have mischaracterized the Knicks and Bullets as mirror images, when the truth was that the rivalry was driven more by contrasts—both existential and ideological. “Everything they were, we were something else,” said Loughery, who shared the role of Monroe’s backcourt partner with Fred Carter. “They were more of a half-court team. We wanted to run.” Added Marin: “They had that championship aura. We were the upstarts.”

  At the Garden, Marin would nudge Loughery as the real glitterati, Robert Redford and Paul Newman, strolled the baseline during pregame warm-ups. “It’s Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,” Marin said. “How are you not impressed?” As the parade of A-list entertainers got longer, the Garden’s mystique only grew.

  At home, the Bullets had one loyal fan who managed to achieve a degree of celebrity. An acquaintance of Monroe’s, Marvin Cooper was a pretty fair Baltimore playground player, a spidery 6'2", but his very best moves were made just outside the lines at the Civic Center, shaking and shimmying in the interests of hexing Bullets opponents. The Knicks had Hoffman, Gould, and Allen behind them. The Bullets had Dancing Harry.

  Because the Knicks had championship authentication to go along with intensifying hometown adoration, what the Bullets wished for, the players went at it like brothers battling in their bedroom. “It was like five heavyweight championship fights going on at the same time,” said Larry Merchant, the former New York Post columnist, borrowing from his HBO boxing lexicon. “My recollection is that most
of those nights, the experience almost seemed cathartic.”

  Unseld and Johnson gave Reed and DeBusschere all they could handle under the boards. Marin relished the dirty dancing with Bradley. Loughery and Carter were able scorers whom Barnett and Frazier had to respect. And of course Monroe was the emerging challenge, launching shots over outstretched fingers from bizarre angles he seemed to invent as some choreographic cross between Dancing Harry and a drunken marionette.

  “The thing is,” he said at the time, “I don’t know what I’m going to do with the ball, and if I don’t know, I’m quite sure the guy guarding me doesn’t know either.” Monroe always loomed as a wild card, a game changer. The Bullets were pugnacious and wanting, but at the same time they were dealing with an opponent more developed and cunning. Merchant said that as the rivalry developed, there was also a sense of New York’s manifest destiny, no doubt fueled by what the Mets had done to the Orioles and the Jets to the Colts.

  “In a certain way, you always expected that, in the end, the Knicks were supposed to win,” he said. By October 1970, who could blame the Bullets for believing that, too? It was difficult to resist the notion that the Knicks were special, almost chosen, in a way the Bullets were just not.

  “You felt it when you were playing them,” Marin said. “I remember going to Chicago later in my career, and they were going to run Chet Walker’s plays for me. I’m there thinking, ‘Am I Chet Walker?’ I was a completely different player. They were just doing what they knew without any instinctive feel for the game. But when you played the Knicks, you never had a sense that anyone was ever in the wrong place, much less the wrong role.”

  Marin admitted that it was never easy to walk onto the Garden floor, where it always seemed to take two baskets for every one New York made. “Some guys in the locker room would say, ‘Let’s go out and have fun tonight,’ ” he said. “For me, it was never fun. It was going to be work. Bradley was the most dedicated player I matched up against—well, he and Havlicek. He wasn’t all that gifted, but he was always there. His feet literally came down on your feet. I’d have to run him off six picks to get one shot. You’d finish the game with scratch marks all over you.”

  The subject of those long, grueling nights reminded him of a letter he’d sent to Bradley when the senator had finished his third and last term in Washington, thanking him for his service. Marin wrote: “You were a far dirtier basketball player than you were a politician.”

  From a distance of decades, the praise for Bradley and the Knicks flowed freely. The nation had survived their uprising, along with their crazed leftist fans. “Now they’re all teaching on college campuses or making all kinds of money,” he dryly noted. Marin couldn’t resist invoking one very rich Old Knick in particular. “Phil Jackson would use the word establishment like it was a profanity when he was playing,” he said. “But he’s turned out to be among the wealthiest people in the sport of the non-owners. I guess the establishment wasn’t such a bad thing.”

  Marin let the thought of Jackson’s long, strange trip marinate for a moment—from admitted user of hallucinogenic drugs during the Knicks’ glory years to earning $12 million a year by the time he’d won his 11th championship with the Lakers in 2010. “But what do I know?” he said, laughing. “Maybe Phil is giving away a lot of his money these days.”

  PHIL JACKSON’S RETURN to active playing duty in the fall of 1970 was gradual, with limited minutes and returns. Red Holzman didn’t want to push him too hard and risk reinjury, and anyway, roles had been established during the championship run. At 6'8", with his long arms and freakish reach, Jackson was a first-rate disruptor on defense. But Holzman cringed whenever he would dare put the ball on the floor; the coach went so far as to establish a two-dribble limit for Jackson and was constantly on his case about it. While Jackson scrimmaged with the second team against Reed, he was more of a multipurpose frontcourt man than a backup center—which was indisputably the team’s crying need with Nate Bowman gone to Buffalo and with Reed’s chronically bad left knee.

  While the Knicks’ principal players remained the same, the end of the bench underwent a forced makeover. Don May and Bill Hosket had also relocated to Buffalo with Eddie Donovan in the expansion draft, while John Warren was lost to the new Cleveland team. The college draft brought new faces but failed to yield serviceable talent. The departure of Donovan seemed to have disrupted the organizational flow. The jobs of GM and coach might have been too much for one man.

  Holzman’s first-round pick, the Illinois guard Mike Price, was a mistake, considering that a pair of future stars, Calvin Murphy and Nate (Tiny) Archibald, were left on the board. Eddie Mast, a third-round pick from Temple, a free-spirited 6'9" forward, made the team and became fast friends with Jackson. Greg Fillmore, a 7'1" center taken in the eighth round out of little Cheyney University of Pennsylvania, stuck because of his size and the hope that he might be a project. At best, he was a poor man’s Nate Bowman.

  Jackson officially joined the Minutemen, thrilled to be back in uniform, though he eventually considered the back injury to be one of those opportunistic and even fortunate life detours. Though he had been inactive for the historic season, Jackson’s inner coach stirred for the first time, and Holzman occasionally gave him small tasks, such as the breakdown of a scouting report, with which to keep busy when he wasn’t taking photographs.

  He believes that he owes much to Holzman, who had twice made the grueling journey to Grand Forks, North Dakota—scouting Jackson and then showing up a second time to sign him in his dorm room on the same day that John Lindsay, the mayor of New York, happened to be in town for an event. What were the odds? Jackson had wondered. Listen, Holzman groused, the mayor’s trip could not have been as circuitous as his had been.

  There was something about the sarcastic Jewish man that Jackson connected to immediately. He didn’t try too hard, didn’t mince or waste words. “Kind words when they were needed, but mostly a matter-of-fact guy,” Jackson said. “It was the middle of the road—not too high, not too low.”

  Tightening the bond they had formed in Grand Forks, Holzman picked Jackson up at the airport on his first visit to New York on the Friday of Memorial Day weekend 1967. Holzman was at the wheel of a Chevy Impala convertible with his wife, Selma, in the backseat, along with a lamp she had brought along from their home in Cedarhurst. “So we’re on the Van Wyck Expressway and some kid leans over the bypass and chucks a stone right down onto the windshield and cracks it,” Jackson said. Holzman barely shook his head and kept driving—all the way into Manhattan, double-parking on Eighth Avenue, where the lamp was dropped off for repair. Finally, he turned to Jackson. “In New York, you get tested every day,” he said. “It takes a special kind of patience—you think you could live here?”

  Jackson suddenly wasn’t too sure. He was the son of Charles and Elisabeth Jackson, Assemblies of God ministers of the Pentecostal faith. After marrying, the couple moved around Montana and North Dakota, starting ministries wherever they went. Jackson’s fundamentalist childhood was rural and religious to the point that he was allowed only herbal remedies for illness. He wasn’t permitted an injection of penicillin until he was 14. He played basketball and baseball and, though he was a strong pitching prospect, he abandoned the sport at 16, already 6'5" and part of a high school basketball team in Williston, North Dakota, that was heralded throughout the state.

  At first glance, New York seemed and sounded like a foreign country to him. When he and Holzman sat down with Donovan at the Garden, Jackson mentioned that he had never even seen a live NBA game. “No kidding,” Donovan said, looking at Holzman as if to say, “This kid’s gonna play here?” Soon Jackson was holding a 16-millimeter film and was told to go ahead, take it back to school, have a look at what the pro game’s all about.

  First he had his New York weekend, staying in a hotel nearby on Eighth Avenue. He was given some meal money and a player escort, Neil Johnson, who had just finished his rookie season. They went to dinner and hit a p
ool hall before Johnson wished Jackson well and went on his way, leaving him to explore.

  “I had Saturday to myself before leaving on Sunday,” Jackson said. “I was wandering around and walked right into thousands and thousands of people marching in favor of the Vietnam War. There were policemen, firemen, sanitation workers, city workers, all over the streets. There were soapbox speakers, literally, in Times Square.” Jackson had been under the impression that only liberals and radicals lived in New York. As a budding peacenik, he was disappointed to discover that wasn’t the case.

  Not sure what to make of the place, he returned to North Dakota the next day, thinking he had seen everything. Then he found a projector, loaded the refrigerator with beer, and summoned his Fighting Sioux teammates. They sat down to watch the game film Donovan and Holzman had chosen for Jackson. It was dated October 18, 1966—the night Willis Reed obliterated Rudy LaRusso and every other Laker who had dared to confront him.

  “Nice intro, huh?” Jackson said, recalling that for a few moments he wondered why he had rejected a competitive financial offer from the Minnesota Muskies of the brand-new ABA, which would have kept him much closer to home. But Reed proved advertisement enough.

  Jackson reported to training camp the following September and matched his relatively scrawny upper body against the muscular and hardworking Reed. Though it was an unenviable chore, they never scuffled or so much as exchanged a bad word. The raging bull he’d watched in grainy black-and-white was indeed a fierce competitor, but a gentleman of the highest order. Jackson also found himself rooming with fellow rookie Walt Frazier, and that, too, was an education he could never have gotten in lily-white North Dakota. He began making friends, falling in with the antiwar crowd and becoming immersed in the political debate.

  It wasn’t long before he knew that his decision to sign with the Knicks and come to New York City was going to be the smartest one he would make in his life.