George Lois was soon bumping into Zero Mostel near the concession stand before games, neither one wanting to go to his seat for the national anthem. (Mostel was one of many entertainers who were suspected of being Communists during the fifties and blacklisted.) They would talk the game, Mostel arguing that Russell should be starting over Bradley and Lois telling him he was seriously full of shit.
On the other baseline, Asofsky was amazed by the transformation the courtside neighborhood was undergoing as the Knicks appeared to be revving up for a championship run. Steve Lawrence and Eydie Gormé. The radio personality William B. Williams. Jerry Stiller and Anne Meara would score different seats around the lower bowl and occasionally leave little Ben on Freddy Klein’s lap so the future comic actor could get the premier courtside view. Dustin Hoffman had a fairly regular perch behind the Knicks’ bench, where the players—having seen Midnight Cowboy, like most people in the country—would address him as Ratso.
Stern was right: here were the earliest indicators that professional basketball players could actually blur the lines between athlete and entertainer, become crossover celebrities and walk alongside America’s most popular.
“They had that quality because of how unique they were as individuals but also because of what they were doing as a team,” Bill Goldman, another regular, told me. Goldman grew up in Chicago, a diehard Bears fan, before moving to New York to meet the everlasting love of his sports life, the Knicks. After the trade for Dave DeBusschere, he fell so hard that he took an entire West Coast road trip with the team during the ’69–70 season, following the guys from city to city like the most devout groupie. He claimed that he didn’t attend the Academy Awards during the playoffs that season—where he won Best Original Screenplay for Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid—because it interfered with the Knicks’ playoff schedule.
Goldman and his wife dined frequently with the DeBusscheres, forever arguing that his good friend was the one player the team could not do without. Robert Redford, who would ring Lois for a ticket when he was in town, had DeBusschere and Bradley to his place in Park City, Utah, for a little snowmobiling during the ’69–70 season—though Bradley would tell me that the notion of the Knicks forwards taking a wild ride was way overblown. “We went about 25 to 50 feet, that was about it,” he said. “We were in the middle of a season and we weren’t going to take any risks.”
The actor Elliott Gould—who by 1970 had risen to stardom in The Night They Raided Minsky’s (1968) and Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice (1969) and could have made the case for being more famous than anyone—tried to get Dick Barnett a cameo role in his 1971 film Little Murders. The film’s director, Alan Arkin, nixed the casting idea because the only acting Barnett had ever done was flopping for the refs in the act of taking a charge.
“I once asked him, ‘What do you do when you’re not playing basketball?’ ” Gould said. “He told me, ‘I’m in public relations without a telethon.’ I didn’t know what the hell he was talking about. But I thought, ‘This guy’s a real character.’ ” Gould, a character in his own right, was another celebrity friend of the Knicks. At various times he hosted Bradley and Phil Jackson at his Greenwich Village apartment. He played Frazier one-on-one at the Garden and would boast for decades that he had managed to pick Clyde’s pocket and lost only 10–7.
At the very least, Gould talked a good game, and no one could accuse him of jumping on the Old Knicks’ bandwagon. He’d been going to the Garden for years. His father, Bernard Goldstein, took him by subway from their home in the Bensonhurst section of Brooklyn. They rooted for Dick McGuire, Ernie Vandeweghe and especially Max Zaslofsky, a Jewish player. “Those were good blue-collar teams,” he said of the Very Old Knicks, who were coached by the legendary Joe Lapchick and lost three straight championship series between 1951 and 1953.
Gould’s passion for the game was a source of pride. He loved it so much that when he presented the Oscar for Best Film Editing at the 1976 Academy Awards, held the same night as the NCAA championship game, he tore open the envelope and said, “And the winner is… Indiana, 86–78.” You couldn’t find famous fans like that anymore, he argued. The modern industry of sports has become too superficial. The be-seen spectacle that began to flourish in New York during the Ewing years in the nineties offended the old hands like Lois, Goldman, and Gould, who compared everything to 1969–70.
“To us, the Knicks represented everything—our hopes, our ambitions, our dreams,” Gould said. “It was not about glamour, about being seen.”
Early in his acting career, Gould was as addicted to gambling as he was to the game, once rushing out of a Broadway rehearsal—in costume and makeup—to see Oscar Robertson take on the spread. But by the beginning of 1969, he said, he had beaten his bad habit, even as the big Hollywood bucks rolled in.
“I’d had a major breakthrough,” said Gould, who added M*A*S*H and Getting Straight in 1970 to his growing list of credits. He was also married to Barbra Streisand, forming a dream paparazzi union that lasted all of eight years before they divorced in Santo Domingo in 1971. In Los Angeles, Gould also spent a fair amount of time at the Forum watching the Lakers. With all due respect to Elgin Baylor and Jerry West, he said, L.A.’s team didn’t have the intrinsic appeal of the Old Knicks.
“Someone once asked me the difference between Bergman and Altman,” Gould said, of the famous directors. “I said, ‘Altman knows who Dave DeBusschere is.’ ”
BY 1969, MOST HIP NEW YORKERS had some idea of who Woody Allen was. He was on the cover of Life magazine and was starring on Broadway with Diane Keaton in Play It Again, Sam. He was on the rise, along with the Knicks, who became a prime source of entertainment and one for which he didn’t have to leave his beloved island of Manhattan.
“It was in the heart of the city, you didn’t have to drive,” Allen said. “I would go every single night, every home game for the entire season.”
Allen had grown up a huge fan of the New York baseball Giants. (Gould said he once gave him a Whitey Lockman card, one native Brooklynite to another.) But with basketball he discovered a very different athletic dynamic—sheer performance could actually blunt the power of partisanship. During a telephone interview on break while filming on location in London, Allen admitted to me, almost sheepishly, that he always preferred to see the opposition win a great game over an insipid Knicks blowout. “I’m not a must-win kind of person,” he said. “When Reggie Miller comes in and scores eight points in the last however many seconds”—16.4, to be exact—“that’s exciting for me. If Earl Monroe came in with the Bullets and scored 100 points and the Knicks lost, that also made me happy,” he said.
Allen was one celebrity fan who wanted nothing more from the players than to sit and admire them, legs crossed, watching impassively, never letting loose.
“I never socialized,” he said. “I never wanted to do any of those Knicks commercials. I preferred to go to the game, watch quietly, and leave. We’d go out afterward—Frankie & Johnnie’s, Elaine’s. Everyone was obsessed with what happened at the game. The whole town was tripping over the Knicks.” If confronted by the Knicks’ public relations folks wanting a halftime interview, Allen typically refused. He was there for the game, nothing more. For him, the Knicks were as much great theater as anything on Broadway or off. The only question was whether Red Holzman could direct them to the ending that the swelling legion of faithful—those famous or not—had in mind.
AT THE GARDEN, THE PLAYERS FELT the surge of excitement as the 1968–69 playoff run raised hopes for ’69–70 and the team’s collective identity grew behind a wave of media attention and applause. “You began to hear the fans applaud the pass that led to the pass that led to the basket,” Bill Bradley said. “You could hear the anticipation as the ball moved around the perimeter that something they would appreciate was about to occur. From a basketball point of view, it was always a knowledgeable audience, but now there was electricity every night, the belief that we all were headed somewhere special.”
Only those paying close attention could have seen the Old Knicks coming, building like a tidal wave of good character and cheer. Jim Trecker was one of them, having typed play-by-play at the Garden beginning in the mid-sixties, a role he also had for the Jets as they moved into the Namath years. The other regulars at courtside were John F. X. Condon on public address, Jim Bukata as the statistician, Tommy Kenville as the official scorer, and, on the clock, Nat “Feets” Broudy—a sweet, diminutive man who also worked at the league office. Broudy handed out root beer candies to reporters, and his selective finger on the game-clock switch infuriated suspicious visiting coaches, who often charged that he, more than any fan or Minuteman, was the Knicks’ sixth man.
None of the crew, Trecker said, made any bones about the fact that they loved the Knicks. They felt like part of the team. “People really took to the Knicks in the late sixties because they were such a pleasurable team to watch, but I think there’s a strong possibility that they wanted to feel psychologically connected,” Trecker said. “Because everything else was blowing up all around us, because it was a tough time to feel good about life in America, there was a yearning for togetherness, a sense of universal family. After the Jets and Mets, there was a strong atmosphere of achievement in the city, and as the Knicks developed, there was the feeling that this was where it was all happening. There was a tremendous sense of pride in the building, from the fans upstairs to the little people working the table. We saw that all coming out of a guy like Red, sitting there every night yelling, ‘See the ball, see the ball.’ We took it as a message that we all needed to see our ball.”
While a generation of Knicks fans came to believe they had invented the chant “Dee-fense! Dee-fense!” many sports historians actually trace it to the 1950s and Yankee Stadium, when the Sam Huff—led Giants defense terrorized NFL offenses. Nevertheless, the Garden adopted it as its own. In a time before JumboTrons and recorded bass thumps, the sound of 20,000 fans shouting as one proved demoralizing, galvanizing, and deafening.
“You always knew that when they started their run, here came that damn chant,” said Butch Beard, the Louisville All-America guard who played nine years in the NBA, the last four with the Knicks. “Not only did it get them up, I thought it intimidated the officials. Many games, Clyde would strip me four or five times, and foul me half the time, but if it happened on one of those runs, with the crowd going crazy, forget it. The refs weren’t calling anything.”
Jake O’Donnell, one of the league’s premier refs for 28 years, agreed that the Garden crowd affected him and his colleagues, but not in the way Beard believed. “The crowd was unbelievable in that place,” he said. “They were more rabid, more knowledgeable, than any other arena. When they started that chant, the game would come alive and would actually make you a better referee, get you really into the game, bring you to a higher level.”
Years into retirement, O’Donnell would ask if “those Carnegie guys”—he meant Asofsky and Klein—were still around. “They raised hell a lot and got you going a little bit, not that they ever swayed a call,” he said. “But it was all in good fun, never vicious, which actually was kind of how those Old Knicks were. Red, he got his T’s, he said what he had to say, but he wasn’t mean-spirited, didn’t whine all night. All those guys, except maybe Phil Jackson, never had too much to say; they just played.”
As a rookie during the ’69–70 season, Beard came into the Garden with the Atlanta Hawks and discovered just what DeBusschere meant when he would implore the refs to “Just let us play.” The two of them chased a loose ball near the Knicks’ bench. “I’m telling you, that fucker hit me harder than a truck, knocked me right into the stands,” Beard said. “In most cases, you get a quick look, maybe a ‘You okay?’ Not a word—nothing. Right then, even as a dumb-ass rookie, I could understand their focus, where they were trying to get to.”
The view wasn’t as good from the affordable blue seats, the nosebleed section, where I considered myself lucky to be on many a glorious night. Only the famous and lucky folks below, however indistinguishable they were to us from up high, could see the perspiration on the players’ brows. But the game was our common denominator. We all had a voice and knew when to howl. We were all onto the fresh scent of success in the air. New York was a city of champions. Why couldn’t our Knicks win one, too?
8
BLOWING IN THE WIND
CAZZIE RUSSELL SAID GRACE. At a long dinner table in a downtown Cleveland hotel on Thanksgiving Day 1969, the New York Knicks bowed their heads in common prayer. They were scheduled to play Oscar Robertson and the Cincinnati Royals the following night—one of several games since 1967 that the Royals had scheduled for upstate Ohio. In a deal with Cleveland Browns owner Art Modell, Cleveland would get a glimpse of the NBA action that was to arrive with their own team, the Cavaliers, in the league’s 1970 expansion.
There was much for the Knicks to give thanks for. The previous night, in Atlanta, they had dazzled the Hawks with a 38–12 third-quarter exhibition that left Richie Guerin, the Atlanta coach and onetime Knicks star, in as much awe as agony. “In all my years in pro basketball, I’ve never felt so embarrassed,” he said. Even Red Holzman, not given to self-congratulation, was struck by how helpless the Hawks were against the Knicks’ defensive heat. “Frazier stole everything but the clock,” he said.
That game was not atypical of their first 23. They sat down to Thanksgiving dinner with a ridiculous 22–1 record, riding a 17-game win streak, which tied the record held by two Red Auerbach—coached teams (Boston in 1959–60 and the Washington Capitols in 1946–47).
This was an added bonus, as the Knicks had no love for Auerbach and his bombastic ways. True to form, Auerbach cautioned the media not to overreact to the havoc the Knicks were wreaking. New York was good, he conceded, but greatness could only be measured by continuous success over a long period—for example, the 11 titles in 13 years the Celtics had won during the Bill Russell era. That, he’d say, was success. It was a fair point, but Auerbach, as usual, was too bullish to let someone else make it. The Celtics, meanwhile, were in utter free fall, en route to a 34-win season and their worst record since the 1949–50 team went 22–46.
Russell was gone, and, for the time being, so was the league’s other goliath of the pivot. In early November, the Lakers’ Wilt Chamberlain had torn up his knee, an injury that the team thought would be season-ending and possibly even career-threatening for a man of Chamberlain’s size and age (34). The only issue with the Knicks was the loss of Phil Jackson, who had landed on the injured reserve list after herniating two disks in a game against the Warriors, an injury that would require spinal fusion surgery. Action Jackson became Traction Jackson…
But even with the Celtics down, the Knicks knew the East was formidable. The Baltimore Bullets had a nice balance of experience and youth, along with the mercurial Earl Monroe. And Lew Alcindor, the slender rookie giant out of UCLA, had landed with fanfare and his unstoppable sky hook shot in Milwaukee.
The loss of Jackson aside, the Knicks were still deeper than they’d been for the ’69 playoffs. Russell’s ankle was healed, giving them another bona fide scorer. Within months, Mike Riordan had gone from hired hack to a valued member of the bench, a brigade Cazzie had dubbed the Minutemen. The reemergence of another bench player was arguably the best evidence yet that an authority even higher than Auerbach was smiling on New York. Dave Stallworth, having missed the two previous seasons with what doctors had diagnosed as a mild heart attack, was back—healthier than ever.
From his high school days in Dallas to his All-America years at Wichita State and now in New York, basketball had been the flame of Stallworth’s life, and it burned the brightest with the Knicks. In 1965, with Bradley in England, he’d hit New York with a colorful nickname, Dave the Rave. Along with Russell, he brought loud taped music to the locker room and an extrovert’s spirit. But it all dissipated one March 1967 night in Fresno, California, in a game against the San Francisco Warriors. Stallworth
clutched at a sharp pain in his chest and got so dizzy he couldn’t play. When the Knicks returned home, he was told by doctors that he’d suffered a minor heart attack. He’d be fine—but no ball.
The game, unfortunately, was all he knew. He had grown up in a Dallas ghetto, raised by his mother, Doris, who worked at a local hotel to support him and a younger sister. He did not have a college degree, and like everyone else in the NBA had been playing on a one-year contract. Eddie Donovan paid him as a scout, but the money didn’t compare.
“I couldn’t go back to Dallas—life was tough there, a lot of killings, poverty, the whole works,” Stallworth said when I reached him in Wichita, where he was retired after putting in 25 years at the local Boeing affiliate. By the time of his heart attack, his mother had moved to Compton, California, but there was nothing for him to do there, either. “I came back to Wichita and got my degree,” he said. “I coached kids and played some pickup, even though the doctors told me not to.” Almost two years later, during a routine checkup with a Wichita specialist, Stallworth was given the opinion that his heart was strong and there was no reason he couldn’t play pro ball again. He traveled to New York to see the team doctor, who concurred.
It was, he said, “like fate. Like I was supposed to be back there in 1970.”
So even without Jackson, the Knicks’ bench was strong. If there was any cause for concern, it was in the middle, where Reed was showing early signs of breaking down. He didn’t like seeing Nate Bowman, Stallworth’s old teammate at Wichita State, playing in his place, and his minutes were piling up. Insiders worried that his knees were starting to go, even at what should have been the prime of his career. He was all of 27. No one wanted to think what might happen if they squandered yet another season.
ON OCTOBER 15, 1969, A WEDNESDAY, an estimated one million antiwar protesters gathered on college campuses around the country for what was known as Vietnam Moratorium Day. Across the Atlantic, a young Rhodes scholar named Bill Clinton organized a demonstration at Oxford. The Knicks won a game against the Royals.
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