When the Garden Was Eden (7 page)

It could have been much worse. The Knicks were already familiar with Chamberlain’s otherworldliness. On March 2, 1962, when the Warriors were still based in Philadelphia, he’d scored a record 100 points in Hershey, Pennsylvania, while the team on the other side barely did more than watch. The young Knicks were eager to move past that and other franchise humiliations.

“The expectations were very low at the time, but even though we weren’t a playoff-caliber team, the fans began to enjoy us because we played hard, we ran, it was more fun than the old style,” said Emmette Bryant, the fourth rookie on the team, a 6'1" guard out of Chicago and DePaul who became Reed’s first roommate and friend in New York.

They visited the World’s Fair together at Corona Park in Queens. They went out for dinner, learned to navigate the subways, found their way uptown over the summer to play in the famed Rucker League. “We liked the idea that we were the guys making the transition from the old era—Richie Guerin and those guys—to the new,” Bryant said.

Last place, though, was still last place. After averaging almost 12,000 fans per game at home in the late fifties, attendance had slipped under 10,000 by 1964–65. The front office was restless, ready to retool, sending the veteran forward Bob Boozer to the Lakers for the shooting guard Dick Barnett, who was moving to his fourth pro team at the age of 29, including a brief jump to the short-lived American Basketball League with George Steinbrenner’s Cleveland Pipers to reunite with John McLendon, his college coach at Tennessee A&I (now Tennessee State).

On the East Coast, Reed was ecstatic. At Grambling, he had heard all about Barnett, who had put on a few shows when visiting in the late 1950s. The black college legend of Skull Barnett—so nicknamed because he shaved off his hair—was such that Reed wondered if the stories were apocryphal. “Everyone said he was a character,” Reed recalls. “When we got him, I thought, I’m going to enjoy playing with this guy.”

He would be less sanguine about the next Knicks trade, early in his second season: Bad News Barnes, Johnny Green, Johnny Egan, and cash to Baltimore for a high-scoring center, Walt Bellamy. As much as Barnes’s departure validated Reed’s belief that he should have been the number-one pick, the acquisition of the 6'11" Bellamy meant that Reed would have to change positions.

“I think they thought because Bellamy was bigger that I would be better as a forward,” Reed said. Throughout his career, he was alternately listed at 6'10" and 6'9", but Holzman had measured him at Grambling in his socks at a shade under 6'9". The conventional wisdom was that if they were to contend for a title, the Knicks would need more size at the position to confront the likes of Bill Russell and Wilt Chamberlain.

Already convinced that he could compete in the paint, Reed wasn’t happy. The deal didn’t make sense to him. Bellamy was already in his late twenties, and his reputation as a talented and statistically prodigious but enigmatic and occasionally unmotivated player preceded him. Eddie Donovan had told Reed upon his arrival in New York that the Knicks intended to build a championship team, largely through the draft. Now Reed wondered: was the blueprint already being abandoned?

For the moment, perhaps it was; while the additions of Barnett and Bellamy didn’t get the Knicks into the playoffs, the team did achieve a winning record at home for the first time in four years, typically a sign of better things to come. The following season, 1966–67, they would creep within nine games of .500. They were no longer league doormats, and their draft status reflected that. With the fifth pick, their choice wasn’t as obvious as it had been with their selections of the previous two years.

At a crucial time in the team’s development, the front office was about to be tested. Luckily for the Knicks, as had been the case with Bradley and Russell, the best place to study again turned out to be Madison Square Garden.

RED HOLZMAN NEVER SAID A WORD
to Walt Frazier. He scouted him assiduously throughout the 1966–67 season and watched Frazier drive Division II Southern Illinois to a series of stunning upsets: over the largely intact defending champions from Texas Western; against second-ranked Louisville, with the All-Americans Wes Unseld and Butch Beard; and opposite another top-ten team, Wichita State. Holzman would later surprise Frazier by telling him that he’d had the privilege of seeing him torch the likes of Kentucky Wesleyan. Wherever Frazier went, Holzman was sure to follow. He hopped flights and rented rooms a step behind Frazier, all the way to Madison Square Garden for the National Invitation Tournament.

But it never made any sense to Frazier that right up to the 1967 draft, Holzman and the Knicks never said so much as
… one … freaking … word
. Maybe they didn’t want to tip their hand, or preferred to remain noncommittal until they saw as much of Frazier as possible after he’d missed his junior season because he had been ruled academically ineligible.

“My sophomore year, I was so upset with my coach, Jack Hartman, I actually thought he was discriminating against me,” he said. “I was already a Division II All-American, playing great, but there were times I just couldn’t get the ball. There were three white guys and two black guys starting, and it was always, ‘Swing the ball, Walt. Swing the ball.’ I started thinking maybe it was a black-white thing. I was unhappy. I stopped going to class. I was planning on leaving, and Hartman, he didn’t even call me. If it wasn’t for the athletic director, I would have been gone.”

Frazier hailed from Atlanta, the eldest of nine children, seven of them sisters—an urban version of Willis Reed’s lower-middle-class family. His grandparents on his mother’s side had been farmhands on the very land where their own parents were enslaved. Early in Frazier’s life, he spent summers with his siblings in the Georgia countryside, as comfortable around pigs and cows as he would later be at the wheel of his Rolls.

In Atlanta, his family lived in Summerhill, a neighborhood just south of downtown that was established after the Civil War as a home for freed slaves and Jewish immigrants. His father’s parents lived next door, his grandfather working on the assembly line at the Atlanta Paper Company. Frazier recalls a strong male presence in his life, though his father, also Walt, was an irascible sort, drifting between running a cafeteria with his wife, Eula, and gambling on the neighborhood’s “numbers.” Still, the family was stable. Frazier’s uncle Eddie Lee Wynn was in the dry-cleaning business and took a special interest in the family’s star athlete. “We had a house, a lot of love,” he said. “I actually cried when I left for college.”

Echoing Reed, Frazier said he believed there was an unintended but palpable benefit to growing up black in the South of the 1950s. “I don’t care how much money you made; in the South, you were still black,” he said. “And when you are openly denied something and discriminated against, it brings people together. Unlike the North, in a way, we were raised by a village. If you were doing something wrong, everybody in the neighborhood had carte blanche to make it their business. We were always taught to have a tenacious work ethic, to get an education. Because no matter what names they called you, once you had that, no one could take that away.”

At the all-black Howard High School, Frazier was the catcher on the baseball team and a good enough quarterback to draw scholarship offers from historically black colleges. But why play football? he thought. Beyond college, there was no professional future for a black QB. He had neither the desire nor the speed to change positions. He saw himself as a quarterback, a leader. But the most important reason for choosing basketball was a simple realization: more than the other sports, he enjoyed practice, even on ramshackle neighborhood courts. He was a fan, watching games on television with his father and uncle. He had a favorite player, Skull Barnett. “My idol,” Frazier said.

He had never heard of Southern Illinois University before being steered there by a local college scout for a tryout that brought him, in turn, a scholarship. Carbondale, Illinois, was a largely white environment in which Frazier felt immediately overwhelmed. “I was so far behind academically, because our schools were inferior,” he said. Befriended by a white teammate, Ed Zastrow, they enrolled in the same classes, studied together. Frazier’s confidence began to grow. Until his frustration with Hartman boiled over and his class attendance suffered late in his sophomore year, he pulled decent grades.

But it was during his season of ineligibility that Frazier moved off campus and became more personally accountable. With the help of the team’s trainer, he went on a strict workout regimen and adopted a healthier diet. He grew stronger and quicker, and when he scrimmaged with the freshmen against the varsity, he dedicated himself to defense, roaming passing lanes, stripping the guards, talking trash—all of this newfound aggression really directed at his coach.

“It got to the point where Hartman would have to say, ‘Walt, sit down,’ ” said Dick Garrett, a talented freshman guard that season, a young man who would later learn, in a more public setting, what it was like to deal with a supermotivated Walt Frazier. “He just didn’t want the varsity guys getting too discouraged.”

The following year, Frazier was back in the lineup and Hartman was happy to ride him all the way to the NIT. “At that point, playing with Walt, we felt we could run with anyone,” Garrett said. “We weren’t all that big, but we were really athletic. We also knew we could beat a lot of the teams in the NCAA tournament, but at the time they could only take 32. So going to New York for the NIT was a big thing for us, for any Division II team.”

Frazier remembered being wide-eyed on the bus ride from Kennedy Airport, and the mob scene of players from the 14 NIT teams housed in one Midtown hotel, along with one very special guest who every day that week held court in the lobby, mobbed by fans. Muhammad Ali, training nearby for his heavyweight title bout with Zora Folley, needed no introduction to a young black basketball player.

“It felt like the center of the sports world,” said Clarence Smith, another college teammate of Frazier’s. “We went to the Garden to see Ali train. Howard Cosell came to one of our practices.” Smith, a 6'4" defensive stopper who allowed Frazier the luxury of gambling for steals, offered a convincing imitation of the famed broadcaster: “Just who are these Salukis from Southern Illinois?”

And what the hell was a Saluki in the first place? Over the course of the tournament, as no one got within nine points of them, with Al McGuire’s touted Marquette team falling in the final by 15, New York discovered why the team’s nickname derived from a breed of dog known for its beauty, endurance, and speed.

Most of all, the city was introduced to the ball hound named Frazier, the tourney MVP and now certain to be a first-round draft pick. He had no great reason to stay for his final year of eligibility, and two good reasons to leave: a wife and young son, living with him in a trailer home. “I just wanted to make sure I would be going to the right team for the right price,” he said. “Otherwise, we did have our whole team coming back.”

DETROIT HAD THE FIRST PICK
and zeroed in on Providence guard Jimmy Walker. Next up was Baltimore, whose college scout, Jerry Krause, had had his eye on a black college sensation, Earl Monroe, from the time Monroe was an unknown sophomore at Winston-Salem State in North Carolina. By his senior year he was averaging 41.5 points and was such a sensation that Winston-Salem games had to be moved off campus to the downtown coliseum, where there were almost as many white faces in the crowd as black. But there were others in the Baltimore organization, including the coach, Gene Shue, who didn’t think Monroe was worthy of that high a pick. They had their eye on the Saluki.

“My coach had gotten a lawyer to advise me,” Frazier said. “Baltimore called. They offered me $15,000 for my rookie season. The lawyer said, ‘What about the bonus?’ They said, ‘It’s in there.’ The lawyer said, ‘Don’t waste your draft pick—Frazier’s going back to school.’ ” Spurned, the Bullets turned their attention back to Monroe, for whom Krause was vehemently lobbying and who had also been scouted by Holzman.

“Cool and good poise with the ball … shooting and range … should be a No. 1 this year,” Holzman wrote in his book under a box score pasted onto the page. “Hits the free man good when double-teamed. Knows the game.”

When I mentioned to Monroe what Holzman had written about him—proof that Holzman knew exactly what he would be trading for years later—the man they called Black Magic (or Black Jesus in college) recognized how different his pro basketball life could have been from the start.

“I guess if the Bullets hadn’t drafted me, I could have wound up a lot sooner in New York,” he said. And had Frazier not had the attorney’s advice and accepted the Bullets’ lowball offer, it could have been him having to strong-arm his way out of Baltimore to join Monroe in New York, instead of the other way around. Instead, Monroe signed with the Bullets, who paid him $20,000 a year—more than they’d offered Frazier but still the lowest salary among the top rookies.

Life is laden with serendipity, to borrow one of Frazier’s pet broadcasting words. The Seattle SuperSonics, an expansion team, informed his lawyer that they were prepared to take him with the sixth pick. Clem Haskins went third to Chicago. Detroit, with another pick, chose Sonny Dove of St. John’s. Until the moment when the Knicks selected Frazier with the fifth pick, they still hadn’t made contact. “When the lawyer called, I was like, ‘The Knicks?’ ” Frazier said. “I thought he was kidding.”

Now the Knicks, for $100,000 over three years, had Walt Frazier. How did they reach their decision? Jimmy Wergeles, a longtime Knicks public relations man, told me it was another case of Ned Irish bigfooting his front office, as he had with Bradley. “After the NIT, Irish said, ‘Take Frazier,’ ” Wergeles said. But there also was evidence that Holzman, at least, agreed with Irish. His scouting archive suggested he knew from the beginning that Frazier was the real deal. In fact, it read like a dead-on preview of a Hall of Fame career.