When the Garden Was Eden Read online

  WHEN THE

  GARDEN

  WAS EDEN

  * * *

  Clyde, the Captain, Dollar Bill, and the Glory Days of the New York Knicks

  * * *

  HARVEY ARATON

  WITH PHOTOGRAPHS BY GEORGE KALINSKY

  DEDICATION

  To Zelda Spoelstra, the Angel of the NBA,

  and to the nurturing women in my life:

  Marilyn Araton, Sharon Kushner, Randi Waldman,

  Ruth Albert, Michelle Musler, Sophia Richman,

  and my special love, Beth Albert

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Prologue: In a Paradise Lost

  PART I: ROOTS

  1. Down Home

  2. Red and Fuzzy

  3. An Irish Carnival

  4. The Real World

  PART II: WHEN THE GARDEN WAS EDEN

  5. Scout’s Honor

  6. From Motown to Midtown

  7. Courtside Personae

  8. Blowing in the Wind

  9. Down Goes Reed

  10. Game 7

  PART III: FALLOUT

  11. Bullets over Broadway

  12. The Parable of the Pearl

  13. Deconstructing Clyde

  14. The Brain Drain

  PART IV: PARADISE REGAINED

  15. Second Coming

  16. Changing of the Guards

  17. Afterglow

  18. Then, Now, and Forever

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  Appendix: Box Scores

  Bibliography

  Photographic Insert

  About the Author

  Praise

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  PROLOGUE: IN A PARADISE LOST

  LAST MAN OUT OF THE TUNNEL WAS WILLIS REED. The Captain emerged to a rousing ovation at Madison Square Garden and made his stiff-legged way toward his teammates waiting at center court. It was Wednesday night, February 23, 2010, halftime of a thoroughly ordinary Knicks-Bucks game except for the presence of the assembled legends. Bill Bradley and Walt Frazier, Reed’s fellow Knicks in the Hall of Fame, stepped out of the spotlight fringe on either side of the Walter A. Brown world championship trophy—a silver cup that takes more than one man to lift—while Dick Barnett and the beloved “Minutemen” Cazzie Russell and Mike Riordan applauded Reed as if he were coming to their rescue all over again.

  This was, in fact, the 40th anniversary of the Knicks’ rise to the summit of pro basketball, and all the men at center court wore varsity jackets custom-made for the occasion: blue-and-white sleeves and 1970 stitched to the left shoulder. Four decades had passed since “Here comes Willis!”—since Reed, with a numbed and practically immobilized right leg, hit the Knicks’ first two shots before Frazier and the others followed his lead and buried the Lakers in Game 7 of the NBA Finals.

  And yet the celebration seemed tinged with sadness. Teri McGuire appeared for her husband, Dick, the venerable organizational lifer—player, coach, and scout—who had suffered an aortic aneurysm and died earlier that month. Eddie Donovan, the architect of the team fondly known in city basketball circles as the Old Knicks, had suffered a fatal stroke and was represented by his son Sean. Gail Holzman Papelian stood in memory of her father, Red, the wily and streetwise coach of both championship teams. The DeBusschere boys, Peter and Dennis, came for their father, Dave, dead seven years from a sudden heart attack in 2003.

  But the legacy lives on. When Frazier stepped to the microphone, the fans in the lower bowl rose, shouting their approval, aiming their cell phones. The man they called Clyde conjured the memories that still, despite the years, abound and astound: “I see the Captain coming through the tunnel, I see three of the greatest players ever to play the game—Baylor, West, and Chamberlain—mesmerized by his presence.”

  He paused for effect, letting the few fans old and lucky enough to have seen the looks on the faces of the Lakers for themselves linger for just a second longer in the reverie. “I say to myself, ‘We got these guys.’ ”

  The disconnect of eras was starkly apparent, 37 years and counting since the Old Knicks had claimed the franchise’s second and last crown, in 1973. A new generation of fans, long suffering and paying staggering prices for an inferior product, constituted that night’s crowd.

  In the second half, a team of young players and short-term rentals—filling roster space as the front office readied itself for the unprecedented 2010 free-agent sweepstakes, the Summer of LeBron—played miserably, falling far behind Milwaukee. There would be no glorious comeback, nothing even close to that storied game of November 11, 1972, when Reed, Frazier, and friends ran off the final 19 points to nip the Bucks right here at the Garden. But tonight, as the stands emptied before the end of the fourth quarter, so, too, did the guests of honor retreat from celebrity row, opposite the Knicks’ bench, with only Barnett resisting the urge to bail. Or, as he might have put it: fall back, baby. The man who had TRICKY DICK stitched into the right sleeve of his commemorative jacket remained in his seat until the final buzzer of the home team’s brutal showing. Sitting alone, Barnett watched through sleepy, expressionless eyes the young men coming off the court, players whose collective achievements pale in comparison with his own but whose individual salaries amount to more than Barnett had earned over his entire career.

  “It is what it is,” he said philosophically, staring out at the deserted court as if it were a vandalized cathedral. “And it’s still just a game.”

  But when the Captain and Clyde and the rest of the Old Knicks played, when the city and the country convulsed with fury and pain: oh, what a beautiful game it was.

  PART I

  ROOTS

  1

  DOWN HOME

  IT WAS A HOT SUMMER NIGHT IN RUSTON, LOUISIANA. The air inside Chili’s, a bustling outlet just off I-20, was almost heavy enough to make breathing not worth the effort. The A/C system appeared to be waging the same losing battle as the makeup on the faces of several waitresses. But Willis Reed paid the wet heat no mind. He was much too tickled at tonight’s role reversal. Here, a few thousand miles south of Manhattan, Reed’s best buddy and oldest friend—Howard Brown—was the name brand, the guy with fans clamoring for his attention, the celebrity.

  “That’s what happens when you’re a teacher and you have a long career in the same area,” said Reed, former NBA champion and national sports hero. “You know everyone.”

  Reed and Brown, both age 67, live not far from here on adjacent properties near the Grambling State University campus where they once shared a dorm room.

  “Howard helped me get the land,” Reed said.

  “Whenever Willis would come back to visit, he’d stay with me,” Brown said from the seat across from mine. “And about the time he was moving back, he said, ‘If you want to build a house, why not right here?’ ”

  The two might as well be brothers, and Reed calls them that. They met in the late 1950s at the all-black Westside High School, a few miles away from Bernice, a 30-minute drive north from Ruston. Willis and Howard both played on Westside High’s basketball team, Reed the star big man and Brown a 6'0" guard who, according to Reed, never met a shot he didn’t like.

  Well, only “until it came down to the wire,” said Brown. “Then Coach would say, ‘Get it inside’—which meant ‘Give it to Willis.’ ”

  Give it to Willis. A smirk grew across Brown’s face, and he looked across the table at Reed: “Remember how Coach Stone would hold the bus for you?”

  Reed cackled at the memory, while Brown narrated:

  “We’d all be there, ready to go, except Willis. There wa
s a guy named Duke who drove the bus, and he’d be looking at Coach, waiting for him to say, ‘Let’s go.’ But then Coach would stand up, put his hands in his pocket, and say, ‘I’ve got to go get my keys.’ He’d go back in the building and wait until he saw Willis walking up to the bus. Then he’d come back on and say, ‘Crank it up, Duke.’ ”

  And so the bus would roll with Reed on board, on the way to another all-black school, another audition for a young man destined for stardom in the heart of New York. But all of that had happened decades ago. It was ancient and unknown history to the Chili’s crowd, sweating over their fajitas.

  The night manager stopped by our table while making her rounds to comment on my accent, which doesn’t sound too Louisianan.

  “He’s here to work on a book,” Brown informed the perky young woman.

  “Really,” she said. “What’s it about?”

  “This man right here and the basketball team he used to play for,” Brown said. “This is Willis Reed of the New York Knicks; his photo is on your wall.”

  He pointed to the entryway of the restaurant and there it was, along with other greats from this area, one uncommonly rich in basketball lore: Bill Russell, a native of Monroe, due east on I-20; Robert Parish, another Celtics Hall of Fame center, out of Shreveport, an hour away on the interstate in the other direction; Karl Malone, who put Ruston’s Louisiana Tech on the college basketball map; Orlando Woolridge, a cousin of Reed’s and a gifted kid who played for Digger Phelps at Notre Dame—on Reed’s recommendation—and later in the NBA; and, of course, Reed himself, who hilariously wasn’t good enough for most of the major universities up north that deigned at the beginning of the sixties to recruit a player or two from the growing pool of African Americans.

  In the end, after a brief and uninspired flirtation with the University of Wisconsin and Loyola University of Chicago, Reed was more comfortable moving on down the road to Grambling, where he could play for Fred Hobdy, a protégé of the coaching legend Eddie Robinson, and stay connected with his best friend. Howard Brown might not have been cut out for college basketball, but Reed was more concerned about having a freshman roommate.

  “I bet my husband knows who you are,” the night manager assured Reed. Then she asked for an autograph, which seemed like the polite thing to do.

  IF WILLIS REED HAD INSTEAD RETIRED to a high-rise perch in Manhattan, maybe his fame would still precede him every time he stepped out the door. Whenever he got a hankering to aim his gun or cast his rod, he might have simply trekked upstate (just as he used to blow off practice—with Red Holzman’s permission—on opening day of hunting season).

  In some ways, remaining in New York would have been the easier life. He would have spared himself the discomfort of climbing aboard prop jets designed for Lilliputians when flying out of small airports in Shreveport or Monroe, on his way to Montana to hunt or to New York City whenever the Knicks or the NBA called. But the perks of celebrity were never his guiding aim. What mattered to him was this: “I just wanted some quiet, to be able to get in my car without worrying about traffic and being able to walk outside on my property and take a piss without worrying about my neighbors.”

  He knew himself well enough to know that he didn’t need strangers to remind him of who he’d once been. For Reed, basketball was about the competition, the wins, and, because he’s a practical man, the financial windfalls. Basketball was a life primarily defined by lessons gleaned from his parents and coaches—even from a few people he was once forbidden to so much as sit next to on the local bus.

  “If you’re going up to Bernice,” Reed told me, “then you’ve got to go see Harry Cook.” We were sitting in the den of the modern home he had built in 1989, on the property scouted for him by Howard Brown. Here, in an otherwise bland rural expanse off the Grambling I-20 exit, the roadside dotted with tired wooden houses and a low-slung Baptist church, was where Reed envisioned and developed his gated dream palace on a rolling landscape with three specially designed ponds he stocked himself with fish.

  Three Ponds Road: the retirement address of Willis Reed and his second wife, Gail.

  Mounted on the walls of the den were his beloved hunting prizes—the stuffed heads of a bison and a mountain lion killed in Montana, a moose bagged in the Yukon, and an elk felled with his arrow, among other stuffed heads and … a basketball trophy, an MVP award.

  Nodding, Reed added: “Harry is a character, a great talker, and he can tell you everything about Bernice.”

  HARRY COOK IS A RETIRED BIOLOGIST who used to work for the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries. For years, Inell Reed, Willis’s mother, worked as a domestic for Cook’s family, among others. When Reed called Cook to tell him of my visit, Cook’s wife answered. Reed addressed her as Miss Alice, and, in keeping with the theme of country quaint, he told her he’d been meaning to drop by anyway because he and Gail were all out of Miss Alice’s delicious mayhaw jelly and they were craving a fresh jar. (Eventually, Cook would send me off with two—one for the Reeds, one for myself.)

  “Willis was a big boy, but Inell, she called the shots,” Cook was quick to say as we settled down in his living room with glasses of fresh lemonade. “She kept him on the straight and narrow. I’ve pretty much known Willis all his life. Yes, we were segregated in those days, but we all came up together, black and white. It was without conflict. When you’re living in a town with 1,500 people, everybody’s on a first-name basis.”

  Later, I asked Reed if he’d sent me to Cook, a white man, in part to dispel whatever preconceived notions that I, a lifelong New Yorker, might have had about the rural South—and by extension his childhood. The question made him chuckle. “I always said that about Bernice—people did get along,” he said. “I mean, I knew there were things I didn’t have. Didn’t have the kind of houses the white folks had; didn’t have a car. The situation was what it was. But you know what? We all made the best of it in Bernice until it changed.”

  Founded in 1899 as a stop on Captain C. C. Henderson’s Arkansas Southern Railroad, Bernice was created to give Henderson an industrial foothold in an area known as the Big Woods, due to its huge virgin pines. In the days of Cook’s and Reed’s youth, the town, all of three square miles, was a thriving lumber-and-agricultural center, its two-light downtown a vibrant shopping district with a movie theater. Strategically placed were the warehouses—more than you would expect in a town that size, and owned by the man who employed most of Bernice’s working-class members, including Willis Reed Sr. and, for one unforgettable summer, his strapping teenage son.

  “Mr. Donald Lindsay,” Reed said. “My dad worked for him, building the warehouses to store cotton for the government. I had a chance one summer to work at my dad’s job, the summer before my senior year in high school. So I was at these warehouses, with the scaffolding and all. Worked all summer in the heat for 75 cents an hour. Had these big old calluses on my hands and, man, that whole experience was life-changing for me.

  “After the summer, my dad said, ‘Well, you don’t have to go to college; you can stay here and work for Mr. Lindsay.’ Now, it wasn’t like today, where a kid who’s a basketball star is thinking he is going to play in the NBA someday. When I was in Bernice and even at Grambling, there were only maybe eight NBA teams. So what did I want to do? Well, after that summer working for Mr. Lindsay, I would see my dad coming home with sweat down to his knees, and, having been there with him, I knew why. And then I went back to school and there was Coach Stone, wearing a jacket and tie to school, nice car, much nicer house. So my real dream was about being a high school coach and a teacher like Coach Stone. I said, Boy, I want to be like him—I’m going to college.”

  He majored in physical education and minored in biology at historically black Grambling State. Beyond rooming with his friend, Reed had been drawn to a place where there were many role models like Coach Stone, and where his new mentor, Hobdy, would teach him not just the fundamentals of the game but how to cope with the degradations of the day
.

  “He used to say to us, ‘Listen, you guys are athletes, and you don’t need to be out there demonstrating and all that,’ ” Reed said. “The best thing you can do is do what you do best. Become as good a player and as good a team, and all of that is going to be a good example.”

  This was hardly black militancy, or even the kind of nonviolent protest that Martin Luther King was championing then, at the start of the civil rights movement. By nature, Reed was no iconoclast. At least not like his idol, Bill Russell, whose family fled Louisiana for the California Bay Area, settling in Oakland when he was 12. Reed wasn’t blind to the fact that there had been only one car, in the rear, in which he was allowed to ride on the train from Bernice to Ruston, and he knew why the white kids like Harry Cook could enjoy their burgers and fries in “the real nice part” of the café on Fourth Street while he and his black friends were relegated to the counter in the back. All these years later, a smirk creased his face when he said, “Separate but equal,” recounting the segregationist mantra that had prevented him from formally competing against white players until 1961, his freshman season at Grambling, in the NAIA basketball tournament.

  What, then, could he—or any athlete—do for the Cause without involving himself directly in the struggle? He could win. He could show what black ballplayers brought to the court in direct competition with whites. Decades after the NAIA semifinals in Kansas City, where he had done exactly that, Reed could still summon the satisfaction of the tight game, his jumper on the baseline that gave Grambling a late 45–44 lead, and then the horror of watching a Westminster, Pennsylvania, shooter—the same one who had nipped Winston-Salem State in the Elite Eight—coming off a screen, wide-open for another buzzer beater.

  “I jumped out at him and he missed the shot, ball hit the front of the rim,” Reed said. He himself had missed only one shot the entire game, free throws included. Grambling won the title by blowing out Georgetown of Kentucky in the final. For Reed, the execution of Hobdy’s strategy—social change via on-court performance—was another example of what had made Grambling the right choice for him. “For me, as a kid growing up in the segregated South, certain things were probably not as tough as for other people in areas where they were integrated but more exposed to those hard feelings,” he said.