When the Garden Was Eden

by Harvey Araton

  In 1972–73, Meminger averaged 18.2 minutes a game, a few more than he had as a rookie. Holzman was not normally one to rely on inexperienced players, but he loved Meminger’s New York sass, his capacity for making things happen with his quick hands and his knack for being around the ball. He was a hell-bent defender, a royal pain in the ass—Holzman’s kind of player.

  Undersized as he was, Meminger had long arms and legs that extended like tentacles from a torso that was shaped like a loaf of bread, with his head sitting on top. He had an innate sense of timing and managed to take his share of rebounds from much taller men. Knowing that most everyone he guarded was bigger than him, he developed the exquisite habit of banging his head against their chests, knowing it wasn’t a foul as long as he kept moving his feet.

  Meminger once frustrated Pete Maravich to the point that the exasperated Pistol cleared space for himself with a well-timed elbow in the mouth. “Wound up in the dentist’s chair at 1 A.M., having a tooth put back in place,” Meminger said. “But you know what? I went right back after the next guy. I always knew how to play defense. I knew my role.”

  A student of defense, he knew how to take advantage of the rules allowing him to Velcro a hand to an opponent’s right hip, forcing the dribbler left with his right hand held low. “That hand has to come up to shoot, and I will not let you bring those hands together,” Meminger said.

  In the 1973 conference finals against Boston, straight-up man-to-man defense was not so much the problem, because the Celtics, with their trademark motion offense, forced teams to constantly switch to avoid leaving jump shooters open. Dave Cowens and Paul Silas were especially ruthless screen setters, and Jo Jo White, who peeled off many of them, was an explosive pull-up shooter. While John Havlicek was planning to play in Game 7, he couldn’t possibly have recovered so quickly from the slight shoulder separation he had suffered earlier in the series. The Knicks knew that White would have to be the focus of Boston’s perimeter offense and that they would have to do a lot of talking on defense. This very subject came up at a film session in Boston the night before the game as the Knicks watched White break them down in Game 6. Meminger complained that his teammates weren’t communicating with him, calling out the picks fast enough.

  “Don’t bitch about the screen—just get through it,” Holzman barked.

  (“Pure Red,” Phil Jackson told me when I asked what he remembered about that session. “Don’t worry about what someone else is doing, only about what you’re supposed to do.”)

  Old Knicks didn’t complain, at least not about one another. Referees, of course, were another matter. None too appreciative of the Game 6 calls, Holzman had cornered John Nucatola, the league’s supervisor of referees, under the stands before Game 7 and “bawled the shit out of him, called him every name in the book.” Nucatola, knowing emotions were running high on both sides, turned off his hearing aid and didn’t hear a thing. Good, Holzman joked later. Nucatola might have kicked his hostile ass right into North Station.

  Holzman had other, in some ways more stifling, concerns about Boston’s home court. For starters, barefoot players risked having their careers mangled by clumsy, stressed-out sportswriters loitering in the tiny visitors’ locker room, not much bigger than a Manhattan walk-in closet.

  Somehow the league let Red Auerbach and the Celtics get away with providing conditions that were barely suitable for even the stray rats that occasionally scurried across the bowels of the arena. At the Garden, the visiting team dressed in a dimly lit, poorly ventilated, and often overheated little room that featured hooks on the wall for clothing instead of dressing stalls. The wooden benches for the players to sit on were splintered. There were peeling walls with frayed and presumably dead electrical wires connected to nothing. This room—locker room number 7—once inspired Brendan Malone, then a Detroit assistant coach, to quip: “There are guys doing 25 years who would refuse to come in here.” But the effects of the room weren’t always funny. In February 1991, Bernard King of the Washington Bullets had to be rushed to the hospital after suffering a severe allergic reaction to mold spores.

  For years, this was all part of Auerbach’s master psychological blueprint: make the opponents uncomfortable. Get under their skin, inside their head, using every ploy imaginable. When hotel alarms mysteriously went off in the middle of the night—I experienced that phenomenon myself while staying in a new Marriott at Copley Square with the Lakers in the eighties—sleep-deprived opponents could only suspect that Auerbach’s leprechauns were everywhere, including the hotel maintenance office. On game day, it didn’t matter if Auerbach had been involved or not, as long as the visiting team showed up to Boston Garden expecting the worst.

  When the Knicks arrived late morning on the Sunday of Game 7, the door to their decrepit digs wasn’t even open. There was no one around who seemed to have a key. They stood outside waiting, while the Celtics strolled in, one by one, at the other end of the dingy corridor. Meminger and Monroe were especially annoyed, anxious to get inside, plop down on the bench, and maybe take a pregame snooze, sitting up.

  “Earl and I hung out all night before that game—but I won’t give you the gory details,” Meminger told me. The two friends were destined over the next couple of years to be regular contributors to the Holzman punctuality fund.

  THE HIP THAT MONROE HAD BRUISED in Game 3 was feeling better, allowing him to line up for the center jump, matched up with White. Though he was in uniform, Havlicek didn’t start, and Don Nelson took his place. “My shooting arm, I couldn’t lift it,” Havlicek said. “When I got in, I tried to do whatever I could, but it wasn’t much.” The book on Havlicek was that he always drove right because he didn’t have much of a left hand. With his right arm hanging limp for much of the 23 minutes he gamely contributed, he had no choice but to go left and hope for the best. Not much good came of it, four points, forcing the Celtics to run their offense through White and Cowens, as Holzman had suspected they would.

  To deal with Cowens, whose quickness made him a difficult cover for Reed and his deteriorating knees, Holzman made a pregame defensive adjustment, shifting Dave DeBusschere onto him. The move allowed Reed to match up with Paul Silas, who seldom did much on offense except crash the boards. Despite lacking the slide-step quickness to fight through the screens, Monroe guarded White because Holzman preferred Walt Frazier to guard the Celtics’ primary ball handler, Don Chaney, a poor outside shooter whom Frazier could all but ignore in order to stalk passing lanes.

  White had an effective, if not dominant, start. He scored six first-quarter points and drew two fouls on Monroe as the Celtics took a 22–19 lead. At the outset of the second quarter, Holzman inserted Meminger along with Jerry Lucas and Phil Jackson. In the huddle, Meminger was already jacked up. “We got these motherfuckers,” he gushed while his teammates eyed him suspiciously. “And Jo Jo is mine.”

  To watch this game on the only surviving video—a grainy black-and-white scout film, spliced to eliminate dead balls and inbounds passes—would make any romanticist of the glory days, any critic of the modern game, pause to reconsider. Play was frantic and sloppy, with both teams shooting poorly—the Celtics under 40 percent. But there is no mistaking whose entrance changed the feel and flow. Meminger began the quarter inauspiciously, shooting an air-ball jumper from the key area, but from there he no doubt became the alarm Heinsohn never heard the night before as he counted Celtics titles and passed into a deep sleep.

  With the score tied at 24, Meminger drew a charge on White, and at the other end he nailed a 17-footer from the left wing. On the Knicks’ next possession, he pushed the ball and scored on a drive. He poked it away from White and scored on a layup. He ran a two-man break with Bill Bradley and dropped in another deuce. He hustled back on defense and contested a missed jumper by White, then raced to the other end to find an opening under the glass in time to rebound a missed jumper by Bradley. Boston fouled him in exasperation.

  The Knicks outscored the Celtics by eight in the se
cond quarter and took a five-point lead into halftime. Holzman was sold. “We’re going with you. Keep working,” he told Meminger before the start of the third quarter.

  “At that point, even I said, ‘What the heck is this?’ ” Meminger recalled, referring to his surprise that Holzman had tabbed him to start the third quarter, ahead of Monroe. But when he thought about the strategy from the distance of decades, it made perfect sense. “I think Red knew we couldn’t let Jo Jo go off. What’d he get—18, 19?” Actually, I told Meminger, White scored 21 that day, 10 field goals made with 21 shots taken, but only 1 free throw in 2 attempts before fouling out with a minute to play. He nodded and noted that White needed to have done more damage with Havlicek hurting. “See, he needed to have a big game and he didn’t,” Meminger said. “And Red knew if we got down to them in the second half in Boston, it was over.”

  Meminger injected into the Knicks a dose of the Celtics’ own medicine, a panacea of gritty defense and transition offense. Once his playground instincts were harnessed by McGuire’s fundamental teachings, Meminger always believed he could have switched uniforms, fit either team. “I played the kind of basketball Boston was known for, did the tough things a lot of other guys didn’t want to do,” he said.

  Frazier, still the Knicks’ best player on the floor, was on the way to a 25-point, 10-rebound, 7-assist gem. But Meminger continued to impose himself, making plays at both ends. He found Reed with a nifty pass for a layup as the Knicks’ lead grew to double figures. He snuck inside the trees and grabbed an offensive board off a missed jumper, which eventually led, after some classic ball movement, to a sweeping hook by Jackson. Meminger harassed White into another turnover. The lead reached 15 after three.

  “You tired?” Holzman asked.

  “I’m good,” Meminger said, noticing Holzman glancing uneasily at Monroe, who remained on the bench, never to reappear, as Meminger played the last 36 minutes. As he walked out for the start of the fourth quarter, Meminger did not look back at Monroe, did not so much as shoot him a glance out of the corner of his eye. From the moment they had made eye contact before Monroe’s first game as a Knick the previous season, Meminger felt that a bond had been established. He knew Monroe was cool with this, putting aside his own ego while Holzman rode the hot player.

  BUT WHAT ABOUT EVERYONE ELSE? Imagine the media firestorm that a three-quarters benching of a superstar, a Top 50 all-timer, for a second-year sub would have set off in a Game 7 of today. Obviously the contemporary superstar carries more clout, means more to his team in an expanded and watered-down NBA. So balanced were the Old Knicks that one starter subtracted from the lineup for a role player did not fundamentally alter their MO.

  “Earl wasn’t really benched,” Bill Bradley reasoned. “We won! It was a normal substitution, Dean for Earl—gave him a blow—but then Dean took off. We were a team; it wasn’t a matter of who got the credit.” Echoing Bradley, calling Game 7 “Dean’s game,” Willis Reed added: “That was no knock, because Dean was a good player, a quick, aggressive guy, and we needed somebody to put the clamps on Jo Jo.”

  Largely forgotten is how much more Meminger contributed to the win than defense. His numbers (13 points, 6 rebounds, 3 assists) fail to convey the impact he had on the game, how his fearlessness in spite of the pressure and the location ignited the Knicks.

  Naturally, the Celtics’ version of what happened was something else entirely.

  “I don’t remember Dean Meminger beating us, and I don’t think he quote-unquote stopped Jo Jo,” Tommy Heinsohn said. “What I do remember is that we didn’t have trouble with them during the regular season and then Havlicek got hurt. We won 68, but the team that won 68 didn’t play them in the playoffs.”

  How, then, had the Celtics managed to win Games 5 and 6? Reed, plagued as he’d been by injuries, didn’t want to hear any excuses. “Hey, we went up there and did it, when no one thought we would, even after our owner cursed us out and called us losers,” he said.

  No one concurred more than Holzman, grinning ear to ear in the triumphant locker room, punching the air with a primal glee. That day, interviewed on television, he called the victory “the most satisfying I’ve ever been associated with.” Bradley recalled watching Holzman celebrate in a manner he almost never did—letting everyone know just how good it felt—and realizing how much it meant for him to beat the Celtics, beat Auerbach, in a seventh game at their own famed arena.

  “The rivalry with Auerbach was obviously something Holzman felt deeply,” Bradley said. For so many years, Auerbach—that preening trash talker—would light up his victory cigars as if to intentionally goad Holzman, or to shame him. It was true that the Knicks had won the previous year’s series, finishing in Boston, but this was a deciding game against a Celtics team that, by virtue of their regular-season record, believed they were the better team—the best in the league. And here they were, unceremoniously dismissed before a crowd of their stunned, subdued faithful.

  However tempted he may have been, Holzman would never have blown smoke in a vanquished opponent’s face. But on April 29, 1973, he indulged himself as much as he ever had or would again.

  “This was their year, 68 wins, and we got ’em,” Holzman told a reporter. “We got ’em in their year.”

  THE MORNING AFTER, in Leonard Koppett’s New York Times story on Game 7, there was only brief mention of Monroe’s absence over the last three quarters. Wrote Koppett: “Actually, the team started moving in the second quarter with Dean Meminger, Lucas and Phil Jackson in action. Meminger played the rest of the game, instead of Earl Monroe.”

  An accompanying sidebar by Thomas Rogers told of how Meminger had been encouraged by Holzman to shoot his jumper after passing up open looks during the first six games. That was it. There was no explanation from Holzman on why he sat Monroe, no quotes addressing the decision from either player. Nor had the camera fixated on Monroe during the national broadcast, homing in on the action, not the ego, which Monroe insisted was not even bruised.

  “One of the things about me I don’t think people really understood was that I always enjoyed my team and having my teammates do well,” he said. In college, Monroe would get his 40 as fast as he could, then fake an injury so Big House Gaines would take him out and his teammates would get theirs. “Dean was my friend—I was happy for him,” he said, affirming what Meminger had felt all along.

  No doubt the team’s equanimity made Holzman’s decision feel more benign. Everyone sacrificed in one way or another. With Reed back, Lucas had accepted a lesser role (though Reed expected to be replaced in certain situations). Bradley and even DeBusschere sat during the stretch of some games while Jackson locked down a scoring forward. And while the team absorbed and dealt with personal issues, external forces also ensured that the Monroe benching caused not a ripple of disgruntlement.

  There is no question that the story would have been more flammable in the antagonistic, invasive sports culture that athletes operate in now. At the height of his sensitivity, Monroe would have been grilled by quote-hungry reporters demanding to know if he felt disrespected by his coach. He would have gone home to watch countless close-ups of his face from the bench while Meminger played. Friends and family and no doubt his agent would have texted their concerns by the time he was out of the shower, all aggravating the fragile human divide between graciousness and victimization.

  “You know what?” Meminger said. “Earl and I never really talked about it. We didn’t have to. And our relationship just kept getting stronger.”

  Exhibit A, Meminger said, was his daughter, Maisha, who was married during the summer of 2009 in the Washington area. He was especially proud that Monroe had made the trip down from New York, despite his ongoing sinus and vertebrae issues. “Earl is my daughter’s godfather,” Meminger said. He also could admit that in a less formal but more painfully realistic way, Monroe and his wife, Marita, were like godparents to him as well.

  LIKE MANY NBA PLAYERS, Meminger did his share of partying du
ring the decadent seventies, when he was young, single, and earning six figures. Around town, people were eager to have him into their homes, their back rooms, where he got high and eventually hooked. He was one of the unlucky ones, discovering too late that he was genetically predisposed to addiction.

  Substance abuse no doubt contributed to the abrupt end of Meminger’s six-year career (which found him back in New York after two seasons in Atlanta). After he retired, he came around the Garden on many game nights and mingled with reporters in the press lounge. Meminger was bright, conversant on a wide range of social issues. He was well liked, universally respected for what he had done on that Sunday afternoon in Boston. Yet there was also discomfort when Meminger became demonstrably animated, and a little too loud, while talking about a new fascination—applied kinesiology. Knicks insiders worried over his well-being.

  He tried to stay in the game as a coach, first in an early women’s professional league, then with the Albany Patroons of the Continental Basketball Association. He rode his players too hard, was fired, and asked his replacement, who happened to be Phil Jackson, for a tryout in the backcourt. Jackson indulged his former teammate, let him give it a shot, but he could see he was after a fix more than he was craving competition.

  When Meminger returned to the city and to old familiar haunts uptown, his cocaine abuse spiraled out of control. He left New York for a while for treatment at the Hazelden facility in Minnesota. He even found work as a substance-abuse counselor. But there was always another relapse as he drifted from one false start to another, trying to escape what he described as an ache of emptiness.

  “I did a lot of self-medicating,” he said. “I went to places I really didn’t want to go.” For several years he lost touch with his children, who were launching their own successful careers—Maisha, a Johns Hopkins graduate, as a social worker, and a son, Dean Meminger Jr., as a reporter for the cable news station NY1.