When the Garden Was Eden (44 page)

When Jackson closed in on a share of the record in Los Angeles, Auerbach, who would die in 2006, conceded that he was a clever guy, a good coach, but would also occasionally tweak him for working with teams that were “ready-made for him,” for never building a championship team from the ground up, as Auerbach had in Boston.

Auerbach seemed to forget that the teams he coached in Boston were disproportionately dependent on Bill Russell. Jackson was never a GM, never responsible for compiling talent. And while all of his championship rosters included the best player in the game—Jordan in Chicago, Shaquille O’Neal and later Kobe Bryant in L.A.—none of them had so much as sniffed a title before Jackson began filling their heads with the tenets of togetherness gleaned from Lost Battalion Hall.

The notion that Jackson had been handed much of anything was also a misappropriation of the facts. Rare was the modern head coach who put up with the bush league life—as Jackson had—for the chance to hone his skills. More than a decade after he retired as a player, when nobody would even give him an assistant’s job in the NBA because of his iconoclast image, Jackson spent summers coaching in Puerto Rico, as had Holzman. It would be good for him, Holzman had advised, because the environment was rabid and the language barrier would force him to find alternative ways to communicate.

During the height of the Bird-Magic era, when Pat Riley fell into the plum Lakers position, Jackson was in Albany, New York, on a career treadmill in the CBA, or Cockroach League, as he called it. Commuting from his home in Woodstock, more than an hour away, he won the title his first year, 1984, and promptly wrote a two-page letter to the GM, pleading for a raise to $30,000 and a per diem hike to $25. He drove the team’s van on road trips of less than 200 miles, checked the team into cheap hotels, and did everything for the players short of squeezing toothpaste onto their brushes.

“It’s a more organic experience,” he told me one night in early 1987 when our paths crossed in Pensacola during his fourth year on the job. I was there doing a feature for the
Daily News
on the comeback of a former Knicks center, Marvin Webster, with the Pensacola team. After the game, Jackson and I hit a roadside seafood shack that fit his meager budget and then a downtown bar. With a houseful of children, he said he was nearing the end of his coaching rope; he couldn’t afford to hang on much longer. He didn’t think anyone in the NBA would hire him and was formulating plans for law school.

But all those years ago when Holzman was keeping a scout’s eye on him in North Dakota, so was Krause of the Baltimore Bullets. A maverick of sorts in his own right, Krause had tried to get Jackson a job on the staff of the Bulls’ head coach, Stan Albeck, in 1985. Jackson showed up in jeans and sandals, with his hair unkempt and a scruffy beard. Albeck, no bohemian, was not impressed.

Two years later, with Albeck gone and a sudden vacancy on Doug Collins’s staff, Krause again called Jackson in for an interview, along with Butch Beard. Knowing both had played for Holzman and that Beard had served as his Knicks assistant, Krause called his old scouting companion at home in Cedarhurst. “They’re both your guys—want to tell me what you think?” Krause said.

Holzman wasn’t about to talk up one at the expense of the other. He loved both. As with his players, he wanted Krause to come to his own conclusion. “You’ll figure it out,” he told him.

Partial to Jackson, Krause told him to wear a suit and cut his hair. Jackson complied, impressed Collins, and got the job. As the 1988–89 regular season was winding down, one in which the Bulls would go 47–35, Krause, believing the team wasn’t playing to its full potential, went to the owner, Jerry Reinsdorf, and asked about replacing Collins with Jackson. That spring, Jordan hit one of his most famous shots—a buzzer beater over Cleveland’s Craig Ehlo to eliminate the Cavs in a decisive Game 5. “You still want to make that change?” Reinsdorf asked Krause.

Krause told him he did; he believed Collins was too emotional, too stressed out, and the more cerebral Jackson was the logical guy to go the distance. After the Bulls lost to the Pistons in the conference finals, Jackson was hired and immediately installed Winter’s triangle, predicated on movement and passing, to diversify the attack (at least until the shot clock wound down and Jordan took over). Within two years, with Pippen growing into the role of second star and anchoring a fierce unit of agile and team-oriented defenders, the Bulls were champions.

The league’s second-greatest dynasty after the Bill Russell Celtics would ignite an unprecedented growth period in revenue and global expansion of its product with six titles in eight years. Chicagoans—especially Krause and Reinsdorf—would forever believe the run would have been eight straight had Jordan not walked out for a year and a half following a frenzy of 1993 headlines on gambling excesses and the murder of his father, James.

As with many great things, competing agendas brought the Bulls dynasty to a disagreeable end, with Jackson, Jordan, and Pippen united against Krause, who was forever reminded (especially by Jordan) that he had taken over the GM job after Jordan was drafted and who alienated His Airness by saying, “Organizations win championships.” The team disbanded in 1998 and Jackson eventually moved on to the Lakers, where he continued adding rings to his collection—one that ironically had begun with him out of uniform in 1970.

Jackson said he prefers not to compare the teams he has coached with the Old Knicks; he doesn’t see the point. Comparing great teams across different eras is like comparing Angelina Jolie to Rita Hayworth. But Bill Bradley, for whom Jackson once nearly quit coaching in order to work on his friend’s presidential campaign, played along with a Bulls—versus—Old Knicks matchup. He began by reminding me that while the Bulls had Jordan, routinely referred to as the best player in history, his team, at least the 1973 version, countered with five players (Reed, Frazier, DeBusschere, Monroe, and Lucas) from the NBA’s all-time Top 50 team selected in the league’s 50th anniversary year, 1996. Only Jordan and Pippen made it from the Bulls.

“First off, Willis versus Bill Cartwright: give that one to Willis,” Bradley said. “Then Horace Grant versus DeBusschere, give it to DeBusschere; Frazier versus B. J. Armstrong, give it to Frazier. Earl versus Jordan: that’s Jordan, but Earl’s also going to do some things with the ball, make him work on defense.”

Even more than Jordan-Monroe, he conceded that the small forward position was the most problematic. “Now I get Pippen,” he said. And here, he agreed, was the ultimate embodiment of the generational stereotype and divide, Pippen representing the evolutionary nightmare—6'8", long-armed, terrifyingly elastic and athletic.

“You really can’t make that comparison, can you?” Bradley said. “So when it gets to that one, what am I going to do? I’m going to cry:
‘Help!’
 ”

And yet if Bradley could count on anything during his years in professional basketball, it was on defense—as with all great teams, help was on the way, all part of a preordained rotation.

IN EARLY JUNE 1999,
I was asked by my editor at the
Times
to do a column attempting to explain how the Knicks, in a matter of weeks, had gone from dysfunctional embarrassment to potential champion. During a lockout-shortened, 50-game regular season, Dave Checketts fired his GM, Ernie Grunfeld, and was chasing the idle Phil Jackson as a coaching replacement for Jeff Van Gundy. Suddenly the team pulled together; sneaked into the playoffs as the conference’s eighth seed; and in succession knocked off Pat Riley’s Miami Heat, the Atlanta Hawks, and the Larry Bird—coached Indiana Pacers on the way to San Antonio for Game 1 of the league Finals.

With the aging Patrick Ewing injured and unable to play, these had become the Knicks of the likable Van Gundy and the smooth-shooting Allan Houston. But the team took its personality more from Latrell Sprewell—notorious for his intimate relationship with the neck of his former coach, P. J. Carlesimo—and the preening Larry Johnson, among other renegades not exactly destined for a Senate run, much less sainthood. Starving for a title, the city was nonetheless turned on by the surge of an embattled underdog.

I decided to check in with Dave DeBusschere to see what he thought of the possibility that this motley crew might tread on the Old Knicks’ sacred championship ground. (Instead, San Antonio won the series in five games, behind Tim Duncan and David Robinson.) DeBusschere laughed and said that a couple of his children had actually called to make the same point.

“What are you talking about?” he told them. “We won our second title 25 years ago.” (It was 26, but who aside from the long-suffering fans was counting?) Then DeBusschere paused as if he wanted to say more but wasn’t sure he should.

“Off the record?” he said.

Whenever DeBusschere was about to say something sarcastic, he had the habit of contorting the lower part of his mouth so that the words would tumble out the side. After I agreed to keep whatever he wanted to add out of the paper, I could picture him as he said, “These assholes could never have what we had in New York.”

I didn’t think him arrogant or unfair. He was merely stating in locker room vernacular what he had every right to believe. DeBusschere’s teams were the city’s first true basketball love, consummated in the years before the romance of sport became complicated by money and the constructed divide between athlete and fan.

But which fans? And for how long? During a bleak decade from the turn of the century, those runs to the Finals in 1994 and 1999 under Pat Riley and then Van Gundy had become the
good old days
to legions of younger Knicks fans. Remember when John Starks threw down that thunderous left-handed dunk in Michael Jordan’s airspace during the ’93 playoffs? When Ewing stood on the Garden press table, soaking in the love after Game 7 of the conference final against Indiana? When the lane parted for Ewing in Game 7 against the Pacers in ’94 and he back-rimmed his layup to end the brief but compelling Riley era?

Those were the playoff epics that Peter DeBusschere—born in 1971, too late to remember his father in uniform, save a couple of wheezing contests that passed for legends’ games during all-star weekends—remembered fondly. “Those were my teams, Ewing and Charles Oakley,” he said. “There were some amazing games at the Garden.”

He would go with his father and brother, mostly on Sunday afternoons, holiday games on Christmas, not so much at night because “Dad didn’t like waiting around after work.” But playoff nights were invariably worth it. “I remember sitting there with him in the front row for Starks’s dunk,” he said. And for Larry Johnson’s 4-point play that brought the Knicks back from the dead in Game 3 of the ’99 conference finals in front of a crimson-faced coach, Larry Bird, on the Indiana bench.

These, too, were magical Garden nights, the appeal of those wild and more than a little crazy Knicks teams unmistakable. But, no, they didn’t win it all, and if they had, they would have been sentenced to an eternity of comparisons reveling in their inferiority. The comparative performance of the seventies and the nineties Knicks amounted to the difference between the oration of a Clinton and a Bush.

Old Knicks fans could appreciate the lunch-pail intensity of the nineties teams, but would always mourn the loss of the artistry. “To watch DeBusschere and those guys play was beautiful, the intelligence and teamwork,” the screenwriter Bill Goldman said. “I’ll never have days like that again.” His despair was echoed by George Lois, who, while unable to kick the season-ticket habit, occasionally wanted to flash a crucifix, like Oscar Robertson, when he watched one side of the floor clear out, and the hypothetical star—call him Otis Elevator—pretend he was playing in a school yard by himself. “Some of it is fucking unwatchable,” Lois said.

But to others, the game’s seismic shift toward entertainment was not so objectionable. Woody Allen was one Old Knicks fan with a New Age agenda. “I absolutely think New York could have the same love affair with the Knicks because other cities have done so—Chicago, L.A.,” he said. “You could see the Garden light up even for those small things, when Sprewell came, for instance. What they would need are one or two great members of the cast, not a group of faceless people who just grind it out. LeBron James or Dwyane Wade—that would have captivated the city right away.”

Alas, Allen never held out great hope that either would come, despite a two-season write-off by a new Knicks regime headed by Donnie Walsh to free up enough money under the salary cap to pursue James. Following LeBron’s rebuff, there was such panic at the Garden that the embattled owner, James Dolan, sent Isiah Thomas, loathed by fans and media alike after a disastrous tenure as team president and coach, to Ohio to flash his championship rings and dimpled smile. That didn’t work, either, as James was bent on teaming with Wade and Chris Bosh in Miami, forming a superteam, at least on paper, reminiscent of the West-Chamberlain-Baylor Lakers.

“My theory is that the Knicks have a curse on them, like Boston’s curse of the Bambino, and it started when they traded Walt Frazier to Cleveland,” Woody Allen decided. His fatalism was a running joke during his long film career, most comically highlighted by Alvy’s admission to Annie that he essentially broke humankind down into two categories: the horrible—which he described as people with blindness and deformity—and the miserable, which in effect was everyone else.

By Allen’s measure, the Knicks emerged from the summer of 2010 as merely miserable. If the James-Wade-Bosh model represented a trend, New York had to sign at least one premier free agent to eventually attract another. Hence, most NBA critics applauded them for handing a nearly $100 million and uninsurable contract to the all-star power forward Amar’e Stoudemire, who had sustained serious eye and knee injuries while in Phoenix. But despite the Suns’ concerns about Stoudemire’s prognosis for extended good health, he didn’t miss a game in the 2009–10 season and had long regained his explosiveness. Upon signing with New York, he boldly declared, “The Knicks are back.”