When the Garden Was Eden

by Harvey Araton

  His professional marriage to the combustible but always entertaining Brown was of the shotgun variety, as Werblin, in trying to replicate his magic with Joe Namath’s Jets, was more enamored of marquee names and less interested in allowing the president of basketball operations to select his own coach and create a unified partnership. Though the Knicks had some modest success after DeBusschere landed the high-scoring Brooklynite Bernard King—they went seven games in the second round of the 1984 playoffs with Larry Bird and the Celtics—Brown was never a DeBusschere ally, complaining about his work ethic to every reporter who would keep his name out of the paper.

  The relationship still might have worked out had King not torn up his knee months before DeBusschere’s most memorable coup—which, granted, was attributable to the cooperative Ping-Pong ball that brought Patrick Ewing to New York via the inaugural NBA draft lottery in 1985. Brown proceeded to alienate his prize rookie by playing Bill Cartwright at center and Ewing at power forward, making him defend quicker opponents much too far from the basket and stressing his tender knees. When the team collapsed under an avalanche of injuries, DeBusschere was fired, and Brown tumbled down soon after. The franchise moved into a period of continuous ownership and administrative transition.

  Not the type to whine to reporters, DeBusschere would express his frustrations to confidants—the broadcaster John Andariese, his old pal Bradley, and his wife. “Dave never really enjoyed his time in the front office because it was run by a corporation and he always felt hampered,” Geri DeBusschere said. He would hash out a deal with another team and have to run it through an unresponsive chain of command. He would fume. The deal would die. And then Brown would blame DeBusschere for being inactive and lazy.

  DeBusschere grew wary of the media responsibilities, calling one reporter back when a story was developing and saying, “Just tell the other guys what I told you.” When the ax fell, he was relieved to exit the basketball stage, once and for all. He would be fine, he said. Two things DeBusschere never lacked: employment suitors and drinking buddies.

  But the organizational infighting didn’t end with DeBusschere and Brown. Werblin’s celebrity matchmaking established a haunting precedent. Front-office conflict became a way of Garden life: Al Bianchi versus Rick Pitino, Ernie Grunfeld versus Jeff Van Gundy, Isiah Thomas versus anyone perceived to be in his way, even after he was replaced by Donnie Walsh (thanks to Thomas’s strangely symbiotic relationship with the congenitally contentious Garden strongman James Dolan). While the intramural contests played out endlessly on the back pages, the team struggled for traction and the years without a third championship turned into decades.

  Even when the Knicks were a conference power and NBA finalist in 1994 and 1999, the Garden was a Midtown shark tank. In 1995, after captivating the city, Pat Riley made an inside move for more power in personnel matters. Dave Checketts, who had hired Riley and restored competitive order to the franchise, resisted the coup. Riley responded by faxing in his resignation and signing a sweeter deal giving him total control of basketball operations with the Miami Heat.

  Checketts, a devout Mormon from Utah who was recommended to the Knicks by David Stern, was a brilliant front man for the organization, a quick study of the New York fan. “Everywhere you went around town, you could still feel a love for those championship teams,” Checketts said. “They were the standard for everything we did. And though we started having success pretty soon after Pat came in, I didn’t want to distance ourselves from that. I wanted to embrace it. The bar was set really high, but that’s what I wanted our goal to be.”

  Checketts brought Holzman back into the fold, made him part of the organizational process. Holzman would sit in on draft meetings and admit he didn’t know who the hell the others were talking about. But that wasn’t the point, as far as Checketts was concerned. He wanted Holzman around for the legacy he represented, for who he was.

  When the Knicks flew to Houston for the first two games of the 1994 Finals, they threw a big party between games at a ranch outside the city with a rodeo theme, called it the Knicks Lone Star Hoedown. It was there that I experienced one of the great moments of my sports journalism life: the sight of Holzman and Spike Lee, two famously hardnosed Brooklynites, chatting away in tall cowboy hats.

  About ten days later, back in Houston for Game 6, the Knicks led the series 3–2 and were trailing the Rockets 86–84, with the ball in the final seconds. The star-crossed Ewing—obscured in college and in the pros by Michael Jordan, who that season had taken leave of the Bulls—set a high screen for John Starks, the streaky shooting guard. Starks was freed momentarily on the left wing, behind the three-point line. But Hakeem Olajuwon switched off Ewing, in pursuit of Starks—just the way Wes Unseld had chased Bill Bradley at the conclusion of Game 7, 1971. It was the same area of the floor and the same result. Olajuwon deflected Starks’s jumper, the Rockets went on to win Game 7, and Holzman never saw his beloved Knicks get that close to a championship again.

  Days after he died in November 1998, in the funeral chapel on Queens Boulevard, not far from the old training site, Lost Battalion Hall, Checketts eulogized Holzman in a quavering voice, calling him the “patriarch of the Knicks … a great coach who forced his will on a group of players.” As he spoke those words, he nodded to those players, who would carry their old coach in his coffin, to the hearse, on the way to his eternal rest.

  IN THE SPRING OF 2003, in the 30th year of the Knicks’ championship drought, a celebration of better times was planned for June 6 at the NBA Store on Fifth Avenue, open to a limited number of fans. It was to be the first reunion of the championship cast since the death of Holzman, and the guys eagerly anticipated standing tall for the man who had given them the confidence and license to, in effect, coach themselves.

  But three weeks before the gathering, on May 14, news arrived that was both shocking and devastating: DeBusschere, 62, had suffered a heart attack during a workday on a lower Manhattan street and died at New York University Hospital.

  “If you told me cancer, I’d say okay,” Geri DeBusschere said. “But the heart? I mean, he was so strong.” Her husband had had no diagnosed history of heart disease, though maybe there were clues that went unheeded, going all the way back to the night of the first championship in 1970. On the way home DeBusschere had thought he was having a heart attack and had Geri rush him to the hospital. Palpitations, he was told; too much excitement, a few too many drinks.

  “Then the year before he died, we were in Florida and Dave was playing golf with Billy Cunningham,” she said. “Billy said, ‘Dave didn’t look too good; he didn’t finish.’ And then he told someone else he felt shortness of breath.” Athletes are commended for soldiering on in spite of the pain, and nobody was better at dismissing his own discomforts than DeBusschere. When Bill Bradley eulogized him at his funeral, he said: “If I had $100 for every night Dave played hurt, I could buy a nice car.”

  If not for Bradley, DeBusschere would have been mourned without fanfare. Several times, he had told his wife that if anything were to happen to him, “I don’t want anything, no big deal, just bury me with the family.”

  “What are you going to do?” Bradley asked Geri DeBusschere on the phone, calling as soon as he’d heard that his old roommate—who had proudly watched from the gallery when Bradley was sworn in to the Senate—was gone. His voice was choked with emotion. She could tell he’d been crying.

  “Dave doesn’t want anything,” she said. “I’ll just get a cemetery plot.”

  “Oh, no, Geri, you can’t do that,” Bradley said. “Too many people loved Dave.”

  He talked her into a public funeral and then took it upon himself to make all the arrangements. On May 19, 2003, mourners filled the pews of the St. Joseph Roman Catholic Church in Garden City. They included DeBusschere’s core teammates, though Earl Monroe said he had gone as friend and foe, as Old Knick and Baltimore Bullet. Someone, he said, had to represent Gus Johnson, who had died 16 years earlier of brain cancer in A
kron, Ohio. “Dave respected Gus so much; he always told me that,” Monroe told me that day outside the church. “He always respected the opponents.”

  The feelings were mutual. John Havlicek—whose shoulder was separated in the ’73 series by a DeBusschere screen—was among the speakers and pallbearers. His son had called with the news, to spare him the shock of hearing it from a television talking head. “I was devastated,” he said. “Dave had become like a brother.” Dave Cowens was another Celtic who came to pay his respects, along with Dave Bing of the Pistons, Cunningham of the 76ers, Oscar Robertson of the Royals and Bucks—every franchise from the Eastern Conference of 1970, present and accounted for.

  Too distraught to speak at the funeral, Reed asked Bradley to represent the team. Bradley spoke lovingly and irreverently of his six-year roommate. DeBusschere may have been an incorrigible snorer, he said, but there was no more loyal friend or less pretentious man once he was awake, no one prouder to be an Old Knick.

  “Championship teams share a moment that few other people know,” Bradley said. “The overwhelming emotion derives from more than pride. Your devotion to your teammates, the depth of your sense of belonging, is something like blood kinship, but without the complications. Rarely can words express it. In the nonverbal world of basketball, it’s like grace and beauty and ease, and it spills into all areas of your life.”

  If only legislative bodies could be so committed to the cause, Bradley mused. But Harry Reid—his friend in the Senate from Nevada who would become majority leader—was so moved when he read Bradley’s eulogy that he placed it into the Congressional Record and sent Bradley a copy of the document. Bradley hung it on a wall in his office, never second-guessing himself for refusing to honor DeBusschere’s request.

  “I felt that whatever Dave would say about the funeral—‘I don’t want it’—that it was a matter of people being given the chance to pay their respects,” he said. “I thought he deserved that and the family deserved it, too.”

  Even with the media coverage, it was difficult to rationalize and accept the loss of Dave DeBusschere. As time passed, some would even forget he was gone. “It’s hard for me, you know?” Geri DeBusschere said in early summer 2009. “It’s an unusual name, so people make the connection when they meet me and you’d be amazed by how many say, ‘Oh, what’s he doing now?’ ”

  Her voice seized, tears flowed. Six years had passed, four grandchildren born to her three children, starting with Peter DeBusschere’s first of two. When Peter’s wife, Kristin, an Upper East Side physician, got pregnant several months after his father’s death, the baby was born a full week after the due date in a bittersweet twist of fate.

  Little David was born on November 22. “Dave’s uniform number,” Geri DeBusschere said, her face brightening even as tears still flowed. “We felt like he was sending us a message that everything was okay.”

  A COUPLE OF MONTHS AFTER MY INTERVIEW with Geri DeBusschere, Bradley called and said that she wanted to speak with me again. I had heard through the Knicks’ grapevine that she had suddenly turned ill and had undergone surgery, and I didn’t wish to impose. “No, she wants to get on with her life,” Bradley said. “She has a funny story to tell you.”

  So I called, and she talked about how DeBusschere, during the 1970 playoff run, had gone out with Reed to a shooting range on Long Island and returned with a deep and ugly-looking gash, still bleeding. DeBusschere’s gun had kicked back and taken a chunk of his forehead. “Dave didn’t want to go to the hospital because he was embarrassed,” she said. “He kept saying, ‘What the hell am I going to tell everyone?’ Finally, we got the bleeding to stop and I said, ‘Tell them Michelle cracked you with her bottle.’ So that’s what he did—the big, tough Dave DeBusschere assaulted by his 18-month-old daughter.”

  It was a sweet story from a courageous woman, who weeks after her husband’s death had gone to the NBA Store for the ’73 team’s reunion and received the biggest ovation of all. Sadly, Geri DeBusschere would not get the chance for a repeat performance when the Old Knicks gathered for the 40th anniversary of the 1970 title, as she succumbed to liver cancer weeks after we last spoke. Months later, Dick McGuire died of a brain aneurysm, casting yet another pall over the franchise and leaving the extended family that remained to wonder if the Garden would, in our remaining years, ever be Eden again.

  18

  THEN, NOW, AND FOREVER

  MAKING THE COURTSIDE ROUNDS IN ORLANDO BEFORE THE LAKERS took on the Magic in Game 3 of the 2009 NBA Finals, Spike Lee became engaged in a feisty discussion with Mark Jackson. The ABC analyst from St. Albans, Queens, got under the skin of the director from Fort Greene, Brooklyn, by making the sacrilegious claim that the Knicks’ teams of the late eighties, featuring Patrick Ewing at center and Jackson himself playing the point, would have handled the Old Knicks, their titles notwithstanding.

  Jackson argued that each succeeding generation is athletically enhanced and therefore superior to the previous one—somewhat out of character for a guy who compiled 10,334 career assists primarily with guile and vision (and who in 2011 would become the head coach of Golden State). Ally and supporter of the modern superstar, Lee nonetheless countered by saying that the Old Knicks’ level of collective excellence in most cases far exceeded that of contemporary teams and would compensate for an inability to play on a high wire. Then Lee excused himself, walked across the court, and bumped right into Cazzie Russell.

  For Lee, the chance encounter felt like an act of providence, akin to a hilarious scene in Woody Allen’s Annie Hall, where Allen’s character, Alvy, complains to Diane Keaton’s Annie, while standing in a Manhattan movie line, about a Columbia professor pontificating on the work of the Canadian media theorist Marshall McLuhan—whom Allen proceeds to pull out of thin air to question how the professor ever got to teach at Columbia in the first place.

  Lights, camera, satisfaction! Lee caught Jackson’s attention, while pointing to Russell, who yelled out, “Mark, you better stop smoking whatever it is you’re smoking.”

  Months later, back at the Garden for the 40th reunion of the 1970 team, Russell could laugh off the slander. “No one will ever know, right?” he said. “But I will say this: we had a pretty decent center, didn’t we? We had a couple of great guards and a power forward who wasn’t backing down from nobody.” Old wounds being better left unopened, Russell didn’t get into the other forward position, which, of course, would have been Bradley starting ahead of him.

  Granted, it is difficult, especially for young people, to watch NBA footage predating the Jordan era and not be amused by the tight shorts, with far less use of the three-point line or no line at all, fewer blow-by dribbles and ESPN-worthy highlights. The rare video preserved from the seventies can look as ancient as Egypt.

  Conversely, the old-timers watch the predictable exhibitions and shake their heads at the bastardized product that seems to mimic a video game—so many mad dashes to the rim and low-percentage shots. “I once asked Oscar, ‘What do you think of the modern player?’ and he said, ‘Other than the fact that he can’t dribble, shoot, or pass, he’s okay,’ ” said Bill Bradley, who didn’t agree with the Big O and believed the talent of twenty-first-century players to be jaw-dropping, in many cases.

  “But the point is that the game changes, so the criteria you used before to determine who’s good, or best, can’t be used,” he said. “If we were playing by the rules of the sixties and seventies, when we played with our feet and with finesse, well, that’s very different than the rules of today, where’s there’s not a premium put on movement, where the game is played with upper-body strength, there’s a lot more intentional contact, and the three-point rule changes the flow. I’ve had people who were major Knicks fans tell me that they’ve stopped watching the games, partly because the game changed.”

  Vintage political Bradley: liberal Democrat straddling the pragmatic center. But his generational rival John Havlicek shifted from his right-side leanings (driving to the basket, that
is) for a more radical assertion. “I certainly think we could compete, and, given the same latitude—wraparound dribbles, three or four steps to the rim—we would be even better,” he said. “For every dunk they’d get on us, we’d probably get two backdoor layups on them.”

  Still a respected and unbiased analyst of the modern game as an octogenarian, Jack Ramsay said it was also wrong to assume that players of 40 years ago would be grossly outclassed athletically in an open-court game with—for argument’s sake—Steve Nash and the Suns. After all, he said, there was something called the ABA, the renegade NBA rival, which had its share of flamboyant sky walkers and three-point bombers. It wasn’t as if the more grounded players of the Old Knicks’ era never had to face players who were more athletic.

  “I have no doubt that teams like the Knicks of the seventies, my Portland team, the old Celtics, would adapt and still be very good,” Ramsay said. “I always hear things—like Bill Russell would be overpowered today by bigger, stronger guys—and I always say: absolute nonsense.”

  I’ve always believed the best NBA decade to be the eighties—as epitomized by Magic Johnson and Larry Bird. These were big men with little-man skills, heralding a new-age athlete still equipped with old-school fundamentals and imbued with team-first values. Asked during an ESPN Classic taping to choose my greatest team of all time, I picked the 1984–85 Lakers—still with a potent Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, the young veterans Magic and James Worthy, and the likes of Bob McAdoo, Jamaal Wilkes, and Michael Cooper off the bench.

  But I also try not to gush too much about one decade or era, because they all come with qualitative extremes. During a college panel discussion in Boston in 2006, a reporter from a local newspaper rambled on about how amazing the eighties were while blasting the contemporary players as essentially uncommitted and clueless. Much as I agreed that the Bird-Magic rivalry was the best NBA story line ever, I had to point out that the eighties had its share of very bad basketball, and we watched more than enough of it in New York.