Before the game, Bradley talked DeBusschere into joining him at a downtown rally against the war, staged mostly by students from the University of Cincinnati and Xavier University. The two forwards had quickly become constant dinner companions on the road, dissimilar men from vastly different backgrounds who were forging a very special friendship. In Cincinnati, Bradley took the opportunity to chat up some of the students, listen to their complaints about the immorality of the war. DeBusschere wasn’t quite sure what to do. He was far less political than Bradley and not all that certain that he agreed with the protesters. But he istened to the chants and the speeches, impressed by the orderly and peaceful demonstrations.
The pacifism didn’t last. Once the game started that night, DeBusschere got into a shoving match with the Royals’ Tom Van Arsdale, a player he’d coached in Detroit and the identical twin of a former Knick, Dick. From the Royals’ bench, a rookie coach named Bob Cousy yelled to his man, “Next time DeBusschere shoves you, take his head off.”
DeBusschere shot back, “Why don’t you come out of retirement and try it?”
Cousy must have liked the idea. A month later, six years after quitting at the age of 41, he activated himself for spot duty just in time to try and keep New York from winning its 18th game in a row, a record held by Boston. In the New York Times on the morning of the game, in Cleveland, reporter Thomas Rogers noted that Cousy “was a member of Boston’s record-sharing team and having been reactivated as a player may put in some playing time in an effort to stop the New York charge.”
Cousy or no Cousy, Holzman’s team should have been stoked for the game, given its implications: the chance to snatch a line in history as if it were a cigar dangling from the jaws of Red Auerbach himself. It felt like “the seventh game of the playoffs,” Bill Bradley said.
Surprisingly, the Knicks came out flat and played what Bradley called a “lousy” first quarter, trailing by seven. DeBusschere was particularly unproductive, on the way to a 2-for-8 shooting night, the same numbers posted by Dick Barnett. Reed would take 22 shots and make only 8. Fortunately for Holzman, the Minutemen—Russell, Riordan, Stallworth, and even Nate Bowman—picked up the starters with a 32–22 second quarter. The game seesawed down the stretch, with the Royals led by Oscar Robertson’s 33 points and 10 assists and by ex-Knick Jumpin’ Johnny Green’s 19 points and 20 rebounds.
Since the last game between the two teams, Cousy had quickly recast Cincinnati from a team dominated by Robertson and Jerry Lucas into one that played tougher defense, ran a more uptempo offense, and shared the ball as though it couldn’t hit the ground. In other words, he had modeled his new team on the Celtics. But in trading Lucas, a gifted outside shooter and rebounder, to the San Francisco Warriors, Cousy had created some locker-room tension, if only because the deal didn’t sit well with Robertson. Lucas had been his costar and sidekick. Who the hell was Cousy to walk through the door four games into the season and send a mainstay like Lucas packing? All these Celtics acted like they had invented the damn game. Now the coach was playing?
Cousy spent the game in his sweat suit, for the most part letting Robertson do his thing. But with 1:49 left in the fourth quarter and the Royals clinging to a 3-point lead, Robertson fouled out. Enter the Cooz: here came the passing and ball-handling wizard to the scorer’s table, ready to roll.
“He was in his forties, hadn’t played in six years, and he put himself in—can you imagine that?” Robertson told me. He still couldn’t, bristling four decades later at the sheer audacity, waiting for the chance to sound off, if someone would just call and poke the scar from the old wound.
Cousy got to work right away. He found Norm Van Lier, a rookie guard, on the wing for a jumper. He made two free throws to give the Royals a 105–100 lead. To a man, the Knicks thought their streak and their chance to break the record were over. But the Royals gave them hope when Van Arsdale fouled Reed with 16 seconds to play, mercifully stopping the clock. Reed sank both free throws. And Coach Cousy, somewhere around midcourt, called his final time-out.
When play resumed, Cousy selected himself to inbound, hemmed in along the sideline near midcourt. “He put himself in because he didn’t trust anyone else, like he was trying to make a point: ‘I’ll show you how it’s done,’ ” Robertson said. “And then he was the one who turned the ball over—not once but twice in, like, ten seconds.”
The miracle began in Cousy’s eyes. On the inbounds play, the Knicks extended their defense to midcourt to challenge the pass—except for DeBusschere, who deliberately held back a step and a half from his man, Van Arsdale, while counting down from five. He knew Cousy had left himself without any remaining time-outs and would have to find someone open. With an instinctive feel for how much space he needed between himself and Van Arsdale, DeBusschere anticipated the release and angled his way between passer and receiver. The ball came to him like a lovesick puppy; he bounded downcourt and dropped in a layup for his second basket of the night, the biggest of the game. The score was 105–104, and those among the 10,438 fans at the Cleveland Arena who’d started moving toward the exit reconsidered.
From Robertson’s courtside view, the Royals were still in control. The NBA had no three-point line yet, so all they had to do was inbound, let the Knicks foul, and make two free throws for a 3-point lead. “Everyone knows you make the shortest pass and hold the ball,” he said. “But what does he do? He puts the ball up in the air. Man, this is a sore subject.”
Cousy risked a heave for Van Arsdale, beyond half-court. The pass was on target, but because the ball was in the air so long, the Knicks were able to swarm the receiver, like free safeties. Van Arsdale was what the Old Knicks liked to call their pigeon. He came down with Cousy’s pass, ripe to be plucked. Reed knocked the ball loose and Walt Frazier picked it up. He barreled downcourt, pulled up from about ten feet, and threw up a brick but had the presence of mind to follow his shot. At the rim, he was fouled by the hapless Van Arsdale. Under long-abandoned penalty rules on shooting fouls, Frazier had three chances to make two. He didn’t need the third.
“They never touched the net,” he said. “I had ice water in my veins.” There were two seconds left. The Royals tried another inbounds pass, but that, too, was picked off, this time by Reed. The game-ending sequence was like something out of Hoosiers. The Knicks triumphantly ran off, their streak having reached a record-breaking 18.
On the one-hour delayed telecast back to New York via WOR Channel 9, the broadcaster Bob Wolff, who had called Don Larsen’s perfect game in the 1956 World Series and the groundbreaking Giants-Colts sudden death overtime NFL championship game in 1958, called it “one of the miracles of basketball… Folks, I’ve never seen anything like it.”
Looking back, the gentlemanly Wolff was less critical than Robertson of Cousy’s decision to put himself in. He chalked it up to the mind-set of a man who stubbornly believed in his Hall of Fame basketball IQ. To him, the moral of the story was that five great basketball minds had outwitted one. “In my opinion, the Knicks were the smartest team ever assembled,” Wolff said. “Their ability to anticipate on the floor was amazing.”
Robertson, conversely, wondered whether Cousy was just selfish. Was he too eager to protect the Celtics’ share of the record that he had helped set? Did he have Auerbach—the mentor he always affectionately addressed by his given name, Arnold—in mind? It still annoyed Oscar that nobody back then had dared question the tactic, at least not that he recalled. “No alarm, no criticism in the media about how a guy at that age could do that,” he said.
Such was the license of a Celtic after Boston’s despotic rule, those 11 championships in 13 years. But in the end, Cousy’s comeuppance was really no more than a subplot to what had transpired in Cleveland. The real story was much bigger than one man’s hurried passes or hubris. To the Knicks and their followers, the 18th straight victory was more than a milestone or even a miracle; it was symbolic of what Holzman had been preaching—team defense—from the day he took over. “The g
ame in Cleveland pretty much convinced us that we were capable of anything,” Frazier said.
The next night, back home against the Detroit Pistons, the Knicks were promptly outscored 35–20 in the fourth quarter and lost by 12, a measure of redemption and revenge for the departed duo of Bellamy and Komives.
It didn’t matter. The Knicks had breached the record books, and not for the last time. The team left the court while a Garden crowd stood in an uproarious ovation still echoing throughout New York City.
EASY AS IT is TO CHARACTERIZE the Old Knicks as the perfect blend of basketball brainpower and abilities, even they weren’t immune to internal conflict. It is the nature of all teams to be challenged from within, said Bradley. Only the best of them can ensure that those “conflicts never turned to bitterness.”
They beat the Phoenix Suns in a neutral-site game in Salt Lake City, where DeBusschere and Bradley had done their snowmobiling with Robert Redford, then the Knicks moved on to Detroit to play the Pistons again during the second week of January. In their previous meeting, on Christmas night in New York, the Knicks had produced another of those revelatory moments. Down a point with one second left, Frazier inbounding the ball from the sideline, Dick Barnett shook Reed loose with a back screen on Bellamy, and Frazier delivered a perfect looping pass that Reed laid in off glass for the game winner.
They pulled into Detroit with a 30–10 record. With three days off between the Suns and Pistons games, the players had a chance to get away from one another, have some room to breathe. Russell spent some time in Ann Arbor, where he had attended college. On that Thursday afternoon, January 15, he barged into practice—late and full of road rage.
A few minutes outside Ann Arbor, he had been stopped by police and ordered out of the car with a gun pointed at his head. The explanation he was given—after producing a driver’s license and only then being recognized as the beloved Wolverine—was that an African American male had broken out of prison in the vicinity. There were roadblocks everywhere. All law enforcement personnel in the area were under orders to look for a black man with a mustache. Russell had a mustache.
Russell’s teammates were appalled by the blatant profiling and were naturally sympathetic when they heard his story—at least until Russell continued to vent with his elbows and forearms during a scrimmage. He especially made a target of Don May, the second-year forward and one of five white teammates (excluding the injured Phil Jackson) on the racially mixed team.
It was no secret that Russell believed he had lost his starting position unfairly to Bradley while he was injured. “I kill [that] white boy in practice,” his friend Stan Asofsky recalls him complaining. He missed the theatrical grandeur of being introduced with the starters. Sometimes he didn’t feel like much of a contributor. Asofsky and others felt for Russell but didn’t agree with him. The team was playing too well with Russell coming off the bench.
No one wanted to believe there was anything deep-seated like racial animus between Russell and Bradley—least of all Bradley.
“In that whole drama, I don’t think race was very relevant,” he said. “It was people with certain talent, and the year when Cazzie came back, he and I were in this competition that Holzman orchestrated. I always thought that Red got the best out of both of us.” Inside the locker room, Russell’s likability was evidenced by the fact that he was a constant target of teasing for his prodigious workout regimen (though Frazier dryly noted that Russell mostly worked on the one phase of his game that was already formidable: his shot). There was no discussion of the subject between Bradley and Russell, just a spirited daily competition that was fraught with implication. Perception or reality, Bradley knew it posed a threat to the team. “I always tried to never say anything or do anything that didn’t show full respect for him and his abilities and, quite frankly, for his character,” he said.
As delicate as things were in the real world, one might expect the controversy to have splintered the locker room across racial lines. But people—his teammates included—looked at Bradley differently than the average white player. No team outsider identified with and befriended the black players more than Cal Ramsey, but he also vouched wholeheartedly for Bradley, having worked with him in community service programs. He knew Bradley would show up whenever anyone asked him to spend time with at-risk kids, or to speak at a rally for their sports teams.
“One time there was a game in Philadelphia the night before and they got back about three o’clock in the morning,” Ramsey said. “I remember it vividly: the weather was bad, a big rainstorm that lasted into the next day. The rally was at eight A.M. at the school. I’m walking down the street on my way, thinking there is no way he’s coming, figuring out what I’m going to say at the rally.” Ramsey turned a corner and there was Bradley, tucked under an umbrella, wearing his tattered fatigues jacket. “How could anyone make a racial issue out of the thing with Cazzie when you had a guy like that?” Ramsey said.
Frazier called Bradley “the least prejudiced player I’ve ever met.” Still, there was a divide among the team, at least socially. “He seemed to be on the outside looking in,” Frazier said. Bradley didn’t disagree, saying that he never acted as if he understood the black experience and tried to make sure other white players didn’t make such pretenses, either.
“If I detected that a white player had an attitude, I would designate myself to talk to him,” he said. “I would say that we don’t do this or that on this team.” He only had to make that speech a couple of times, but he remained vigilant. “You always had to try to figure out what you could try to do on and off the court to try and help the team,” he said. “Sometimes it was in the playing of the game, sometimes it was psychological, sometimes it was who’s got what role, who’s going to talk to the press, who’s going to do this or that, so you have that meshing.”
To many around the league, especially opposing coaches, it was obvious that the Knicks were better with Bradley as the starter. “He wasn’t a great scorer or defender, but there were intangibles—especially his movement and toughness—which opened up everybody’s game,” Jack Ramsay said. “Cazzie was a great shot maker, but they had a lot of guys that could score. They needed Cazzie, but as a spark plug. Not as a guy playing 40 minutes and taking 20 shots, even though that’s what he’d always done.”
Russell’s identity had been forged from raw production. Now his minutes had dropped to 18.3 per game from 32.9 before his injury the previous season. His scoring average was down from 18.3 points a game to 11.5. In Detroit, his feelings of highway victimization crashed head-on with his frustration at playing second fiddle to Bradley. Their history was vast and tumultuous, from their college showdown at the Garden to the unequal pay upon being drafted by the Knicks to their perceived standing on a team that was soaring in the nation’s imagination.
If there was anyone on the team with a platform to speak out on sensitive racial matters, it wasn’t Russell but Dick Barnett. Everyone knew how much he had suffered and sacrificed as a player, given his age and ability and how little he’d earned in part because he was black. Barnett being Barnett, whatever he said came out in droll, often hilarious, and sometimes painfully honest sound bites of sobering reality.
“Cazzie was the better player individually, that much was obvious,” he said matter-of-factly. “The team members understood the ‘white hope’ thing was there when Bradley came in—that’s part of sports. But it’s always going to come down to the question, Can you play? Bradley proved he could, and it was up to the coach to recognize which player fit in better. In fairness to Cazzie, it wasn’t easy, that situation, and I would to a great extent call him very accommodating and diplomatic, except for that one time.”
HOLZMAN WASN’T ABOVE BARKING at or needling players when they blew assignments or played badly. He would say to Bradley, “How the fuck did you become a Rhodes scholar?” Disgusted after a blowout loss, he would bark, “Go get laid tomorrow, don’t even come to practice.” But when he sensed the need fo
r a tender mediation, he preferred that it come from a fellow player. When he saw Russell sulking, disconnecting, he would pull Reed aside. “Talk to Cazzie,” he would say. “See what he’s thinking.”
This time, Cazzie’s anger was obvious—he was playing like he wanted to hurt everyone around him—and Reed already had a pretty good idea what it was about. Russell had every right to be mad at the world, as long as his teammates were excluded.
He stepped toward Russell and threw up his hands.
“What the hell are you doing, throwing elbows at your teammates?” Reed said. The gym fell quiet. Reed’s expression demanded an answer. Before Russell could rewrite the thought, it spilled out, angrily and regrettably.
“Be quiet, Uncle Tom,” he snapped.
Shut the fuck up, Adolf Hitler, would have landed better. But to say what he’d said—a black man from Chicago to another from the Jim Crow South—was a mind-bending betrayal, even if it was behind the team’s closed doors (as opposed to Muhammad Ali’s very public slandering of Joe Frazier several years later).
“I thought he was going to kill me,” Russell told a friend afterward. Those most familiar with Reed’s history had to know that the possibility of violence was not beyond the realm. As early as the start of his third pro season, Reed had demonstrated that he was no one to fool or fuck with. On October 18, 1966, in the Knicks’ home opener against the Lakers, Reed was involved in a fracas at the old Garden that was downright shocking—not so much because it broke out in the typically combative theater of an NBA game but for what transpired after the first punch was thrown.
It was the third quarter, and Elgin Baylor was at the free-throw line at the side of the court nearest to the Lakers bench. Reed had been complaining about the physical play of Rudy LaRusso, a 6'7", 220-pound All-Star-caliber forward out of Madison High School in Brooklyn and Dartmouth College. The famed refs Richie Powers and Mendy Rudolph told him to shut up and play ball. Reed decided he would have to send LaRusso his own message—and chose an elbow to the side of the head as they jockeyed for position. On his way upcourt, LaRusso threw a right cross. Everything after that was a blur of Reed beating on men in blue (the color of the Lakers’ uniforms at the time).
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