When the Garden Was Eden

by Harvey Araton

  “We knew that was it,” Frazier said. “We’d had our run. I remember thinking, If it had to end, then at least we went out to a great team.” Indeed, having seized conference supremacy from the squad that had taken it from them, the Celtics proceeded to claim another NBA championship—the franchise’s 12th—by winning a seventh game in Milwaukee, another notch on the belt of the NBA’s lone dynasty, pre–Magic and Kareem.

  “Honestly, in comparison to the Celtics, we were almost nothing,” George Lois said. “But we had our taste, a nice little run, two great championships.”

  Marv Albert always believed that if Reed had been healthy, a run of four straight titles would have been possible. But the record is what it is, and a perception exists outside New York that the phenomenon was overstated, based more on location than on merit. My friend Marty Beiser, a former editor at GQ magazine and Free Press, grew up in Philadelphia. He liked to crack, “So many books, so few titles.”

  Havlicek told me that the Old Knicks’ literary indulgences were also a subject of discussion in Boston. “I know some of our guys saw all the books being written about the Knicks and thought, If our team had been in New York, instead of 100 books it would have been 500,” Havlicek said. “I also know up in Boston, after the Knicks won in ’70, people said, ‘How can they make such a big fuss about one championship?’ ”

  Bostonians would argue that while New Yorkers thought of the Old Knicks era as a religious experience, it was more the opium of the Big Apple masses, two drops in the bucket compared with the 11 titles won by the Celtics in the 13 years prior to 1970. But partisanship misses the larger point of what the Old Knicks represented to their fans and to many neutral basketball connoisseurs: the game distilled to near perfection. “We weren’t the team with the best players or the leading scorers,” Reed said. “But to have played with a group like that, well, that maybe happens once in a lifetime.”

  To his credit, Havlicek more or less agreed with Reed. He understood and accepted the cultural differences between Boston, a hockey town, and New York, a basketball mecca. He preferred not to play to provincial passions, mimic Auerbachian bluster. In fact, when the Boston Garden crowd twice stood and cheered for the retiring DeBusschere in the fourth quarter of his final game—just the way New Yorkers had saluted him the previous spring when he had to sit out Game 4 with his separated shoulder—Havlicek was moved by the show of graciousness to the man who would become his Florida snowbird neighbor and close friend. “Let’s face it,” he said, “those Knicks were really good, and anyone who thinks they were overrated should look at the number of Hall of Famers.”

  Counting Holzman and Phil Jackson as coaches, the Old Knicks happened to have eight. But even then, any good adman with a baseline seat for the half decade of high drama could tell you that evaluating the impact of the Old Knicks by conventional measures was missing the point. Reed’s pathos, George Lois maintained, may have diminished the achievements, but it also enhanced the team’s Broadway legend.

  “Listen, the fans from that time, we know how good the Celtics were, and we know who we were, too,” he said. “The Knicks get a lot of credit, undeserved and unwanted, for changing the game. They didn’t change the game. But they did bring a romance to it, the pure love of an unusual team that basketball hadn’t seen before. And those years when they were such a treat to watch—it was really ’68 to ’74—you didn’t have to think too much about Richard fucking Nixon.”

  In fact, the televised Watergate hearings began one week after the 1973 championship season, and Nixon’s resignation came three months after the Old Knicks’ last stand in Boston. One era ended in disgrace, the other with unquestioned honor.

  MY FATHER WAS NEVER MUCH OF A SPORTS FAN beyond a hankering for a good boxing match. He grew up on Manhattan’s Lower East Side in a time when boxing was as big league as it got in America’s teeming ethnic strongholds. When I was young, he would regale me with stories of his cousin, a lightweight named Danny Bartfield, who won 41 of 46 bouts between 1940 and 1948, several of them in the old Madison Square Garden.

  As a family man, Gilbert Araton—whose parents immigrated from the Galicia region of Eastern Europe, formerly part of Poland and now Ukraine—was an outer-borough guy, commuting to the general post office on Eighth Avenue between 31st and 33rd streets. He worked days in the mailroom when I broke in as a beat reporter across the street in 1978, at the new Garden, on the Knicks night shift.

  After he’d finished work and before I began, we would occasionally meet for a late-afternoon meal. Then he would ride the subway home to Brooklyn, to which my parents had returned after what he considered an eight-year exile to bagel-challenged Staten Island. I would hustle inside the Garden press entrance on 33rd Street, next door to the old Charley O’s restaurant, to cover games my father would seldom watch but would persistently archive in the bottom drawer of his bedroom bureau.

  A man whose own immigrant father was functionally illiterate, my father was stunned and delighted to discover the family name in his beloved tabloids, first the New York Post and later the Daily News. From the beginning, he faithfully cut out my Knicks dispatches, filing them haphazardly in that bottom drawer. It didn’t matter what I had written—game story, sidebar, notebook. They were all crammed in faithfully. When I left the Post for the Daily News in 1983 and the editors ran a flattering promotion introducing their new basketball reporter who’d been lured away from their blood rival downtown, he cut out the same blurb that ran for several days.

  The plan, he said, was to make a scrapbook, but when he’d catch me sitting cross-legged on the carpet during a visit, searching for a clip I easily could have gotten from the newspaper morgue, he’d say, “Take what you need.”

  “If you want me to take them, why are you saving them?” I’d say, pretending to be clueless.

  He would grin, shrug, and continue clipping—right up to the day the telephone rang in my Brooklyn Heights apartment on the Sunday of Memorial Day weekend 1990. It was my younger sister, Randi, calling with the terrible news that he’d suffered a heart attack at my parents’ apartment on the outskirts of Canarsie and had been rushed to the hospital.

  The trip across Brooklyn was not too far, but by the time I navigated the holiday traffic to the Brookdale Hospital Medical Center on Linden Boulevard, on the edge of the Brownsville neighborhood, where we’d lived until I was ten, my father was gone, dead at 67. I had turned 38 earlier that month, and my firstborn son, the child who assured my father the family name would live on, was only seven months old.

  It was late in the evening by the time we returned to my parents’ apartment on East 78th Street off Flatlands Avenue. Wrapped in the Sunday comics, the Daily News rested in its customary position, on the edge of the living room coffee table. In those early hours of mourning, when mind and body seem to be acting independently, some part of me couldn’t leave my father’s ritual unexamined. So one last time the story I had written—a baseball column about a father and son—was cut from the paper and carried into the bedroom. But when I tried to place it onto the pile, I couldn’t. The drawer was packed so tight I could barely open it.

  “Did he stop cutting out my stories?” I asked my mother.

  She looked at me and laughed.

  “Check the bottom drawer in the other bedroom,” she said.

  There I found the clip annex, and that was the moment when it finally hit me—as hard as I’d ever been hit—that my father was gone. I sat there and cried and promised myself that I would make something of his collection, a scrapbook for his grandson.

  Here were the boldface headlines, the Post exclusives, including “Willis to Sonny (Werblin): In or Out,” that had launched my career and helped in getting Reed fired. Here were the screaming “Knicks in Turmoil” standbys that took a morsel or two of in-house controversy and ratcheted it up to outright mutiny.

  Perusing those stories, deciding which ones to save, I realized there was much more there than a dozen years of tabloid indulgences
, more than a narrative of Old Knicks afterlife, but instead a whole trove of Old Knicks afterglow: the chronicled ceremonies of jerseys retired, appointments of various players to organizational positions, successes and failures and inevitable firings. Above all, my father’s collection reflected not only profound shifts in the methodology of covering mainstream sports but the general coarsening of a culture.

  IN THE YEARS BETWEEN 1973 AND 1978, professional sports underwent their most impactful changes since the breaking of color lines. Players were empowered by the courts to market themselves as independent contractors. With union director Larry Fleisher behind him, pro basketball’s labor champion was Oscar Robertson, then of the Milwaukee Bucks. As president of the players’ union, he attached his name to a lawsuit seeking to block an NBA-ABA merger in 1970 and to change the system that bound a player to a single NBA team in perpetuity. As a result, the merger was blocked until 1976, when the suit was settled and a form of free agency was adopted, though too late for Robertson—who, like the trio of Knicks frontcourt men, retired in 1974.

  Along with richer, more empowered players came agents promoting agendas that sounded antithetical or even heretical to the core team-sport principles. This revolutionary change was more complicated in the NBA, whose stars were increasingly African American and were often subjected to harsher judgments when they took advantage of their newfound leverage. In racially charged Boston, for instance, Havlicek and Larry Bird could play hardball with Auerbach and remain beloved Celtics, in part because they were white. When Paul Silas and Cedric Maxwell took a stand, they were derided as greedy and shipped out of town.

  In New York, the nascent labor conflict was intensified by a man named George Steinbrenner. Months after promising to stick to building ships—to, in effect, leave his freshly purchased Yankees to his baseball people—Steinbrenner’s first season of authoritarian decrees began as the Knicks made their second championship run. Three years later, the Australian press lord Rupert Murdoch got his hands on the New York Post and soon after—merely by the force of their personalities and their desire to shake up the establishment of their respective industries—had consummated the perfect marriage of industry titans and intemperate tactics: Steinbrenner was the perfect tool for what Murdoch’s people deemed to be back-page news.

  Steinbrenner himself contrived a business model in which winning was less a collective pursuit and more a contractual demand. Payback for failure—especially for the most well compensated—became a bold-faced flogging on the back page of the Post. In turn, this forced the other papers, especially the Daily News, to amplify their negative coverage. Steinbrenner established these new terms of administrative engagement with his Billy Martin—Reggie Jackson teams and his tirades of the late seventies. When Sonny Werblin took over as president of the Garden in 1978, he enthusiastically played by the new rules in targeting Reed, the Knicks’ most beloved player, in a heartless exercising of executive power. When Werblin fired Reed and returned Holzman to the bench after my Post story gave him an opening, Old Knicks values seemed as obsolete as the quaint idea that the new Knicks would always prepare and police themselves in the evolving age of enhanced reward and risk.

  Upon returning, Holzman barely recognized the working environment he’d left in 1977, or at least the one in which he had achieved his greatest successes. In the world he was used to, reporters were part of the extended family. They could walk into the Knicks’ Garden administrative offices, kibitz with the secretaries, prowl the hallways like trusted staff members. “It was small, intimate, like family,” said Gwynne Bloomfield, who began working for the Knicks on December 18, 1969, answering telephones with the directive to never give out a player’s number. On her first day, a man called asking for the number of “the butcher.” She frantically searched the Rolodex before giving up and asking one of her colleagues if they knew who this butcher was. It took a few seconds before they realized she was talking about DeBusschere. Embarrassed, she returned to the caller, apologizing for the delay and for being unable to furnish a player’s number. “But this is Bill Bradley,” the caller said. Bloomfield didn’t know who Bradley was, either.

  “Somehow they didn’t fire me,” she said. She worked 12 years for the Knicks, had a front-row seat for home games next to the wife of New York Post columnist Milton Gross, and eventually had a guest list that was the envy of many when she married and became Mrs. Gwynne Bloomfield-Pike. As the years passed, she never missed an Old Knicks reunion. She loved all the players like brothers, and all the coaches, too, with the exception of Holzman. To her, he was a kind of father, whistling Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “Oh, What a Beautiful Morning” when he strolled into the office.

  “I always said that team ruined it for all of us who covered them,” said Ira Berkow. “Because they were so bright and so interesting that everything else after that couldn’t come close.”

  Sportswriters in the twenty-first century—long gone from the team planes and hotels, reduced in many cases to asking questions at sterile press conferences televised on the Madison Square Garden Network or with public relations people eavesdropping on the most benign chatter—would be shocked by the access their predecessors once had. Leonard Lewin, who was still at the Post when I got there, was a close friend and co-author of Holzman. When the Knicks held a victory party after winning the title in 1970, Lewin got up to speak on behalf of the writers, who were feted and fitted for championship rings.

  “You have to understand how different it all was in the fifties and sixties,” said Phil Pepe, a colleague of mine after I left the Post for the Daily News in 1983. “When I started with World-Telegram & Sun, we would never have traveled with a pro basketball team.” With newspapers unwilling to pay the road freight, the Knicks picked up the expenses to ensure daily coverage.

  Pepe, who became a News columnist, never wore his ring or profited from it, either. “Removed the diamond, made a pendant for my wife, and then got divorced,” he said. His son took the devalued ring; Pepe kept the memories. “We hung with Red a lot, him and Frankie Blauschild,” Pepe said. “We’d go out to dinner on the road all the time.”

  The tradition continued when Holzman returned, but only sparingly. With the exception of the Times’ Sam Goldaper, the beat reporters were younger, edgier, professional acquaintances who needed to be kept at a safe distance. In the arena of circumspection, nobody was tougher than Holzman. When I would occasionally call late at night with a deadline looming, I would beg Selma’s forgiveness and then wait for Red to come to the phone. “Boy, are you in big fucking trouble,” he’d say, knowing I had to be desperate, at wit’s end, to be putting my story in his hands.

  But the Garden became a strange, bewildering place for Holzman in the nearly four seasons of his second coming. He inherited some young talent from Reed, but it was undisciplined to the point of being uncoachable. When point guard Micheal Ray Richardson, Reed’s prized draft pick in 1978, lost his playing time under Holzman because he couldn’t keep a healthy percentage of his passes out of the stands, the rookie fumed until he could no longer contain himself.

  “This old man, he don’t want me,” Richardson, an endearing but troubled kid, told me (with a severe stutter) one night in the locker room after a road game. “I’m calling my agent to get me out of here. Write that.”

  When I asked him if he was sure, he went off again on Holzman, who happened to be standing a few feet away, out of our sight line, pretending he wasn’t listening. Turning to rush my scoop into the paper, I noticed the coach and trod by carefully. Holzman leaned into me as I passed: “That poor schmuck thinks you’re gonna help him.” When the story led the back page the next day, Richardson went to Werblin’s office and tearfully told the Garden boss that he wanted to stay.

  Sowing my tabloid oats, I took to playfully attributing sensitive material to a loquacious and quasi-fictitious character named “One Knick.” Many players said things they didn’t want their names attached to, but Holzman, unaccustomed to the muckr
aking, became convinced that One Knick was just one Knick: he suspected it was Mike Glenn, an unthreatening but chatty shooting guard. While the team and traveling party sat on a bus one day, Glenn was outside with the coach, vigorously denying that he was Deep Throat.

  The anonymous nitpicking intensified during a miserable 1981–82 season, undercut by rampant womanizing and drug use during the height of the NBA’s cocaine era. On the way down, Richardson uttered his famous line “The ship be sinking.” And when Nat Gottlieb of the Newark Star-Ledger asked how low it could go, Richardson marvelously reasoned, “Sky’s the limit.”

  Through it all, Holzman coached and comported himself as he always had. He never confronted reporters, as he had John Nucatola before Game 7 in Boston. Never got too high or too low, responding to our declarations of doom by reminding us that he was going home to have a scotch and dinner with Selma. By early spring of ’82 he knew that Werblin was going to make another coaching change. In Boston (where else?) for his final game, I asked him if he wished to comment on his players’ effort that season.

  “Maybe I’ll say something soon,” he said. He looked away, then back with a trademark sly grin that told me I should have known better. “Probably not.”

  STILL TAKING ADVICE FROM HOWARD COSELL, Werblin replaced Holzman with the rising coaching star (and unabashed know-it-all) Hubie Brown, while also bringing home Dave DeBusschere to direct the organization. While not quite persona non grata, DeBusschere had not been the most welcome Old Knicks legend during his time with the Nets and a subsequent stint as ABA commissioner. In fact, the Knicks waited seven years to retire DeBusschere’s number 22, loath to honor him while he was working for a local competitor.