When the Garden Was Eden (39 page)

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 during 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.

During an extended run of sobriety into 2003, Monroe recommended Meminger for a coaching position at a small college, Manhattanville, in a northern suburb of New York, where Marita Green-Monroe worked in the office of development. Meminger landed the job but didn’t stay long. “I felt Dean needed that shot,” Monroe said. “He did okay, but it just didn’t work out for him.”

There were other acts of kindness, responses to his cries for help. “There were times when Marita really tried to look after Dean,” Monroe said.

He had tried to date Sandra Johnson, a model turned social worker, when he was still earning NBA money, but she resisted, wary of his lifestyle. Years into a friendship, romance finally blossomed when Meminger convinced Johnson, or she convinced herself, that he could beat the drugs. They married after the turn of the century. With her support, Meminger managed to stay clean. But even happiness brought trauma, then tragedy. In 2002, Johnson was diagnosed with cancer and underwent surgery to have a tumor removed. Months later, Meminger took her to Lenox Hill Hospital one night when she complained of stomach pain. A perforated ulcer had caused her organs to become infected. On the operating table, she suffered a heart attack.

Meminger called Monroe, who rushed over to cry and pray with him. Though Johnson survived, the cancer would take her life within a few more years, leaving Meminger emotionally adrift once more.

Asked in his apartment during the summer of 2009 if he believed his old friend and roommate would ever have clear sailing, Monroe shrugged and crossed his fingers. Monroe and others who cared about his well-being knew better than to speak with assurance. “Dean seems to be doing okay,” he said. “I saw him dance at his daughter’s wedding. I hadn’t seen him dance in years.” But months after the wedding, Meminger, at 62, was rescued from a fire, unconscious near his bed in a single-room-occupancy building in the Bronx. Newspaper reports said several crack pipes were found on the scene.

Meminger recovered, tried again to move on, with the Monroes standing by him. Throughout his own physical and financial struggles, Monroe never could bring himself to cut Meminger from his life. Meminger was a good man, he believed, the most loyal of friends. As Meminger moved on from the Bronx fire episode and resumed working basketball clinics, drawing on his lifetime connection to the basketball community of Greater New York, he could be sure that Monroe would be there if he needed him.

“I think Dean’s always known he could count on me but also that I’d tell him what I thought about things, even when it was painful,” Monroe said. The truth could hurt, but it was the only way forward, just as it was for Monroe after Game 7 in Boston, when he had to admit to himself that Meminger, at least on that Sunday afternoon, was the better man for the job.

DWELLING ON THE PAST,
Monroe liked to say, was for those who were powerless to do anything about the future. “As soon as the Boston series was over, I actually started thinking about Gail Goodrich,” he said. “I’d heard it a lot after the ’72 Finals—you know, how Gail ate me up. It didn’t matter to me that I was hurt. Great players make no excuses. Now that we were back, there was no time to think about what happened in Boston.”

A mob of fans greeted the Knicks as they returned from Boston, filling the arrival area at LaGuardia Airport and briefly (mistakenly) engulfing the Kansas City Royals baseball team, which had arrived at a nearby gate simultaneously. The Knicks had only one night at home, jetting to Los Angeles the next day after their request to delay the start of the Finals from Tuesday to Wednesday—so they could have an extra day to recover from the Boston pressure cooker—was denied.

The Lakers were finishing practice when the Knicks’ bus arrived at the Forum for a light practice late on Monday after they touched down in L.A. As they walked onto the floor, Meminger heard a familiar voice.

“Hey, Dream, over here.”
It was Wilt Chamberlain, ambling off the floor, barefoot, the biggest man in the gym summoning the smallest.

“Little fella, I’m going to tell you something, these motherfuckers wouldn’t even be here if it wasn’t for you,” he said.

Meminger snickered. “What else do you want to tell me?”

Chamberlain loved Meminger’s brashness. Playing along, he turned back to the court and pointed at the lane, painted Lakers purple.

“See that area?” he said. “You’ll be fine if you keep your little ass out of it.”

Meminger didn’t flinch. By this point, he pretty much embodied the contentious mind-set of his teammates, who had heard that the Lakers—after disposing of Golden State in five games in the Western finals—were not so keen on renewing their one-sided series with the Celtics a year after they had handled the Knicks with relative ease.

“I’m coming for you, too,” Meminger told Chamberlain.

THE GAMES OF THE 1973 NBA FINALS
are never presented as classics on ESPN or the Madison Square Garden Network. There is no special moment to romanticize, or signature performance to immortalize. “I always say a lot of people don’t even remember that we won a second championship,” Willis Reed said.

Other than being the reverse of the Finals the year before—when the Knicks lost four straight after winning Game 1—the series proved unremarkable indeed. This time, the Lakers got the jump, 115–112, behind Gail Goodrich’s 30 points (to Monroe’s 18) and Jim McMillian’s 27.

Worse, in Game 2, Monroe tweaked his already sore hip when he collided with Bill Bridges, the Lakers’ power forward, in the third quarter. But once again, his roommate rode to the rescue. Meminger clamped down on Goodrich, who finished with 14 points, and the Knicks claimed a 99–95 victory behind Bill Bradley’s 26. The series was squared heading back to New York for Games 3 and 4.

As always, or so it seemed, there was a key player hurt. Jerry West, weeks shy of his 35th birthday, was suffering from tender hamstrings in both legs. “That’s part of the game,” he said, consistent as ever in eschewing the alibi. “I seem to remember that when we beat the Knicks in the Finals, they had a couple of fellows who were hurting or out.”

After scoring 32 points in Game 2, West managed only 16 in Game 3. Monroe finally outplayed Goodrich, outscoring him 21–14 while adding 6 assists. Phil Jackson had his Meminger moment, replacing a foul-plagued DeBusschere in the third quarter and staying on for 21 of the last 24 minutes, scoring 8 points, grabbing 9 rebounds, and being a nuisance on defense.

But it was Reed, sensing the crowning completion of his long road back, who led the Knicks with 22 points and contributions that typically were undetectable in the box score. With the Lakers down a basket, inside a minute to play, he mustered every ounce of strength after a typically grueling night and denied Chamberlain a low-post position, forcing Keith Erickson to launch a jumper in vain with the shot clock running down. Reed claimed his 10th rebound and the Knicks held serve at home, 87–83.

In Game 4, they were coasting by 13 after three quarters but lost Walt Frazier to fouls in the fourth and were clinging to a 4-point lead with less than a minute to play when Bradley missed a 15-footer. Chamberlain and Reed went for the rebound and deflected the ball right to DeBusschere, who scored on the put-back, was fouled by Chamberlain, and made the free throw. DeBusschere’s 33 points and 14 rebounds gave the Knicks a 3–1 series lead going back west.