In Game 1, for reasons that were related to his health, his head, or both, Chamberlain refused to move away from the basket to contest Reed’s midrange jump shot. Reed scored 25 points—in the first half.
The teams split the first two games in New York, but Reed erupted again for 38 points in Game 3, the majority of which put the Knicks in position to win on a possession with the score knotted at 100. They ran one of their staple half-court sets, Bradley on the baseline, moving right to left around screens set by DeBusschere and Reed. It was the play they called 2-3-F, with DeBusschere drifting out to the free-throw line as a second option while Reed positioned himself in the lane for a rebound.
“Nine out of ten times, Bill would be open, but for some reason, both guys went with Bill and they left Dave alone,” Reed said.
Baylor was just a second late hustling after DeBusschere, who caught a pass from Frazier at the free-throw line. He had just enough space to rise and can a 16-foot jumper. Three seconds remained. Joe Mullaney, the Lakers’ coach, was out of time-outs.
Chamberlain inbounded to West, not even bothering to make sure both feet were out of bounds. West took three dribbles in the backcourt and, with Reed in his shadow, launched a running one-hander that swished cleanly through the net, sending the L.A. fans into spasms of delirium. Under the basket, a disbelieving DeBusschere put his hands on his head. Chamberlain, heading toward the locker room, apparently thinking the Lakers had won, had to be called back.
A decade later, that shot would have been worth three points, a game winner (though Reed argues that the Knicks’ long-range marksmen would have been comfortably ahead had the three-point rule been in effect back then). In 1970, the 55-foot shot simply spelled overtime. The Knicks had to gather themselves for another five wrenching minutes.
“Most teams in that situation, you’d have bet anything they’d lose in the OT. We killed them,” DeBusschere would say years later, with imprecise recall. Reed had to break a tie at 108 with a free throw. Dick Barnett, the former Laker, had to pump in the clincher with four seconds left. But DeBusschere’s point is well taken. The Knicks defied the natural tendency in that situation to deflate, especially on the road. By winning, they further convinced themselves and their followers that Destiny—having already urged the Jets and Mets to victory—was indeed a New York fan.
West’s 37-point, 18-assist masterpiece two nights later evened the series in another overtime classic, though both games in Los Angeles were historically diminished due to the lateness back east; this was long before the NBA fixed Finals start times. The Game 4 loss did not dampen New York’s conviction. Nothing could, except one nagging caveat: Willis Reed’s health.
The Knicks all knew that the Captain’s left knee was barking as the team returned to New York for Game 5. It had been an issue for months and was aggravated earlier in the series when Reed was accidentally kicked there, suffering a bruise.
The team doctor asked him if he wanted a shot to dull the pain.
“No,” came the reply. Reed had already taken his share of cortisone and had been warned that the pain-numbing drug could soften the tissue and lead to permanent damage. Reed’s threshold was high to begin with, and he figured, or hoped, that the adrenaline of a crucial game would see him through. But with his declining the injection, unseen forces were set in motion, creating a narrative that would stretch the realm of plausibility and define Reed as an exemplar of athletic heroism, the one-legged wonder who stared down the goliath named Wilt.
EVEN BEFORE THE SELLOUT CROWD of 19,500 filed into the Garden for Game 5, that day—May 4, 1970—had already become a historic day in America; that is, historically bleak. Hours earlier, the National Guard had fired on Kent State University students after several tense days of protest in the Ohio college town. During an afternoon rally on the school’s Commons against a Vietnam War that had just been expanded into Cambodia by President Nixon, a multitude of National Guardsmen unleashed 67 rounds into a crowd of students. Four were killed, including two who were merely walking to class.
The tragedy was a defining moment for the antiwar movement and a disaster for America’s war hawks. The loss of innocent life could not be ignored, even by professional athletes in the middle of the most important games they’d ever played.
“Up until Kent State, you had to worry about long hair and being against the war,” Phil Jackson said. “Then it turned, and people were asking, ‘How can this be happening, and all for a war that most people don’t know why we’re in?’ You had to be paying attention to what was going on.”
Jackson had already publicly expressed his views on the war, if only by his choice of clothes and length of hair. But he could afford to be distracted by what was going on outside the basketball cocoon. Still on the injured list thanks to Holzman’s determination to protect him from the expansion draft, he wasn’t playing. And Jackson had an expanding cabal of liberal friends who were shocked by the images they saw that night on the evening news. In the ensuing days, students nationwide would boycott classes. But the rest of the Knicks and Lakers were like millions of others on the night shift who had to go to work.
Steve Albert, brother of Marv, was a college sophomore at Kent State when the shootings occurred, and had fled campus as soon as he could. He caught a late-afternoon flight to Newark and walked into his home on Kensington Street in Brooklyn’s Manhattan Beach section while Walter Cronkite was solemnly sharing the horror of what had happened on the evening news.
“I saw it all for the first time that night: the rock throwing, the guns firing,” Albert said. “I guess I was in a state of shock.” Safe at home, the family exhaled and soon after flipped on the radio for Marv’s broadcast of Game 5.
THE NIGHT BEFORE the Kent State shootings, Steve had walked out of the library—the campus already in lockdown, curfew in place—with an armful of books and had a national guardsman’s bayonet pointed at his nose.
“What are you doing?” the guard asked.
“A paper, on broadcasting,” Albert responded. He was escorted back to his dorm.
Studying to follow Marv into the business that would eventually employ three Albert brothers and later Marv’s son, Kenny, Steve was no campus radical. He was not involved in the next day’s demonstrations, which formed while he was in a child psychology class that ran from 11 to 1. “We were watching a film, and in it a baby was crying—so we never actually heard the gunshots,” Albert said. But a voice thundered on the public address for students to grab whatever belongings they could and exit campus pronto.
Outside, wailing ambulances rolled by—Albert recalled counting nine—and smoke from the guns and tear gas choked the air.
“It was like one of those scenes in a Godzilla movie, where people are fleeing the city,” he said. He rushed to his dorm, gathered some things, and hitchhiked to Akron with a friend. The airport was in chaos. He didn’t have time to call home, where his parents had already heard that one of the dead students was from Long Island. At the WHN radio studio, Marv scoured the wires, hoping no news was good news, before heading to the Garden. By game time he’d been informed that his brother was home. Naturally, his family’s involvement in the debacle was part of the pregame chatter.
In high school, Steve had been a ball boy for the Knicks, like Marv, working special occasions like Bill Bradley’s debut and the opening of the new Garden. He missed one game in three years on the job. It was a Tuesday night, and he wanted to watch an episode of The Fugitive. “I gave them an excuse that I was sick,” he said. Danny Whelan, the irascible trainer, didn’t hold it against him. An old wisecracking Navy guy out of San Francisco who had been with the Pittsburgh Pirates when they beat the Yankees in the 1960 World Series, Whelan had a heart of gold. He always liked Steve, felt for what he’d been through after hearing about it from Marv.
Whelan would eventually come up with an idea to soothe Steve Albert’s pain. But first there was a Game 5 to play, with home court to desperately defend.
I HAD TI
CKETS to THE GAME THAT NIGHT, courtesy of a friend’s relative. My high school graduation was weeks away, and my interest in the antiwar movement was intensifying. I had attended protests in Central Park and sung the angry anthems of the folk singer Phil Ochs. Still, news of the shootings was almost overwhelming. My friends and I were a year away from college ourselves, and some of us had relatives—my cousin Stan, who was like an older brother to me—in Vietnam.
There was a scary, surreal nature to the shootings and a palpable tension in Midtown that evening as my friend and I stepped out of the subway at Penn Station. The late-afternoon editions of the Post screamed bloody murder from its front page while we walked into the arena. Upstairs, in the blue seats, the shootings dominated the pregame chatter, especially among the younger fans. As usual, the smell of marijuana wafted through our section. There was a feeling of restlessness in the crowd, an air of pessimism and fear that came close to resignation. With the first quarter under way, it didn’t feel appropriate to be expending so much emotion on a basketball game, even one that was billed as the most important ever played at Madison Square Garden.
Game 5 began with a road rush for the Lakers. Eight minutes into the first quarter, they opened a 23–13 lead behind Chamberlain and West. Reed had scored the Knicks’ first basket on a soft jumper from the left side of the lane and soon after nearly gave Chamberlain a facial after a strong drive, only to miss the dunk off the back rim. But Reed was persistent: he scored the Knicks’ 14th and 15th points by cleverly ball-faking Chamberlain, spinning off his pivot foot, and shielding the ball with his body as he laid it up with his back to the basket.
The problem was that the Lakers were dominating the Knicks at the other end of the floor, looking strong despite their own nagging injuries—a groin pull that Baylor had suffered in practice and a jammed thumb that made gripping the ball a chore for West. After Reed’s basket, they promptly scored again to lead 25–15. On the Knicks’ next possession, Bradley hit Reed in the middle with a two-hand pass, and Reed immediately drove left as the Lakers’ Keith Erickson dropped off Bradley to help. Reed had a step on Chamberlain, and there didn’t appear to be contact when Reed suddenly lurched forward and down. The ball squirted loose, into Chamberlain’s hands. He shuffled a pass to West. DeBusschere saw Reed hit the floor, writhing in pain, and blurted out, “Oh my God.” But the Lakers were off in transition and the four upright Knicks followed, leaving Reed alone and crumpled.
How and why he tore his right tensor muscle, which originates around the hip and extends into the upper thigh, remains something of a mystery. Reed always had his suspicion about what went wrong.
“I think because of the pain in my left knee, I may have instinctively shifted all the weight to my right side as I made my move around Wilt,” he said. The one thing there was never any doubt about was the excruciating pain he was in as he lay on the floor. It was etched unforgettably on his face and was captured magnificently by the lens of George Kalinsky.
As it happened, the Garden photographer had just switched courtside positions, as he often would during the course of a game. Call it journalistic savvy, random intuition, or just dumb luck, but Reed crashed not more than a minute later, right in front of him.
Kalinsky was more than a fan of Reed’s; he was a friend. Consequently, the photo, while one of his greatest, was also one of the most painful he would ever take. In the New York Times the following morning, a grimacing Reed would be captured sitting up, struggling to stand. But in this shot, the Times had either missed or not published the most gut-wrenching frame. Working for the Garden, Kalinsky had the much tighter and superior close-up of Reed stretched out, eyes shut, facial muscles contorted, head resting on his right arm.
The Captain was down. For the time being, the horror of Kent State was forgotten. The Knicks were in trouble.
ALL OVER THE GARDEN, including along the Knicks’ bench and even with the players on the floor, there was the dread of impending defeat. “We thought it was over,” Frazier said.
With the season suddenly dangling on the edge of disaster, Holzman sent Nate Bowman into the game. Nate the Snake was something of a foul machine, accumulating more personals during his five NBA seasons than field goals. To no one’s surprise, he quickly hacked Chamberlain twice. The Knicks fell further behind and trailed by 16 late in the second quarter. Fearing that Bowman would foul out before the break, Holzman reached deeper into his bench. Several seats away, Bill Hosket was minding his own business when he felt a poke in the ribs from Cazzie Russell.
“Red wants you,” Russell said.
Hosket was dumbfounded. He hadn’t played a minute in the first four games.
“Me?” he implored.
He looked down at Holzman to make sure Russell wasn’t mistaken or pulling his leg. Holzman waved him over and put his arm around the strapping blond kid’s shoulder. “I knew something was up, because he had never done that before,” Hosket said. Only 6'8" and 225 pounds, Hosket would be giving away at least 50 pounds and 5 inches to Wilt. What the hell could he do to stop him? He peeled away his warm-ups to check in. On the way, a pained voice called to him from behind.
“Wilmer… Wilmer.”
Hosket turned and there was Reed, still on the bench with an ice pack attached to his waist, motioning him over. When they had roomed together during Hosket’s rookie year, Reed had taken to calling him by his real name. Around the team, they became known as a tandem, Willis and Wilmer.
“Yeah, Will?”
“Lean on him, Wilmer,” Reed said. “Just lean on him.”
“Okay, Cap.”
When the Lakers set up their half-court offense, Hosket did exactly as he was told. At least he tried. He lowered his left shoulder into Chamberlain’s back, affixed his right hand to his waist, and pushed with every muscle he could muster. Chamberlain took one step back as he received the entry pass. Oh my God, I can’t believe how strong this guy is, Hosket thought. Chamberlain dribbled, backed in some more, and thrust his behind into Hosket’s stomach, literally knocking him out of bounds. In his sweet spot, Chamberlain went up for a trademark finger roll, only, instead of floating through the net, the ball danced off the rim. The Knicks rebounded and took off upcourt. Trailing the play, Hosket gave a quick look to the bench, hoping for a nod of approval from the league’s MVP, but Reed was already gone.
COOLING OFF IN THE GREAT ROOM, Reed’s eyes widened when I casually mentioned that I had come upon a DVD of what Old Knicks loyalists have come to simply call Game 5. It appeared to be a scouting video, incomplete, in black-and-white and with some of Marv Albert’s radio play-by-play dubbed in. Given the scarcity of NBA video from those years, Reed was delighted to learn that some form of Game 5 even existed.
“No kidding!” he said. “You know what? I never actually have sat down and watched that game.” Not on the night in question—when he remained in the locker room for the second half, listening to Albert’s classic call on the radio—or any other night, which amazed me, considering that Game 5 is one of the Knicks’ all-time classics.
Once he had pressed PLAY, the first thing he noticed was his limp: faint and unnoticeable to a layman like me. He was certain now that the injury had occurred because he had favored his left knee and leaned too heavily to the right.
When Reed went down, naturally all eyes were on him, but the camera followed the play as it advanced up the court. The ball moved from Chamberlain to West to Baylor on the left side. For a moment it appeared that Baylor would launch a jump shot, until Chamberlain, following the play, lumbered into the picture and the paint. Baylor fed him the ball. A dunk seemed imminent, but before Chamberlain could lift, he was surrounded by DeBusschere and Bradley. They tied him up: jump ball.
This one play, so easy to overlook in the tumult of the moment, spoke forcefully and symbolically about how the masters of improvisation were already banding together, compensating for the loss of their leader before he’d even left the court. “I guess you could say that’s what our team
was about,” Reed beamed as the camera found him again, being helped off by the trainer, Whelan.
The screen went dark for a few seconds. When the players reappeared, DeBusschere was jumping center against Chamberlain to begin the third quarter. The hole-plugging with Bowman and Hosket had ended with about four minutes left in the first half. DeBusschere shifted over from Baylor to play Chamberlain, leaning on the big man for all he was worth, having to peer over his shoulder or around him to keep tabs on the ball. Holzman had realized that no backup center or power forward was going to bail the Knicks out of their dire situation. This was no time to be fighting fire with convention. The Knicks needed a different strategy to challenge Chamberlain, physically and mentally.
Reed had waited in the locker room for the team to come in at halftime. Now the Captain had a ringside seat for the Knicks’ halftime discussion. According to Reed, it was Bradley who devised the strategy that would change the course of basketball history.
Old Knicks huddles were always known to be studies in democracy. Holzman’s ego never got in the way. He would look around at his players’ faces, wanting them to be part of the process. He had no problem asking, “What do you think we ought to do?”
His coaching philosophy was to teach the players, in effect, to coach themselves. He had no interest in being dictatorial, calling every play, or clinging to a particular style because it was his MO. To Holzman, a coach with a so-called system was mostly interested in maximizing his job security, of trying to have it both ways. If the team won, the system was brilliant. If it didn’t, the players didn’t fit the system. A coach, he believed, could program his players to the point of paralysis. The best of them would invariably figure out the game and make their own decisions.
Holzman didn’t burden his teams with an abundance of half-court sets, and his players couldn’t recall him ever diagramming a play, but that didn’t mean his offense was shallow or predictable. Every play had multiple options, to which Holzman would dedicate entire preseason games in order to make sure his players could execute each and every one in their sleep. As the team grew better, and tighter, often there was no play called at all, just fundamental screen-and-roll movement. The players would communicate with their eyes and body language, five men linked to the central nervous system of the coach, who believed in their basketball IQ and allowed them freedom as long as they followed the scripture: Make the extra pass, find the open man.
When the Garden Was Eden Page 15