When the Garden Was Eden

by Harvey Araton

  “People in New York who saw me here would probably be disappointed in me,” he told me as we eased our way down a shady path and began a tour of his property—which he had transformed from a largely barren single lot to roughly five acres of tropical paradise. He was wrong about that, dead wrong. Old Knicks fans would be fascinated, I told him.

  As we walked the grounds, stopping to admire a veranda or a view, he admitted that he often found himself looking around, asking: How did I do all this? Part determination, he said, and part fate. When he ventured outside on the morning after Hugo, he made a startling and miraculous discovery. On the edge of the pool, blown out from the living room, was his wallet—money and credit cards snug in the fold. How could the wallet have not blown away, given the force of the wind? The stroke of luck had provided the means of surviving, the credit cards he needed to stay on and begin the rebuilding process. Not that he wasn’t intimidated—there was so much to do—but the oldest of nine Frazier children, the man who would be Clyde, was no resplendent prima donna. Walt had been raised on menial tasks. “As a kid, my job was mopping the floors and taking out the garbage,” he said.

  On a devastated island, he didn’t have a work crew or basic life comforts like electricity or even a bed. For several weeks, he slept in the bathroom to avoid the mosquitoes. Realizing the first thing he needed was windows, he removed the broken glass, measured the spaces, and ordered replacements. He emptied the rooms and the property of debris. He replaced fixtures, scrubbed muck off the walls, and gave them all a fresh coat of paint.

  The more he did, the more stimulation he felt, a sense of purpose he hadn’t known since his peak playing days. “I began to see there was work for me to do here, work that was going to keep me young,” he said. “I was experiencing a metamorphosis, a change for the better.”

  On the east side of the island, also known as the dry side, he had discovered a well, which on St. Croix spared him the risky dependence on rainwater and the prohibitive costs of purchasing water from private sources. With a well, he could grow to his heart’s content. “Called this guy, told him where I lived, and he told me, ‘Man, you can’t get no water out there,’ ” Frazier said. “I told him, ‘No, come out and see.’ He looked at these hills and he said, ‘Okay, I’ll try right here.’ He went 160 feet deep. I paid him $8,000—my best investment. People told me that around here, it was like striking oil.”

  There were hundreds of plantings—fruit trees and palms and colorful flowers that could match Clyde’s most ostentatious outfits. Nurturing them reminded him of running an offense, educating himself about his teammates’ needs, knowing what to feed them and when.

  He built an intricate system of cisterns that tapped into the well but also utilized rainwater. He hired a gardener to help him, to teach him how to plant and nurture. “Every morning I’d work with him,” he said. “He’d pick, I’d shovel.” The more the property bloomed, the greener his thumb became and the more determined he was to upgrade and expand. He began buying up the surrounding one-and-a-half-acre lots, most with run-down houses he knew he would want to renovate.

  “But I was so naive about most of these things,” he said. “I didn’t know about boundaries, property lines, zoning, nothing.” One time, he cleared land that actually belonged to a neighbor and planted trees—again with fortuitous results. It turned out the neighbor wanted to sell. On the other side of that property he scooped up more land and homes.

  He gave each one a name: the Green House, the Pink House, the Pool House, and the Main House, where he and Patricia lived. He redeveloped them with a strong Caribbean flavor, emphasizing decks and terraces, with outdoor kitchens and bathrooms. The furniture was understated: earth tones and bamboo. He still loved mirrors but kept them off the ceilings, confining them to sliding closet doors. “I’m selling you nature, easy living,” he said.

  He perused home and garden magazines, attended home shows in Miami and New York, scoured outlets and home appliance stores for furniture and fixtures—it became an obsession. When he wasn’t working on a house, he was mentally designing additions for the property. His builder, a slow-moving local man named Michael Wynter, grinned slyly when I asked how he and Frazier collaborated. “He comes up with the ideas and I build them,” he said. “But he changes his mind a lot.”

  The project that had Frazier’s attention during my visit was one that had begun as a plain wooden deck overlooking a hilly vista. He decided it needed a roof as a cover for rain, and then he expanded the plan to a clubhouse and bar that all his tenants could use. Finally, he added a side room he thought he might rent out, with an accompanying bathroom. Down the road, he said he might build a gym and run basketball clinics for island kids and vacationers staying at the posh Buccaneer Hotel next door.

  In the spirit of the island, there was no urgency to any of these plans. About half the houses already had renters, but he seemed in no rush to finish the others. Most important, Frazier said, was getting a project right. He finessed the details the way he fussed over Clyde’s wardrobe and fine-tuned his game, telling me, “I always thought I was the consummate player, that I could do everything.” The man was not without humility. He snickered and added, “Except maybe go to my right.”

  He admitted he was not easy—and occasionally impossible—to work for. In late middle age, if there was one standout regret that Frazier had, it was that he had not spent enough time with his son when he was young, after divorcing his first wife. He was always on the road, playing ball, being Clyde. Just the mention of the separation glazed Frazier’s eyes. So when Walt III had finished college, a University of Pennsylvania grad, his father hired him to look after the property while he was in New York. And then fired him when he discovered how much partying and how little work was going on.

  Similarly, when Patricia was laid off from her job in broadcast media, Frazier made her property manager—testing her resolve and their relationship. He obsessively scrutinized the work of painters and handymen, distrusting their willingness to cover every spot and their ability to properly wield a squeegee. Walt did windows.

  Sitting on a terrace at one of the unfinished homes on a warm, breezy afternoon while Frazier was off watering his trees, I remarked to James how beautiful the property was. She nodded and after a pause of several seconds became teary-eyed. “Until you come here, you don’t know what this place means to him,” she said.

  And there was the rub. Rare was the person who knew Frazier in New York, around the Garden, who had ever set foot on this place he had poured so much of himself into, including much of his earnings as a broadcaster and Old Knicks legend. To them, St. Croix was no more than a rumor, a gleam in their old teammate’s eye. He admitted to me that he sometimes wished they could all spend a few days, walk with him up the hill to the one undeveloped tract of his property.

  Here was where he was planning to build his dream house, the one he would live in when he was completely done with New York. He would sell off the rest of the property, hopefully rake in five or six million (after an initial investment of $215,000 and an estimated $1.5 million more in additions). He could already envision the open-air living room, alongside a pool, with breathtaking views of Christiansted Harbor on one side and the Caribbean on the other.

  Yes, he still loved New York. In fact, months after my visit to St. Croix, Frazier expanded his real estate holdings with a three-apartment investment in Harlem. Attracted by the building’s large outdoor spaces that would allow him to exercise his green thumb in the city, as well as the opportunity to reinvest in the community that had once chastised him for his liquor store endeavor, Frazier had decided he would share one of the apartments with Walt III. Father and son had also begun planning another sports-management company that Walt III might carry on when the old man was finally ready to kick completely back and chill in the cool breeze of the island.

  When that day might come he couldn’t say—possibly never—but the view of Walt Frazier in St. Croix was nonetheless one of a
man at peace. If a basketball-savvy tourist did a double take at a nearby table when he was out to dinner or at breakfast, overlooking the grounds of the Buccaneer Hotel, Frazier would smile, sign his name, but never look pained that the attention was for something long ago.

  As we walked down the hill, back toward the Main House, Frazier told me he had found the secret to a life beyond the Garden. It was really the same concept that had allowed him to share his prime real estate in the Knicks’ backcourt with Earl Monroe. “The main thing is controlling one’s ego and being creative in any way you can,” he said. He tugged on his baseball cap, pulling it low to shield his eyes from the sun. “Nobody watches me anymore, but that’s okay. I get pleasure from what I do. It’s what you feel inside.” We stopped for a while at the deck and future clubhouse, where the builder Wynter was busy measuring planks while his assistant, operating a backhoe, cleared weeds from a space nearby. Leaning against the rail, Frazier drifted away from our conversation, into a trancelike state. I figured he was scrutinizing the assistant’s work, until he pointed to a flock of egrets bobbing for worms in the path of the backhoe.

  “It’s amazing how they compete with each other, how they jockey for position and then jump out of the way as the shovel comes down,” Frazier said. He studied them for several minutes, as if they were neighbors playing a set of tennis. “They’re survivors,” he said. “They get what they want and then they get out.”

  14

  THE BRAIN DRAIN

  JERRY LUCAS LOST HIS WAY. A STATE CHAMPION IN HIGH SCHOOL, A national champion in college, and a gold-medal Olympian, Lucas was a perennial winner who had nevertheless wandered waywardly in pursuit of an NBA title. In Cincinnati, he and Oscar Robertson had toiled in vain to surmount the Celtics, and he soon found himself banished from his home state of Ohio—by Bob Cousy—to a lousy Warriors team. In San Francisco, Lucas broke his hand and went bankrupt when his chain of restaurants, Beef ’N’ Shakes, veered sharply into the red. When he filed, to the tune of $822,000, he lost his savings, along with his Cincinnati home. His play with the Warriors suffered.

  “The day I was traded to the Knicks, I was absolutely overjoyed, because being in San Francisco was the worst time of my basketball life,” Lucas said. But if his two seasons out west were not worth remembering, he couldn’t help himself. Every sad detail lay stored in what he himself claims is his “incredibly creative mind.”

  Wherever Lucas went, he astounded people with his extraordinary mnemonic skills and aptitude with numbers. His was a life of constant counting. During time-outs in the middle of games, he might glance into the stands to determine how many steps were in a particular aisle. On the team bus to the arena, he might lose himself by calculating how many white stripes per mile were painted on the highway. He would be introduced to someone and immediately convert the person’s name into numbers that corresponded with the respective place of the letters in the alphabet. He fancied himself an expert magician and card-trick specialist.

  When he got to New York, the man who had been Phi Beta Kappa at Ohio State University embarked on a calculated mission to cash in as a real-life Carnac, Johnny Carson’s psychic alter ego. While Bill Bradley and Phil Jackson were reading up on Richard Nixon’s historic trip to China and the chilling rise of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, Lucas was memorizing 50,000 names from the Manhattan telephone book. He ripped out handfuls of pages and studied them on Knicks road trips. His teammates would have thought he’d lost his mind, so he would read in secret to spare himself their worried glances. Given the team’s high profile and the large number of Old Knicks fans in the entertainment business, it wasn’t long before Lucas’s showbiz potential was discovered. He hooked up with the music impresario Don Kirshner, who had played college ball and was often at the Garden.

  Presto! With Kirshner behind him, Lucas soon had a 28th-floor office in a Midtown tower and a network television special called The Jerry Lucas Super Kids Day Magic Jamboree. He was soon in the celebrity seat next to Carson, Carnac himself, on The Tonight Show. He co-wrote The Memory Book, which soared to number two on the New York Times best-seller list. He earned endorsement deals with Vitalis and United Airlines.

  “Let’s face it,” he reasoned, “New York is the place to be if you have ability.” But even better for his mental health than promotional appearances and parlor tricks, Lucas got to mind-meld with the team that he, like so many others, believed was “the most intelligent ever.” It was a stroke of fortune that revived his flagging career, in part by returning him to his college position. At 6'8", Lucas had played center on an Ohio State team with John Havlicek and a bullheaded reserve forward named Bobby Knight. But in the NBA, Sports Illustrated’s 1961 Sportsman of the Year was considered too small for the pivot and proceeded to become a great rebounding forward, a canny anticipator of the carom, which he credited to hours of studying opposing shooters. In February 1964—when Lucas averaged 17.4 rebounds a game and was third in the league behind Bill Russell and Wilt Chamberlain—he grabbed 40 in one game, a record for a forward.

  Critics claimed Lucas cheated by sagging off his man and surrendering easy shots so he could pad his rebounding stats. They claimed he’d lapsed into poor training habits in Cincinnati and was overweight, charges he quieted by dieting in San Francisco and shedding 20 pounds, easing pressure on his knees and back. As a result, the Knicks made out in the deal better than they ever imagined they would. The timing was especially propitious. Holzman acquired Lucas to help at both positions but especially at center, where it was becoming obvious that Reed would never again play at full capacity. When Reed, after 11 games, was declared out for the season due to the tendinitis in his left knee, Lucas was suddenly the starter. Less physical than Reed but a gifted and willing passer off the high post, Lucas was a shooter with as much range as any contemporary three-point specialist.

  Growing up in Middletown, Ohio, between Cincinnati and Dayton, the son of a pressman at a local paper mill, Lucas was always the biggest player on his team and as such was typically stationed under the rim. Disinclined to convention, he spent hours every day “shooting from all over.” He developed a strange-looking jumper in which his release point was just above his right shoulder, a one-handed push that was only slightly more elegant than Dick Barnett’s own contortions. Given the distance most of his shots traveled, his career shooting percentage of 49.9 percent is remarkable.

  “But it was when I was with the Knicks and had the opportunity to play center that I was really able to take advantage of it,” he said, admitting how much he enjoyed tormenting lumbering seven-footers outside the lane. “Wilt was dumbfounded,” said Lucas, yet another enthusiastic abuser of the poor, misunderstood Dipper. “If he did come out, I’d drive around him to the basket or pass off to DeBusschere or Bradley.”

  Sometime before Chamberlain’s death in 1999, Lucas flipped on his television to find him in the chair opposite the interviewer Roy Firestone on ESPN. Firestone asked Chamberlain which player he least enjoyed matching up against. Lucas was sure he’d say Russell, but Chamberlain never would admit that. “Jerry Lucas,” he said. “He took me places I never wanted to go.”

  On a team of strong, eclectic personalities, Lucas stood out nonetheless. His new teammates wondered about his eccentric personality and were occasionally miffed by his lack of humility. Some were not amused by his memory games and didn’t want to be bombarded with interesting but ultimately useless information.

  “Lucas was a nutcake,” Phil Jackson told me. “He was a gifted guy, but he did that memory thing that drove us all crazy.” According to Jackson, least impressed by Lucas was Dave DeBusschere, the ale-loving clock puncher who didn’t see the point in alphabetical word games and knowing the number of stairs he was about to climb.

  “DeBusschere had no time for Lucas’s nonsense,” Jackson said. “But they played great together.” Opposites in personality, DeBusschere and Lucas were practically interchangeable on the court, with their dark hair and rugged good looks. With
Bradley in the mix, the frontline had a throwback appearance, straight out of the fifties, that by today’s standards was insanely small and startlingly white. But the bottom line on Lucas—once called by John Wooden “the most unselfish player” he’d ever seen—was that he was a born Old Knick. “Extremely smart basketball player—the game was almost too easy for him,” Jackson said. “He taught me how to shoot.”

  Bradley said Lucas’s arrival elevated the team’s offensive IQ even higher and provided him with a companion to tap into his own brand of brainy mischief. “A guy would be guarding me and I would come down, the ball would come to me, and I would yell out to Lucas”—here Bradley spewed some guttural nonsense—“and then Lucas would yell something back that sounded the same, and if the guy was a rookie or a young player, he’d be saying, ‘What … what?’ ” The gibberish wasn’t code for anything, just a way of playing with the opponent’s head while Bradley and Lucas improvised the play.

  Lucas, laughing uproariously at the mention of his linguistic adventures with the future senator, said he was dazzled and reenergized by the intellectual challenge of playing with his new teammates on the Broadway stage. “People in San Francisco did not know or understand basketball,” he said. “There was no real love of the game. In New York, it felt like religion.” Lucas thought he’d already been blessed to have played on great high school and college teams. He relished his six years with the Big O in Cincinnati. But there was nothing close, he said, to stepping onto the court with a group that was as exceptionally intuitive as the Knicks. “On other teams, you’d have guys who would come out of a time-out, look around, and say, ‘What are we doing?’ ” Lucas said. “With the Knicks, that never happened. Red would come in at halftime and ask us, ‘What should we do in the second half?’ I have to say that my time with them was the most fun I ever had, far and away.”