When the Garden Was Eden (41 page)

Counting Holzman and Phil Jackson as coaches, the Old Knicks happened to have eight. But even then, any good adman with a baseline seat for the half decade of high drama could tell you that evaluating the impact of the Old Knicks by conventional measures was missing the point. Reed’s pathos, George Lois maintained, may have diminished the achievements, but it also enhanced the team’s Broadway legend.

“Listen, the fans from that time, we know how good the Celtics were, and we know who we were, too,” he said. “The Knicks get a lot of credit, undeserved and unwanted, for changing the game. They didn’t change the game. But they did bring a romance to it, the pure love of an unusual team that basketball hadn’t seen before. And those years when they were such a treat to watch—it was really ’68 to ’74—you didn’t have to think too much about Richard fucking Nixon.”

In fact, the televised Watergate hearings began one week after the 1973 championship season, and Nixon’s resignation came three months after the Old Knicks’ last stand in Boston. One era ended in disgrace, the other with unquestioned honor.

MY FATHER WAS NEVER MUCH OF A SPORTS FAN
beyond a hankering for a good boxing match. He grew up on Manhattan’s Lower East Side in a time when boxing was as big league as it got in America’s teeming ethnic strongholds. When I was young, he would regale me with stories of his cousin, a lightweight named Danny Bartfield, who won 41 of 46 bouts between 1940 and 1948, several of them in the old Madison Square Garden.

As a family man, Gilbert Araton—whose parents immigrated from the Galicia region of Eastern Europe, formerly part of Poland and now Ukraine—was an outer-borough guy, commuting to the general post office on Eighth Avenue between 31st and 33rd streets. He worked days in the mailroom when I broke in as a beat reporter across the street in 1978, at the new Garden, on the Knicks night shift.

After he’d finished work and before I began, we would occasionally meet for a late-afternoon meal. Then he would ride the subway home to Brooklyn, to which my parents had returned after what he considered an eight-year exile to bagel-challenged Staten Island. I would hustle inside the Garden press entrance on 33rd Street, next door to the old Charley O’s restaurant, to cover games my father would seldom watch but would persistently archive in the bottom drawer of his bedroom bureau.

A man whose own immigrant father was functionally illiterate, my father was stunned and delighted to discover the family name in his beloved tabloids, first the
New York Post
and later the
Daily News
. From the beginning, he faithfully cut out my Knicks dispatches, filing them haphazardly in that bottom drawer. It didn’t matter what I had written—game story, sidebar, notebook. They were all crammed in faithfully. When I left the
Post
for the
Daily News
in 1983 and the editors ran a flattering promotion introducing their new basketball reporter who’d been lured away from their blood rival downtown, he cut out the same blurb that ran for several days.

The plan, he said, was to make a scrapbook, but when he’d catch me sitting cross-legged on the carpet during a visit, searching for a clip I easily could have gotten from the newspaper morgue, he’d say, “Take what you need.”

“If you want me to take them, why are you saving them?” I’d say, pretending to be clueless.

He would grin, shrug, and continue clipping—right up to the day the telephone rang in my Brooklyn Heights apartment on the Sunday of Memorial Day weekend 1990. It was my younger sister, Randi, calling with the terrible news that he’d suffered a heart attack at my parents’ apartment on the outskirts of Canarsie and had been rushed to the hospital.

The trip across Brooklyn was not too far, but by the time I navigated the holiday traffic to the Brookdale Hospital Medical Center on Linden Boulevard, on the edge of the Brownsville neighborhood, where we’d lived until I was ten, my father was gone, dead at 67. I had turned 38 earlier that month, and my firstborn son, the child who assured my father the family name would live on, was only seven months old.

It was late in the evening by the time we returned to my parents’ apartment on East 78th Street off Flatlands Avenue. Wrapped in the Sunday comics, the
Daily News
rested in its customary position, on the edge of the living room coffee table. In those early hours of mourning, when mind and body seem to be acting independently, some part of me couldn’t leave my father’s ritual unexamined. So one last time the story I had written—a baseball column about a father and son—was cut from the paper and carried into the bedroom. But when I tried to place it onto the pile, I couldn’t. The drawer was packed so tight I could barely open it.

“Did he stop cutting out my stories?” I asked my mother.

She looked at me and laughed.

“Check the bottom drawer in the other bedroom,” she said.

There I found the clip annex, and that was the moment when it finally hit me—as hard as I’d ever been hit—that my father was gone. I sat there and cried and promised myself that I would make something of his collection, a scrapbook for his grandson.

Here were the boldface headlines, the
Post
exclusives, including “Willis to Sonny (Werblin): In or Out,” that had launched my career and helped in getting Reed fired. Here were the screaming “Knicks in Turmoil” standbys that took a morsel or two of in-house controversy and ratcheted it up to outright mutiny.

Perusing those stories, deciding which ones to save, I realized there was much more there than a dozen years of tabloid indulgences, more than a narrative of Old Knicks afterlife, but instead a whole trove of Old Knicks afterglow: the chronicled ceremonies of jerseys retired, appointments of various players to organizational positions, successes and failures and inevitable firings. Above all, my father’s collection reflected not only profound shifts in the methodology of covering mainstream sports but the general coarsening of a culture.

IN THE YEARS BETWEEN 1973 AND 1978,
professional sports underwent their most impactful changes since the breaking of color lines. Players were empowered by the courts to market themselves as independent contractors. With union director Larry Fleisher behind him, pro basketball’s labor champion was Oscar Robertson, then of the Milwaukee Bucks. As president of the players’ union, he attached his name to a lawsuit seeking to block an NBA-ABA merger in 1970 and to change the system that bound a player to a single NBA team in perpetuity. As a result, the merger was blocked until 1976, when the suit was settled and a form of free agency was adopted, though too late for Robertson—who, like the trio of Knicks frontcourt men, retired in 1974.

Along with richer, more empowered players came agents promoting agendas that sounded antithetical or even heretical to the core team-sport principles. This revolutionary change was more complicated in the NBA, whose stars were increasingly African American and were often subjected to harsher judgments when they took advantage of their newfound leverage. In racially charged Boston, for instance, Havlicek and Larry Bird could play hardball with Auerbach and remain beloved Celtics, in part because they were white. When Paul Silas and Cedric Maxwell took a stand, they were derided as greedy and shipped out of town.

In New York, the nascent labor conflict was intensified by a man named George Steinbrenner. Months after promising to stick to building ships—to, in effect, leave his freshly purchased Yankees to his baseball people—Steinbrenner’s first season of authoritarian decrees began as the Knicks made their second championship run. Three years later, the Australian press lord Rupert Murdoch got his hands on the
New York Post
and soon after—merely by the force of their personalities and their desire to shake up the establishment of their respective industries—had consummated the perfect marriage of industry titans and intemperate tactics: Steinbrenner was the perfect tool for what Murdoch’s people deemed to be back-page news.

Steinbrenner himself contrived a business model in which winning was less a collective pursuit and more a contractual demand. Payback for failure—especially for the most well compensated—became a bold-faced flogging on the back page of the
Post
. In turn, this forced the other papers, especially the
Daily News
, to amplify their negative coverage. Steinbrenner established these new terms of administrative engagement with his Billy Martin—Reggie Jackson teams and his tirades of the late seventies. When Sonny Werblin took over as president of the Garden in 1978, he enthusiastically played by the new rules in targeting Reed, the Knicks’ most beloved player, in a heartless exercising of executive power. When Werblin fired Reed and returned Holzman to the bench after my
Post
story gave him an opening, Old Knicks values seemed as obsolete as the quaint idea that the new Knicks would always prepare and police themselves in the evolving age of enhanced reward and risk.

Upon returning, Holzman barely recognized the working environment he’d left in 1977, or at least the one in which he had achieved his greatest successes. In the world he was used to, reporters were part of the extended family. They could walk into the Knicks’ Garden administrative offices, kibitz with the secretaries, prowl the hallways like trusted staff members. “It was small, intimate, like family,” said Gwynne Bloomfield, who began working for the Knicks on December 18, 1969, answering telephones with the directive to never give out a player’s number. On her first day, a man called asking for the number of “the butcher.” She frantically searched the Rolodex before giving up and asking one of her colleagues if they knew who this butcher was. It took a few seconds before they realized she was talking about DeBusschere. Embarrassed, she returned to the caller, apologizing for the delay and for being unable to furnish a player’s number. “But this is Bill Bradley,” the caller said. Bloomfield didn’t know who Bradley was, either.

“Somehow they didn’t fire me,” she said. She worked 12 years for the Knicks, had a front-row seat for home games next to the wife of
New York Post
columnist Milton Gross, and eventually had a guest list that was the envy of many when she married and became Mrs. Gwynne Bloomfield-Pike. As the years passed, she never missed an Old Knicks reunion. She loved all the players like brothers, and all the coaches, too, with the exception of Holzman. To her, he was a kind of father, whistling Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “Oh, What a Beautiful Morning” when he strolled into the office.

“I always said that team ruined it for all of us who covered them,” said Ira Berkow. “Because they were so bright and so interesting that everything else after that couldn’t come close.”

Sportswriters in the twenty-first century—long gone from the team planes and hotels, reduced in many cases to asking questions at sterile press conferences televised on the Madison Square Garden Network or with public relations people eavesdropping on the most benign chatter—would be shocked by the access their predecessors once had. Leonard Lewin, who was still at the
Post
when I got there, was a close friend and co-author of Holzman. When the Knicks held a victory party after winning the title in 1970, Lewin got up to speak on behalf of the writers, who were feted and fitted for championship rings.

“You have to understand how different it all was in the fifties and sixties,” said Phil Pepe, a colleague of mine after I left the
Post
for the
Daily News
in 1983. “When I started with
World-Telegram & Sun
, we would never have traveled with a pro basketball team.” With newspapers unwilling to pay the road freight, the Knicks picked up the expenses to ensure daily coverage.

Pepe, who became a
News
columnist, never wore his ring or profited from it, either. “Removed the diamond, made a pendant for my wife, and then got divorced,” he said. His son took the devalued ring; Pepe kept the memories. “We hung with Red a lot, him and Frankie Blauschild,” Pepe said. “We’d go out to dinner on the road all the time.”

The tradition continued when Holzman returned, but only sparingly. With the exception of the
Times’
Sam Goldaper, the beat reporters were younger, edgier, professional acquaintances who needed to be kept at a safe distance. In the arena of circumspection, nobody was tougher than Holzman. When I would occasionally call late at night with a deadline looming, I would beg Selma’s forgiveness and then wait for Red to come to the phone. “Boy, are you in big fucking trouble,” he’d say, knowing I had to be desperate, at wit’s end, to be putting my story in his hands.

But the Garden became a strange, bewildering place for Holzman in the nearly four seasons of his second coming. He inherited some young talent from Reed, but it was undisciplined to the point of being uncoachable. When point guard Micheal Ray Richardson, Reed’s prized draft pick in 1978, lost his playing time under Holzman because he couldn’t keep a healthy percentage of his passes out of the stands, the rookie fumed until he could no longer contain himself.

“This old man, he don’t want me,” Richardson, an endearing but troubled kid, told me (with a severe stutter) one night in the locker room after a road game. “I’m calling my agent to get me out of here. Write that.”

When I asked him if he was sure, he went off again on Holzman, who happened to be standing a few feet away, out of our sight line, pretending he wasn’t listening. Turning to rush my scoop into the paper, I noticed the coach and trod by carefully. Holzman leaned into me as I passed: “That poor schmuck thinks you’re gonna help him.” When the story led the back page the next day, Richardson went to Werblin’s office and tearfully told the Garden boss that he wanted to stay.