When the Garden Was Eden (26 page)

The party moved uptown to the Four Seasons on East 52nd Street—Reed’s favorite restaurant. “DeBusschere was putting them down, I do remember that,” Reed said. In pain, Reed stayed for about an hour before hailing a cab. He eased himself into the backseat, went home to his apartment in Rego Park and straight to bed. With the Carbocaine still coursing through him, he fell into a strange, fitful sleep.

Did those first two shots really fall? Did it all really happen? Reed might have slept for a week after all he’d been through, but sometime after ten the next morning—Saturday, May 9—a car pulled up in front of his building. Holzman was inside, and so was Marv Albert. The appearances at a chain of toy stores had been prearranged—win or lose. At the various outlets in Queens and Long Island, thousands would line up for autographs. Reed was aching and exhausted—“really out of it,” according to Albert. But duty called. The Captain of the newly crowned NBA champions showed.

He was feeling better several days later when he went to Leone’s restaurant to be honored as the Finals MVP, an award from the old
Sport
magazine that came with a new car, a Dodge Charger. The joint was jammed with reporters, including
The Boys of Summer
author Roger Kahn, and a buddy who had tagged along, Zero Mostel.

“Mostel was the first guy on the Upper West Side we knew with cable TV, and he used to have people over to his place on 86th and Riverside to watch some games,” Kahn told me. “Entertainers, writers. So I tell him I’m going to see Reed get his award and he says, ‘Can I come?’ I said I doubted they’d mind. We walk in and the basketball people spot him right away and ask him to sit on the dais and say a few words. He gives me a look and he says, ‘Can you write me something quick?’ ”

Kahn told him to be serious, get up and ad-lib like the paid professional he was. When the time came, the once-blacklisted actor stood up, looked out at the roomful of reporters and various sports heavyweights, and said that he, like the late Martin Luther King, had a dream: “That there will eventually be a day when a man like Willis Reed can not only be captain of the Knicks … but president of the United States.”

TWO WEEKS AFTER THE SHOOTINGS, KENT STATE STUDENTS RETURNED TO
collect their possessions. The retrieval was done alphabetically, which meant Steve Albert was among the first to go. He got a ride with his roommate’s father, packed up in one day, and did not return until the following fall.

“It was a changed campus, very somber,” he said. “On the other hand, this horrible thing had put the school on the map. Who had ever heard of Kent State? Suddenly we were a symbol. The Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young song—which still makes me emotional every time I hear it—was everywhere. And all these entertainers wanted to come—George Carlin, Bob Hope, Sinatra.”

Albert went to a few events, all of them haunted and spiritually numbing. For him, nothing could match the gift he’d been given by Whelan: the chore of running warm-ups and towels to and from players, of being inside Madison Square Garden on the night it was also united by pain—just not enough to keep a man like Willis Reed down.

Steve Albert had seen Game 7 with his own eyes. For him, even more than Sinatra could vocalize, that would always characterize the recuperative powers of New York, New York, and the night his college town blues began melting away.

“To experience that after what had happened at school was the best medicine I could have gotten. In the midst of all the tumult in the country, all the unrest, I think there was some poetic justice to having that feel-good story in the media capital and having it end as dramatically and inspirationally as it did after Willis came out.”

As defending champions, the Knicks were officially the darlings of New York City, regularly drawing packed houses of 19,000-plus to Madison Square Garden. But the crowning glory of the New York franchise—what Ned Irish had strived for seemingly from the beginning of time—also unearthed an issue that would plague the NBA for decades: the profit disparity between large- and small-market teams.

Owners like the Bullets’ Abe Pollin, a Washington builder who purchased the team with two partners for $1.1 million in 1964 and gained full control four years later, believed teams like the Knicks and Lakers should be forced by the league to share home gate receipts. (Founded in 1961 as the Chicago Packers and soon after renamed the Zephyrs, the Bullets moved to Baltimore in 1963. They played in the Baltimore Civic Center, opened in 1962—often far short of its 12,500 capacity.) That socialist notion, which had also been championed by the smaller markets when the league set sail in 1946, was quashed, largely by Irish.

When Irish made his presentation for league membership, the first words out of his mouth were that he represented a corporation worth $3.5 million. Most of the others, virtual paupers by comparison, resented Irish and his braggadocio. But he got his way. The league would base itself in New York and be driven by large urban centers and their handsomely compensated stars, and as a result would forever be vulnerable to charges of favoritism—even conspiracy—for the sake of higher TV ratings. The notion of lucrative paydays in New York for owners like Pollin would remain a fantasy, with one conciliatory exception: in the deciding game of a playoff series, gate receipts were shared.

But beyond the dollar signs, for a team like the Bullets, a visit to a packed Madison Square Garden was “extraordinarily charged,” as Jack Marin, the Bullets’ small forward, said. Even the hired help seemed sprinkled with stardust. “You had that great John Condon voice on the PA, a character like Feets Broudy on the clock, Marv Albert broadcasting the games. Who even knew the people who did these jobs in other places?”

Trips to New York were also marked by an unmistakable connection to the prevailing social upheaval of the times, as the sixties gave way to the seventies. For players who didn’t quite relate, the Garden could be a bewildering, disorienting place. For his part, Marin sometimes felt as if the New York fans were rooting as much for a set of ideals as for the Knicks.

“It was almost like a protest,” he said. “You know, I never saw the war as immoral or ignoble—maybe a bad idea, but not an immoral one. We were all aware of the political issues. But when you were in a place like New York, you could feel the anger, the rebellion. I thought it was the end of the nation.”

Marin and the Bullets had an altogether different agenda. They didn’t necessarily want to overthrow the government. They just wanted to unseat the Knicks.

BILL BRADLEY (PRINCETON) AND JACK MARIN (DUKE)
were both jump-shooting forwards from comparable towers of ivory erudition. Their similarities as basketball players were most memorably described by George Lois as “two crazy motherfuckers chasing after each other for the whole goddamn night.” But when the buzzer sounded, when the dance ended, there was little that Bradley and Marin actually had in common.

Marin, the left-hander, came hard from the political right, and Bradley, the right-hander, leaned to the left. Bradley was the Eddie Haskell of Rhodes scholars. No less feisty, Marin wore his red-hot emotions on his sleeve: his arm was conspicuously marked by a large crimson birthmark from shoulder to elbow that he considered part of his offensive arsenal.

“I used to tell people that one night my shooting was so hot, I set my arm on fire,” he said, conceding that he was a bit of a hothead and something of a technical-foul machine. But he claimed that under no circumstances did he ever call Bradley a Communist cocksucker.

“He told you that, right?” Marin said.

“Well, yes, matter of fact, he did,” I said.

Bradley offered his side of the story, from a game sometime during the 1970–71 season, as the Bullets’ frustration over their inability to beat the Knicks was reaching the boiling point.

Marin was a devotee of Ayn Rand, and I was a liberal. So there were these differences, and then we’d get on the court and there were real battles. Occasionally we’d talk politics off the court, but not too much, because we were so far apart. So there was one game where he thought I hit his elbow and they didn’t call it, and we’re running down the floor and you could just see his face light up, and he goes, “You Communist cocksucker!” Thirty years later, we were at some event in Washington when I was a senator and he was with some conservative group. We went out, and I said to him, “Jack, do you remember that night when you called me a Communist?” He looked at me and said, “No, I didn’t call you a Communist; I called you a commoner.”

That was Marin’s version, and he—a Duke-trained lawyer—was sticking to it.

“A guy called me from
GQ
magazine in 2000,” he said. “He said he was working on an article about Bradley’s run for the presidency, and that he had talked about me and mentioned that because he was a liberal Democrat I had called him a Commie cocksucker. But the real story was that it came out of a golf game I was playing that summer, with Kevin Loughery and a guy from CBS. The CBS guy had a foot-and-a-half putt, missed it, and just came out with this line: ‘common cocksucker.’ The phrase somehow stuck in my head. So when we played them the next season and Bradley was hanging all over me—as usual—I turned around and used that phrase. I think I was feeling a bit humorous on the court and it just came out of my mouth.”

Since Loughery had no recollection of what was said at the golf outing, the old rivals and ideological opposites had long since agreed to disagree, letting the difference stand as evidence of their competitive enmity. Playing as often as their teams did, six straight years in the playoffs in addition to all those nights they dragged their tired bodies up and down the East Coast during the long and winding regular season, how could it not get personal? “Those games were works of art,” Marin said.

Earl Monroe went a step further. “I always felt that our playoff series with the Knicks were the best games I had ever seen, let alone played in,” he said. “I think because the Knicks played a lot of great series over the years against the Lakers and the Celtics, people remember them more. But because we were so closely matched up, almost interchangeable, the intensity, the whole aura, led to something that was very special.”

Based on those classic individual match-ups—Bradley—Marin, Reed—Unseld, DeBusschere—Gus Johnson, Frazier—Monroe—people for decades have mischaracterized the Knicks and Bullets as mirror images, when the truth was that the rivalry was driven more by contrasts—both existential and ideological. “Everything they were, we were something else,” said Loughery, who shared the role of Monroe’s backcourt partner with Fred Carter. “They were more of a half-court team. We wanted to run.” Added Marin: “They had that championship aura. We were the upstarts.”

At the Garden, Marin would nudge Loughery as the real glitterati, Robert Redford and Paul Newman, strolled the baseline during pregame warm-ups. “It’s Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,” Marin said. “How are you not impressed?” As the parade of A-list entertainers got longer, the Garden’s mystique only grew.

At home, the Bullets had one loyal fan who managed to achieve a degree of celebrity. An acquaintance of Monroe’s, Marvin Cooper was a pretty fair Baltimore playground player, a spidery 6'2", but his very best moves were made just outside the lines at the Civic Center, shaking and shimmying in the interests of hexing Bullets opponents. The Knicks had Hoffman, Gould, and Allen behind them. The Bullets had Dancing Harry.

Because the Knicks had championship authentication to go along with intensifying hometown adoration, what the Bullets wished for, the players went at it like brothers battling in their bedroom. “It was like five heavyweight championship fights going on at the same time,” said Larry Merchant, the former
New York Post
columnist, borrowing from his HBO boxing lexicon. “My recollection is that most of those nights, the experience almost seemed cathartic.”

Unseld and Johnson gave Reed and DeBusschere all they could handle under the boards. Marin relished the dirty dancing with Bradley. Loughery and Carter were able scorers whom Barnett and Frazier had to respect. And of course Monroe was the emerging challenge, launching shots over outstretched fingers from bizarre angles he seemed to invent as some choreographic cross between Dancing Harry and a drunken marionette.

“The thing is,” he said at the time, “I don’t know what I’m going to do with the ball, and if I don’t know, I’m quite sure the guy guarding me doesn’t know either.” Monroe always loomed as a wild card, a game changer. The Bullets were pugnacious and wanting, but at the same time they were dealing with an opponent more developed and cunning. Merchant said that as the rivalry developed, there was also a sense of New York’s manifest destiny, no doubt fueled by what the Mets had done to the Orioles and the Jets to the Colts.

“In a certain way, you always expected that, in the end, the Knicks were supposed to win,” he said. By October 1970, who could blame the Bullets for believing that, too? It was difficult to resist the notion that the Knicks were special, almost chosen, in a way the Bullets were just not.

“You felt it when you were playing them,” Marin said. “I remember going to Chicago later in my career, and they were going to run Chet Walker’s plays for me. I’m there thinking, ‘Am I Chet Walker?’ I was a completely different player. They were just doing what they knew without any instinctive feel for the game. But when you played the Knicks, you never had a sense that anyone was ever in the wrong place, much less the wrong role.”