When the Garden Was Eden (34 page)

On a team of strong, eclectic personalities, Lucas stood out nonetheless. His new teammates wondered about his eccentric personality and were occasionally miffed by his lack of humility. Some were not amused by his memory games and didn’t want to be bombarded with interesting but ultimately useless information.

“Lucas was a nutcake,” Phil Jackson told me. “He was a gifted guy, but he did that memory thing that drove us all crazy.” According to Jackson, least impressed by Lucas was Dave DeBusschere, the ale-loving clock puncher who didn’t see the point in alphabetical word games and knowing the number of stairs he was about to climb.

“DeBusschere had no time for Lucas’s nonsense,” Jackson said. “But they played great together.” Opposites in personality, DeBusschere and Lucas were practically interchangeable on the court, with their dark hair and rugged good looks. With Bradley in the mix, the frontline had a throwback appearance, straight out of the fifties, that by today’s standards was insanely small and startlingly white. But the bottom line on Lucas—once called by John Wooden “the most unselfish player” he’d ever seen—was that he was a born Old Knick. “Extremely smart basketball player—the game was almost too easy for him,” Jackson said. “He taught me how to shoot.”

Bradley said Lucas’s arrival elevated the team’s offensive IQ even higher and provided him with a companion to tap into his own brand of brainy mischief. “A guy would be guarding me and I would come down, the ball would come to me, and I would yell out to Lucas”—here Bradley spewed some guttural nonsense—“and then Lucas would yell something back that sounded the same, and if the guy was a rookie or a young player, he’d be saying, ‘What … what?’ ” The gibberish wasn’t code for anything, just a way of playing with the opponent’s head while Bradley and Lucas improvised the play.

Lucas, laughing uproariously at the mention of his linguistic adventures with the future senator, said he was dazzled and reenergized by the intellectual challenge of playing with his new teammates on the Broadway stage. “People in San Francisco did not know or understand basketball,” he said. “There was no real love of the game. In New York, it felt like religion.” Lucas thought he’d already been blessed to have played on great high school and college teams. He relished his six years with the Big O in Cincinnati. But there was nothing close, he said, to stepping onto the court with a group that was as exceptionally intuitive as the Knicks. “On other teams, you’d have guys who would come out of a time-out, look around, and say, ‘What are we doing?’ ” Lucas said. “With the Knicks, that never happened. Red would come in at halftime and ask
us
, ‘What should we do in the second half?’ I have to say that my time with them was the most fun I ever had, far and away.”

At 70, Lucas was still busy promoting himself as Doctor Memory, marketing his Lucas Learning System of retention techniques. He was still wedded to the itinerant life but not very interested in the NBA. “I never look back at the game,” he said while driving to the airport after an appearance in Columbus, Ohio, to catch a flight home to California. “It hasn’t been important to me for 30 years, because I’ve had so many other interests. And I really don’t think it’s as interesting a game as it used to be.” From the little he knew of it, what ailed it most, he said, was too much emphasis on jumping and dunking—and not enough on the brain.

KNICKS FANS COULD ONLY DESPAIR
when the Captain went down. Would we ever see him in uniform again? The first title had barely been won
with
Reed; if he was finished, what were the realistic odds of claiming another? To complete the misery, the regular season marked a familiar tormentor’s return to prominence, one we had wanted to believe would trouble us no more. Red Auerbach had managed to rebuild the Celtics in two years, mainly by drafting Dave Cowens, the undersize but speedy and hard-nosed center, and the smooth-shooting guard Jo Jo White. With John Havlicek still playing at All-Star capacity, it was hard to believe, much less accept, that the Celtics were already back running their mouths and their vaunted fast break. They won 56 games and took the division by a meaty 8 games over the transmogrifying Knicks.

“Auerbach had always found a way to replace players,” said Tommy Heinsohn, the former Celtic forward, who’d replaced Bill Russell as coach after the last championship in 1969. “His philosophy was always quickness and speed, push the ball, attack people. Cowens came my second year, and he was perfect for that style. We developed an offense for him against the bigger centers; he became our point center. Handled the ball a lot and revolutionized the game by the way he was used.”

A nauseatingly familiar story line was unfolding: the Celtics were imposing their will, even on the Lakers. Pat Riley had joined the team as a shooting guard the previous season, after three with the San Diego Rockets. He had forged a friendship with Jerry West, who admired the intensity of the former Kentucky Wildcat and had lobbied the Lakers to acquire him. From West, Riley learned what he would later preach as the dapper and sloganeering coach in Los Angeles, New York, and Miami: there was only one way to evaluate a season—whether or not a trophy sat in your locker room following the last game of the year.

“Jerry epitomized, for me, the most desperate superstar this game has known,” Riley told me. “One of the greatest and most caring players ever, and every year he had to endure the torture of losing at the end.”

It was enough to drive any man to the brink. West was in a blind rage when he telephoned Riley one day during the summer of 1971. “You won’t believe what the fuck is going on,” West hollered. “They hired the goddamn Celtics!”

Having fired Joe Mullaney, and needing a third coach in four seasons, owner Jack Kent Cooke had brought in a man steeped in Celtics honor, Bill Sharman, who in turn tapped K. C. Jones to be his assistant. West’s horror notwithstanding, Cooke had endured enough humiliation at the hands of the Celtics. If he couldn’t beat them, why not hire them? Sharman certainly had the right credentials, beginning with his California roots. Raised in Porterville, California, he starred for USC before teaming with Cousy in the Boston backcourt and winning four titles during the first half of the Russell era. As a coach, Sharman already had an impressive résumé. Besides his title in the defunct ABL with George Steinbrenner’s (and Dick Barnett’s) Cleveland Pipers, he’d led the San Francisco Warriors to the Finals in 1967. Four years later, he won an ABA title with the Utah Stars.

Sharman hit L.A. preaching green gospel. The Lakers were not going to run their offense through Chamberlain, Baylor, or West anymore; they were just going to run, period. The days of the star system were over. The offensive wealth would have to be spread around. He instituted a new system that included a morning practice on game day, which later became a leaguewide staple called the shootaround. “He gathered the troops and said he would like us to come in the morning before the first game for a practice,” Riley said. “We looked at each other and thought, What the hell is he talking about? Wilt was beside himself. He said, ‘Here’s the deal. You get me once a day, morning or evening. It’s up to you which one.’ ”

Somehow Sharman convinced the big man to give it a try, albeit on his own recreational terms. Chamberlain liked to begin his day early, playing volleyball at Laguna Beach, and took to arriving at the Forum in his tank top and sandals, sand in his hair.

“That’s how he walked through the plays,” Riley said.

The Lakers began the season by winning six of nine while another drama played out behind the scenes. During the preseason, Sharman had come to the conclusion that Elgin Baylor was not a good fit for the high-octane offense, given his age and bad knees. He intended to pull Baylor from the starting lineup in favor of the second-year forward Jim McMillian. Once Sharman made clear his intentions, Baylor said he would quit rather than come off the bench.

Sharman had been taught to believe that no one—with the exception of Russell, who practiced when he felt like it, with Auerbach’s blessing—was bigger than the team. And since the Lakers stars had never won a championship, they didn’t have the right to dictate protocol. “It was,” Riley said, “a very bitter time.”

McMillian was relaxing at home when word came that Baylor was retiring. He was as stunned and conflicted as he’d been at Madison Square Garden on the night of Game 7, 1970. The Columbia man didn’t mind playing behind the certain Hall of Famer. Even being pushed for minutes, Baylor had treated him kindly during his rookie year. “It was a delicate situation,” McMillian said. “I mean, how do you sit Elgin Baylor?”

With the benefit of hindsight, the answer was obvious. In the very first game without Baylor, the Lakers beat the Bullets and proceeded to make one of the more bizarre transformations. Upon the departure of an all-time great, they embarked on a 33-game win streak, destroying the mark of 20 that had been set by Milwaukee the previous season.

“We just dismantled teams,” West said. “We had a lot of weapons that allowed us to play a different kind of game. It seemed easy, to tell you the truth.” While giving Sharman his due for diversifying the attack, West preferred to credit the players more than the Celtics’ philosophy. Given his scars, that was too much to ask. “I did the same things I always did but never got credit for,” he said.

But Gail Goodrich, who had been reacquired the previous season after spending two years in Phoenix, disagreed. “In many ways we played like the Celtics,” he said. “Before that, the Lakers had been pretty much a stagnant team, the offense going through a couple of stars.”

The most compelling evidence of the Sharman effect was written in the fine print of the box score. Goodrich raised his scoring average by more than 8 points from the previous season and led the team by a fraction over West, who for the first and only time in his career topped the league in assists. More than any other season, Chamberlain sacrificed personal achievement by averaging 14.8 points, 6 off the previous season and an astonishing 36 off his career high of 50.4 in 1961–62.

Over and over, Sharman stressed the running game, reminding the Lakers of the common misperception that players had to be sprinters to run a formidable fast break. The Celtics’ credo—carried on proudly in the eighties by the likes of skilled tortoises such as Larry Bird, Kevin McHale, Cedric Maxwell, and Chris Ford—was their commitment, positioning, and everlasting motion. “With us, we also had the speed, and I guess that’s where Showtime in L.A. really started,” McMillian said.

Riley would argue that the brand name was still eight years in the making. But for all five titles Magic and Kareem would win in the eighties (four under Riley), he had to admit: “That 1971–72 season was the most glorious ride I’ve ever had.”

To McMillian, the fusion of those Lakers was epitomized in a
Sports Illustrated
photo of Chamberlain starting the break with a long pass, with the other starters—West, Goodrich, and the forward Happy Hairston—all in perfect position. Chamberlain finally was the Lakers’ institutional pillar, cast in the image of his longtime Boston rival.

THE SUBJECT OF RUSSELL AND THE CELTICS
was never far from Chamberlain’s restless mind. Sitting on the bus one day that season, McMillian got an earful on the inequities of the ongoing comparison. “Look here, rookie,” Chamberlain said, addressing McMillian as an apprentice even though he was in his sophomore pro season. “I don’t know why they’re always talking about Russ being the greatest. Look at all the players that played with Russ that are in the Hall of Fame. Look at me—how many? If all you have to do is rebound and block shots, how great do you have to be?”

The definition of greatness for Chamberlain would invariably come down to how he chose to describe it, individually or collectively. In addition to the 33-game streak, the ’71–72 Lakers won 69 games, eclipsing the previous record of 68 won by Chamberlain’s Philadelphia team in 1967–68. Until Michael Jordan and the Bulls won 72 in 1995–96 in an expanded league littered with lousy teams, Chamberlain could claim to have anchored the two most dominant single-season teams in history. But he also knew legacies were established in the springtime; those 69 wins meant nothing in the playoffs.

In the first round, the Lakers swept Chicago before confronting Kareem and the Bucks, who had pounded them the previous year. Milwaukee had also been the team to end L.A.’s 33-game streak, at the Milwaukee Arena. Chamberlain, of all people, requested a team meeting. He spoke of all the years when he believed that he was a better player than Russell but that Russell won in the end because he’d had the better team. Jim Cleamons, Phil Jackson’s longtime assistant in Chicago and L.A., was a rookie guard on that team, soaking up every word. “At one point Wilt looked around the room and said, ‘You know what? Kareem is a better player than me, but I know that we’re the better team.’ ”

Coming from the typically bombastic Chamberlain, the admission was a startling concession—to Father Time, if no one else—but his point was well taken. An uneasy alliance of star players, the Lakers had every reason to believe, or at least suspect, that they had finally become a well-oiled machine. They took the penultimate step by strafing the Bucks in six games, reaching the Finals for the eighth time in eleven years. Now came the thorniest part. Never had a team with Jerry West been burdened with such expectations.

“Good as we were that season, the pressure when we got to the Finals was incredible, especially for Jerry,” Riley said. “He wanted to be a champion so much. I’m telling you that you could see the desperation in his eyes.”

THE KNICKS, MEANWHILE, HAD WON
48 games, good enough to account for the NBA’s seventh-best record. They were now two years removed from championship glory, and only growing older. The uproar created by the Monroe acquisition had quieted to whispers—fears that both parties might have made a colossal mistake. The bench missed Mike Riordan and Dave Stallworth, while Barnett, 35, was slowed by injuries. The backup center—with Lucas starting—was the one and only Luther Rackley, acquired from Cleveland after Reed went down. Was there any compelling reason to think of the Knicks as serious title contenders? Not really. Yet the playoffs in New York had become a rite of spring that we fervently hoped would consume us for weeks. My friends and I relished spending the few dollars we had on a blue-seat ticket and the occasional night outside the Garden, an urban camping trip in chilly April, to queue up.