Jerry Krause—a young scout for the Baltimore Bullets, who much later would fit all the right pieces around Michael Jordan for the Bulls’ six-title dynasty—remembered meeting Holzman for the first time. Krause had just disembarked from a flight on a Saturday morning in St. Louis—like Red, a travel-weary soul in need of a week’s worth of sleep.
“You’re Krause, aren’t you?” Holzman said. “I hear you work hard. Where you been?”
Krause was flattered that someone as experienced in the business as Holzman knew who he was, but he wasn’t keen on sharing trade secrets.
“Oh, up the road,” Krause said. Holzman shot him a don’t-shit-a-shitter look.
“Now listen, Krause,” he said. “I know for certain you were in Oklahoma City last night, because there were only two games worth seeing, and I was at the one in Wichita. Secondly, I know you’re going to scout the Van Arsdale boys tonight, because that plane over there is to Indianapolis and I know they’re the only ones worth seeing up there. So don’t try to lie to old Red again and maybe I’ll let you drive with me.”
Holzman even imparted some road wisdom, telling Krause how to maximize his time in a town by spending the afternoon before a night game at the school, watching tapes of earlier games, instead of wasting time watching television in a cheap hotel room.
Beyond the car and the counsel, Holzman didn’t reveal much, saving whatever he knew about the players for the detailed scouting reports he prepared for the Knicks’ front office. On those pages was evidence that he had even more of an impact on those two Knicks championships than is commonly known.
Not all the reports were saved. Some have inevitably been lost in the shuffle of lives lived. But a couple of bound volumes went into the back of Holzman’s closet with the rest of the keepsakes he never displayed at his modest Cedarhurst home in the Five Towns area of Long Island (where the Holzmans resided with a listed telephone number). His daughter and son-in-law would have other ideas. After Holzman’s death, in the finished basement of their Westchester townhome, Gail and Charles Papelian created a display of photos and memorabilia. There was the framed, player-autographed photo of the Rochester Royals’ 1951 NBA championship team, the net Holzman had worn around his neck after Game 7 of the 1970 Finals; even one of Selma’s old scorecards was framed and mounted on the wall. But the scouting reports were kept out of sight, delicate and protected like expensive family heirlooms.
When I spent time with Gail and Charles in their basement, talking about the qualities that can lead one to success, she posed a question that sounded right from the Holzman lexicon: “Doesn’t it always come down to character?” She seemed to have inherited her father’s personality, private and modest and unwilling under any conditions to publicly share anything that might be construed as negative. I could peruse the reports as long as I didn’t share some of what I saw—the various critical appraisals of players long retired and, in some cases, dead. Her father would not have approved.
She explained to me that it wasn’t as if she and her husband had created a shrine for mass consumption. It was their way of paying private tribute to a man who loved the game, and who proved it with a decade’s worth of oppressive travel and toil for $5,000 a year well into the sixties.
Born to Eastern European immigrants on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, Red moved to a tenement in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn when he was four. His early life was focused resolutely on the school yard and its games—basketball and handball—and his daughter figures he would have been a basketball lifer, one way or another. Just like his lifelong friend Fuzzy.
“Red didn’t mind scouting; he just wanted a job,” Levane said. “Me, I always wanted to coach. So what happens? I end up as a scout and he winds up coaching the perfect basketball team.” Not the best team, Levane would have to admit, in deference to Russell, Sam and K. C. Jones, and, yes, even that other, less likable Red. But take it from a guy who had been around long enough to have seen every NBA season from day one: “As far as five men working together, the Knicks were the perfect team.”
A DECADE AFTER RED WAS BURIED, I called Fuzzy at his daughter’s home in South Carolina during the summer of 2009, unaware that his wife, Kay, had recently passed away. Quick to offer condolences, I said I would call back another time, but, no, the 89-year-old Levane insisted he didn’t want to hang up. He wanted to talk about basketball, the other great love of his life—a welcome distraction from yet another season of grief.
Death had been too much a mainstay since he’d lost his sister, Marie, in the late nineties, followed by a couple of close friends and finally his best friends, Selma and Red. The sadness sent him into an emotional tailspin, in part because he just couldn’t figure out how he had outlasted all of them after his own near-death experience in 1991. Driving home with his wife after his induction into the New York City Basketball Hall of Fame, Levane suffered a ruptured aortic aneurysm. Had it occurred an hour later, he would have died of internal bleeding in his sleep, doctors later told him. Instead he was rushed to St. Francis Hospital in Roslyn, Long Island, where he needed a minor miracle to survive the next 72 hours in a coma. Holzman visited him every day for two weeks, until he was out of danger.
Beyond all the ribbing, Holzman and Levane had deep and abiding respect for each other. However famous or successful Holzman would become, he never forgot to credit Levane. “He always said that Fuzzy paved the way for him, every step of the way,” Gail told me.
When Holzman died, in 1998, Levane felt as if doctors had excavated a chunk of his heart. He especially missed him when the Knicks made a shocking run to the NBA Finals the following spring with a socially dysfunctional team that had finished eighth in the Eastern Conference during a season shortened by a lockout.
After they eliminated the Larry Bird—coached Indiana Pacers in the Eastern Conference finals, I was working my way through the crowd in the lower stands of the Garden when I bumped into Levane near his seat behind the Knicks’ bench, tears streaming down his face. I asked him about that. The emotional unburdening was part joy, he said, but also the result of all the funerals and wakes, the post-traumatic stress his doctor had explained to him. Despite the Knicks’ success, he was still hurting, most of all when he looked across the court to where Red once sat, Selma faithfully keeping score by his side, as she had ever since Holzman was on the bench, leaning forward, immersed in his work.
If only Red could have lived to see the Knicks back in the NBA Finals—Levane couldn’t let go of the thought. Maybe it would have given him more incentive to fight, kept him going after Selma was gone. Basketball had always meant that much to both of them. He admitted to compulsively dialing Holzman’s number throughout the stunning playoff run before hanging up, embarrassed and heartbroken all over again. He would think to himself: What the hell am I doing?
3
AN IRISH CARNIVAL
FIFTEEN YEARS BEFORE MAGIC AND LARRY, THERE WERE CAZZIE AND BILL. Like Magic Johnson and Larry Bird, who all but created March Madness with their epic 1979 final, Cazzie Russell (Chicago) and Bill Bradley (Crystal City, Missouri) were native sons of the Midwest. Like Magic, Russell played for a traditional sports power, the Michigan Wolverines. And Bradley, for his part, was largely responsible for lifting Ivy League Princeton into the national championship discussion, just as Bird would later do with a motley collection of Indiana State Sycamores. And then there was the unmistakable color of their skin: Russell was black, Bradley was white.
But unlike Bird and Magic, their teams met twice during the 1964–65 season, including a semifinal Michigan blowout of Princeton in the Final Four. It’s difficult to imagine, in an age of “one-and-done” college prospects, that a matchup akin to Bradley versus Russell (or, for that matter, Lew Alcindor versus Elvin Hayes, which played out on January 20, 1968, in front of 52,693 fans at the Houston Astrodome and has been billed ever since as the Game of the Century) will ever happen again.
The use of the college game as a one-year springboard t
o the NBA, the lusting after network television money, and the obsession with postseason tournaments have long reduced the college regular season to a drone of revenue-generating exhibitions, nightly cable filler. But on December 30, 1964, at Madison Square Garden, Michigan-Princeton not only captivated the city; it helped restore college basketball’s reputation after the 1951 point-shaving scandals had implicated four New York schools and brought disrepute to the basketball world in general.
The game was especially gratifying for Ned Irish, who had watched the Garden’s reputation crumble along with the sport it showcased. The first college basketball game he promoted—a doubleheader in which NYU defeated Notre Dame and Westminster beat St. John’s—had drawn 16,180 fans on December 29, 1934. He bragged that he didn’t have to put up a cent, the Garden demanding only that its percentage of the gate offset the $4,000 cost of renting the building. “Don’t forget, it was the Depression, and the Garden was dark a lot of nights,” Irish said. Under Irish, attendance for college basketball peaked at an average of 18,196 in 1946, when the pro leagues were in diapers. Five years later came the scandals; Irish watched helplessly as his gold mine collapsed, as the NCAA tournament made sure to steer clear of bookie-infested New York, and as the renowned CCNY program downscaled its involvement in the sport.
With the Michigan-Princeton matchup, the wounds seemed finally to heal. Michigan was ranked number one, with Russell leading its freewheeling offense. Playing for the first time in the Garden, Bradley was up from New Jersey, having months earlier captained the gold-medal-winning Olympic team in Rome, one of three Americans to average double figures in points. But he was still carrying the predictable Ivy stigma. Was he a dominant force because he had primarily been measured against scholarly white boys with secure futures in banking or law? “That was the number-one question: Is he playing against the kind of competition we were?” said Gail Goodrich, an All-American guard that season at UCLA. “I remember we played Yale and beat them by 40, so my first take was, well, probably not.”
More than 40 years after being shuttered and demolished, the old Garden survives only in New York’s collective memory, romanticized in photographs of an era gone by: outside, the landmark Nedick’s sign, where they served up hot dogs and drinks, the ritual snack on the way in or at halftime; inside, the sorely missed voice of the public address announcer, John F. X. Condon, launching the night with his elegant opening: “Good evening, everybody. Welcome to Madison Square Garden.” The court itself was buried beneath a gray, smoky haze that grew thicker and thicker among the arena’s steel girders as the night progressed. Balconies hovered over the court as if the Garden were an opera house, one filled with vociferous fans whose rooting interests often had more to do with the point spread than with home-team fidelity.
When I try to recall the old Garden’s interior, I only seem to summon Boston Garden (a building I frequented as a reporter in the 1980s, when Bird and company reigned). “It was actually a lot like Boston,” said Marv Albert, who broke into the business at the old Garden as a ball boy, on his way to replacing Marty Glickman as the radio voice of the Knicks. “And if you were able to go back to it now and saw everything that was wrong with it, the tiny locker rooms and all, you’d say, ‘How did professional athletes ever play here?’ Of course, that was all they knew, and if you were around back then, you have a great nostalgia for the place, the same way people feel about Ebbets Field. There were some great games there.”
That Garden incarnation was actually the second of three locations in the long history of the arena, dating back to 1879. The first two were located at East 26th Street and Madison Avenue. By 1925 the brand had moved to Eighth Avenue between 49th and 50th streets, where it remained until 1968. For the Michigan-Princeton game, the building was sold out, with scalpers outside demanding a princely sum of $35 for choice seats. Two NBA games on the same night in New York could be seen for a fraction of the cost.
But no Knicks game to that point was anywhere near as compelling an attraction as Michigan-Princeton, which was anticipated with a raw tension beyond any normal athletic competition. “I was at that game, and I can tell you that everybody was rooting for Bill,” said Cal Ramsey, the would-be Knick who had gone into teaching but never strayed far from the Garden. By “everybody” he meant everybody who was white. “It was 1964.”
In a positive light, it was also the year the Civil Rights Act was signed into law by President Lyndon Johnson—a blow against racial discrimination and segregation. A couple of weeks before the Michigan-Princeton game, Martin Luther King Jr. had traveled to Norway to receive the Nobel Peace Prize. But 1964 was as much about violence and unrest as it was about peace. In June, three young civil rights workers were murdered in Mississippi. Race riots shook Harlem during a six-day period in July and then spread to Rochester and Philadelphia. At the end of the year, here came an event in the heart of New York that had all the trappings of social conflict: the white star from an elite private school versus the black star from a public powerhouse—Old World privilege versus the New World knocks of a Chicago housing project.
Even for basketball fans, the game took on a rare significance. Everyone was eager to see how Bradley and the Ivy Leaguers would meet the challenge of the Wolverines—though they should already have known that Bradley, at least, was not likely to be intimidated. When Princeton played Syracuse in its opening game of the Holiday Festival, the Orange immediately set up a box-and-one defense, assigning a tough kid from Brooklyn, Sam Penceal, to chase Bradley. Reporting for Sports Illustrated, Frank Deford wrote: “Penceal literally clung to him, clutching, grabbing, clawing. Suddenly, obviously furious, Bradley lashed back with an elbow that rocked the husky Penceal … the crowd gasped.”
The scouts drooled. This particular Ivy Leaguer, no white wallflower, was not about to be bullied. Bradley, the only child of Warren (a banker) and Susan (a teacher), had been a natural at the game from the time he began playing in fourth grade. He was blessed with wide peripheral vision that made him an expert passer and a desire to work on the staples of his game, which depended more on repetition than physiological gifts. On school days, he would practice for three and a half hours after class. On Saturdays, from nine to five. On Sundays, he went from one thirty in the afternoon until five. He scored 3,068 points at Crystal City High School and could have gone to any basketball power he wanted.
Russell had no reason to question Bradley’s qualifications and recalled having no interest in the social context of their confrontation. Growing up in a Chicago housing project, he had strong Baptist roots and blue-collar parents who told him that he was no victim as long as he had the ability and a job to showcase it. “We didn’t have much, but enough to do what we needed to do,” Russell said. “I had two or three pair of pants, but they were always clean. I always had to go to class, account for my grades. I came home late from high school one night and my father said, ‘Where you been?’ I said, ‘I was at basketball tryouts.’ He wasn’t sure that’s what I should be doing. He came to the school one day, the same day the coach made final cuts. He looked in the gym and saw I was still there. He turned around, never saw that I saw him, and never said a word. That was his way of saying ‘Okay.’ ”
Russell said the prospect of playing a widely anticipated game in New York obscured everything else. “Madison Square Garden, a buzz in the city, everyone carrying their newspapers around, all hyped up,” he said. “That’s what I remember. Bradley didn’t have anything to prove to us. We already knew he was good.”
How good? That was what they had yet to find out. Not only did Bradley riddle the Wolverines for 41 points, but he brought the ball up against the press, controlled the offense, defended tenaciously, and went to the boards for 9 rebounds. Until he fouled out with 4:37 left in the game, it appeared that Princeton was going to win handily, the score 75–63 in the Tigers’ favor. Bradley’s commanding performance essentially overshadowed the 27 points scored by Russell, who at the time was reported to have struggled
because he was playing with a damaged sneaker. Unless memory failed, that was news to him. “I honestly don’t remember anything wrong with my sneaker,” he said. “I know I didn’t shoot well. I know Bradley did.”
After Bradley left the court, Princeton extended the lead to 77–63 before its historic collapse. Without Bradley to steady them against the relentless pressure, Princeton might as well have sent its debate team to try to break the half-court line. Michigan closed the game with a 16–1 run that included wiping out a 78–68 lead in 65 seconds, beginning with a rebound by Russell and run-out for a fast-break layup. So toothless were the Tigers without Bradley that on three of their next four possessions, they failed to reach midcourt before turning the ball over. With the fans in pandemonium, Michigan had the ball with 36 seconds left for the last shot, and put it where it belonged: in Russell’s hands.
He remembered the clock ticking down, the Princeton defender Ed Hummer trying to force him left so he couldn’t use his explosive quickness to get to the rim. Russell thought: Fine, have it your way. He dribbled left, stopped, and launched a 15-footer that won the game by the time it hit the ground. The celebration began. But in a more general accounting, and one that would preview the Bradley-Russell chronicles to come, the shot came too late to steal the night.
This proved Bradley’s show from start to finish. As he sat on the bench with a towel over his head, fouled out and helpless, the totality of Bradley’s performance took on a whole new dimension.
In an era of reigning big men, it seemed all the more amazing that one player who was no goliath in the paint, no Chamberlain or Russell, could have such an impact on a game. In his Sports Illustrated dispatch, Deford called Bradley’s effort “as fine an individual performance as has ever been given on a basketball court.” Deford, of course, was also a Princeton man. But Joe Lapchick, the former Knicks coach whose St. John’s team would upset Michigan in the festival final, was equally awestruck: “I always thought Oscar [Robertson] was the greatest, but Bradley is only a half step behind him,” he told Deford.
When the Garden Was Eden Page 4