When the Garden Was Eden

by Harvey Araton

  This was heady stuff for a young man with the vertical range of a YMCA warrior and one who didn’t appear quick enough to play in an NBA backcourt (or big and brawny enough, at 6'5", to survive as a forward). Bradley suspected that he received the zealous praise precisely because he was no exceptional specimen. Many coaches and sportswriters relished the opportunity to champion a so-called thinking man’s player, and were inclined to celebrate him for that reason—if not strictly for the color of his skin.

  Given the mounting evidence that the sport was well on its way to becoming a national stage for talented black men, and in the face of fomenting social issues, Bradley believed he may have been the first of the great white hopes. In hindsight, he admitted that it was not a role he was comfortable with; white and black players alike saw through the thinly disguised media stereotyping, he said. From Bradley to Bird and beyond, black stars would chafe at the blue-collar, hardworking characterizations that accompanied the shrinking number of their white counterparts, while they themselves were lauded for their God-given talent.

  In 1987, the issue would for the first time become a public discussion when Dennis Rodman and Isiah Thomas suggested that Bird was the beneficiary of white hype. The timing was bad: Bird’s Celtics had just eliminated the Pistons from the playoffs, and only two games separated the miracle (in Boston, at least) of Bird stealing Thomas’s inbounds pass, which resulted in one of the all-time end-of-game heists in NBA history. The execution was clumsy. But given time to explain himself in a calmer setting, in an interview with Ira Berkow of the New York Times, Thomas captured the sentiments of many black players:

  When Bird makes a great play, it’s due to his thinking, and his work habits. It’s all planned out by him. It’s not the case for blacks. All we do is run and jump. We never practice or give a thought to how we play. It’s like I came dribbling out of my mother’s womb.

  No one was quite ready to speak that way in 1964. By season’s end, Bill Bradley had accepted a Rhodes scholarship and was on his way to England. If he was going to effect social change, he believed he’d do it as a Washington power broker, not as a basketball player.

  He didn’t mind telling people about his ambitions for the political arena. In Minneapolis for the announcement of the Sporting News All America Team, he befriended Gail Goodrich. They played a lot of Ping-Pong, Bradley determined to beat the quick-handed Goodrich before they left town. At one point they discussed their plans. Goodrich said he expected to play in the NBA. He asked Bradley what the future might bring. “He said, ‘Oh, I’m going to Oxford. And then I’d really like to start working toward being president of the United States,’ ” Goodrich recalled. “Just like that—no big deal.”

  NED IRISH COULDN’T FORGET the furor Bradley and Russell had created in New York that late December night. He couldn’t ignore the potential gate appeal Bradley in particular would have if he ever returned to basketball. Irish leaned on his people to secure Bradley with a territorial draft pick, in which a team could lay claim to a player based on his school’s location in the same region.

  Without question, Eddie Donovan and Red Holzman did not need to be convinced that the risk was an acceptable one. Fuzzy Levane and Dick McGuire, who’d succeeded Donovan as coach when Donovan was moved into the general manager’s seat during the 1965–66 season, both said they believed the Knicks would have taken Bradley with or without the owner’s approval. “Bill was too good not to play anymore—that’s what everyone thought, anyway,” Levane said. Once they had reached that conclusion, it made perfect sense for the Knicks to lock Bradley up with a territorial pick, even if he wouldn’t play for two years while studying at Oxford, if at all.

  As for Russell, he would deposit his game-winning shot into the bank of special memories. Sportswriters might never let him forget Bradley’s transcendent effort, but his peers would remember who came through at the finish. Years later, when Russell attended a Lakers game, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar told him he had been at the Garden that night and that it was one of the best games he’d ever seen. He said he’d always admired how Russell had shaken off the subpar shooting night and risen to the moment.

  Compared with Bradley, Russell may not have looked like the best player in the country, but there was at least one Garden witness on December 30, 1964, who believed Russell’s performance was worth savoring, too.

  “Guts to take the last shot,” Red Holzman wrote in his scouting report, making special note after detailing Russell’s offensive strengths, his impressive athletic gifts.

  Though hardly irrelevant, the fact that Russell had made the shot to beat Princeton was not the main point. The way Holzman saw it, any team with serious NBA championship aspirations did not have room in its end-of-game lineup for conscientious objectors. The main point was that Russell had taken the shot. The team needed to be a complete coalition of the willing. Let the shots fall as they may.

  One year later, when the Knicks won a coin flip with Detroit to determine who would get the first pick of the 1966 draft, they used it to bring Cazzie Russell to New York. The Pistons, desperate for Russell as an in-state draw, were crushed—especially the man who had called tails. Dave DeBusschere, their player-coach, was, after all, a lifelong resident of Detroit.

  BY THE TIME BRADLEY AND RUSSELL SQUARED OFF in New York, the Knicks were well on their way to another forgettable season, running a distant fourth in the NBA’s Eastern Division (which at the time had only four teams). But there was hope. Three of the four rookies on the team—the front-liners Willis Reed, Bad News Barnes, and a guard, Howard “Butch” Komives—were all under 24 and already averaging double figures. Reed was in the process of winning the league Rookie of the Year award, posting at year’s end 19.5 points and 14.7 rebounds, while taking over at center.

  One night against the Warriors in San Francisco, Reed scored 32 against Wilt Chamberlain, using a variety of jumpers and agile post moves to keep the Stilt on his heels. The game went to overtime, where the Warriors pulled it out, but Reed was quite pleased with himself … until he picked up a box score. “I held him to 56,” he recalled. “He killed me, man. One big step and jump, dunk it, or the finger roll.”

  It could have been much worse. The Knicks were already familiar with Chamberlain’s otherworldliness. On March 2, 1962, when the Warriors were still based in Philadelphia, he’d scored a record 100 points in Hershey, Pennsylvania, while the team on the other side barely did more than watch. The young Knicks were eager to move past that and other franchise humiliations.

  “The expectations were very low at the time, but even though we weren’t a playoff-caliber team, the fans began to enjoy us because we played hard, we ran, it was more fun than the old style,” said Emmette Bryant, the fourth rookie on the team, a 6'1" guard out of Chicago and DePaul who became Reed’s first roommate and friend in New York.

  They visited the World’s Fair together at Corona Park in Queens. They went out for dinner, learned to navigate the subways, found their way uptown over the summer to play in the famed Rucker League. “We liked the idea that we were the guys making the transition from the old era—Richie Guerin and those guys—to the new,” Bryant said.

  Last place, though, was still last place. After averaging almost 12,000 fans per game at home in the late fifties, attendance had slipped under 10,000 by 1964–65. The front office was restless, ready to retool, sending the veteran forward Bob Boozer to the Lakers for the shooting guard Dick Barnett, who was moving to his fourth pro team at the age of 29, including a brief jump to the short-lived American Basketball League with George Steinbrenner’s Cleveland Pipers to reunite with John McLendon, his college coach at Tennessee A&I (now Tennessee State).

  On the East Coast, Reed was ecstatic. At Grambling, he had heard all about Barnett, who had put on a few shows when visiting in the late 1950s. The black college legend of Skull Barnett—so nicknamed because he shaved off his hair—was such that Reed wondered if the stories were apocryphal. “Everyone said he was a character,” Re
ed recalls. “When we got him, I thought, I’m going to enjoy playing with this guy.”

  He would be less sanguine about the next Knicks trade, early in his second season: Bad News Barnes, Johnny Green, Johnny Egan, and cash to Baltimore for a high-scoring center, Walt Bellamy. As much as Barnes’s departure validated Reed’s belief that he should have been the number-one pick, the acquisition of the 6'11" Bellamy meant that Reed would have to change positions.

  “I think they thought because Bellamy was bigger that I would be better as a forward,” Reed said. Throughout his career, he was alternately listed at 6'10" and 6'9", but Holzman had measured him at Grambling in his socks at a shade under 6'9". The conventional wisdom was that if they were to contend for a title, the Knicks would need more size at the position to confront the likes of Bill Russell and Wilt Chamberlain.

  Already convinced that he could compete in the paint, Reed wasn’t happy. The deal didn’t make sense to him. Bellamy was already in his late twenties, and his reputation as a talented and statistically prodigious but enigmatic and occasionally unmotivated player preceded him. Eddie Donovan had told Reed upon his arrival in New York that the Knicks intended to build a championship team, largely through the draft. Now Reed wondered: was the blueprint already being abandoned?

  For the moment, perhaps it was; while the additions of Barnett and Bellamy didn’t get the Knicks into the playoffs, the team did achieve a winning record at home for the first time in four years, typically a sign of better things to come. The following season, 1966–67, they would creep within nine games of .500. They were no longer league doormats, and their draft status reflected that. With the fifth pick, their choice wasn’t as obvious as it had been with their selections of the previous two years.

  At a crucial time in the team’s development, the front office was about to be tested. Luckily for the Knicks, as had been the case with Bradley and Russell, the best place to study again turned out to be Madison Square Garden.

  RED HOLZMAN NEVER SAID A WORD to Walt Frazier. He scouted him assiduously throughout the 1966–67 season and watched Frazier drive Division II Southern Illinois to a series of stunning upsets: over the largely intact defending champions from Texas Western; against second-ranked Louisville, with the All-Americans Wes Unseld and Butch Beard; and opposite another top-ten team, Wichita State. Holzman would later surprise Frazier by telling him that he’d had the privilege of seeing him torch the likes of Kentucky Wesleyan. Wherever Frazier went, Holzman was sure to follow. He hopped flights and rented rooms a step behind Frazier, all the way to Madison Square Garden for the National Invitation Tournament.

  But it never made any sense to Frazier that right up to the 1967 draft, Holzman and the Knicks never said so much as … one … freaking … word. Maybe they didn’t want to tip their hand, or preferred to remain noncommittal until they saw as much of Frazier as possible after he’d missed his junior season because he had been ruled academically ineligible.

  “My sophomore year, I was so upset with my coach, Jack Hartman, I actually thought he was discriminating against me,” he said. “I was already a Division II All-American, playing great, but there were times I just couldn’t get the ball. There were three white guys and two black guys starting, and it was always, ‘Swing the ball, Walt. Swing the ball.’ I started thinking maybe it was a black-white thing. I was unhappy. I stopped going to class. I was planning on leaving, and Hartman, he didn’t even call me. If it wasn’t for the athletic director, I would have been gone.”

  Frazier hailed from Atlanta, the eldest of nine children, seven of them sisters—an urban version of Willis Reed’s lower-middle-class family. His grandparents on his mother’s side had been farmhands on the very land where their own parents were enslaved. Early in Frazier’s life, he spent summers with his siblings in the Georgia countryside, as comfortable around pigs and cows as he would later be at the wheel of his Rolls.

  In Atlanta, his family lived in Summerhill, a neighborhood just south of downtown that was established after the Civil War as a home for freed slaves and Jewish immigrants. His father’s parents lived next door, his grandfather working on the assembly line at the Atlanta Paper Company. Frazier recalls a strong male presence in his life, though his father, also Walt, was an irascible sort, drifting between running a cafeteria with his wife, Eula, and gambling on the neighborhood’s “numbers.” Still, the family was stable. Frazier’s uncle Eddie Lee Wynn was in the dry-cleaning business and took a special interest in the family’s star athlete. “We had a house, a lot of love,” he said. “I actually cried when I left for college.”

  Echoing Reed, Frazier said he believed there was an unintended but palpable benefit to growing up black in the South of the 1950s. “I don’t care how much money you made; in the South, you were still black,” he said. “And when you are openly denied something and discriminated against, it brings people together. Unlike the North, in a way, we were raised by a village. If you were doing something wrong, everybody in the neighborhood had carte blanche to make it their business. We were always taught to have a tenacious work ethic, to get an education. Because no matter what names they called you, once you had that, no one could take that away.”

  At the all-black Howard High School, Frazier was the catcher on the baseball team and a good enough quarterback to draw scholarship offers from historically black colleges. But why play football? he thought. Beyond college, there was no professional future for a black QB. He had neither the desire nor the speed to change positions. He saw himself as a quarterback, a leader. But the most important reason for choosing basketball was a simple realization: more than the other sports, he enjoyed practice, even on ramshackle neighborhood courts. He was a fan, watching games on television with his father and uncle. He had a favorite player, Skull Barnett. “My idol,” Frazier said.

  He had never heard of Southern Illinois University before being steered there by a local college scout for a tryout that brought him, in turn, a scholarship. Carbondale, Illinois, was a largely white environment in which Frazier felt immediately overwhelmed. “I was so far behind academically, because our schools were inferior,” he said. Befriended by a white teammate, Ed Zastrow, they enrolled in the same classes, studied together. Frazier’s confidence began to grow. Until his frustration with Hartman boiled over and his class attendance suffered late in his sophomore year, he pulled decent grades.

  But it was during his season of ineligibility that Frazier moved off campus and became more personally accountable. With the help of the team’s trainer, he went on a strict workout regimen and adopted a healthier diet. He grew stronger and quicker, and when he scrimmaged with the freshmen against the varsity, he dedicated himself to defense, roaming passing lanes, stripping the guards, talking trash—all of this newfound aggression really directed at his coach.

  “It got to the point where Hartman would have to say, ‘Walt, sit down,’ ” said Dick Garrett, a talented freshman guard that season, a young man who would later learn, in a more public setting, what it was like to deal with a supermotivated Walt Frazier. “He just didn’t want the varsity guys getting too discouraged.”

  The following year, Frazier was back in the lineup and Hartman was happy to ride him all the way to the NIT. “At that point, playing with Walt, we felt we could run with anyone,” Garrett said. “We weren’t all that big, but we were really athletic. We also knew we could beat a lot of the teams in the NCAA tournament, but at the time they could only take 32. So going to New York for the NIT was a big thing for us, for any Division II team.”

  Frazier remembered being wide-eyed on the bus ride from Kennedy Airport, and the mob scene of players from the 14 NIT teams housed in one Midtown hotel, along with one very special guest who every day that week held court in the lobby, mobbed by fans. Muhammad Ali, training nearby for his heavyweight title bout with Zora Folley, needed no introduction to a young black basketball player.

  “It felt like the center of the sports world,” said Clarence Smith, another coll
ege teammate of Frazier’s. “We went to the Garden to see Ali train. Howard Cosell came to one of our practices.” Smith, a 6'4" defensive stopper who allowed Frazier the luxury of gambling for steals, offered a convincing imitation of the famed broadcaster: “Just who are these Salukis from Southern Illinois?”

  And what the hell was a Saluki in the first place? Over the course of the tournament, as no one got within nine points of them, with Al McGuire’s touted Marquette team falling in the final by 15, New York discovered why the team’s nickname derived from a breed of dog known for its beauty, endurance, and speed.

  Most of all, the city was introduced to the ball hound named Frazier, the tourney MVP and now certain to be a first-round draft pick. He had no great reason to stay for his final year of eligibility, and two good reasons to leave: a wife and young son, living with him in a trailer home. “I just wanted to make sure I would be going to the right team for the right price,” he said. “Otherwise, we did have our whole team coming back.”

  DETROIT HAD THE FIRST PICK and zeroed in on Providence guard Jimmy Walker. Next up was Baltimore, whose college scout, Jerry Krause, had had his eye on a black college sensation, Earl Monroe, from the time Monroe was an unknown sophomore at Winston-Salem State in North Carolina. By his senior year he was averaging 41.5 points and was such a sensation that Winston-Salem games had to be moved off campus to the downtown coliseum, where there were almost as many white faces in the crowd as black. But there were others in the Baltimore organization, including the coach, Gene Shue, who didn’t think Monroe was worthy of that high a pick. They had their eye on the Saluki.

  “My coach had gotten a lawyer to advise me,” Frazier said. “Baltimore called. They offered me $15,000 for my rookie season. The lawyer said, ‘What about the bonus?’ They said, ‘It’s in there.’ The lawyer said, ‘Don’t waste your draft pick—Frazier’s going back to school.’ ” Spurned, the Bullets turned their attention back to Monroe, for whom Krause was vehemently lobbying and who had also been scouted by Holzman.