When the Garden Was Eden (25 page)

The car battery had burned out by halftime, but so had the Lakers. Nine days shy of my 18th birthday—at that time the legal drinking age in New York City—I met up with friends to get a head start. We shared our various radio locations and adventures. “Walt Frazier,” I remember someone saying, several sheets to the wind, “is God.”

Once again, the city was relishing the result of another sports event on a day when one needed 200 ccs of Carbocaine to the brain to get good and numbed to the harsh political reality. Much earlier, at a noontime student antiwar protest in the city’s Financial District, construction workers had started a melee that resulted in about 70 injuries. The hard-hats didn’t stop there, rushing City Hall, where they forced officials to raise the American flag to full staff from half, where it had been since the shooting deaths of the four Kent State students. Police offered no resistance. With war protests raging, President Nixon planned a nationally televised news conference to defend the troop movement into Cambodia, during which he would promise to conclude the incursion by June.

Those days, I cast my own wary eye on the draft lottery while waiting for precious dispatches from my cousin and surrogate big brother in Vietnam. But to step inside Madison Square Garden was to grab hold of a lifeline to an alternate world of harmonic order and balance. Black men and white men from north and south, east and west, worked together for the common good, with purpose, commitment, and intelligence. It was a time in America when the generation gap may have never been wider but a Knicks game could bridge even the widest. It was Broadway’s rendition of what the country aspired to be but obviously, and painfully, was not.

“In life, it’s very difficult to get to the mountaintop, because one day leads to another day and leads to another day,” Bradley would tell me years later. “There are small wins and losses in the process. You win an election or lose an election. You can close a deal or not close a deal. But in sports, what you can do as a team, and with your fans feeling part of it, is show what’s possible for human beings to achieve if they work together, if they care about each other. Winning the title gave resolution to people who didn’t have much resolution in their lives, at a time when resolution was something they really needed.”

Late in the ABC broadcast, which was live in Los Angeles, Schenkel told his audience to stand by after the telecast for the president’s address. But Knicks fans were to be forgiven if they preferred to savor every last second before letting the real world intrude on their triumph. Like me, they were likely reliving the whole thing in an inebriated state of euphoria.

AS HE SAT ALONE IN HIS APARTMENT
, a University of Denver grad student glued to his television and the Game 7 massacre at Madison Square Garden, Richard Lapchick was filled with warmth in a way that far transcended the meaning of any one game. More than the manner in which his team was winning, his joy was tethered to the gratification of knowing that his father was there watching.

Joe Lapchick, who had already suffered multiple heart attacks, had survived to see his beloved Knicks—the team he had coached to the NBA Finals three times in the early fifties—finally win a championship. How well they played made the man who had also put St. John’s University on the basketball map “want to rip out the mooring of my seat,” as he told the author Pete Axthelm for his book
The City Game
, in 1970.

“They are the meeting point of the old and new in the sport,” Joe Lapchick said. “You really have to know and understand basketball to enjoy some of the things they are doing out there. This is the greatest basketball team I have ever seen.”

Such gushing from the impassioned or the provincial had to be taken with at least a tacit nod to Russell and the rest of the Boston cast, but in the case of Joe Lapchick, one of the sport’s first iconic figures, who was going to tell him he didn’t know preeminence when he saw it?

He was a Celtic in his own right, a member of the Original Celtics, barnstormers out of New York City in the 1920s and 1930s, often with the all-black New York Rens. In most places, the Rens would have to take their meals and slumber on the bus. One time, a gas station owner shooed the whole traveling squad off with a rifle. In places where a riot was entirely plausible at the sighting of a white man hugging a black, Lapchick, who jumped center at 6'5", would embrace his Rens counterpart, Charles “Tarzan” Cooper, prior to tip-off. Later, his contributions to basketball’s integration would go far beyond mere demonstrations of racial comity.

As far back as 1947, Lapchick made a presentation to the league to have the Rens crash its color line by entering intact. No, thank you, he was told. Undeterred, Lapchick three years later, in his role as Knicks coach, put a contract in front of Nat “Sweetwater” Clifton, a former member of the Rens. Clifton became the first African American to sign with the NBA. The news was not universally welcomed, even in Lapchick’s hometown of Yonkers. Young Richard awoke one morning to look out the window to find his father hung in effigy from a tree in the family’s front yard. People called only to sneer “nigger lover” and hang up.

Richard’s values were admittedly shaped by his father’s acts of virtue. An aspiring player, he went off to basketball camp one summer and befriended a towering, skinny kid named Lew Alcindor. One day a problem arose between Alcindor and another boy. A racial epithet fouled the air. Lapchick objected, took a pummeling for his trouble, and made a friend for life. In 2009, when Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition was preparing to honor Lapchick as a human rights activist and for his relentless efforts in promoting racial equity in sports, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar called. “Please let me be your presenter,” he said.

On his desk at the University of Central Florida, where Lapchick was named endowed chair of the DeVos Sport Business Management program in 2001, is a keepsake one of his father’s trainers gave him after finding it in a pawn shop in Detroit: a blue-and-white street sign, Eighth Avenue and 50th Street, site of the old Garden, where Joe Lapchick coached and where Richard went religiously to watch Clifton and others forever change a game that kept getting better. By 1969–70, it couldn’t get any better in New York.

“Symbolically, for me, that Knicks team definitely represented the attitudes I developed growing up,” Richard Lapchick said. “As someone who thinks about race almost every day of my life, I would say that a major allure of that team, looking back, was that it was so mixed, black and white working so well together, and so beloved at a time and place when it was important for people to see that. I think that has been one of the beautiful things about sports: it has allowed African Americans to be embraced for their qualities, contrary to the stereotypes many Americans believed in. Willis, especially, smashed a lot of that with his courage and sacrifice.”

Three decades after Reed walked out of the tunnel and the Knicks owned the town, Richard Lapchick would think of them not long after terrorists forever scarred the downtown skyline on 9/11. Weeks later, New York turned to a baseball team to help it cope and move forward.

“I hated the Yankees all my life, but at that moment after the twin towers were destroyed, I was rooting for them because they were helping,” he said. “Sports teams can do that. A football team at Virginia Tech helped that community after the shootings just by bringing people together. I have always believed the Knicks had that effect on New York during a difficult period in the country.”

Having followed the Knicks from the time he could bounce a ball, Richard Lapchick had watched Reed and the others take their first toddler steps and grow into a team he would always relish, respect, and remember. Receiving the live broadcast on May 8, 1970, in the Mountain Time Zone, he smiled at the thought of the old coach witnessing the summary essence of his lifetime intentions.

“I’m so glad my father lived long enough to see it,” he said.

Joe Lapchick, 70, died of a heart attack in Monticello, New York, on August 10, 1970, three months after the Knicks beat the Lakers in Game 7.

COMPETITIVELY SPEAKING
, the second half of the Knicks’ 113–99 victory was as anticlimactic as a clock counting downward.

With the Knicks coasting, Schenkel and Twyman sounded particularly stricken for West, though not so much for Baylor, who arguably deserved more pity as the older player less likely to have another chance at a title. They avoided the observation that West had not exactly risen to the occasion of this Game 7 in his seventh losing championship series—or Game 5, for that matter. West had been the third best guard on the floor, behind Frazier and Barnett, who scored 21 points and played solid defense against him.

“I was there, sitting with Larry Fleisher,” said Kevin Loughery, the Bullets guard, referring to the legal muscle behind the players’ union, whom Loughery was serving as vice president. “In all honesty, the Lakers quit in that game. Even Jerry didn’t play hard, I’d have to say.”

For an NBA colleague to offer such an indictment of the proud legend—who a year later would become the model for the league’s silhouetted logo—was almost unthinkable. Teammates like Mel Counts and Garrett were quick to defend West—and Chamberlain and Baylor. They would point out that with all the attention on Reed, the Lakers’ own medical woes were grossly overlooked. Chamberlain was not in peak condition after rushing back from surgery. Baylor’s groin was groaning. While Reed was taking the most celebrated injections in NBA history, West was given shots in both aching hands—not the most ideal conditions for a man who was expected to shoot the ball 25 times and handle the ball on the majority of possessions.

West was not one to dwell on injuries or excuses. To him, the ’70 Finals was another botched opportunity, another swift kick where it hurt the most. “I look back on that Knicks series and what I remember is that we’d get in position and everything that could go wrong would,” he said. “People shooting the ball who shouldn’t have been, turnovers, missed free throws.”

Over the decades, the miscues had blurred with the misery, but if there was one lasting impression, one haunting echo, it was the collective voice of the Madison Square Garden fans. “I could not hear that well for a few days after that seventh game; that’s how loud that crowd was,” he said.

In the final minutes, the Garden faithful chanted, “It’s all over now” and “We’re number one,” quaint and tame sendoffs compared with more contemporary taunts. Still, Jim Trecker, the Garden’s play-by-play typist at the scorer’s table, knew a New York mob was nothing to trifle with. With about 90 seconds to go, he picked up his typewriter—the gig required he bring his own—and wedged himself between the edge of the table and Holzman.

Working a college game, Trecker had already had one machine ruined when a young Army coach named Bobby Knight furiously kicked the table and sent his Royal portable flying. The Garden replaced it, but Trecker wasn’t about to lose another. During a lull in the action, he made a dash for the tunnel on the opposite side of the floor. Kneeling against a wall, he watched as the 19,500 fans were treated to the final home-team basket—one last study in sharing, and one that was as distinctively Old Knicks as any in the franchise’s first championship season.

Reed had already left the floor, but the other four starters remained to finish the job. Now the ball moved around the perimeter in a game of keep-away—DeBusschere to Bradley to DeBusschere to Frazier to Bradley to Frazier. With the shot clock winding down, Frazier drove along the left baseline as Barnett slipped into the lane just below the free-throw line. Frazier delivered the ball. Barnett’s kick-back jumper from 13 feet registered Frazier’s 19th assist.

Game and season ended soon after, with the ball in DeBusschere’s hands. The players dashed for the tunnel, trying to beat the crowd surging onto the court. Inside, DeBusschere went straight for Reed and planted a kiss on the big man’s cheek.

WHEN THE KNICKS TRIUMPHANTLY REACHED
the locker room after Game 7, the first person they saw was Steve Albert, who had been invited by Danny Whelan to “help out with things” on the bench and in the locker room for the night, to distract him from the Kent State nightmare. But beyond Reed’s first jumpers, and the mind’s highlight reel of Frazier’s excellence, the game nevertheless remains a blur. “I’ve watched it on tape and see myself running back and forth, picking up the warm-ups,” he said. “And that’s what I really remember most: Danny telling me near the end of the game to collect them and get them into the locker room because it’s going to be a madhouse at the final buzzer. So that’s what I did. I never actually saw the end.”

In a development that would be unfathomable in the twenty-first century and that bespoke a nobler time before television had seized sports in its iron grip, ABC was refused entry to the Knicks’ celebration. Howard Cosell set up camp nearby, informing viewers that he was in the “quietude” of the Rangers’ locker room due to the “diminution” of the Knicks’ champagne-soaked quarters.

The players were funneled in, Frazier first, with his muttonchop smile. When Cosell told him he and the Knicks were finally champions, Frazier added: “Of all the world.” When Cosell asked Barnett how he’d managed to float his driving shots over Chamberlain’s elastic reach, Barnett responded as only he could: “I see dollar signs up there on the basket.” (The Knicks’ collective take for winning the title would be $118,000, or less than $10,000 per man.)

Bradley came in with DeBusschere, Cosell several times fawning over Bradley’s verbal acumen—which in Cosell’s mind was second only to his own. DeBusschere flashed his dimpled smile and said the title was “a long time coming.” Finally, Reed appeared after having been preoccupied by a ringing telephone in the locker room that was answered by Phil Jackson. It was the White House calling: even as Nixon prepared for his televised address, he found a few moments to congratulate the series MVP. To no one’s surprise, and Frazier’s chagrin, it was Reed.