When the Garden Was Eden

by Harvey Araton

  “It all happened fast,” said Gail Goodrich, who was in his second year with the Lakers. “Rudy threw a punch and Willis went off. Rudy backed up. Willis started swinging. It was all right in front of me on the bench, and I can tell you that Willis was a menacing-looking guy when he was mad.” Goodrich gave himself the best advice of his life: “ ‘Do not get up!’ ”

  As Reed recalled, the 6'10" Darrall Imhoff tried to grab him in a bear hug—so LaRusso could nail him, or so he feared. Reed responded by sending Imhoff to the floor with a punch that drew blood from a cut above the eye. Next, a 6'9" rookie named John Block made the tactical mistake of stepping inside Reed’s punching range. He took a blow to the face that broke his nose and bloodied Reed’s fist. With Imhoff and Block stretched out, fans streamed onto the court for a closer inspection of the damage. Police scrambled to restore order.

  It was a scene that, in the contemporary NBA, would have had David Stern meting out draconian suspensions and fines and holding spin-control press conferences. On multiple ESPN channels, every angle and aspect of a black man’s evisceration of three white players would have been rewound and dissected, frame by frame. But news traveled much slower in 1966, and the NBA did not have much of a national image to uphold. Reed and LaRusso were ejected but shrugged off the brawl. Reed mostly wondered where the hell his teammates had been. “Man, you were winning,” the newly acquired Dick Barnett told him.

  Barnett was one of three Knicks in uniform that night who would still be around when Russell crossed a line that neither LaRusso nor any other player ever would. Dave Stallworth was another. The third was Russell, a rookie who was making his NBA debut after missing the season opener on the road with a sprained ankle and who was asked after the game where he had been while Reed was taking on all comers. “Right in the middle, observing,” he said. Hence, Russell was well aware of what the otherwise affable Reed was capable of when someone challenged him. He also knew why Reed, at 24, was named captain of the Knicks not long after the L.A. fight.

  Reed had held the same title for his high school football team and for Grambling during his junior and senior years. He proudly accepted the Knicks’ honor when Dick McGuire made the announcement one day at practice that management had made the decision. He had been under the impression that captain was a position that players voted on.

  “I guess I had showed them I was a guy who wasn’t going to get pushed around,” he said. Yes, Reed had demonstrated how much of a one-man wrecking crew he could be, but more important was his total commitment to doing whatever it took to make teams respect the longtime doormat Knicks. “The guy was an unbelievable teammate, the absolute best,” McGuire said, calling Reed his favorite player ever. “Winning was all he ever cared about.”

  Reed did not view his position as ceremonial. He wanted his teammates to expect him to lead in every way possible. He wanted their respect. When Bradley joined the team, for instance, it troubled him that Reed, of all people, would address teammates on a first-name basis—“Hey, Cazzie,” “Hey, Dave”—except him. “I would always think: Why is he always calling me Bradley?” he said. In the Cleveland airport one day, he finally mustered up the nerve to ask, “Why don’t you call me Bill?”

  Reed looked at him, considering the request.

  He nodded, finally, and said: “Okay, Bradley.”

  Flustered, Bradley dropped the subject but eventually caught on to the ways of the Captain.

  “It was his way of saying, ‘I’m in charge,’ ” Bradley said.

  There were times when Reed wanted the ball in the post and wasn’t shy with his feelings when it didn’t come. But he always gave back, in ways that were surprising and incalculable. “Willis did so many things for guys on the team that no one even knew about,” Frazier said. Sometimes the help was financial—Barnett, according to Frazier, was the biggest beneficiary—and sometimes it took other forms, like when Reed set Frazier up on his first date in New York.

  By the late sixties, Reed had set a tradition of rooming with a rookie, whether white (Bill Hosket in ’68–69) or black (John Warren in ’69–70), to demonstrate firsthand how to conduct oneself as a pro. “He filled you in on all the dos and don’ts—and there were many,” said Warren, who honed his dribble and jumper on the same Far Rockaway courts at 108th Street that had produced the McGuire brothers, and, like Dick, he then went on to St. John’s.

  In that one season, Reed made a lasting impact on Warren’s life, promising his parents—who were from Georgia, with deep southern roots, and could relate well to Reed—that he would look after their self-described mama’s boy. Reed did that and more, even trying his hand as an unlicensed social worker.

  “At some point that season, I pissed off my girlfriend and was in a bad way,” Warren said. “We got back into Newark Airport after a game in Cincinnati the night before, and Willis says, ‘Rook, what’s wrong?’ I said, ‘Willis, you gotta help me out.’ I knew he was dead tired, but he got right in the car with me and drove out to Westbury in Long Island.” There, Reed rang the doorbell of the girlfriend’s parents’ home. Naturally, they were delighted to see him. While Reed charmed the parents, Warren slipped away to plead with his girl for forgiveness. They married and had a son, John Warren III. “Whenever we see Willis, he’ll say, ‘Hey, I put this together,’ ” Warren said. “He’s right about that. We’re like his children.”

  The man from Bernice knew that the fabric of a team had to be as strong as the familial ties that bind, and especially for challenges like the one in Detroit. Russell had thrown down the existential gauntlet, from the color of Reed’s skin to his innermost core. And why? Was it because Reed was not an outspoken man on political or social matters? Was it because he roomed with a white player? Or that his most pressing cause was the behavioral well-being of his basketball team?

  EVEN AS HIS TEAMMATES RECOILED and prepared for the worst, Reed was instantly calculating his options in the line of fire: he could take the slur personally and teach Russell a lesson he would never forget, or he could put the welfare of the team first. The Knicks, he knew, could not afford to lose Russell’s concentration and offense, a distinct possibility if Reed vilified him to the point of alienation. On top of that, everything he had been taught in college by Fred Hobdy had been centered around shielding the team from the corrosive issue of race.

  Reed stepped in Russell’s space, looked him in the eye.

  “This Uncle Tom is gonna be whuppin’ some ass in a minute if you don’t keep quiet,” he said.

  If I’m an Uncle Tom for calling you out for abusing a white teammate, so be it. We play basketball here and we play it together.

  How many men in the corner Reed was backed into would have been able to resist punching their way out? How many would have had the restraint to give Russell even five seconds to back down? How truer a test could there be of character and leadership? “I was telling him, ‘Hey, throw those damn elbows at other people, not us, and us includes everyone wearing the uniform,’ ” Reed explained. “I mean, basketball-wise, we’re in the same war. You can’t hurt one of our guys. You can’t hurt me. Take it out on the Pistons tomorrow.”

  Of course he was hurt. But he knew he couldn’t let his teammates recognize the pain. “That story,” Bradley said, “was the essence of Willis.”

  IN THE END, NOBODY APPRECIATED Reed’s restrained leadership more than Russell. When we spoke, he had just finished a 13-year run as the head basketball coach at the Savannah College of Art and Design, which had ended its men’s and women’s programs. Was he interested in another coaching job? I asked. No, he said, he had finally moved on from basketball to his higher calling. He was the new head pastor of a 287-member nondenominational church in Savannah.

  I asked the preacher about the episode with police in Michigan and those two terrible words he had spat at Reed. There was a long pause. “How do you know about that?” he asked. I said there was a very brief accounting of it—without context—in DeBusschere’s book. But it had also
come up in a couple of interviews, referenced primarily as a pivotal moment for that team.

  Russell took a deep breath, seemed to relax and let his guard down. Those years leading into what transpired in Detroit had been bewildering for a young black basketball star, he said. He wondered how it was that even as he was feted as college basketball’s player of the year in 1966, “those kids at Texas Western couldn’t eat in a restaurant.”

  After two Final Four appearances, Russell and Michigan were beaten that year by Kentucky in the regional final. He had come to believe that this was all part of some master plan from the head coach upstairs. Adolph Rupp’s team was in the national spotlight and in the NCAA title game against Texas Western’s all-black starting five, so the country could witness the deconstruction of the white superiority myth. Unwittingly and involuntarily, Russell considered himself an agent of change.

  “It would have been nice to have gone back to the Final Four again, but then what Pat Riley always calls basketball’s Emancipation Proclamation wouldn’t have happened,” Russell said. “So I’m happy to have taken part, done my share, in that piece of history.”

  The racial climate and profiling did not excuse “the worst thing that had ever come out” of his mouth, he said. He was ashamed and worried about what his teammates would think going forward. He had never had problems with white players or white people at large; he had taken several white Michigan students home with him to Chicago on school breaks, to sample his mother’s southern-style cooking. But above all, Russell had to square things with the Captain. He apologized and asked Reed’s forgiveness, and not just once.

  “It was something I learned from,” Russell said. “I came to see it as a character-building situation, not just for me but for us as a team. No matter what I had personally experienced, I think we all understood how important it was to keep a situation, and especially one like that, from getting in the way—to keep things in perspective, focused on our job.”

  He couldn’t say whether Reed, at the height of the fast-moving drama, really had had enough time to ponder the best way to defuse it. As much as he’d replayed it all in his mind, Russell had long ago settled on the belief that the right thing to say had just come naturally to Reed. It was just who he was, a natural-born leader.

  “Willis Reed,” Russell said, “is an amazing man.”

  THE MOST UNCONVENTIONAL LOSS the Knicks suffered during the 1969–70 season was not a game. Before the playoffs, Eddie Donovan, their general manager, departed the organization for a similar position in Buffalo, where the expansion Braves would debut the following season, along with teams in Cleveland and Portland. Donovan’s departure left Holzman pretty much in charge to make a shrewd personnel decision: a recovered Phil Jackson was kept inactive to protect him from the expansion draft—and in all likelihood Donovan. Based on the regular season, Holzman determined that he had enough talent to win it all.

  Despite a late-season swoon in which the Knicks lost their focus and dropped seven of their last ten, they finished with a 60–22 record, best in the league and four games ahead of Milwaukee in the East. Reed was the league’s Most Valuable Player, despite being its 15th-highest scorer (21.7) and fifth-best rebounder (13.9). He was joined on the all-NBA first team by Frazier. Holzman was named Coach of the Year, but most gratifying to him was the inclusion of three Knicks—Reed, Frazier, and DeBusschere—on the All-Defensive first team. The Knicks played the stingiest D in the league (at a time when allowing 105.0 points per game counted as such). Their point differential was 9.1, almost five full points better than anyone else.

  They began the playoffs against a Baltimore Bullets team they seemed to own, having won nine of the past ten games, including the playoff sweep the year before. Their five regular-season victories came by an average margin of 19 points. But like all of Baltimore, the Bullets were tired of being a piñata for New York. They came into the Garden for Game 1 with a chip on their shoulder the size of Wes Unseld’s biceps. With the improving Unseld grabbing 31 rebounds and Earl Monroe scoring 39 points, the Bullets pushed the Knicks into a second overtime before losing, 120–117, in Game 1 at the Garden. “You could see a difference in them, like they knew they belonged,” Frazier said.

  Reed had to play 54 of the 58 minutes, about 10 more than Holzman would have preferred and way too many for a man with barking knees matched against a younger opponent, Unseld, who was built like a brick shithouse. Reed’s performance was uneven as the series dragged up and down the coast, on the way to a nerve-racking seventh game. On the night of April 6, 19,500 packed the Garden, wondering for the first time if the Knicks really were of championship timber. But the Knicks took charge early behind DeBusschere and Barnett. They built a 62–47 halftime lead. And when the Bullets made a run to within 88–82 after three quarters, the Knicks had a none-too-secret weapon to unleash. They had Cazzie Russell.

  With Bradley in foul trouble and the Bullets forcing the Knicks to play at Baltimore’s freewheeling pace, Holzman turned to his most explosive and highest-paid Minuteman. And here, with the magnificent season hanging in the balance, Russell came on to play the role he so dearly wanted. He hit clutch fourth-quarter shots, the kind that halt rallies and break spirits. In January, Reed had given Russell seconds to compose himself, and he had. In Game 7, Holzman gave him 21 minutes to redeem himself, and he did. On the strength of his 18 points overall, the Knicks won by 13, a sweet epilogue to the saga of Cazzie and the Captain and a buoyant prologue of better things to come.

  9

  DOWN GOES REED

  WILLIS REED SAT PEACEFULLY IN THE GREAT ROOM OF HIS GRAMBLING home. After a morning of chores outside, or fishing with a pal, he loved cracking open a grape soda and settling into the recliner in the middle of the room, in front of his flat-screen television and surrounded by the vacant stares of his hunting conquests. But at age 68, lowering himself into his easy chair was no effortless exercise. The maneuver unfolded in stages, like a sequence of snapshots. Knees too acquainted with the touch of a scalpel do not bend as they once could.

  “This one’s been replaced,” he said, tapping the right one, safely ensconced. We had just finished touring the property during my visit in the steamy summer of 2009, concluding the walkabout in a garage filled with every fishing tool imaginable.

  The left knee, stretched out, was also going to need a replacement, Reed said, but doctors had advised him to hold out for as long as possible because surgical techniques were constantly improving. In the meantime, he took a daily anti-inflammatory pill and tried not to put undue stress on the leg.

  Funny, he said, but that was exactly how the whole storied medical drama of 1970 had begun.

  The minutes had piled up in the opening playoff series with the Bullets, and then came the ballyhooed challenge of the Milwaukee Bucks and Lew Alcindor (who wouldn’t change his name to Kareem Abdul-Jabbar until 1971) in the division finals. The rookie from New York (a high school legend at Power Memorial on 61st Street) was already a handful in the post. He possessed an unstoppable sky hook, but Reed was much stronger and could muscle him just enough to disrupt his flow. Making Alcindor’s playoff homecoming even worse was the booing he endured at the Garden. Maybe the city’s basketball fans still harbored a civic contempt for Alcindor’s attending UCLA instead of staying home and making St. John’s an instant title contender. Stanley Asofsky called that theory “a lot of bullshit.” The razzing, he said, was more about the young Alcindor being the enemy of the Old Knicks, plain and simple.

  “I don’t think he ever liked playing in New York, and it probably was because the fans gave him such a hard time that first year,” Reed said. “He was just young, and we were really good.”

  Offensively, Reed was a nightmare for the UCLA grad. The young Alcindor was loath to switch on screens, and against a team with as many shooters and willing passers as the Knicks, that sort of immobility amounted to playing too long on the railroad tracks. Reed would step outside for jumpers, and when Alcindor deigned to cha
llenge him, he would fake the jumper and go hard to his left.

  New York won in five unremarkable games, a welcome breather after the close encounter with mortality in the Bullets series.

  Reed’s approach against the young Kareem—camp out on the perimeter and dare him to come out—would go double for Wilt Chamberlain in the Finals. After playing in only 12 regular-season games, the man known as Wilt the Stilt or the Big Dipper had made a surprisingly effective recovery from his own knee injury. He had helped the Lakers survive a seven-game challenge from Phoenix in the first round and to sweep Atlanta in the second.

  And—unlike the Bucks—the Lakers had superstars in the backcourt and on the front line to offer Chamberlain support. Nearing his 32nd birthday, Jerry West averaged 31.2 points that season while Elgin Baylor, though no longer the NBA’s preeminent high-flier at 35 years old, was still good for 24 points and 10 rebounds a game. They also had abundant NBA Finals experience, having played all seven games the previous spring, in Russell’s farewell with the Celtics. But in contrast to the Knicks, the Lakers were not the purest blend of personality and talent. With their top-heavy star system of West, Chamberlain, and Baylor, they more resembled a twenty-first-century NBA team: big names in an uneasy and sometimes fragile coexistence. Production-wise, there was a yawning gap between the haves and have-nots. A rookie guard—Dick Garrett, Frazier’s college teammate at Southern Illinois—started alongside West in the backcourt.