When the Garden Was Eden

by Harvey Araton

  While many of Frazier’s teammates were handed ringside tickets for the Fight of the Century, the first of three bouts between Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier, on March 9, 1971, at the Garden, it was Clyde Frazier who was included in the celebrity sightings in the next day’s reports. There he was in the same news columns as Frank Sinatra, Norman Mailer, Ted Kennedy, and Diana Ross. “You name them, they were there,” Frazier said, recalling the experience, in part as an affirmation of his own rise to full-blown star. “Sinatra was taking pictures. And then the mink coats—everybody had a mink coat. And that was just the guys.” He laughed and added, “And diamonds, too.”

  He remembered seeing himself on the news the next day, strolling into the Garden in his own full-length mink, not quite sure if he was in the Ali camp along with the majority of the glitterati. As much of a stylist as Ali was, in the mold of Clyde, there was something about the no-nonsense Smokin’ Joe that indisputably appealed to Walt’s working-class southern roots.

  “I was kind of in between, but when Frazier hit him with that left hook in the last round, it kind of hit me: ‘Oh, yeah, I guess I’m rooting for Frazier.’ But we all knew that we were witnessing something special, man. Nobody left when the fight was over, just standing there. And then when you went outside, there were limousines all around this place, triple-parked. And all the celebrities, every celebrity in the world.”

  Or so it seemed to the Knicks superstar, who began to feel as if the world were waiting for him every time he stepped out on the Upper East Side and on up into Harlem.

  Frazier—as Walt or Clyde—was never much of a drinker. He didn’t have a sip in high school and didn’t know what to do all those years later when gratis alcohol came his way at famed hangouts like P.J. Clarke’s, Jimmy Weston’s, and Elaine’s. “At first I would say, ‘Hey, man, I didn’t want a drink,’ ” he said. “But then a guy I knew told me, ‘Don’t ever turn one down, because these people will think you’re not a good guy.’ ” Bartenders caught on and kept his alcohol intake next to nothing, though Clyde bent his own rules when it came to entertaining the opposite sex. Divorced not long after he joined the Knicks, Frazier created a new ethos. “Clyde was wine, clothes, song, and a different woman each night,” he said. Pressed for a statistical estimate of his scoring totals, he joked that he was nowhere close to Wilt Chamberlain (who, in a 1991 autobiography, claimed to have slept with 20,000 women). One road roommate of Frazier’s said the hotel telephone seldom stopped ringing. “Women calling day and night, wanting tickets, wanting a piece of him,” the roommate said.

  “If they want to see Clyde tonight,” he’d say, “they got to pay.” He meant for the tickets, his trademark frugality being a habit he was never eager to break.

  Few, if any, got too close to Clyde, who was clearly shielding Walt from the superficialities of fame. He understood that self-promotion required only a mastery of commercial invention. Image was everything. Hence, Clyde never had to work too hard for the attention he received, never had to make a spectacle of himself. Walt was always at the controls, behind the curtain, manipulating his wizard of ah’s.

  A fawning woman might be at his side in a club, and suddenly he would announce he was leaving—with her number in his pocket, of course—to have a bowl of granola and go to sleep. Sometimes it was an opposing player, out on the town on the night before a game at the Garden, who would unwittingly prompt Frazier to call it a night, lest he be more sleep-deprived than the man he might have to guard.

  “We didn’t have a curfew,” Frazier said. “But if I saw someone like Oscar leave at a certain time, that was my cue to get out of there, too.”

  Once the media were playing ball, all he had to do in order to be Clyde was let people have a glimpse into his material world, allow the occasional photographer access to the bedroom of his East Side high-rise, where the closets were jammed with velour suits and flowing capes and his $5,000 black ranch mink coat. All he had to do was grow the muttonchops, then the beard, and hit the town in his 1965 Rolls. He purchased the car gray but had it painted burgundy and beige before adding the coup de grâce, his gangster whitewalls. “The Clydemobile.”

  Nobody appreciated Frazier’s theatrical pose and natural stage presence more than the emerging director Woody Allen. “He’d come into Elaine’s,” Allen said of his longtime Second Avenue hangout. “There was this amazing aura about him when he’d step into a room.”

  Allen was, in effect, the perfect Clyde audience. He only wanted to observe the splendor of the man, not impose on him or so much as chat. When Ira Berkow was co-writing Frazier’s book Rockin’ Steady, in the early seventies, they went out to lunch one day at P.J. Clarke’s, settling in at a backroom table on a slow late afternoon. There was one other patron nearby, reading a newspaper but stealing the occasional glance over the top of it. Every time Berkow looked over, the guy would defensively pull the paper up. This went on for a while, Berkow humored by the game of Clyde-and-mouse, until the fellow got up to leave. Only then did he realize it was Woody Allen. As long as he could maintain his distance, Frazier enjoyed the attention, and grew adept at eliciting more of it.

  “My first game in New York, he gets knocked down and he’s laying there like he’s dead,” said Butch Beard, who joined the Knicks after the championship years, in 1975. “I rush over there, thinking, Oh my God, he’s really hurt.” Frazier looked up at his teammate without cracking a smile. “Beard,” he said, “how’re my fans taking it?” “Fuck you,” Beard said. Beard was no NBA star, just an acerbic, tough-minded guard on a variety of teams, including the 1975 champion Golden State Warriors. Frazier had respected Beard after the classic games Southern Illinois had played against Louisville. In New York, Frazier showed Beard around, gave him rides in his Rolls from the team’s new downtown gym at Pace College. He got him hooked on yoga. On the road, they were occasional dinner companions, including one night in Chicago when Frazier carried in a bag that he set on the table and left there until the waiter brought over a glass of wine.

  “Now he opens the bag, and what comes out but the ingredients for a damn salad,” Beard said. “Right there in the restaurant he starts chopping the shit up, and the maître d’ actually comes by and watches, asking him all these questions about how he prepares it.” Beard shook his head in amazement and thought, “I do that, my ass is definitely out of here.”

  Frazier was no national media sensation like Magic and Bird would be in the eighties (much less Jordan in the nineties and James now). No NBA player of Frazier’s era was. But looking back, people like Kalinsky and Beard marveled at how brilliantly Frazier marketed himself with the help of his New York—based agent, Irwin Weiner. By the early seventies he was in demand all over town, and earned $1,000 per appearance, pocket change compared with his $300,000 salary and $100,000 a year in endorsements and appearances. From the head beneath his wide-brim hats to his canvas-covered toes, Clyde played Cupid in the eventual marriage of pro basketball and the sneaker industry. In 1972, Puma paid Frazier $5,000 (and promised him all the free merchandise he needed) to put his name on a shoe. The Clyde brand was sold only in the New York tristate area, but in the days before basketball players were branded as national pitchmen, Frazier’s shoes were hot.

  “I did a poster—I had my mink coat and sneakers on,” he said. Three decades after his retirement, Puma was still selling the shoe, now internationally, noting on pumashoes.com that Frazier was the first to endorse a casual sneaker that became synonymous with style: “A 1970s basketball icon and renowned ladies’ man, he took court style to the streets for the first time. And there was no going back.”

  Despite the headlines of the time and his proximity to men like Bradley and Barnett, Frazier remained largely apolitical and uninvolved. In the late sixties and early seventies, Frazier didn’t win many friends uptown by coming off as uninterested in the movement to empower the black man in America. To some, his dress and lifestyle represented a black male stereotype. As Clyde, he rubbed salt in that percepti
on when he called the Italian bombshell Sophia Loren his ideal woman at a time when black women were picking out their hair, kinky and proud. Black activists also complained when Frazier bought a liquor store in Harlem, arguing that a man of his stature should set a better business example, especially in a community where so many young males were at risk. (He eventually sold the store.)

  But as the years wore on, Frazier found himself playing defense in ways he found more irksome. It angered him when sportswriters who had once compared him to Oscar and West accused him of playing hard only during the last five minutes of a game. After the championship years, on a team in decline, he felt singled out, made a scapegoat. Why didn’t the press ever go after Bradley or Monroe?

  When the Knicks struck first, banishing him to Cleveland in 1977, he found out on a Friday night, his agent, Weiner, waiting for him in the lobby of his apartment building. “Cleveland?” Frazier said. “Come on, man.” He was stunned. To make matters worse, the deal had been partly orchestrated by the incoming coach, Willis Reed, who called it “a painful decision to make the team younger.” Frazier would come back early that season, get a rousing Garden ovation, lead the Cavs to a victory, and hand Reed his first coaching defeat. But a depressing reality soon set in: he had to return to Cleveland and look for a place to live in a drab and distant suburb, where the Cavs had moved after abandoning the city, though they eventually returned downtown. When a female broker showed him several posh condominiums, Frazier remarked that the closet space in one was scarce, compared with what he had in New York. And how would he get his round bed through the narrow front passageway? The broker responded by directing him to a window with a view of the forest.

  “You call that a view?” Frazier said. “I’m used to looking out on the greatest city in the world.” When the broker replied that Cleveland was not New York, Frazier snorted, “I’m hip,” and moved in with a teammate, Jim Chones.

  He tolerated Cleveland until he quit in 1980, returning to New York to resume his life as Clyde. The Frazier name was still magic in the city, and he launched Walt Frazier Enterprises with Weiner and the 76ers great Billy Cunningham. Together they managed the business affairs of some heavyweight players, including Julius Erving and George McGinnis. But Frazier discovered that serving a superstar was nothing like being one. He hated the solicitation, “the glorified babysitting.” He began to wonder what the hell he was going to do with the rest of his life.

  He soon realized that, being a former player, people didn’t quite see him the same way. After a while he didn’t care. “I kind of got fed up with all the material things, fed up with New York and that scene, the nightclubs and the cars,” he said. “I said, ‘Man, I don’t want this anymore.’ I didn’t want to vegetate as Clyde. I was searching for something—I just didn’t know what it was.”

  The year before he retired from basketball, 1979, he had taken his son, Walt III, on a vacation to St. Croix. The boy, then 12, loved to swim, and someone had recommended to him the largest of the Virgin Islands. Coming from most places, the lush St. Croix terrain would have been breathtaking. From Cleveland, Frazier felt the sea breeze on his face and found it intoxicating. He called a real estate broker and within days had purchased a Caribbean-style one-story house with four curved columns that looked like tentacles. The house was on one acre and built into a hill overlooking the water.

  Back home, Frazier startled friends with the news. They believed he had acted impulsively, that he would quickly grow tired of the Caribbean commute, of being so far from the Manhattan nightlife. Shouldn’t he at least have shopped around? Visited other islands like Barbados or Bermuda? Frazier had an answer for them, his logic, as usual, steeped in financial pragmatism. In St. Croix, a territory of the United States, he wouldn’t have to worry about government upheaval and the potential seizure of property.

  Initially, St. Croix was just a getaway destination from the New York scene. “I would come and just chill, do nothing,” he said. But whenever he gratefully stepped off the prop jet from San Juan or Miami, he felt as if he were exhaling. He began to adjust to the slower pace, the island rhythms. He took a sailing course, got his captain’s license, and purchased a boat. He befriended an old island native named Rufus Knight, who became his mentor on the water. One morning, they started out for St. Thomas at 4 A.M. Out at sea, Frazier looked up at the sky to see the first rays of light and thought, “I’ve found paradise.”

  Something within him was changing fundamentally. As a man, Walt was growing. Clyde was dying. But unlike Clyde’s birth, it was easier to pinpoint the time of his official expiration.

  ALMOST A DECADE AFTER HE HAD LEFT THE GAME, soon after he began his broadcasting career, which kept him anchored in Manhattan and the mainland for much of the basketball season, Frazier was watching football at his island retreat on Sunday afternoon, September 17, 1989, when the first terrifying winds blew the awnings off his home. The television went dark. The living room windows blew out. He and his lady friend raced for the bathroom, hunkering down for a long, fierce night.

  “We sat there, in the dark, hungry and cold, water coming from under the door, wind howling, hearing crashes sounding like freight trains running down the track,” he said. Bizarre thoughts rush through your brain in such moments of peril. Frazier recalled how his mother liked to tell him, “You don’t know what it’s like to not have a roof over your head.” He wondered if he was about to find out. The hurricane’s full force arrived in the wee hours of September 18. “All we could say was, ‘Hold on, house. Hold on,’ ” he said.

  Thank God, he thought, the roof was concrete and apparently hurricane-proof. Little else in the house proved to be of the same durability, but it managed to remain upright all the same.

  The next morning, Hugo having left $1 billion in damage to the island, Frazier warily opened the bathroom door, sidestepping the refrigerator that had hurtled from the kitchen. He surveyed his residential wreckage—rooms bathed in water, glass everywhere, furniture gnarled and blown outside. His boat was gone, sunk in the cay. Soon a neighbor would deliver terrible news: Rufus Knight had fallen while scrambling amid the debris and hit his head. Frazier’s sailing partner was dead.

  Frazier said he felt “like someone stabbed me in the heart,” but as he contemplated the dark side of paradise, he also found himself strangely fascinated by the chaos, by forces so far beyond human control that he could only wonder about how he had lived his life in the fast lane, about all the material things he had pursued and collected and what they all were really worth.

  The clothes, the cars, the mirrors presenting a reflection of what he—or Clyde, at least—had come to define as success. “I think that was when I started to think about what else I could really do with my life and that there had to be more to it than basketball,” he said.

  Before that could happen, he had to embrace the realization that he was one lucky man. He had survived nature’s onslaught. He was alive. If Clyde wasn’t quite dead, Walt at least felt reborn.

  EMERGING FROM THE TINY ST. CROIX AIRPORT TERMINAL on February 24, 2010, I walked outside and there he was, standing along the curb, arms resting on the driver’s-side door of his GMC light truck. Before I took another step in Walt Frazier’s direction, it occurred to me how far I had come, literally and figuratively, from our first professional encounter, when I took a deep breath and approached him as a wide-eyed reporter for the Staten Island Advance.

  “Excuse me, Walt?”

  He didn’t look up.

  “Walt?”

  He still didn’t look up.

  Finally, three words.

  “Get lost, chump.”

  Granted, I would experience even worse first impressions of my other idols: Mickey Mantle was stone drunk in the clubhouse after a Yankee Stadium event in 1976. Reggie Jackson met my outstretched hand with an icy glare before turning his back to me and cutting a loud fart. At least Frazier, I later came to realize, had good reason to be grumpy. In his final discontented days as a K
nick, he was understandably in no mood to jabber with reporters, much less a greenhorn like me.

  We would laugh about the episode years later when I confessed that I’d gone home and contemplated flinging myself out the fifth-floor window of my apartment, clutching my dog-eared copy of Rockin’ Steady. He told me I shouldn’t have been too insulted. In those days, chump was a common insult around the team, reserved for friend and foe alike.

  This time, Frazier smiled as I approached, extending a hand. A little more than a month from his 65th birthday, he was still remarkably youthful, despite thinning hair and the faintest hint of an expanding midriff. He wore a baseball cap, off-white jeans with painter’s pockets, a T-shirt, and a pair of flat canvas sneakers—the Clyde Pumas, of course. By the second day of my stay, I would learn that this was Frazier’s island uniform. His current girlfriend, Patricia James, had grown accustomed to asking him on the way out to dinner, “You’re not going to change?”

  This was no longer the stylish and image-conscious night stalker she had adored while growing up in the north Jersey suburb of Montclair. Frazier of the island was a homebody who had long ago ditched the Rolls and preferred his truck, who couldn’t remember the last time he had been out in a club (on this island or Manhattan), who tried to avoid trips to neighboring St. Thomas because it was “too commercial, just like New York.”

  So who, then, was the nattily dressed legend on the Knicks radio and television broadcasts since the late eighties? He looked like Clyde. He sounded like Clyde. But he was merely a vestige of the past, Leonard Nimoy putting on his Spock ears for a Star Trek convention. On St. Croix, where he camped out when his broadcasting duties were finished and to which he escaped whenever he could during the season, the locals knew him more as “Frazier the tree guy.” He loved the melodious sound of the extended name; it affirmed what he felt about growth, nature’s and his own, from renowned hedonist to home-building horticulturist.