When the Garden Was Eden

by Harvey Araton

  As much as the NBA’s reputation sank after embarrassing losses by the American national team in the 2002 World Championship and 2004 Olympics, Phil Jackson told me that his Shaq-and-Kobe Lakers team that won three straight titles starting in 2000 reached a point where it was as cohesive as any team he’d ever coached, including Jordan’s Bulls, or played on, including the Old Knicks. “The first year was a test pattern,” he said. “But the middle years they swamped teams for about 150 games, went 15–1 in the playoffs. They really knew how to play together.”

  I would also maintain that the Spurs, my favorite team of the early twenty-first century, would have been recognizable and formidable in any NBA decade. Yes, league officials cringed whenever they made a run to the Finals, because it augured a television ratings nosedive for the lack of a sexy, shoe-company-hyped superstar. The numbers were irrefutable, but they reflected more on our celebrity-driven culture of superficiality and a sport dumbed down for teenage consumption than on the brilliant San Antonio team foolishly typecast as a collection of boring South Texas hicks.

  Had that team been transported to Madison Square Garden or assembled in New York, it would no doubt have been characterized very differently. In the nation’s media capital, Tim Duncan would have been cast as the second coming of the Captain, celebrated for his quiet leadership, his fundamental purity. The Spurs would have been a proud reflection of the great melting pot, with their rich blend of international stars: Duncan of the U.S. Virgin Islands, Manu Ginóbili of Argentina, and Tony Parker of France. With their beautiful pick-and-roll passing game, they would have been hailed for reinventing basketball as an art form, just as the Old Knicks had been.

  Like Red Holzman, Gregg Popovich effectively deployed players who, when judged individually, were unimposing, especially by the measure of modern metrics. Bruce Bowen was an earthbound career journeyman, a scratch-and-claw midsize defender with the ability to knock down an open three. After David Robinson retired, the Spurs used a rotation of ordinary role players at power forward or center, depending on how you preferred to define Duncan. But as a unit, they were brilliant at maximizing their strengths, spreading the floor, running their half-court offense through the multi-skilled and exceedingly unselfish Duncan. In other words, the team’s whole was significantly greater than the sum of its parts.

  According to Mike Riordan, that was precisely how the Old Knicks would have imposed themselves on the best teams, regardless of when they played. “You see all the double-teaming they do now?” he said. “We would have welcomed that, because we were a great—not good, but great—passing and jump-shooting team.”

  Months after the Phil Jackson—coached Lakers won the ’09 title by defeating Orlando, Riordan used the Magic to make his case that the ’70 Knicks would have matched up favorably against an elite modern-day squad. “The Magic are a light-it-up team, without great size except for their presence in the middle, kind of like we were,” he said.

  Asked if he thought Willis Reed could contain the chiseled man-child Dwight Howard, Riordan said, “Are you kidding me? Willis stood in there against Wilt Chamberlain! He was a lot better than people give him credit for. He was strong enough to play center, but he had the skills of a forward. You think Dwight Howard would like having to go out and defend against that lefty jumper?”

  With good reason, Riordan also liked his guys’ chances in the backcourt, with Hall of Famer Walt Frazier matched up against Jameer Nelson and Dick Barnett against Courtney Lee. At forward, he was certain that Dave DeBusschere, while surrendering a few inches, would kick the jump-shooting derriere of the one-dimensional Rashard Lewis, while Bradley would hold his own against the streaky Frenchman Mickael Pietrus.

  Riordan’s point was well taken: for all the assumption that the athlete of old would be in over his head, the Magic would hardly have been a physically intimidating opponent for the Old Knicks. “How many games did they win against the Lakers, one?” Riordan said. Yes, one, though had the rookie Lee converted a lob to the rim at the end of regulation in Game 2, the series would have gone longer. “Okay, maybe they get one against us, too,” Riordan said.

  In the aftermath of those ’09 Finals, one coronation indisputably affirmed Old Knicks eminence—Phil Jackson’s tenth coaching title, breaking a deadlock with Red Auerbach. One of the purest joys for Jackson was in establishing the new mark (which he improved on a year later against the Celtics), one not likely to be broken in his or perhaps anyone else’s lifetime.

  “He is the reason why I am a coach, obviously,” Jackson said of Holzman, who always told him to not make the game more complicated than it was. “It’s not rocket science, Phil,” Holzman would say. “It’s see the ball on defense, hit the open man on offense.” But while Jackson’s X’s and O’s strategy, his celebrated use of the triangle offense, came from another old lifer, Tex Winter, his best coaching trait was in knowing how to handle people. Zen philosophy stripped away, Jackson was much like Holzman: he allowed his players to succeed through self-discovery.

  Never was this more evident than after Game 3 of the 1994 Eastern Conference semifinals, when the Bulls—having found a way to flourish without the baseball wannabe Michael Jordan, winning a stunning 55 regular-season games—found themselves in a deadlocked battle for survival, already down 2–0 in the series, at home against Patrick Ewing and the Knicks with 1.8 seconds left.

  Jackson called a play for Toni Kukoc, the Croatian star, whom Jerry Krause, the GM, had pursued faithfully, even as his team was in the midst of winning three consecutive titles, rankling Jordan and his wingman, Scottie Pippen.

  Ninety-nine times out of 100, the ball would have gone to Jordan, but he wasn’t around, and Pippen was furious that Jackson would dare nominate Kukoc, an NBA rookie, over him. Pippen sat down during the time-out and refused to get up. Kukoc, the better shooter, proceeded to drain the game-winning jumper from straight out.

  In the locker room, the players were stunned by what had occurred. Given Pippen’s standing, it was a pivotal moment for Jackson, not all that different from the one Holzman had faced when Russell took his racial-profiling anger out on white teammates and Reed. Holding back deliberately, Jackson watched Bill Cartwright, the respected veteran center, stand up to tearfully confront Pippen. “Scottie, how could you?” he said.

  Chastened by a colleague, not his coach, Pippen apologized. Jackson never had to say a word to exert his authority, much less berate Pippen in the way the media would in the aftermath of the Sitting Bull episode. His teams policed themselves and as a result were stronger for it.

  “A lot of people thought the 1.8-second denial would define Scottie’s career, but it was a learning moment in his life,” Jackson said on the eve of Pippen’s 2010 induction into the Naismith Hall of Fame. “He came back as the leader of teams for another decade.”

  Jordan’s return helped, of course, but so did Jackson’s willingness to loosen up on the reins and allow Cartwright to make it easier for Pippen to express his remorse, just as Holzman had done through Reed. Pippen’s reputation as one of the great multipurpose players in NBA history actually grew when Jordan returned for the Bulls’ second three-peat, extending Jackson’s ring collection to a second hand.

  When Jackson closed in on a share of the record in Los Angeles, Auerbach, who would die in 2006, conceded that he was a clever guy, a good coach, but would also occasionally tweak him for working with teams that were “ready-made for him,” for never building a championship team from the ground up, as Auerbach had in Boston.

  Auerbach seemed to forget that the teams he coached in Boston were disproportionately dependent on Bill Russell. Jackson was never a GM, never responsible for compiling talent. And while all of his championship rosters included the best player in the game—Jordan in Chicago, Shaquille O’Neal and later Kobe Bryant in L.A.—none of them had so much as sniffed a title before Jackson began filling their heads with the tenets of togetherness gleaned from Lost Battalion Hall.

  The notion that Jac
kson had been handed much of anything was also a misappropriation of the facts. Rare was the modern head coach who put up with the bush league life—as Jackson had—for the chance to hone his skills. More than a decade after he retired as a player, when nobody would even give him an assistant’s job in the NBA because of his iconoclast image, Jackson spent summers coaching in Puerto Rico, as had Holzman. It would be good for him, Holzman had advised, because the environment was rabid and the language barrier would force him to find alternative ways to communicate.

  During the height of the Bird-Magic era, when Pat Riley fell into the plum Lakers position, Jackson was in Albany, New York, on a career treadmill in the CBA, or Cockroach League, as he called it. Commuting from his home in Woodstock, more than an hour away, he won the title his first year, 1984, and promptly wrote a two-page letter to the GM, pleading for a raise to $30,000 and a per diem hike to $25. He drove the team’s van on road trips of less than 200 miles, checked the team into cheap hotels, and did everything for the players short of squeezing toothpaste onto their brushes.

  “It’s a more organic experience,” he told me one night in early 1987 when our paths crossed in Pensacola during his fourth year on the job. I was there doing a feature for the Daily News on the comeback of a former Knicks center, Marvin Webster, with the Pensacola team. After the game, Jackson and I hit a roadside seafood shack that fit his meager budget and then a downtown bar. With a houseful of children, he said he was nearing the end of his coaching rope; he couldn’t afford to hang on much longer. He didn’t think anyone in the NBA would hire him and was formulating plans for law school.

  But all those years ago when Holzman was keeping a scout’s eye on him in North Dakota, so was Krause of the Baltimore Bullets. A maverick of sorts in his own right, Krause had tried to get Jackson a job on the staff of the Bulls’ head coach, Stan Albeck, in 1985. Jackson showed up in jeans and sandals, with his hair unkempt and a scruffy beard. Albeck, no bohemian, was not impressed.

  Two years later, with Albeck gone and a sudden vacancy on Doug Collins’s staff, Krause again called Jackson in for an interview, along with Butch Beard. Knowing both had played for Holzman and that Beard had served as his Knicks assistant, Krause called his old scouting companion at home in Cedarhurst. “They’re both your guys—want to tell me what you think?” Krause said.

  Holzman wasn’t about to talk up one at the expense of the other. He loved both. As with his players, he wanted Krause to come to his own conclusion. “You’ll figure it out,” he told him.

  Partial to Jackson, Krause told him to wear a suit and cut his hair. Jackson complied, impressed Collins, and got the job. As the 1988–89 regular season was winding down, one in which the Bulls would go 47–35, Krause, believing the team wasn’t playing to its full potential, went to the owner, Jerry Reinsdorf, and asked about replacing Collins with Jackson. That spring, Jordan hit one of his most famous shots—a buzzer beater over Cleveland’s Craig Ehlo to eliminate the Cavs in a decisive Game 5. “You still want to make that change?” Reinsdorf asked Krause.

  Krause told him he did; he believed Collins was too emotional, too stressed out, and the more cerebral Jackson was the logical guy to go the distance. After the Bulls lost to the Pistons in the conference finals, Jackson was hired and immediately installed Winter’s triangle, predicated on movement and passing, to diversify the attack (at least until the shot clock wound down and Jordan took over). Within two years, with Pippen growing into the role of second star and anchoring a fierce unit of agile and team-oriented defenders, the Bulls were champions.

  The league’s second-greatest dynasty after the Bill Russell Celtics would ignite an unprecedented growth period in revenue and global expansion of its product with six titles in eight years. Chicagoans—especially Krause and Reinsdorf—would forever believe the run would have been eight straight had Jordan not walked out for a year and a half following a frenzy of 1993 headlines on gambling excesses and the murder of his father, James.

  As with many great things, competing agendas brought the Bulls dynasty to a disagreeable end, with Jackson, Jordan, and Pippen united against Krause, who was forever reminded (especially by Jordan) that he had taken over the GM job after Jordan was drafted and who alienated His Airness by saying, “Organizations win championships.” The team disbanded in 1998 and Jackson eventually moved on to the Lakers, where he continued adding rings to his collection—one that ironically had begun with him out of uniform in 1970.

  Jackson said he prefers not to compare the teams he has coached with the Old Knicks; he doesn’t see the point. Comparing great teams across different eras is like comparing Angelina Jolie to Rita Hayworth. But Bill Bradley, for whom Jackson once nearly quit coaching in order to work on his friend’s presidential campaign, played along with a Bulls—versus—Old Knicks matchup. He began by reminding me that while the Bulls had Jordan, routinely referred to as the best player in history, his team, at least the 1973 version, countered with five players (Reed, Frazier, DeBusschere, Monroe, and Lucas) from the NBA’s all-time Top 50 team selected in the league’s 50th anniversary year, 1996. Only Jordan and Pippen made it from the Bulls.

  “First off, Willis versus Bill Cartwright: give that one to Willis,” Bradley said. “Then Horace Grant versus DeBusschere, give it to DeBusschere; Frazier versus B. J. Armstrong, give it to Frazier. Earl versus Jordan: that’s Jordan, but Earl’s also going to do some things with the ball, make him work on defense.”

  Even more than Jordan-Monroe, he conceded that the small forward position was the most problematic. “Now I get Pippen,” he said. And here, he agreed, was the ultimate embodiment of the generational stereotype and divide, Pippen representing the evolutionary nightmare—6'8", long-armed, terrifyingly elastic and athletic.

  “You really can’t make that comparison, can you?” Bradley said. “So when it gets to that one, what am I going to do? I’m going to cry: ‘Help!’ ”

  And yet if Bradley could count on anything during his years in professional basketball, it was on defense—as with all great teams, help was on the way, all part of a preordained rotation.

  IN EARLY JUNE 1999, I was asked by my editor at the Times to do a column attempting to explain how the Knicks, in a matter of weeks, had gone from dysfunctional embarrassment to potential champion. During a lockout-shortened, 50-game regular season, Dave Checketts fired his GM, Ernie Grunfeld, and was chasing the idle Phil Jackson as a coaching replacement for Jeff Van Gundy. Suddenly the team pulled together; sneaked into the playoffs as the conference’s eighth seed; and in succession knocked off Pat Riley’s Miami Heat, the Atlanta Hawks, and the Larry Bird—coached Indiana Pacers on the way to San Antonio for Game 1 of the league Finals.

  With the aging Patrick Ewing injured and unable to play, these had become the Knicks of the likable Van Gundy and the smooth-shooting Allan Houston. But the team took its personality more from Latrell Sprewell—notorious for his intimate relationship with the neck of his former coach, P. J. Carlesimo—and the preening Larry Johnson, among other renegades not exactly destined for a Senate run, much less sainthood. Starving for a title, the city was nonetheless turned on by the surge of an embattled underdog.

  I decided to check in with Dave DeBusschere to see what he thought of the possibility that this motley crew might tread on the Old Knicks’ sacred championship ground. (Instead, San Antonio won the series in five games, behind Tim Duncan and David Robinson.) DeBusschere laughed and said that a couple of his children had actually called to make the same point.

  “What are you talking about?” he told them. “We won our second title 25 years ago.” (It was 26, but who aside from the long-suffering fans was counting?) Then DeBusschere paused as if he wanted to say more but wasn’t sure he should.

  “Off the record?” he said.

  Whenever DeBusschere was about to say something sarcastic, he had the habit of contorting the lower part of his mouth so that the words would tumble out the side. After I agreed to keep whatever he wanted to add
out of the paper, I could picture him as he said, “These assholes could never have what we had in New York.”

  I didn’t think him arrogant or unfair. He was merely stating in locker room vernacular what he had every right to believe. DeBusschere’s teams were the city’s first true basketball love, consummated in the years before the romance of sport became complicated by money and the constructed divide between athlete and fan.

  But which fans? And for how long? During a bleak decade from the turn of the century, those runs to the Finals in 1994 and 1999 under Pat Riley and then Van Gundy had become the good old days to legions of younger Knicks fans. Remember when John Starks threw down that thunderous left-handed dunk in Michael Jordan’s airspace during the ’93 playoffs? When Ewing stood on the Garden press table, soaking in the love after Game 7 of the conference final against Indiana? When the lane parted for Ewing in Game 7 against the Pacers in ’94 and he back-rimmed his layup to end the brief but compelling Riley era?

  Those were the playoff epics that Peter DeBusschere—born in 1971, too late to remember his father in uniform, save a couple of wheezing contests that passed for legends’ games during all-star weekends—remembered fondly. “Those were my teams, Ewing and Charles Oakley,” he said. “There were some amazing games at the Garden.”

  He would go with his father and brother, mostly on Sunday afternoons, holiday games on Christmas, not so much at night because “Dad didn’t like waiting around after work.” But playoff nights were invariably worth it. “I remember sitting there with him in the front row for Starks’s dunk,” he said. And for Larry Johnson’s 4-point play that brought the Knicks back from the dead in Game 3 of the ’99 conference finals in front of a crimson-faced coach, Larry Bird, on the Indiana bench.