When the Garden Was Eden

by Harvey Araton

  As much as any triple double (he remains the only player to average one for an entire season, 1961–62), he could still summon the ignominy and outrage of being in a restaurant in the uniform of the United States Army and being made to feel like the invisible black man. “I couldn’t even get a sandwich,” he said.

  In the entirety of his career, Robertson made a fraction of what Jordan and later James could claim in salary and endorsements from a single season. But he was, indisputably, a man of and for the sixties, hot-wired for a decade that was dedicated to challenge and change. The rewards that he carried across the years could be stored only in his mind and heart, never the bank. Nonetheless, Robertson was eager to disclose all that he’d earned.

  “A lot of guys will say now they were involved in the movement, but what did you do at that time?” he said. “What did you say?”

  AS A MATTER OF PERSONAL POLICY, the most political of all basketball players chose to say nothing, skirting inquisitions with a skilled evasiveness that occasionally struck interviewers as churlishness.

  “I was extremely suspicious of being asked about the war,” Bill Bradley said. Nor did he care to expound on the country’s issues related to race, religion, or poverty, he added. “Why were they asking me? They were asking me because I was a well-known basketball player and therefore I was a celebrity. I would basically say, Look, I’m no different than any other 24-year-old. There are a lot of other people whose answer to that question is going to have a lot more import.”

  Bradley was seated across a conference room table at the Fifth Avenue offices of Allen & Company, a boutique investment firm serving media and entertainment moguls, where he worked as a managing director. Far from my working relationships with Reed, Frazier, Monroe, and others, this was the first time I had sat down with the former senator from New Jersey for a formal interview. He had departed the New York basketball scene before I arrived on the beat, though I had been around him when he returned for special events—Old Knicks jersey-retirement ceremonies and the like. For a few years, we actually lived in the same town, Montclair, New Jersey, and occasionally I would see him at the local YMCA, usually on the treadmill.

  “You know, I’ve read your column for years,” he said upon sitting down. “I would have sworn you were black.” Startled, I took the mistake as a compliment, an acknowledgment that without a face to identify me by (the Times does not run columnist photos), he had made a judgment based on what he had read and that I had come across as an empathetic analyst of the NBA’s majority African American player base.

  But I wondered: Was Bradley’s unwillingness as a player to share his political and social thoughts also a result of his own sensitivity to the commotion he had caused just by deciding to play in the NBA? Did he intuitively understand that to become part of a truly committed team meant that his personal ambitions beyond basketball could not become part of any public locker-room discussion?

  As it was, Bradley thought he was already attracting too much undeserved attention. After two years at Oxford, in April 1967, Bradley signed a record four-year, $500,000 rookie contract, $25,000 a year more than Cazzie Russell was being paid. The Knicks called a major press conference at Leone’s and bought the Oxford man of honor a new suit.

  So eager were they to show off their prize that they arranged a scrimmage with some of their players and draft picks—including Walt Frazier—at the old Garden. They invited the press to watch, and that was just the beginning of the hype. By the time Bradley finished a stint with the Air Force Reserve and joined the Knicks in mid-December, it was out of control. The Garden attracted a sellout, 18,499, for his debut game, against a team, the Pistons, who would have normally drawn 10,000, tops. Fans roared at the sight of Bradley on the layup line. Photographers were shooting his every move. In the radio booth, the levelheaded Marv Albert was caught up in the frenzy, too. “I was literally calling his pregame shots,” Albert said.

  Two minutes after Bradley sat down on the bench between Butch Komives and Dick Van Arsdale for the start of the game, the fans were chanting his name, screaming for the coach, Dick McGuire, to put him in. McGuire didn’t relent until the second quarter. Bradley played seven minutes, hitting one of his patently coiled jumpers on a fast break, the ball delivered by Cazzie Russell. The building erupted.

  The general reception to Bradley was so overwhelming that it was bound to provoke the opposition. He remembered Bill Russell having the Celtics run him into bone-crunching picks in the backcourt that season, most of them set by a brick wall named Wayne Embry. When he played for the first time against the Lakers, coached by his college mentor Butch van Breda Kolff, the Lakers were forced to sit through a long-winded pregame discourse on Bradley’s prowess. At the end of it, Elgin Baylor piped up from the back, “Uh, Bill, is it okay if we try to guard him?”

  Bradley understood the capricious nature of both fan and reporter. He knew how long he had been away from regular and high-level competition and what he was being set up for. “I came in, I’m the Great White Hope, I’ve got a big contract, I’m supposed to save the team,” he said. “But I’m playing guard, and after ten games it’s pretty clear that I’m not cast properly. I’m failing and then the public turns, people spit at me, throw coins at me, it goes from great adulation to hostility and anger. Then I go out on Eighth Avenue one day, get hit by a car, and that was kind of a symbol.”

  He was only shaken up in the accident, but the Oxford man wasn’t enjoying the school of hard knocks when all he had wanted to do, at least for a season or two, was break in slowly, on and off the court. “I felt that I had been dropped into a black world and therefore I had a lot to learn,” he said. “I knew that I was going to learn a lot more from the black players than they were going to learn from me.”

  WHILE BRADLEY HAS OFTEN SAID that he had “unlocked the part of me that I’d closed off” while shooting around in an Oxford gymnasium, there was more to the story of his decision to play in the NBA. In trying to settle the inner conflict, the competing callings to public service and the pro game, he sought out Mo Udall, the Arizona congressman, who had briefly played pro basketball in the old NBL. Udall, in turn, sent Bradley to see Byron “Whizzer” White, who had shoehorned in a few years of pro football in the early NFL before going on to become a JFK-appointed Supreme Court justice.

  Udall told him, “If you like playing, you ought to play. The key is what you do with your free time.” What Bradley quickly discovered—beyond the social education of traveling with men whose life experiences were for the most part nothing like growing up as the only child in a Republican home in Crystal City—was that basketball was an itinerant, high-pressure life, but one also filled with an extraordinary amount of downtime along with a lengthy off-season.

  Outside the arena, Bradley happily slipped the dreaded White Hope syndrome. Without fanfare, he found his way uptown to Harlem, to work with kids who were trying to manage their own escape—from the cycle of poverty and drugs—and salvage an education in Urban League street academies, which were considered early versions of charter schools. Its employees and volunteers were called street workers.

  Dr. Eugene Callender, who was executive director of the Urban League’s Greater New York chapter, didn’t need to be told who Bradley was. Callender had been a pretty fair ballplayer himself, a 5'10" guard who was one of two black players on the Boston University team in the mid- to late forties. “Basketball was huge in Harlem, but so was heroin,” he said. “I remember the sound of the ball—bomp, bomp, bomp—all day and night, or whenever they weren’t shooting up.” There were other players who were civic and socially minded, native New Yorkers like Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. But Callender especially appreciated Bradley’s involvement. “I always gave him a lot of credit,” he said. “Especially in those days; it couldn’t have been easy for him to come uptown.”

  It wasn’t long before Bradley was traveling much greater distances, to more forbidding places, shaping a more global perspective. He read Kipling’s
“The Man Who Would Be King,” a short story about two adventurers from British India who travel to a remote part of Afghanistan. Wanderlust grabbed him.

  “One off-season, for two months, I was in India, Iran, Afghanistan, all over, and this was a trip that was very formative for me,” he said. “I mean, here we are with Afghanistan in the center of the news for how long now? Well, I’ve been to the northwest provinces, went with a Pashtun guide, into villages that were 15,000 to 18,000 feet high. In one we met the village elder, and I’m sitting on his rug, shoes off, legs crossed, having tea, and what did he want to talk about? The Israeli-Palestinian issue, 40 years ago. So when people say now, ‘Oh, that’s not important to people in Pakistan and Afghanistan,’ well, that wasn’t my experience. So my point is that basketball allowed me to grow in ways that were unforeseen when I began, in terms of my personal and social experiences. If I had left Oxford, gone to law school, and never played pro ball, I would never have done that.”

  Traveling the country with the Knicks provided an abundance of downtime built into the itinerant madness. “Bradley never wasted a minute on the road, at the airport,” Marv Albert said. “He always had a book, a newspaper, a discussion with someone he met. There was never any idle time, goofing around.”

  But Bradley also relished sharing a locker room with Reed and Frazier, a room on the road with Dave DeBusschere, and the street-honed wit and wisdom of Dick Barnett. What other profession would have provided such diversity of people and places?

  None would have provided weeks off to explore, maybe even get a feel for what it was like to work inside the political arena of Washington, D.C. “One off-season, I worked in a congressman’s office,” Bradley said. “He had graduated from Princeton, and I had handled the tenth reunion of his class when I was a sophomore. I took care of all the people coming back. I got to know him, and then when I was at Oxford he asked me to write a paper on NATO for him in, like, 48 hours. I couldn’t do that, but then he asked me to come out to a place close to Oxford, and I did and he introduced me to Mo Udall. And then he asked me to come down and work for him in the summer of ’69.”

  That congressman was Donald Rumsfeld. Bradley recalled:

  So I was there for about three weeks, and then Nixon appointed him the head of the Office of Economic Opportunity, the OEO, which is the poverty program. Well, Sargent Shriver and the whole Kennedy thing was a big deal to me, so when he said, “Do you want to come with me on the poverty program?” I said, “I only have about another seven weeks and I’ve got to go to training camp. But sure.”

  So I remember we walked into the seventh floor of the office building, his office—big office—and there was a rectangular table and a big stack of papers on it. And those were résumés. And Rumsfeld says to me, “Would you look through those résumés and make a recommendation as to who you think might be good on staff? And if you want to interview them, interview them.” And so I interviewed several people.

  Let the record show that Dick Cheney—whose political career officially began in 1969 as an intern for Congressman William A. Steiger—began his climb through the Republican ranks as one of Rumsfeld’s OEO staff members in 1969. “You could say,” Bradley sighed, “that I’m responsible for some of what’s happened.”

  The moral from the left would have to be that the political world’s learning curve was as challenging for Bradley as the NBA’s. But as difficult as his rookie season was, 1967–68 wasn’t a total write-off, collectively speaking. It ended in a new Madison Square Garden, with a new coach, Red Holzman, and the Knicks finishing strong with 43 wins, over .500 for the first time in nine years. After losing a six-game series to the Philadelphia 76ers in the first round of the playoffs, the team nevertheless brimmed with optimism.

  A sobering context would come three days after the series ended, when Dr. King was assassinated on the second-floor balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, where he had gone in support of striking black public-works employees. Riots broke out in several cities, including the nation’s capital. As spring turned to summer, and the presidential campaign of Bobby Kennedy was also struck down by an assassin’s bullet in a Los Angeles hotel kitchen, the temperature and tolerance in the country would rise to near boiling point.

  There were plenty of places to howl in pain or protest, or just quietly try to help with the healing. Most days, Bradley went to Harlem to volunteer in the street academy. But as much as he felt committed to a country in chaos, so, too, was there a fire burning within him to be a better basketball player. It was the part of him he could no longer deny. Disappointed by his rookie year, he knew he needed to remake and relaunch himself. On many summer afternoons, he got in the car and headed down to Philadelphia and to another prestigious educational institution: the reputable basketball hot spot known as the Baker League.

  PART II

  WHEN THE GARDEN WAS EDEN

  5

  SCOUT’S HONOR

  DICK MCGUIRE MADE IT TO CHRISTMAS. On December 27, 1967, after a year in which the Knicks struggled and stratified under lax leadership, Red Holzman was abruptly named the team’s head coach. He had, supposedly, been threatened with losing his job as a scout if he didn’t accept the offer. According to legend, and the New York Post’s Leonard Lewin (a close friend of Holzman’s and co-author of his autobiographical books), Holzman had wanted nothing to do with coaching ever since he’d been fired in St. Louis. He was said to be a man without grand ambitions, one who coveted attention and responsibility for wins and losses the way other men desired a root canal.

  “He wanted to be left alone, and he wanted to leave you alone,” said Larry Pearlstein, another Holzman pal. Pearlstein made a living in the business world but loved the game and had cultivated enough friendships in and around the sport that he answered to a nickname befitting an entrenched insider: the Scout. He met Holzman in the early fifties on a handball court in Long Beach, Long Island, where Holzman was a regular. “He was with the Rochester Royals at the time, but I had been a big fan of his when he was at CCNY,” Pearlstein said. “We all considered him a tough guy, an overachiever. But he was almost embarrassed when I told him that. He was friendly, but he wanted to talk about handball and other things, not basketball. That was Red. He was just very uncomfortable when you praised him. He had no ego, none whatsoever.”

  Rule number one for Holzman was to never glorify himself, especially at the expense of a colleague. “Red would come into your building, kick your ass, and tell the local media what a great job you were doing,” Jack Ramsay, who coached against Holzman in Philadelphia and later Portland, said. “He was always aware of the position of the other guy. He thought the scoreboard was enough; he didn’t have to gloat.”

  That said, ego and pride are qualities that share an unguarded border, and Holzman, in his own quiet way, was as stubbornly proud as he was pragmatic. Pearlstein saw that side of him firsthand when the coach was inducted into the New York City Basketball Hall of Fame.

  According to Pearlstein, Holzman—who had several years earlier, in 1986, been inducted into the Naismith Hall of Fame in Springfield, also as a coach—bristled that the New York voters had overlooked him as a player. Hadn’t he been a college star—a 1942 All-American at City College—in his own right? Didn’t he have an NBA championship ring, something that McGuire—inducted as a player into the Naismith Hall—did not? Characteristically, Holzman would only reveal such feelings to those in his inner circle, and even then with a temperament to suggest that the oversight was no big deal, even if his friends suspected otherwise. That was Holzman: never revealing too much, never wanting his emotions to betray his intentions or ambitions. It was a coaching strategy as much as a personality tic.

  In the case of McGuire, Holzman realized that the Irishman was beloved in the New York basketball community. The pride of Rockaway’s 108th Street courts and St. John’s University, McGuire had landed in the Knicks’ backcourt in 1949, a born playmaker (or point guard, though there was no such designation yet).
Before Bill Russell came along to make a champion of everyone in green, Boston had Bob Cousy—and the Knicks had McGuire, their own backcourt wizard. McGuire was such a passing genius that, deep into middle age, he could, with one adept look away, still bloody the ample nose (mine) of a sportswriter who dared put his head down in a pickup game when he should have honored the man’s peripheral vision.

  During my interview with Mario Cuomo, the former governor of New York went off on an impassioned tangent raving about McGuire, his Queens homey and favorite player of all time—and a onetime opponent in a church league game. Larry Pearlstein felt the same way about McGuire, as did scores of others, no doubt. But while no one ever had a bad word to say about McGuire, neither would anyone take to the street to defend him as a coach, least of all him.

  McGuire was the first to admit that his younger brother Al—the college coach and NCAA television analyst, who died in 2001—was the family orator. Known around the game as Mumbles, Dick was a man of many words—only, like an AM radio station on the fritz, you couldn’t understand any of them. He was no more a disciplinarian than he was a communicator. Improved personnel notwithstanding, his two-plus seasons coaching the Knicks produced a record of 75–102 and a me-first environment that shocked the rookie Walt Frazier.

  “There was no camaraderie, a lot of selfishness, one or two guys getting back on defense,” Frazier said. “I remember at first thinking that I wished I had gone someplace else, because I had never played on a team where guys wouldn’t pass each other the ball.”