When the Garden Was Eden

by Harvey Araton

But then, who was to say what the inclusion of Baylor would have meant? Would a war of wills with Sharman have affected team chemistry? Would the Lakers have gone on the winning streak and developed their own Celtics-like sense of manifest destiny? Would McMillian have been given the minutes to average almost 19 points as a fluid jump shooter and lane filler, the better frontcourt complement to Chamberlain? There has never been a series and season that wasn’t subject to the impossible but irresistible computation of what we might call “the human element.” West, for example, could never quite forget how the Lakers were beating the Knicks by 10 points on the night Reed crashed to the court in Game 5, 1970, changing the dynamic of that crucial swing game.

  “Through all the years, you remember every turn those games took, every time there was a play you didn’t make, every shot that rolled in and out that might have been the difference between winning and losing,” he said. “And take it from me: you can drive yourself crazy doing that.” Not Lucas, though. He lived by an obscure calculus that only he could solve.“I guarantee you that if Dave hadn’t gotten hurt, we could have beaten them four straight,” he said. “Guarantee it.”

  PART IV

  PARADISE REGAINED

  15

  SECOND COMING

  THE RAGE OF THE SIXTIES HAD GIVEN WAY TO THE RUIN OF THE SEVENTIES. A war-weary country was looking toward an end in Vietnam, more desperate than triumphant. The airwaves carried word of a political scandal that within two years would derail the second term of Richard M. Nixon. Hope was scuttled, heroes were scarce, and even rock stars who had given voice to youthful rebellion were dying of their own drug-fueled recklessness. The presumed safe haven of sports wasn’t spared, either. Eleven Israelis were taken hostage and murdered by Palestinian terrorists at the Summer Olympics in Munich, West Germany. The studio host, Jim McKay, looked red-eyed into the ABC camera on that early September day and uttered the three irrevocable words—“They’re all gone”—that would echo forever. Scandalously, the Olympics carried on. Life trudged ever forward. When another NBA season began in October, at least Old Knicks fans had the Garden, our erstwhile Eden and fortress of enchantment, in which to drown our real-world discord and despair.

  As they had in 1969–70, the Knicks of 1972–73 started fast, winning 10 of their first 11 with Reed back in the lineup. They were 15–3 when the Milwaukee Bucks pulled into town on Saturday night, November 18, and appeared to be coasting to victory behind Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. In the arena of his rookie discontent, the placid-faced big man was toying with Our Guys, scoring 32 points, hitting 14 of his first 21 shots, making it look as gracefully easy as only he could. The Bucks rolled to an 86–68 lead with 5:50 left in a game for which the Knicks were not at full strength. Jerry Lucas had badly twisted an ankle a week earlier, forcing Willis Reed, who had been coming off the bench, to play more and more on a bum knee. Not that Lucas had the size or strength to deal with Abdul-Jabbar’s length in the post: that was more a job for the Captain.

  Reed had reentered the game after a rest on the bench at the eight-minute mark, replacing John Gianelli, a mop-haired rookie from the University of the Pacific, as the Knicks regrouped for the obligatory and seemingly futile last run. While a fair number of fans had already headed for the exits, the more sophisticated among them could on some dispassionate level appreciate the grace of Abdul-Jabbar and the all-court wizardry of Oscar Robertson.

  So Woody Allen sat with one leg crossed over the other, accompanied by his favorite costar, Diane Keaton. Stan Asofsky and Freddy Klein leaned forward in their baseline seats and baited the refs—while on the other side of the floor George Lois tried to ignore his fairly bored wife. Rosemary Lewandowski-Lois didn’t know much about basketball beyond her husband’s love for the game, an obsession that had moved her to remark a few weeks into the marriage that he would have to make a choice, “basketball or me.” Lois left the room for a few moments and returned with a ball, which he proceeded to dribble. She got the message, learned to work around his passion for YMCA tussles and nights out with the Knicks. As it was, she was attending her very first game, and even Lois had to admit it was a competitive dud. But just when the notion of leaving early in deference to the missus actually crossed his mind, the Knicks began pressing full-court, man-to-man. If they’re not giving up, Lois thought, why the hell should I?

  Immediately, the press seemed to bother the Bucks, forced them to accelerate their offense. Off a missed jumper, Earl Monroe got out on the fast break, scored on a layup, and cut the deficit to 16. Monroe was a starter now, finally a Knick, at least by the measure of his minutes, with Dick Barnett having turned 36 and more into his graduate studies than basketball. This would be his final full season in uniform.

  Monroe’s ascension was accompanied by the presence of his Baltimore acolyte Dancing Harry, who began showing up with tickets usually obtained from Monroe. He quickly became a favorite of the Garden crowd and embellished his act with a flowing cape. Harry didn’t quite fit the image of the button-down Knicks or management’s idea of courtside entertainment, but that was the appeal of Earl the Pearl. He was different from the others. He was spice. On Broadway, he was Cirque du Soleil. With Monroe starting, Lucas, Phil Jackson, and Dean Meminger were the primary reserves on the 1972–73 Knicks. Gianelli received occasional spot duty, as did Henry Bibby, the UCLA guard who would regale Reed, his roommate, with tales of John Wooden and especially the great young Bruins center, Bill Walton.

  “The big redhead—can he get it done?” Reed would ask Bibby. “Cap,” Bibby said, “the big redhead, he’s a motherfucker.” Of all the Knicks newcomers, the most intriguing was a man who would log 59 minutes in 13 games, or 59 and 13 more than anyone would have believed. Harthorne Nathaniel Wingo was a 6'9" forward with long arms and limited skills beyond running, jumping, and dunking. The small-town North Carolina native was even less credentialed to be an NBA player, having kicked around junior college and the Eastern League, living with an aunt in Harlem, and working in the Garment District pushing racks of clothing around Manhattan streets. The barnstorming Harlem Wizards discovered him in a Greenwich Village pickup game. From there he found his way to the end of Red Holzman’s bench, where, by virtue of his name alone, Wingo became someone for whom the crowd would chant when games entered what Marv Albert liked to call gar-bage time.

  Another coach might have cleared his bench when trailing a team as powerful as Milwaukee by 18 with less than six minutes to play—no point in draining the hourglasses within Reed’s knees. But to Holzman it was always bad precedent to concede too soon.

  “I always felt that you’ve got no place to go, anyway,” he said. “You can’t go to the movies until after the game is over. You can’t go out to dinner until after the game is over. So you might as well give it your best shot until it’s over.”

  Still, against the Bucks, Holzman couldn’t have thought they had a chance. How long could anyone keep Abdul-Jabbar and his sky hook from the scoring column? “You think about it, we were down 18 and we didn’t have the luxury of shooting threes,” Frazier said. “To come back, you would have to hold them scoreless, and how were you going to do that when they had Kareem?”

  But with the Bucks under intensified defensive pressure and Reed leaning on Abdul-Jabbar, forcing him a step farther from his preferred post-up position, the feel and tempo of the game changed quickly. The lead was down to 11 when Robertson drove against Frazier, thinking one measly basket would put an end to whatever fantasies the Knicks were entertaining. He went up for a jumper near the right baseline. The ball bounded off the rim, right into Abdul-Jabbar’s hands for a put-back from close range—a gift of a shot he would probably make nine of ten times. Not this one. Dave DeBusschere’s outlet found Bradley, who hit Monroe for a left-baseline jumper, 86–77. Murmurs of hope became spasms of excitement.

  Meanwhile, a sense of uneasiness permeated the Milwaukee side. Better than most, Robertson knew how these Knicks had a knack for the momentous occasion, for outright thievery, tho
ugh his Cousy-in-Cleveland nightmare in 1969 had been more of a shocking left-right combination in the final minute of the game and before his Royals knew what hit them. What was developing now was different, a slow, cinematic build to disaster. When Monroe up-faked his man and maneuvered for a right-side jumper, the Knicks were within seven points, 86–79 with 3:10 remaining. Abdul-Jabbar missed another sky hook, DeBusschere took a handoff from Monroe and buried a long jumper to make it a 5-point game. Bradley found Monroe again for another open right-side look that took the lead down to three. Frazier was fouled, went to the line, and—just as he had in Cleveland three years earlier, in the comeback against the Royals—calmly sank two free throws. Now the Knicks were somehow down by one, 86–85, with 47 seconds left. The Bucks called time. Their coaches—Larry Costello and a young, acerbic assistant named Hubie Brown—put the ball in Robertson’s hands to inbound at midcourt with instructions to run off some clock and get the ball to Abdul-Jabbar.

  “The fans were making so much noise that you swore the basket and backboard were moving every time we shot,” Brown said. “The noise was such that you couldn’t hear yourself think in the huddle.”

  At this point, the Bucks were handed another chance to avoid infamy when Monroe was whistled for tripping the guard (and former UCLA teammate of Abdul-Jabbar’s) Lucius Allen before the ball was inbounded—an automatic two-shot foul. But Allen’s first attempt hit the back rim and rolled off the front. His second missed, too. Reed rebounded and passed to Frazier, who dribbled upcourt against Allen. “Most coaches in that situation would have called time-out. Not Red,” Frazier said. “What was he going to tell me in that situation—get a good shot? They were reeling, man, back on their heels. You didn’t want to give them a chance to regroup.”

  Frazier attacked Allen, spinning left at the free-throw line, creating just enough space to rise for the jumper. But Monroe had drifted out to the left of the lane, clear of Robertson, who had hesitated in following, believing Frazier was going to shoot. In the moment that would symbolically cement their unlikely partnership, Frazier followed the blueprint and hit the open man. “Walt had a decent shot, but mine was better,” Monroe said. “He knew I would make it.” From 16 feet out, Monroe buried the uncontested look of his life for his 21st and 22nd points of the game, 11 of them scored during the incredible 19-point run that had given the Knicks an 87–86 lead with 36 seconds remaining.

  Abdul-Jabbar would get two more cracks—the first a makeable sky hook from the baseline, the second a buzzer-challenging turnaround from deep on the other side of the basket. (A brain cramp by Bradley had led to a Knicks 24-second violation and given the Bucks the ball with two seconds remaining.) He missed the first, air-balled the second. The buzzer sounded as Frazier grabbed the ball and carried it like a newborn toward the tunnel. His teammates followed, somewhat stunned themselves. “I don’t think we realized what we had done until we got inside,” Frazier said. Staying off the floor, the fans cheered madly for several minutes before carrying their exuberance into the street.

  George Lois’s wife turned to him and said, “That was exciting.” He thought, You just watched the greatest fucking comeback ever, and all you can say is, “That was exciting”? But he also knew that it took night after regular-season night to truly appreciate what seemed like only one of 82 meaningless games before the playoffs. Abstractly, Marv Albert agreed that the Knicks’ 16th win of that season “epitomized the greatness” of the era perhaps more than any other game. Playoff success and championships won would of course remain history’s tried and true barometer of achievement. But scoring the last 19 points and silencing the league’s reigning MVP (and ultimately the leading scorer in NBA history) would never be forgotten as a hallmark of the Old Knicks.

  “I don’t think anything could top that game, not even winning the championship, because that was just something you knew you would never see again,” said Woody Allen. Abdul-Jabbar now had more reason to despise the Garden, while Robertson could only console himself with the satisfaction of having predicted, in the first place, that Frazier and Monroe would successfully coexist.

  But the real story—or the moral of the story—was how Holzman’s coalition of the willing could incorporate even the most flamboyant of scorers while continuing to make sure that the basketball was the team’s most cherished star. In twenty-first-century terms, the open man was the franchise or go-to player. Frazier to Monroe for the game winner on November 18, 1972, was not only Monroe’s Garden baptism in the home-team uniform; it was affirmation that the team was still collectively capable of greatness. “When that happened, we almost felt invincible,” DeBusschere would say years later. “That was when we felt we could do this again.”

  THE KNICKS’ 57 WINS AGAINST 25 LOSSES that season would represent the fourth-best record in the league. Out west, the Lakers and Bucks each won 60. In the Knicks’ own division, the Celtics put even more distance between the teams than during the previous regular season, crafting a 68–14 record, one win shy of the Lakers’ 1971–72 record. But history had also shown that veteran teams with championship timber could have priorities beyond driving themselves for an extra home game in a seven-game series. Russell’s Celtics had powerfully demonstrated the art of lying in the weeds in 1969. The Knicks’ first title team had needed the emotional cushion of home-court advantage, but the second one needed to fine-tune, pace, and heal itself. Those 57 wins were achieved while completing the assimilation of Monroe and incorporating Reed back into the frontcourt rotation. Reed, in particular, was a work in progress, averaging career lows in points (11) and dipping under 30 minutes a game (to 27.2) for the first time in his career.

  “I was struggling for a lot of that season,” he said. “But I started to feel pretty good going into the playoffs.” In the blue seats for the first-round opener in the now annual conflagration with the Bullets, someone in my row made that very observation during a third-quarter burst in which the Knicks took over the game. I remember it vividly: Monroe picking up a loose ball off a Bullets turnover, looking up, and, seeing a white uniform streaking ahead, leading him with a perfectly timed pass. Running like a guard—or a 22-year-old rookie—Reed turned it up a gear, beat the Bullet to the ball, cradled it on a bounce, and continued to the rim for a lay-in. Three years after the legendary limp, a year after he’d been shut down for the season, Reed on the run was a rousing sight, in itself enough to make an entire fan base believe.

  PHIL CHENIER HEARD THE QUESTION a little too often early in his NBA career, even in the Baltimore-Washington area, where he was starting for the Bullets. There would be stares. There would be whispers. Finally someone would summon the nerve, step forward to ask:

  “Are you Clyde?”

  “No, sir,” he would say. “I am not Walt Frazier.”

  Chenier didn’t really get the whole body-double thing that would shadow him for years. Frazier was bigger, by at least an inch, and outweighed him by 15 pounds. Yes, he, too, had the wide sideburns extending due south, but he didn’t move like Clyde, cool and deliberate. He had more pep in his step, like the man he had studied growing up in the Bay Area of California, Jerry West.

  But—still—there had to be some resemblance for so many people to have mistaken him for the imperturbable Knick. “Maybe around the eyes, Walt and I were similar,” Chenier conceded. His reluctance was understandable. Chenier was a very good pro guard with five consecutive seasons averaging between 19.7 and 21.9 points. But he was not at Frazier’s Hall of Fame level, and the comparisons only played to a larger characterization that delighted New Yorkers: namely, casting the Bullets individually and collectively as Knicks Lite.

  Chenier was in college at Cal Berkeley when the Knicks came of age. He was riveted by their early series with the Bullets, and especially the backcourt duels between Frazier and Monroe. He was ecstatic when he was drafted by the Bullets in 1971, and chagrined when Monroe left abruptly to join the Knicks, even if the roster upheaval meant instant playing time. After ten years
in the NBA, Chenier, like Frazier, went on to a long broadcasting afterlife, with the Bullets-turned-Wizards. With all he had witnessed from backcourt to broadcast booth—from Russell’s Celtics to Kobe’s Lakers—he still considered the core Old Knicks to be the best team he ever laid eyes on.

  “Many personalities, but somehow no egos,” he said. Chenier also knew something about the challenges of heterogeneous bonding. Before attending college at Cal, he’d grown up in a modest but diverse Berkeley neighborhood during times of political and social dissent that engulfed the city in the late sixties. As a teenager, he’d witnessed a few things, including his high school gymnasium being taken over by the National Guard after the assassination of Martin Luther King.

  “Riots, demonstrations—you name it, we had it,” Chenier said. “One day it was about the war, the next day it was about poverty, and the day after that it was about race. For me, basketball was the place you went to get away from it all, where people could actually get along.”

  How ironic, then, that Chenier, one of the more well-liked NBA lifers, is best remembered in New York for one behavioral misstep, one retaliatory slip. In what may have been the fiercest Knicks-Bullets playoff game of all, bodies flew, whistles blew, and the referees, Earl Strom and Bob Rakel, were abused by both benches and from all sides of the Garden crowd. The players—even the former Minuteman Mike Riordan—were pawing and yapping at one another. Most antagonized was Chenier. Bradley was a master at knocking opponents off stride and getting into their heads. That night, Bradley’s elbows seemed to be targeting Chenier whenever they passed in the lane. “That was Bill: every trick in the book,” Chenier said. “I was sick of it and made a mental note that I wasn’t going to put up with it anymore. So we’re in the third quarter, and I go through the lane and he hits me with a forearm. I stop. I’m stupefied. And the next thing I know I’m swinging.”