When the Garden Was Eden (22 page)

A Garden public relations official had agreed to vacate his office for our viewing of Game 7. While the DVD loaded, Frazier and I sat side by side in front of a flat-screen television, chatting about the dismal state of the Knicks as they continued, in the wake of the Isiah Thomas debacle, a two-year roster purge in anticipation of a free-agent bonanza in the summer of 2010. In the meantime, it was his job to analyze on television the dreck that passed for the beautiful game he and the Old Knicks had played. In calling the games, he still prided himself on never revealing his emotions, or disgust, at what he saw. But he admitted to me, “Man, sometimes it’s like watching a different sport.”

On the subject of his emotions, Frazier could also admit, years after the fact, that when Willis Reed was named MVP of the 1970 Finals, he was sacrilegiously teed off. “I told everyone it was bullshit,” Frazier said. “I was still a young guy, trying to get where West and Oscar were. I remember saying, ‘You know, momentum can only carry you so far…’ ”

Still, an incipient smile creased the corner of his mouth as the ABC broadcast began, with Howard Cosell quizzing Red Holzman on the condition of Reed. His body language changed—he sat up straighter in his chair—and watched raptly. He had not seen Game 7 in years.

It always began the same, with Cosell sending it back to the play-by-play man, Chris Schenkel, for a pregame exchange with the analyst and former Royals star Jack Twyman, while the teams warmed up, waiting for a sign of Reed.

Minutes earlier there had been a false alarm when Cazzie Russell came through the tunnel after receiving treatment for a thigh bruise sustained in Game 6. The crowd erupted—a six-foot-something black man, in uniform, making his way! (“I was always told I resembled Cap—I didn’t know what that meant,” Russell told me, chuckling at his little white lie about an old black stereotype. He wasn’t insulted when the crowd abruptly shut up. “It was like, ‘We love you, Cazzie. You’re just not who we’re looking for,’ ” he said.)

In the middle of his conversation with Schenkel, Twyman picked up a frantic voice in his earpiece. It was the ABC director Chet Forte, relaying information that Reed had received the Carbocaine injections and was on his way. (When Twyman mistakenly reported that Reed had taken 200 ccs, enough to kill a couple of elephants, the switchboard lit up with incredulous callers.)

So while Twyman continued setting the scene with Schenkel, he kept an eye trained on the tunnel. The Lakers were apparently waiting on Reed as well. When he finally appeared, Chamberlain took a walk in the direction of midcourt to see what was happening for himself. Watching the replay on the television screen next to me, Frazier chuckled at the big man’s obvious inability to stay focused on his side of the floor. After all these years, no matter how indifferent he tried to be, the pregame drama remained spellbinding. It was the greatest single moment in the history of the Knicks.

GEORGE LOIS WAS DRIVING HIMSELF CRAZY
in the first row behind the basket where the Knicks were warming up. If the Knicks won their first championship, it would be akin to the consummation of a first love. It would be achieved with a heroic Willis Reed or without him, either way under extraordinary circumstances.

And what if the Knicks were to lose? Unthinkable as that was, then West and Baylor would finally have their championships and Chamberlain would get to celebrate his second, this time on the Madison Square Garden floor. Much as the Knicks were his guys, Lois worked with and worshipped celebrity athletes nationwide. Above all, the renowned adman, the darling of Madison Avenue, was a basketball junkie. Whatever the outcome, the spectacle would be one to remember.

Intuitively, Lois knew this was no night to share exclusively with the ref-baiting YMCA ballers. He had to bring his son Harry, who was a few months short of his 12th birthday. Already a huge Knicks fan, he was certainly old enough to appreciate and remember the magnitude of the occasion.

“The whole day, it was, ‘Do you think Willis is playing?’ ” Lois said. He didn’t know what to tell his son. He was hoping—no, praying—like everyone else who had watched this team come together piece by piece over the previous six years, who all season long had anticipated its crowning glory, that it was just meant to be. And now this unfathomably shitty luck and interminably torturous wait, made even more agonizing by that uncertainty that attended the Knicks hitting the floor without their center and leader. “We’re all standing around thinking, He’s not fucking coming,” Lois said. “And they destroyed us without him in Los Angeles.”

What were the odds, realistically, of the Knicks staging another miracle like the one they’d pulled off in Game 5? “What the hell, you play the game,” Lois said.

His seats were on the east end of the arena, first-row courtside, where the Knicks were warming up, the crowd already on the verge of a nervous breakdown. As young fans gifted with tickets in the lower bowl often do, Harry Lois wandered away from his seat and stood inches from the court, watching, waiting, and all wide-eyed as the Knicks shot around.

JIM MCMILLIAN WAS A BASKETBALL CHILD
of New York City by way of rural North Carolina. “It’s not where you’re born, it’s where you learn the game,” he said, proud of where and how he cut his teeth—on the cement playgrounds of East New York, Brooklyn. “I started playing in the eighth grade,” he said. “In those days, when you grew up in Brooklyn, you didn’t have to leave to go very far to find great competition.”

In the early sixties, the neighborhood was a middle- and working-class melting pot. Racially speaking, the basketball courts were a harbinger of the area’s rapidly developing white flight, the proprietary sanctuary of the rising black player.

Before long, the new kid from Carolina, Jimmy Mac, was running full-court with the budding playground legends Rodney Parker and James “Fly” Williams, along with a future St. John’s star and Knick, Mel “Killer” Davis. McMillian became a court and classroom star at Thomas Jefferson High. He rejected a scholarship offer to play with Lew Alcindor at UCLA and even spurned the University of North Carolina and its impressive young coach, Dean Smith. All to embrace his adopted city and to play Ivy League ball at Columbia University.

“Being in the city, being near Harlem, you could really pick up a tremendous education that goes way beyond your years here in college,” he said. That was never more the case than in 1968, when the campus was roiled by war protests and racial strife ignited by the university’s expansion plans, and basketball games became a de facto demilitarized zone. Fortuitously, the ’67–68 season, McMillian’s sophomore year, happened to be the best in Columbia’s history.

A 6'5" forward with a jump shot to die for, he teamed with Heyward Dotson, a Staten Islander out of Stuyvesant High, who, like Bill Bradley, would become a Rhodes scholar. Columbia went 23–5 and was one missed free throw from the regional final.

“Fucking Bruce Metz,” I said to McMillian when he picked up the phone, back in his native Carolina, in the Greensboro area.

“You remember that?” he said. “You know, it happened right down here in Raleigh.”

“Vividly,” I said. Heyward Dotson had come from my West Brighton neighborhood on Staten Island. His sister was in my high school class. Before the Old Knicks, Columbia was the first basketball team we all lived and died with, perishing most painfully in the ’68 NCAA tournament when Metz, a guard, missed a free throw against Lefty Driesell’s Davidson team in a 55–55 game with two seconds left in regulation. On a transistor radio, I listened disconsolately as the Lions lost in overtime before spanking a very good St. Bonaventure team with Bob Lanier in the regional consolation game.

Still, Columbia finished the season as the sixth-ranked team in America, far and away the number-one basketball story in town. But the Knicks were a playoff team that spring, too, and McMillian occasionally would ride the subway from Morningside Heights to check them out. He was intrigued. “I liked the way they played the game, as a team, because that’s the way I learned it—moving without the ball, backdoor, setting screens,” he said.

Team player that he was, McMillian was also a three-time winner of the Haggerty Award—given annually to the best college player in New York—and one of three Ivy Leaguers destined for the pros via the first round. (Princeton’s John Hummer and Geoff Petrie were the others.)

On March 23, 1970, the Lakers took McMillian with the 13th pick of the NBA draft, which was then held right after the college season and before the professional season had ended. The next day, he attended a banquet to receive his third Haggerty, on the same day the New York Nets of the ABA acquired his rights in a trade after that league’s own draft.

Willis Reed, also being honored as the pro player of the year, chatted with McMillian, wondering which league he was leaning toward. McMillian wasn’t sure. He thought of himself as an NBA player, but the Nets offered an opportunity to play pro ball in New York. Reed told him—just his opinion—that there was only one place to play, and that was with the best, against the best.

The following week, McMillian signed a three-year deal with the Lakers and was heralded as Elgin Baylor’s eventual heir.

As he concluded his senior year, earning his degree, McMillian suddenly had NBA rooting interests on two coasts. “I had been a Knicks fan from the time I started playing,” he said. “But now I was a member of the Lakers.” To make matters worse, he met Chamberlain, West, and Baylor and they all treated him like a kid brother.

By the time the Finals began, McMillian was on a figurative fence, invested in both teams. By the night of Game 7, he had a ticket that had been provided by the Lakers and a sick feeling in the pit of his stomach. “Who am I rooting for?” he asked himself. He went to the Garden without a clue.

He sat in the lower stands and watched the Lakers jog out, followed by the Knicks, without Reed. The tension was building, along with his discomfort. His head told him that he was an L.A. man now. His heart bled for New York. He reasoned that if the Lakers won the title, he would be joining the NBA champions in the fall, a much healthier environment—he assumed—than the aftermath of another agonizing finish for West and Baylor.

Then Reed appeared.

THE FANS ON THE OPPOSITE SIDE
of the court spotted him coming through the tunnel and rose as if it were the Messiah himself. “It felt like the building rose off the ground 20 feet,” George Lois said. “It was like an out-of-body experience.”

The line that would be repeated ad infinitum across the decades—
the night Willis limped onto the court—
was a distortion. He didn’t limp. Just past the press table, a step onto the court, he brushed past a man in a burgundy sport coat—Sam Goldaper of the
New York Times
. Feeling playful, in control of his emotions, he bumped Goldaper deliberately as the exhilarated crowd came unhinged.

When John Warren turned and saw his roommate seemingly propelled by the roar of the crowd, tears filled his eyes. Chills washed over Bill Bradley. Bill Hosket’s heart beat so fast he feared he might have a stroke. Ever pragmatic, emotions in check, DeBusschere sidled up to Russell and casually thrust his chin toward the other side of the floor. “Watch those guys,” DeBusschere said. Russell gazed at the Lakers’ faces, specifically those of Chamberlain, Baylor, and West. He saw what DeBusschere saw. DeBusschere laughed and said: “We got ’em.”

Fans with the benefit of a courtside view would swear on a stack of 1969–70 Knicks yearbooks that they also had turned instinctively to look at the Lakers’ side as Reed came out. They would make the same claim as Russell, Frazier, and the others: the Lakers were mesmerized. Chamberlain was stricken. Knicks loyalists would never believe that Chamberlain might merely have been stretching his legs when he took his little stroll. The Lakers were simply whipped by the magnitude of the moment. This aspect of the night would become as much a part of the legend as Willis limping out.

Yet Dick Garrett protested, “I didn’t even see him. That stuff was so overrated.”

The mere thought was insulting, West said. “I never believed that for a second,” he told me. “I actually felt we had an advantage against an injured player. I knew he would play, and I wanted him to.” His longtime teammate Elgin Baylor would have no doubt agreed.

THE BALLAD OF WEST AND BAYLOR
begins with an interlude of loss. By 1970 they had suffered through a total of seven different NBA Finals (six of them together) that all had one thing in common. As a rookie averaging almost 25 points a game, Baylor’s Minneapolis Lakers were swept by Bill Russell’s Celtics in the 1959 Finals. After the team moved to Los Angeles and West joined, they did the same dance six more times through the 1960s, the last of which brought the additional ignominy of an MVP trophy granted in a staggering home defeat in Game 7, balloons tied to the rafters above. “You think, By God, will it ever work out?” said West. “It’s too painful; I can’t go through this again.”

While Baylor was in career twilight, West had grown into a giant of the game. Sports pages around the country hailed him as Mr. Clutch (imagine that, without a ring), and the attention only soured him. All he could show for six championship series was “a lot of scar tissue.”

And then there was the enigmatic Chamberlain, who was acquired for the ’68–69 season to neutralize Russell and instead finished the Finals on the bench, feuding with the coach, Butch van Breda Kolff. Chamberlain had asked out of the final minutes, with the Celtics comfortably ahead, claiming to be in some form of physical discomfort. The Lakers rallied, only to fall excruciatingly short when Don Nelson made a jump shot off a broken play late in the shot clock that bounced high off the rim and back through—“the luckiest shot of my life,” he said.