When the Garden Was Eden

by Harvey Araton

  Chenier missed his target, instead hitting the man he was guarding in the back of the neck. Frazier, stumbling in an entanglement of humanity, was somehow whistled for a foul. Chenier went to the line, glancing at his disbelieving look-alike, trying to focus on his free throws while fighting off pangs of guilt. From a distance, he really respected Frazier. Years later, the two broadcasters would pose for a photo with a Garden fan during a Bullets visit, and Frazier would make him laugh by bringing up the tomahawk chop, telling him, “I still don’t know how I got the foul.” But to Chenier, the most amazing and telling aspect of the incident was that Frazier, who had every right to be furious, did not mouth off or get hit with a technical foul. The man was beyond cool. And then, with the basketball in his hands, he got hot.

  “He comes down on the next play and he makes a jumper,” Chenier said. “Then he made another shot, then another. I’m thinking, ‘Oh, shit, I’m in trouble.’ Next time, he pump-fakes, drives around me, uses the left hand, and puts in a reverse. The crowd is going crazy. And let me tell you something: 25 years later, people were still coming up to me and saying, ‘I remember when you hit Clyde in the head and he busted your ass after that.’ ”

  Off the top of his head, Chenier couldn’t pinpoint in which playoff game the punch had occurred, only that it was during his second year in the league—1972–73. In his 2006 book The Game Within the Game, Frazier concurred, pinpointing Game 2 of the conference semifinal. But a check of the clippings revealed that it was actually the following year, spring of ’74, in Game 5 of the first round. In that game, Frazier’s response indeed was spectacular. He led the Knicks to a one-point victory in overtime with 38 points, making eight of nine fourth-quarter shots. For both men, the memory lapse was understandable, given the passage of time, the blur of six consecutive playoffs series between the teams.

  THE BULLETS BEGAN THE ’73 SERIES with a renewed taste for the rivalry after capturing another Central Division title, this time with a robust 52 wins, 14 more than the previous season. To his credit, Abe Pollin didn’t stop competing after the Monroe fiasco, dealing for the talented but enigmatic Elvin Hayes to replace Gus Johnson, who had gone to Phoenix and then to Indiana, of the ABA, for his last season. Chenier grew up fast, averaging 19.7 points. But the most pleasant surprise—again, to Pollin’s credit—was the emergence of Riordan, who thrived at the Bullets’ faster pace, averaging 18.1 points and leading the team in minutes played.

  After the Knicks won the opener, they were engaged in a tight second game at the Garden before pulling away behind Frazier and Monroe, who combined for 61 points. Frazier added 13 assists and 9 rebounds, barely missing a triple double. With Reed in decline, Frazier, at 28 and the height of his prime and fame, was the team’s most potent two-way player. Making life easier—especially in the absence of a consistent low-post threat—was Monroe, the kind of bailout option the Knicks had never had.

  “That team was so smart, they knew how wise it was to utilize Earl’s one-on-one skills,” Chenier said. “He was always there for them in the last seven or eight seconds of the shot clock if they needed him.” The Milwaukee comeback was a stunning demonstration of what Monroe brought to the Knicks. But for him, the Bullets series was even more gratifying, coming as it did a year after he had contributed so little. He tormented his old team with waves of tantalizing dribble drives and midrange jumpers. The Knicks brushed off the Bullets in five games but had no time to celebrate. The Celtics were next. They headed to Boston, where Red Auerbach was already blowing smoke about the restoration of royalty, the rightful return of his team to the top of the Eastern Conference—and beyond.

  TOMMY HEINSOHN NEVER BELIEVED in the prevailing notion of Willis Reed as the Knicks’ heart, soul, and 1970 savior. While he was certain that leprechauns resided in the bowels of Boston Garden, he didn’t quite get the Reed mystique in Madison Square Garden. Heinsohn rated Walt Frazier as one of the great guards in NBA history, thought Bill Bradley was nonpareil running the baseline, and appreciated Dave DeBusschere’s rugged determination. But in Heinsohn’s opinion, explained with a Celtic’s smug assurance that made the Old Knick fan in me want to lash him with my digital recorder, Reed was no more than “a hardnosed player, a plugger who fit that team, but someone you could take advantage of.”

  There was more, unsolicited: “I mean, Russell could outplay him at the end of his career because he was a defensive player who could take away his offense. And we always felt Cowens could beat him down the floor with his speed. If you tried to put Willis up there with Russ, Wilt, and Kareem, come on, give me a break. They put him in the Hall of Fame because of the whole New York thing. Willis came on board when I was playing, and we would absolutely kill them. So they put together a team around him—a very unusual team—that was kind of made to beat us.”

  Born in Union, New Jersey, Heinsohn was a New York metropolitan-area native—like Auerbach and Cousy—and actually a charmer if you didn’t let blood rites or partisanship get in the way. But by 1973 Heinsohn was as loathsome a sight to New Yorkers as Auerbach had been, looming over the court at 6'7", arms folded, head bent so that his shaggy hair shaded his eyes, and wearing a perpetual frown and a loud sports jacket.

  Paul Silas, on the other hand, spent only four of his twelve NBA seasons in Boston, and while he came to enormously appreciate what the franchise achieved and represented, he didn’t parrot every party line. “We came in about the same time, and Willis was the most amazing basketball player I’d ever seen,” Silas said. “To be such a tough guy, to rebound and score the way he did against bigger men, and then have that feathery touch from outside—there was something special about Willis that you couldn’t explain but you could feel.” Like many old-time enforcers, Silas relished the days when not every altercation in a physically grinding sport turned into an overnight referendum on myriad social (and racial) issues, with every fracas shown countless times, from every conceivable angle, on ESPN. Because Silas worked as an assistant coach in New York and New Jersey before being hired as LeBron James’s first pro coach in Cleveland, I’d heard many an old war story from him. One of his favorites concerned a turbulent night in Atlanta when he got into it with Phil Jackson, and Reed rushed over to stand up for his guy. Fists were soon flying. Nate Bowman somehow wound up in the stands with his head in a railing, long before Ron Artest was a glimmer in his parents’ eyes. “It was just chaos, everybody fighting,” Silas said. “But Willis was in the center of it all—and nobody wanted to go after him.”

  As much as anyone, Silas put the power in power forward. On a good day, his offensive range was about five feet, but when Silas was generously sent to the Celtics by Phoenix for the 1972–73 season, Dave Cowens had the perfect complementary frontcourt partner. His 13.3 points and 13 rebounds a game elevated the Celtics from very good to special. Everyone expected a brutally competitive series as the Celtics pushed to regain their standing while the aging Knicks were making what felt like a last stand, if only because Reed was playing on borrowed time. “It was amazing what he put himself through that season,” said Henry Bibby, who, as Reed’s roommate, had the closest look. “He would rub this ointment on his body to loosen up his joints, just spread it all over himself like it was sunblock, except it made your skin feel like it was on fire. He’d even rub it on his feet—I swear it ate the skin right off. You could see the white on his toes.”

  Reed wasn’t the only key player in the series to cope with infirmity. After the teams each won a game at home, Monroe bruised a hip in Game 3 while diving for a loose ball and departed in the third quarter. Chasing Bradley in the same game, Havlicek smacked into a granite screen set by DeBusschere, suffered a separation of his right shoulder, and barely played in the fourth quarter after compiling 29 points, 9 rebounds, and 6 assists. When the Knicks pulled out a 98–91 victory, the series returned to New York, where neither player could suit up. When Havlicek walked onto the floor in street clothes, the Garden fans cheered, many of them standing. “They showed me resp
ect, and that told you a lot about the intelligence of that crowd,” he said. But Game 4 would not be remembered for mutual admiration. For three quarters, behind Cowens and Jo Jo White, the Celtics dominated the Knicks, leading 76–60 with ten minutes left. But Don Chaney, their backcourt defensive specialist, fouled out at the 8:51 mark after keeping Frazier, who had 17 points, reasonably contained.

  “They started blowing the whistles against us and it got out of hand in the fourth quarter,” Heinsohn said. Time, naturally, had made the performance of the referees—Jake O’Donnell and Jack Madden—even more abusive and dishonorable in Heinsohn’s memory. He recalled “something like 19 straight calls going against us,” which of course was an exaggeration. A check of the box score showed the Knicks shooting 15 more free throws over the course of the game (not exactly the worst home-court playoff hosing in the history of the league). Most significantly, Chaney’s exit freed Frazier, who attacked Jo Jo White, who was also in foul trouble and whose offense was too important for the Celtics to lose.

  On his way to a playoff career high of 37 points, Frazier scored 15 in the quarter, and his jumper with 17 seconds remaining pushed the Knicks into overtime—though not before they dodged an end-of-regulation bullet: Don Nelson took an inbounds pass with the game tied and called for time-out in the backcourt, violating a rule implemented that season meant to force the offensive team to advance the ball and not bail itself out by calling for time. “I’m standing at the other end of the court and Madden blows his whistle,” O’Donnell said. “He runs down to me and says, ‘Did you see him call time?’ I said, ‘Jack, it’s your call.’ He gives the ball back to the Knicks, and Heinsohn is ready to pop a vein.”

  The glut of whistle blowing took its toll on the Knicks as well. Reed fouled out. After 38 minutes in Monroe’s stead, so did Dean Meminger. On the floor for the Knicks at the start of the second overtime were Frazier, DeBusschere, Jackson, Bibby, and John Gianelli. Gianelli may have been the freest of Old Knicks spirits, a beach lover who yearned for the West Coast life, who would build a cabin with his wife in the mountains between Yosemite and Tahoe and play several years in Italy after seven-plus NBA seasons. In Milan, his team won the 1982 championship when Gianelli hit teammate Mike D’Antoni for a title-winning shot. The future Knicks coach sank the jumper, and the two U.S.-born stars, or stranieri (foreigners), were carried off the floor. Gianelli was skinny as a rail, but Red Holzman played the hunch that his length would be more effective against Cowens’s bullish rushes to the rim than what Jerry Lucas had shown. Gianelli wound up playing 16 minutes in total, hitting all four of his shots and drawing Cowens’s sixth foul.

  “He’s my roommate,” Frazier bragged afterward. “I guess something must have rubbed off on him.” DeBusschere broke a tie with a long jumper, Jackson stole the ball and drove for a layup, and the Knicks pulled away, 117–110.

  “People forget about that game, but it was one of the all-time best,” said George Lois, whose game face made it into the next morning’s New York Times, along with his younger son, Luke’s. Played on Easter Sunday, the game exhausted everyone. Looking older than his 32 years, DeBusschere sat on a table in the trainer’s room after playing 51 minutes and said, “I couldn’t have gone another.” Frazier logged 57 of a possible 58 minutes. Silas, who grabbed 23 rebounds, was wrapped in cold towels, unable to make it into the shower. But no one needed to chill more than Heinsohn, who left the floor in a red-faced rage, screaming at Madden and O’Donnell through the tunnel, all the way to their locker room. When Madden left the following season to ref ABA games, Heinsohn was convinced that it was because there was so much consternation in the league office over the Game 4 calls.

  “Just our luck, we go down to Carolina to play the Cougars in an exhibition game and Jack’s doing the game,” he told me. “He fouls Cowens out in about six minutes and he throws my ass out as soon as I open my mouth.” For all of Heinsohn’s fury, the Celtics weren’t done after Game 4. Back in Boston, Silas saved the series in Game 5 with his 20th rebound, following a missed jumper by White with the Celtics trailing by one and seven seconds left. Reed, guarding Cowens, was screaming, “Block out, block out!” But Silas slipped by Lucas, grabbed the ball, and was fouled by DeBusschere.

  “He makes the free throws and we lose,” Reed said. “Everybody says, ‘Don’t worry about it, we’re going home.’ What happens? We get beat on a Friday night, we don’t play worth a damn, and now we’ve got to go back to Boston on Sunday.” But not before they were bitterly reminded by Ned Irish at practice the next day that the Celtics had never lost the seventh game of a playoff series on their home floor. “You could have won it last night; now look what you’ve got to do,” Irish fumed, mixing F-bombs and other choice words into his diatribe. “You blew it.”

  Irish stormed out, convinced that his team had cost him the lucrative finals gate. Either that or he was a master reverse psychologist. As an analytical man, Bradley long ago rendered a verdict on Irish’s speech as more motivational than hysterical. “If you needed incentive, he provided it, and, you know, it had the desired effect.” But the Irish speech was just another chapter in the legend of the Old Knicks, destined as they were to make that other Garden their own piece of Eden.

  16

  CHANGING OF THE GUARDS

  THE NEW GUY LOOKED SAD, ALONE, AND DEAN MEMINGER, AN NBA PLAYER for all of one month, felt kind of sorry for him. This was back on November 11, 1971, Earl Monroe’s first night in uniform with the Knicks, when he found himself sheepishly encouraging Walt Frazier and Dick Barnett as they discarded their sweats and walked onto the floor, leaving him behind.

  Monroe had signed his new contract just that afternoon, then pushed open the door to the Knicks locker room, not knowing what to expect. Bill Bradley got up to greet him, then Dave DeBusschere. Monroe relaxed and dressed quietly, pulling his number 33 jersey from his shoulders and tucking it into his home white shorts. The hardest part, out on the Garden floor in a game against the Golden State Warriors, was still to come.

  Strange, Meminger thought. Hadn’t it been only weeks since he had watched the Knicks go at Monroe and his Bullets as if it were Game 7? It wasn’t—“Just a damn exhibition,” Meminger said, cackling at the memory and the intensity of the Knicks-Bullets rivalry. Yet there Monroe stood, alongside Meminger, blurred at the edge of his periphery like a white-and-orange hallucination. Earl the Pearl, he thought, a Knick, trying to pretend he knew how to act under these bizarre circumstances, beginning his new life as a celebrated scrub.

  If Meminger was uncomfortable just watching Monroe, imagine how the Pearl felt as the starters strolled toward midcourt for the opening tip, leaving him to figure out where to sit.

  Meminger sat down near the end of the bench and fixed his gaze on Monroe, keeping it there until the Pearl raised his head. Eye contact made, Meminger nodded, his message unspoken but clear.

  Right here, next to me. It’s cool.

  The seeds of a lifelong relationship were sown in the seconds it took for a relieved Monroe to fold himself among the row of Minutemen.

  “THE OTHER GUYS were courteous, but they weren’t going to hang with him, because he was a Bullet and they had their own things going,” Meminger would tell me when I asked about the origin of the friendship. “But I was new myself, looking for someone to have dinner with on the road. We became friends right away, hung out more than any of the others. I saw what he went through that first year, people asking, ‘What happened to you?’ He’d just shrug. He knew he’d have to make adjustments, but 11 points a game—not that kind of adjustment. He wasn’t Jesus in the community anymore. It was damaging, and Earl suffered, and that’s not something I read in a book.”

  Friends and teammates called him Petey—his full name was Dean Peter Meminger—but fans would remember him as Dean the Dream. That was the nickname he was given by his coach at Marquette, Al McGuire, who recruited the stoop-shouldered guard out of Rice High School on West 124th Street in Harlem. After a race for his se
rvices that included UCLA’s John Wooden, Meminger wound up in a courtside Garden seat the night Walt Frazier and Southern Illinois beat McGuire’s team and his star guard, George Thompson, from Brooklyn’s Erasmus Hall High. “I went to see George,” Meminger said. “I’d never even heard of Walt Frazier.”

  At six feet tall, Meminger was no high-flying dunker, no graceful showstopper: his jump shot often launched with the trajectory of a bullet train. But with a pedigree of a respected Division I program and a first step famously described by McGuire as “quicker than 11:15 Mass at a seaside resort,” Meminger was the 16th player taken in the 1971 NBA draft.

  “I was more of a structure guy,” he said, explaining why he signed with the Knicks instead of the ABA’s Indiana Pacers. He was proud of the street-savvy mentorship he’d received from McGuire (to say nothing of the mean streets of Harlem) and grew eager to take his game downtown to the Garden.

  He drew heat from his old Harlem pals for moving to an apartment in Peter Cooper Village, but it did little to dull the pride most of the neighborhood felt toward Meminger. He was a graduate of Urban League programs who had gotten out of Harlem before the inherent temptations turned him into another school-yard city legend, dribbling here and there and fast-tracked to nowhere, trapped in the Rucker League prison of what-if. In other words, Meminger had made it downtown, where the real games were played.

  He knew that what happened at the Rucker ultimately meant nothing, even if the guys on the streets would tell you about it forever. “If I got 35 in the Rucker and someone dropped 50 on me up there, I didn’t care,” he said. “You have to understand, even in college, it wasn’t my day job. Someone up there might be after you, but you weren’t going to worry about what happened on a stage for could-have-beens. I’m not saying it to put them down, because there were some really talented guys. But they never got to play on Broadway; what happened in the park meant a lot more to them than it meant to me.”