When the Garden Was Eden (6 page)

When I try to recall the old Garden’s interior, I only seem to summon Boston Garden (a building I frequented as a reporter in the 1980s, when Bird and company reigned). “It was actually a lot like Boston,” said Marv Albert, who broke into the business at the old Garden as a ball boy, on his way to replacing Marty Glickman as the radio voice of the Knicks. “And if you were able to go back to it now and saw everything that was wrong with it, the tiny locker rooms and all, you’d say, ‘How did professional athletes ever play here?’ Of course, that was all they knew, and if you were around back then, you have a great nostalgia for the place, the same way people feel about Ebbets Field. There were some great games there.”

That Garden incarnation was actually the second of three locations in the long history of the arena, dating back to 1879. The first two were located at East 26th Street and Madison Avenue. By 1925 the brand had moved to Eighth Avenue between 49th and 50th streets, where it remained until 1968. For the Michigan-Princeton game, the building was sold out, with scalpers outside demanding a princely sum of $35 for choice seats. Two NBA games on the same night in New York could be seen for a fraction of the cost.

But no Knicks game to that point was anywhere near as compelling an attraction as Michigan-Princeton, which was anticipated with a raw tension beyond any normal athletic competition. “I was at that game, and I can tell you that everybody was rooting for Bill,” said Cal Ramsey, the would-be Knick who had gone into teaching but never strayed far from the Garden. By “everybody” he meant everybody who was white. “It
was
1964.”

In a positive light, it was also the year the Civil Rights Act was signed into law by President Lyndon Johnson—a blow against racial discrimination and segregation. A couple of weeks before the Michigan-Princeton game, Martin Luther King Jr. had traveled to Norway to receive the Nobel Peace Prize. But 1964 was as much about violence and unrest as it was about peace. In June, three young civil rights workers were murdered in Mississippi. Race riots shook Harlem during a six-day period in July and then spread to Rochester and Philadelphia. At the end of the year, here came an event in the heart of New York that had all the trappings of social conflict: the white star from an elite private school versus the black star from a public powerhouse—Old World privilege versus the New World knocks of a Chicago housing project.

Even for basketball fans, the game took on a rare significance. Everyone was eager to see how Bradley and the Ivy Leaguers would meet the challenge of the Wolverines—though they should already have known that Bradley, at least, was not likely to be intimidated. When Princeton played Syracuse in its opening game of the Holiday Festival, the Orange immediately set up a box-and-one defense, assigning a tough kid from Brooklyn, Sam Penceal, to chase Bradley. Reporting for
Sports Illustrated
, Frank Deford wrote: “Penceal literally clung to him, clutching, grabbing, clawing. Suddenly, obviously furious, Bradley lashed back with an elbow that rocked the husky Penceal … the crowd gasped.”

The scouts drooled. This particular Ivy Leaguer, no white wallflower, was not about to be bullied. Bradley, the only child of Warren (a banker) and Susan (a teacher), had been a natural at the game from the time he began playing in fourth grade. He was blessed with wide peripheral vision that made him an expert passer and a desire to work on the staples of his game, which depended more on repetition than physiological gifts. On school days, he would practice for three and a half hours after class. On Saturdays, from nine to five. On Sundays, he went from one thirty in the afternoon until five. He scored 3,068 points at Crystal City High School and could have gone to any basketball power he wanted.

Russell had no reason to question Bradley’s qualifications and recalled having no interest in the social context of their confrontation. Growing up in a Chicago housing project, he had strong Baptist roots and blue-collar parents who told him that he was no victim as long as he had the ability and a job to showcase it. “We didn’t have much, but enough to do what we needed to do,” Russell said. “I had two or three pair of pants, but they were always clean. I always had to go to class, account for my grades. I came home late from high school one night and my father said, ‘Where you been?’ I said, ‘I was at basketball tryouts.’ He wasn’t sure that’s what I should be doing. He came to the school one day, the same day the coach made final cuts. He looked in the gym and saw I was still there. He turned around, never saw that I saw him, and never said a word. That was his way of saying ‘Okay.’ ”

Russell said the prospect of playing a widely anticipated game in New York obscured everything else. “Madison Square Garden, a buzz in the city, everyone carrying their newspapers around, all hyped up,” he said. “That’s what I remember. Bradley didn’t have anything to prove to us. We already knew he was good.”

How good? That was what they had yet to find out. Not only did Bradley riddle the Wolverines for 41 points, but he brought the ball up against the press, controlled the offense, defended tenaciously, and went to the boards for 9 rebounds. Until he fouled out with 4:37 left in the game, it appeared that Princeton was going to win handily, the score 75–63 in the Tigers’ favor. Bradley’s commanding performance essentially overshadowed the 27 points scored by Russell, who at the time was reported to have struggled because he was playing with a damaged sneaker. Unless memory failed, that was news to him. “I honestly don’t remember anything wrong with my sneaker,” he said. “I know I didn’t shoot well. I know Bradley did.”

After Bradley left the court, Princeton extended the lead to 77–63 before its historic collapse. Without Bradley to steady them against the relentless pressure, Princeton might as well have sent its debate team to try to break the half-court line. Michigan closed the game with a 16–1 run that included wiping out a 78–68 lead in 65 seconds, beginning with a rebound by Russell and run-out for a fast-break layup. So toothless were the Tigers without Bradley that on three of their next four possessions, they failed to reach midcourt before turning the ball over. With the fans in pandemonium, Michigan had the ball with 36 seconds left for the last shot, and put it where it belonged: in Russell’s hands.

He remembered the clock ticking down, the Princeton defender Ed Hummer trying to force him left so he couldn’t use his explosive quickness to get to the rim. Russell thought: Fine, have it your way. He dribbled left, stopped, and launched a 15-footer that won the game by the time it hit the ground. The celebration began. But in a more general accounting, and one that would preview the Bradley-Russell chronicles to come, the shot came too late to steal the night.

This proved Bradley’s show from start to finish. As he sat on the bench with a towel over his head, fouled out and helpless, the totality of Bradley’s performance took on a whole new dimension.

In an era of reigning big men, it seemed all the more amazing that one player who was no goliath in the paint, no Chamberlain or Russell, could have such an impact on a game. In his
Sports Illustrated
dispatch, Deford called Bradley’s effort “as fine an individual performance as has ever been given on a basketball court.” Deford, of course, was also a Princeton man. But Joe Lapchick, the former Knicks coach whose St. John’s team would upset Michigan in the festival final, was equally awestruck: “I always thought Oscar [Robertson] was the greatest, but Bradley is only a half step behind him,” he told Deford.

This was heady stuff for a young man with the vertical range of a YMCA warrior and one who didn’t appear quick enough to play in an NBA backcourt (or big and brawny enough, at 6'5", to survive as a forward). Bradley suspected that he received the zealous praise precisely because he was no exceptional specimen. Many coaches and sportswriters relished the opportunity to champion a so-called thinking man’s player, and were inclined to celebrate him for that reason—if not strictly for the color of his skin.

Given the mounting evidence that the sport was well on its way to becoming a national stage for talented black men, and in the face of fomenting social issues, Bradley believed he may have been the first of the great white hopes. In hindsight, he admitted that it was not a role he was comfortable with; white and black players alike saw through the thinly disguised media stereotyping, he said. From Bradley to Bird and beyond, black stars would chafe at the blue-collar, hardworking characterizations that accompanied the shrinking number of their white counterparts, while they themselves were lauded for their God-given talent.

In 1987, the issue would for the first time become a public discussion when Dennis Rodman and Isiah Thomas suggested that Bird was the beneficiary of white hype. The timing was bad: Bird’s Celtics had just eliminated the Pistons from the playoffs, and only two games separated the miracle (in Boston, at least) of Bird stealing Thomas’s inbounds pass, which resulted in one of the all-time end-of-game heists in NBA history. The execution was clumsy. But given time to explain himself in a calmer setting, in an interview with Ira Berkow of the
New York Times
, Thomas captured the sentiments of many black players:

When Bird makes a great play, it’s due to his thinking, and his work habits. It’s all planned out by him. It’s not the case for blacks. All we do is run and jump. We never practice or give a thought to how we play. It’s like I came dribbling out of my mother’s womb.

No one was quite ready to speak that way in 1964. By season’s end, Bill Bradley had accepted a Rhodes scholarship and was on his way to England. If he was going to effect social change, he believed he’d do it as a Washington power broker, not as a basketball player.

He didn’t mind telling people about his ambitions for the political arena. In Minneapolis for the announcement of the
Sporting News
All America Team, he befriended Gail Goodrich. They played a lot of Ping-Pong, Bradley determined to beat the quick-handed Goodrich before they left town. At one point they discussed their plans. Goodrich said he expected to play in the NBA. He asked Bradley what the future might bring. “He said, ‘Oh, I’m going to Oxford. And then I’d really like to start working toward being president of the United States,’ ” Goodrich recalled. “Just like that—no big deal.”

NED IRISH COULDN’T FORGET
the furor Bradley and Russell had created in New York that late December night. He couldn’t ignore the potential gate appeal Bradley in particular would have if he ever returned to basketball. Irish leaned on his people to secure Bradley with a territorial draft pick, in which a team could lay claim to a player based on his school’s location in the same region.

Without question, Eddie Donovan and Red Holzman did not need to be convinced that the risk was an acceptable one. Fuzzy Levane and Dick McGuire, who’d succeeded Donovan as coach when Donovan was moved into the general manager’s seat during the 1965–66 season, both said they believed the Knicks would have taken Bradley with or without the owner’s approval. “Bill was too good not to play anymore—that’s what everyone thought, anyway,” Levane said. Once they had reached that conclusion, it made perfect sense for the Knicks to lock Bradley up with a territorial pick, even if he wouldn’t play for two years while studying at Oxford, if at all.

As for Russell, he would deposit his game-winning shot into the bank of special memories. Sportswriters might never let him forget Bradley’s transcendent effort, but his peers would remember who came through at the finish. Years later, when Russell attended a Lakers game, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar told him he had been at the Garden that night and that it was one of the best games he’d ever seen. He said he’d always admired how Russell had shaken off the subpar shooting night and risen to the moment.

Compared with Bradley, Russell may not have looked like the best player in the country, but there was at least one Garden witness on December 30, 1964, who believed Russell’s performance was worth savoring, too.

“Guts to take the last shot,” Red Holzman wrote in his scouting report, making special note after detailing Russell’s offensive strengths, his impressive athletic gifts.

Though hardly irrelevant, the fact that Russell had made the shot to beat Princeton was not the main point. The way Holzman saw it, any team with serious NBA championship aspirations did not have room in its end-of-game lineup for conscientious objectors. The main point was that Russell had taken the shot. The team needed to be a complete coalition of the willing. Let the shots fall as they may.

One year later, when the Knicks won a coin flip with Detroit to determine who would get the first pick of the 1966 draft, they used it to bring Cazzie Russell to New York. The Pistons, desperate for Russell as an in-state draw, were crushed—especially the man who had called tails. Dave DeBusschere, their player-coach, was, after all, a lifelong resident of Detroit.

BY THE TIME BRADLEY AND RUSSELL SQUARED OFF
in New York, the Knicks were well on their way to another forgettable season, running a distant fourth in the NBA’s Eastern Division (which at the time had only four teams). But there was hope. Three of the four rookies on the team—the front-liners Willis Reed, Bad News Barnes, and a guard, Howard “Butch” Komives—were all under 24 and already averaging double figures. Reed was in the process of winning the league Rookie of the Year award, posting at year’s end 19.5 points and 14.7 rebounds, while taking over at center.

One night against the Warriors in San Francisco, Reed scored 32 against Wilt Chamberlain, using a variety of jumpers and agile post moves to keep the Stilt on his heels. The game went to overtime, where the Warriors pulled it out, but Reed was quite pleased with himself … until he picked up a box score. “I held him to 56,” he recalled. “He killed me, man. One big step and jump, dunk it, or the finger roll.”