When the Garden Was Eden

by Harvey Araton

  He was talking, primarily, about Cazzie Russell and Butch Komives, whose dislike for each other was widely known. But there were other distractions and dysfunctions. Bellamy and Reed, who had made the move to forward, couldn’t get out of each other’s way in the lane. Phil Jackson, a rookie when McGuire coached the first 37 games of the 1967–68 season before switching roles with Holzman, recalled ball boys being sent out to the Garden lobby at halftime for hot dog runs to Nedick’s. Others slumped in front of their lockers and fired up cigarettes. For road games—to Boston or Philadelphia, say—the players often traveled on their own. Even as a rookie, practically a deer from North Dakota caught in the bright lights of the big city, Jackson realized that any coach without leverage over his players could not last very long.

  “The players were making tens of thousands, and you’re paying the coach a few thousand dollars,” Jackson said, looking back from the perch of 11 championships, the most by any coach in NBA history. The pre-Holzman days, he recalled, were chaotic and fraught with the vagaries of how money paid translates to respect earned, and McGuire didn’t help himself by avoiding confrontation. He would even apologize to the forward Dick Van Arsdale when he would sub him out of a game, because Van Arsdale was the one player he knew wouldn’t bitch.

  (“I should never have been coaching, because I didn’t want to yell at anybody,” he told me in his Long Island home during the summer of 2009, with his wife, Teri, nodding nearby.)

  When Holzman took over, “he changed all that loose stuff,” Jackson said. “We traveled as a team whenever possible.” He told Frazier he’d be getting more time, because he wanted “guys playing both ends,” but that he should also sit next to him whenever he was on the bench, absorb all that he could. He put an end to Bellamy’s sweetheart arrangement of having his own room on the road, telling the veteran he wasn’t earning the privilege. He implemented a fine system for rule breakers, nailing Bill Bradley for being a few minutes late to one of Holzman’s first meetings.

  But while establishing order, Holzman operated without autocratic zeal and with a wry sense of humor. When Russell broke the travel edict to test-drive a new Cadillac to Philadelphia, Holzman fined him $100 but wondered how much he’d spent on tolls. Russell figured about $8. Holzman said, “Okay, I’ll only charge you $92.” Russell went away thinking he’d made out.

  “That was Red: always thinking of ways he could turn a situation, good or bad, into something better,” said Jackson, who was watching closely, storing away little trade secrets he would draw on years later in Chicago and Los Angeles.

  Holzman also had an indisputable and immediate impact between the lines, stylistically and statistically. “When he took over, we had like 25 practices—it felt like training camp except it was midseason—and it was always defense, defense, defense,” Bradley said. Holzman believed that effective defense—much like great offense—was a collective act, five players coordinating as one. His emphasis was on extending it full-court, forcing dribblers into vulnerable positions, rotating to areas where they would most likely be forced to pass. Stressed most of all was the concept of covering for one another, of becoming a team whose proverbial calling card would one day read, simply: Defense.

  The Knicks went from 15–22 to start the season under McGuire to 28–17 under Holzman, and steamed into the 1968 playoffs against Philadelphia. It’s an established truism of sportswriting that coaches, in all sports and on every level, get too much credit and too much blame upon season’s end, but what other explanation could there be for the Knicks’ turnaround except that the right man had come at the right time? “Red was obviously the guy to coach us, because he was the one who scouted us, who knew us better than anyone,” Reed said. “He knew that. People always said he had to be ordered to do it, but I think, deep down, he knew we had a chance to be really good.”

  In other words, he wanted the job. What man with Holzman’s competitive instincts (to go along with the relationships he had with the players) wouldn’t have? Of course, to admit that he desired another crack at coaching—and in his native New York—might have left the impression that he had undermined McGuire, a good man and a trusted friend. Holzman would have none of that. Hence, my theory: that he was all too willing to propagate the notion of his being forced to give up his comfy—and low-paying—scouting gig to assume the reins. Better for everyone’s sake to have people believe he was just taking orders from Irish.

  HE WAS WILY IN OTHER WAYS, TOO. On his office door at the Knicks’ administrative digs, Red had scratched out measurement markers for various heights—6'2", 6'5", and so on. Wary of players who lied about their height, Holzman instructed his secretary, Gwynne Bloomfield, to usher incoming prospects by the door. This way, when Holzman got up to greet him, his head would align with the corresponding marker. The player never knew he was literally being sized up.

  But Holzman never took his due credit. He would forever deny having anything to do with the immediate turnaround. That was a blessing bestowed by his players—at that point two in particular: Reed, who may still be the greatest second-round draft pick ever, albeit in a league with fewer teams (and thus shorter rounds), and Dick Barnett, a man who arrived from the Lakers in exchange for Bob Boozer and who fit in so well, it was almost as if he had been born to be an Old Knick.

  BARNETT WAS BORN AND RAISED IN GARY, INDIANA, the youngest of three children in a close-knit family that lived in a poor neighborhood in the shadow of smoke-belching factories. His father at one time worked in a nearby steel mill but quit when he was ordered to do menial jobs that were below his skill level, and wound up being employed by the city’s parks department.

  Barnett was a reticent child, never looking for acceptance in gangs or places where trouble lurked. His refuge from the darker aspects of his adolescence was always the basketball court at the local Roosevelt High School. He played half-court games but spent more hours alone, sometimes well into the night, crafting an unconventional southpaw jump shot—the ball almost shot-putted from his left shoulder, legs bent behind him, practically parallel to the ground, as he elevated for his release.

  Asked about his strange form, which defined the unorthodoxy of the man and his game, the original Tricky Dick said: “It was the unintended consequences of just being on the court, without rhyme or reason, something that came naturally and worked for me. It was in the playground before I even got to high school that I learned how to execute that shot without really knowing what I was doing.”

  Coaches shook their heads at Barnett’s shot, tried to get him to change, but ultimately couldn’t argue with the results: he became the best player in the city of Gary. As a high school senior, his school, Roosevelt, lost the Indiana state championship game to Oscar Robertson and Crispus Attucks High of Indianapolis. Barnett went off to college in Nashville, eager to play for John McLendon, if not as enthusiastic about going to class. McLendon took a look at his freshman grades and wanted to send him home, but school officials persuaded the coach to give Barnett time. A scholar he was not, but he did enough to “get by.”

  In Nashville, during his college years in the late fifties, he experienced lawful segregation for the first time. He unknowingly sat in the front of a bus and was ordered to move, in the stark language of the times. He tried to eat at a lunch counter in a whites-only restaurant and was spat on by the attendant. But if Nashville was jarring and occasionally humiliating, Syracuse, his first NBA stop, was downright depressing. Drafted in the first round in 1959, Barnett was paid $7,500 to play behind two established guards, Hal Greer and Larry Costello. After two years, he hated the snowy upstate New York outpost so much that he jumped at the opportunity to join McLendon, who had by then become the first black pro coach, with the ABL’s Cleveland Pipers.

  The Pipers were owned by the son of a rich shipbuilder, a guy named George Steinbrenner, who was every bit the madman you might imagine the young Boss would be. He threw tantrums. He drove McLendon crazy, then out of town. Worse, his checks bounced l
ike basketballs pumped with helium. But before the ABL folded, Barnett and the Pipers won a championship under McLendon’s successor, Bill Sharman.

  After the Lakers purchased his NBA rights from Syracuse, Barnett went to Los Angeles, where he became the sixth man and third-leading scorer behind Jerry West and Elgin Baylor. Barnett’s new mates appreciated his game and loved his idiosyncratic ways. He had a unique personality that brought people together. On the road, he appointed himself commissioner of late-night wagering. He summoned teammates with a typically colorful telephone greeting: “Darlin’, they are playing the national anthem.” The poker game was about to begin.

  There was little that Barnett said or did that sounded or looked conventional. He brought a school yard swagger to the court, a knack for dropping back on defense after releasing his jumper and advising teammates out loud that there was no point in them waiting around for an offensive rebound, either.

  The Lakers’ famed announcer Chick Hearn soon incorporated the showmanship into his game call: “Fall back, baby,” he would cry after a Barnett release. In his first season in L.A., Barnett made good on enough of his mini-prophecies to keep the coach off his back. In the twenty-first-century NBA, Barnett’s antics would no doubt have set off a national debate, countless shouting matches on ESPN about etiquette and sportsmanship. Back then, Barnett figured if the game’s most successful coach (Red Auerbach) could light up victory cigars, why couldn’t he have a little fun? As Cal Ramsey said, it was the sixties, a decade devoted to shaking things up. Reporters and fans got a kick out of the man with the sleepy eyes and the gait so deliberate that Phil Jackson would later, in New York, give him yet another nickname: Molasses.

  That the Lakers wound up trading him remains one of the more painful transactions in that franchise’s history. West said the team was worried about Baylor’s knees and the number of minutes he was playing, hence the need for Boozer. But during his three seasons in L.A., Barnett had helped the Lakers reach two Finals (they lost both) and developed all the trappings of a star—with the important exceptions of promoting and paying him as one.

  West took issue with Barnett’s assertions—made after he was gone—that there was no room on the team for another luminary, and especially a second black one, in addition to Baylor. He said Barnett was deployed as the sixth man because the Lakers needed a playmaker to start alongside him. “I loved Barnett,” West told me. “Everybody did. I still don’t know why we traded him. That day was one of the worst of my career.” Not so much for Barnett: he was thrilled to go to the world’s media capital. In the pre—Walt Frazier days, he was confident of becoming the Knicks’ featured guard.

  Barnett fit in well with the Knicks. Reed admired him for his fearlessness on the floor, the delight he took in challenging Wilt Chamberlain, craftily floating a runner or hook shot over the giant’s high-altitude reach—and talking all the while: “Get this, you big motherfucker.”

  DURING THE 2007 NBA ALL-STAR WEEKEND in Las Vegas, Willis Reed took part in a lunchtime panel at the ESPN Zone, with Bill Walton, Greg Anthony, and Spud Webb. Most of the discussion was overwhelmed by a lively debate between Walton and Anthony about the state of the game. Both of them happened to be players whose careers had progressed from professional gaming to professional TV gabbing—Reed and Webb struggled to get a word in edgewise.

  Eventually the floor was opened to the fans, and the program ended with the former players each shooting a trivia question at the crowd, with ESPN-brand prizes on hand for the winners. When Reed’s turn came, he asked: “Who was the starting backcourt for the 1969–70 champion Knicks?” Several hands shot up. Reed called on one.

  “Frazier and Monroe,” the man said, proudly.

  “Sorry,” Reed said, disappointed.

  Immediately, the other hands were lowered, all apparently having been prepared to give the same answer. Sitting at a table in the back, where Reed and the others couldn’t see me, I gave my then—17-year-old son Alex a nudge.

  “Frazier and Barnett,” I whispered.

  “Young man all the way in the back,” Reed said when Alex raised a hand.

  “Frazier and Barnett,” he shouted with glee.

  Reed smiled, looking relieved. Someone, thankfully, had remembered Dick Barnett.

  Considering the totality of his career, a strong case could be made that Barnett—one of the most overlooked and underappreciated players in the history of the sport—should be enshrined in the Naismith Hall of Fame. After all, the other four starters from the 1970 champions—Reed, Frazier, DeBusschere, and Bradley—are found in Springfield. Why not the fifth? Barnett played in five championship series, winning two rings in New York. Playing under John McLendon at Tennessee A&I, he was the star of three consecutive NAIA champions—the first time that many were claimed in succession by any college team.

  Barnett was vital to the success of a system predicated on the delicate melding of unique personalities. He was its cold-blooded gunslinger, lock-down backcourt defender, and most offbeat locker-room character.

  When I asked him about the Hall, the subject evoked Barnett’s typical cocksure charm and a suspicious, almost dismissive attitude about the establishment that kept the black athletes of his time way down, if not out. “Based on my ability, I know I should be in the Hall,” he told me. “Even if I didn’t play in the pros, we were the first team to win three national titles before UCLA. That whole team should be in the Hall. But now you’re getting into a whole political construct. It’s who you know. And you can say whatever you want, but what are you going to do?”

  While those three NAIA titles may not sound like much based on college basketball’s contemporary classifications, those were the days before the major southern universities were desegregated. Many NAIA teams reaped the benefits of the black talent that would eventually move on to big-conference powerhouses. Knowing how strong much of his competition in college really was, Barnett never doubted that he was as talented as any nationally celebrated All-American of the late fifties.

  “In my mind, it came down to answering the question, Am I as good as that player from Kentucky or UCLA, who benefited from the promulgation of the media?” he said. “Do I accept the conspiracies and stereotypes that were designed to continue a corrupt system that was going to crumble and bring about major change in American society? In the pros, it was one-on-one—can you play at this level or not? But on my college team, we always believed that we could play with anyone in the country. We had no reason not to think that, unless we wanted to accept the greater deceit that we were also lesser human beings.”

  Barnett’s teammates had to lobby the Knicks organization before they would retire his No. 12 jersey, 20 years after the first title was won. On the night of March 10, 1990, Barnett at least had good company. A banner was also raised for Holzman, with the number of his Knicks regular-season victories, 613 (the same as the number of commandments in the Torah).

  Other than his backcourt mate, Walt Frazier, who called Barnett “the most exciting of us to watch when he got hot,” nobody appreciated him more than Holzman, who had experienced the live phenomenon of Skull Barnett during his college career as a scout. “Red loved Barnett,” Marv Albert said. “He always thought he was one of the most underrated players in the game.”

  “Barnett was a pain in the ass,” Larry Pearlstein said. “But Red considered him a great player. He used to tell me that all the time.”

  When Holzman returned to the Knicks for a second coaching run, replacing Reed on the bench in 1978, he would reflect on his old guys, often with his assistant coach Butch Beard. “We’d stay up late on the road, a couple of drinks, and I’d get inside his head as a coach,” Beard said. “He wanted to talk about Barnett all the time. See, by the time Red took over as coach, Barnett didn’t care about getting his name in the paper, as long as his teammates and his coach knew what he was about.”

  And yes, Barnett was flaky, occasionally a pain in the aforementioned tuchus, with his streetwise nee
dling and his incessant need for “action.” During his Knicks days, he was well known for his gambling and for bumming dollar bills wherever he could get them. “Dick owed us and probably a lot of other people money,” Reed said. “But I always figured, What the hell—he was winning us a lot of money on the court.”

  No one knew what value Barnett brought to the team more than Holzman. Years later, in reflective moments invariably fueled by his beloved scotch, Holzman would get misty-eyed while expressing his fondness for the old lefty. He would contend that Barnett was as much a student of the game as any Old Knick.

  But even with the memory of Holzman’s sly appreciative grin, it occurs to me now that this might well have been a tacit admission that Barnett, also a child of modest urban roots, somehow reminded Holzman of himself. He was feisty and uncompromising and in no particular hurry to say or do anything for the sake of promoting himself. Known for his outrageous commentary among teammates, Barnett dialed it down considerably as soon as reporters entered the room.

  At bottom, he was a team-first insider, a coach’s kind of guy. Following the second championship in 1973, Holzman made Barnett his first-ever bench assistant.

  Barnett took the job to stay in the game and to keep some money coming in while he pursued his advanced degrees. He wasn’t much interested in athletic achievement anymore. Flamboyant as he was on the floor, he never much cared for the limelight.

  In 1978, Barnett was cited by the New York State Attorney General’s office for “engaging in fraudulent business practices” related to monies invested in a magazine venture he had fronted. A report in the New York Times said that the DA’s office was unable to locate Barnett to serve a restraining order. Friends told the DA they were accustomed to going months without seeing him.

  Thirty-one years later he was still mysteriously elusive. Former teammates would cackle when I mentioned that even Zelda Spoelstra, the NBA’s senior director of alumni relations, did not have a clue about how to contact Barnett. “You know, Dick’s probably staying a couple of steps ahead of the law,” Reed said jokingly. Such was the way most of Barnett’s former teammates and friends spoke of him: as the most endearing rascal they’d ever shared a locker room with—but also a consummate professional. Phil Jackson called him an “all-time teammate, great storyteller, a hustler who never drank or smoked and was always looking for an angle.”