When the Garden Was Eden (3 page)

More impresario than sports executive, best known for landing Joe Willie Namath and putting the Jets and the old American Football League into the ring with the establishment NFL, the nearly 70-year-old Sonny didn’t know a pick-and-roll from the first pick of the college draft. Neither did his friend Howard Cosell, but it was Cosell who apparently made perfect sense to Werblin when he whispered in his ear that Reed was no worthy coach and that Holzman, who had been relegated to a nominal position in the organization, never should have been replaced.

In Seattle, following an afternoon workout, I asked Reed if the rumors were hurting the young team. He nodded, wearily. “It hurts our gate and it kills team spirit,” he said. “Either I’m in or out.”

The last quote was incendiary, fast-tracked for the
Post
’s back page. But while I accepted my no-holds-barred Murdochian mission to search and disrupt, if not actually distort, I also had to consider Reed’s facial expression, his reasoned tone of voice. He seemed more bewildered—hurt, actually—by Werblin’s refusal to acknowledge what he had meant to the organization.

When I called Werblin the next day for a comment, I told him that Reed’s words amounted to more of a plea than an ultimatum, although the
Post
headline sitting on his desk had certainly read like the latter. Werblin said he understood the nature of the tabloid newspaper. Days later, when he fired Reed and replaced him with Holzman, Werblin confided to a member of the organization, “Nobody gives me an ultimatum.”

That story was my first big splash as the Knicks beat reporter, but it came fraught with conflicting emotions. No matter how much I reminded myself that I was just doing my job, the advancement of my young sportswriting career at the expense of the most essential Knick in the history of the franchise did not feel much like a triumph.

Through the years, Reed and I never talked about the story or its consequences. After he went across the Hudson River to work for the New Jersey Nets in 1988, he always returned my calls, greeting me at the arena with an outstretched hand. But I nevertheless wondered if there was resentment on some level, subliminal or not. Professionalism aside, it mattered to me on a deeper and more personal level. The space in my memory reserved for Willis Reed was more vast than what an occasional quote might fill.

“You know what? Sonny had come in wanting to make changes,” he said when I finished a rambling but sincere recounting of the
in-or-out
story, the call to Werblin included. “He came in and fired other people, and he wanted to fire me. So if it didn’t happen that day, it would’ve happened the next week or the next month. So…”

So the case was closed, finally and forever? Yes, he said, I shouldn’t give it another thought. I thanked him for his graciousness, for everything he’d given to New York. And when I asked what he was most looking forward to in retirement, he laughed and said, “That’s easy. If you happen to call, my wife will tell you that I’ve gone fishing.”

I hung up the phone and wondered why a man who had been the biggest fish and most important catch the Knicks had ever made would want to return to a pond in north-central Louisiana.

SURE ENOUGH, WHEN I WENT TO VISIT, HARRY COOK
volunteered to show me around Bernice. We rode in his truck and made a quick stop at the Depot Museum, a two-room boxcar with artifacts from the town’s bustling sawmill era, a time when, as Cook noted, there were as many as 75 warehouses in operation. Inside, under glass, was a frayed copy of the book
Willis Reed:
The Knicks’ Take-Charge Man
, by Larry Fox, who happened to have been the sports editor of the New York
Daily News
for a spell when I covered basketball there in the eighties. (You could damn near fill a library with Old Knicks tomes produced in the first half of the 1970s.) Folded neatly beneath the book was one of the seven Eastern Conference All-Star jerseys Reed wore during his ten-year career with the Knicks.

Cook drove to the end of Third Street, stopping in front of the gleaming one-story house Reed built for his mother, just a few hundred feet from the remains of the more ramshackle home he had inhabited as a child and where he had, on his own, built a backboard and rim. “That was a proud day for Willis when his mother moved into that place,” Cook said.

The next stop was the mayor’s office in the town hall on Fourth Street, in the heart of what was once a busy town center. “On Saturdays, the streets were crowded with folks from here and the towns from all around us,” Cook said. “This street here, it had everything. You didn’t have to leave Bernice to get anything.”

Now, with the sawmill industry long gone, with the remaining warehouses abandoned, Bernice was just another sleepy, depressed town. At one corner of Fourth Street were the remnants of a gas station. Several storefronts were shuttered; what remained open was hardly uplifting: Union Paper & Chemical, Professional Home Health Services, Rexall pharmacy. Across Highway 167 was the town’s lone fast-food emporium, a Sonic Drive-In.

Without the industry, Cook said, a slow, steady exodus of townsfolk had occurred in recent years. Bernice High—once the white school—was targeted for closure, with local students soon to be bused to a regional school in Farmerville, 17 miles away. Westside, the school Reed and Brown attended, sat empty and unkempt several miles north on 167. Even the two stoplights in town were gone, along with the welcome sign that once informed visitors that Bernice was
THE HOME OF WILLIS REED
.

Inside the town hall, Mayor Joe Hicks promised that the sign would soon be replaced by a new one, with a second one to be posted at the north end of town. Bernice was also planning a day in Reed’s honor, because, as Hicks said, “Willis is still giving back to the community and to the church here, even though most people don’t know about it because he does it so quietly. All people here have to do is ask.”

Hicks had left Bernice as a young man for work in Detroit, returning much later in life, presumably to retire. He wound up being elected Bernice’s first black mayor. Granted, it had taken a while for the historic event, about 35 years after the desegregation of the town’s schools. But Hicks said he was proud to have received biracial support. “It couldn’t have just been the black vote, because in general, black folks don’t vote,” he said.

Hicks and Cook said that any of the town’s old-timers, black or white, would tell you that all folks in Bernice could always agree on one thing, and that was their affection for Reed. Nothing united the town more back in the day than a Knicks playoff game against the Bullets, Celtics, or Lakers. “I can tell you that my father didn’t care a thing about basketball, but if there was a Knicks playoff game on, he was in front of that TV and he didn’t move until the end of the game,” Cook said. “The whole town came to a standstill when Willis was playing. It wasn’t a black thing or a white thing…”

“It was a Bernice thing,” Hicks added.

“That’s right,” Cook said. “Everybody here felt good about Willis. You’d see him on TV, a star in New York, and then he’d be back in town and it was the same Willis we’d all known growing up.”

The same Willis Reed who appeared during my last stop in Bernice—the Third Street home of his aunt Grace and her husband, the Reverend Clyde Oliver. Aunt Grace, his father’s sister, had been a teacher in the town’s black school system. The Reverend Oliver was the principal at Westside High School for part of Reed’s time there.

“I remember when Junior—we all called him that—was playing in high school, everyone came out to see him, white folks, too,” Aunt Grace said. “As a boy, he was always all-out, never a problem for anybody. He always wanted to work, just like his mother and father, and he always loved money. He’d do anything to get that money: mow lawns, whatever.”

When Reed arrived, in his fishing uniform, after a morning out on a lake in Farmerville with a friend, he asked me: “Did the Reverend tell you that he coached basketball?” No, I said, he hadn’t. But it turned out that Oliver had coached scholastically in the area, against Reed. Apparently, Reed never suffered for role models.

WHEN HE WAS A SENIOR AT GRAMBLING
, Reed was offered an invitation to try out for a 1964 Olympic team for which he had surprisingly little interest in playing.

It was nothing political—or personal. He was just fatigued after a long senior season that was preceded by the Pan American Games the previous summer in São Paulo, Brazil. His body was still expanding, putting on natural weight. His knees were hurting. And with the ’64 Summer Games scheduled for October in Tokyo, any NBA draftee on that team would miss not only his first NBA days of training but also the opening game of his rookie season. Reed decided he wasn’t up for the sacrifice. More than a gold medal, he wanted the hardware that came with being named NBA Rookie of the Year.

With his attention focused on his future, he settled on the belief that he was going to be drafted by Detroit, which had sent Earl Lloyd, one of the league’s first African American players, to scout him in a game against Southern University and the future Chicago Bulls star Bob Love. “I had about 40 that night,” Reed said.

The Knicks looked at him, too, and a smile spread across Reed’s face when he recalled Red Holzman standing in the corner of the Grambling gym, raincoat draped over his arm, watching him arc soft southpaw jumpers and dominate the boards against an opponent long faded from memory. They shook hands afterward, but Holzman didn’t say much.

When word spread within Grambling that he wasn’t planning to try out for the Olympic team, Reed was called to the athletic office. Hobdy was waiting, along with Eddie Robinson, who was the athletic director as well as the football coach. The school president also weighed in. Their judgment was unanimous and firm: he had to go to the Olympic trials at St. John’s University in New York.

“But I’m kind of banged up,” Reed argued. “I’m tired. I want to be ready for my rookie season.”

He was told to put his school first, to recognize how rare it was for a player from a historically black school to even be invited. Months before President Lyndon Johnson would sign the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964, Reed was reminded of the greater struggle, the team that needed him most. He packed his bag and flew to New York for the first time.

As it turned out, he failed to impress, and didn’t make a squad that would include a Texas Western forward, Jim “Bad News” Barnes, along with a heralded Princeton man named Bill Bradley. Reed didn’t worry about it. He had done what his Grambling mentors had asked. He had tried. He accepted the result. In Brazil the previous summer, he had competed with the best American collegians for playing time on the way to a gold medal and had been convinced that he was NBA material—to the point that he was furious to learn that spring that he had not been a first-round pick in the 1964 college draft.

“Matter of fact, I was finishing up my student teaching when Eddie Donovan called to tell me I was the first pick of the second round,” Reed said. “Boy, was I pissed.”

With the number-one pick, the woebegone Knicks had selected Bad News Barnes, whose Olympic trials performance had convinced the Knicks that he was the quicker, better athlete. Reed wound up as the first pick of the second round, the eighth overall, not counting two territorial selections. Upon arrival in New York, he bumped into Holzman at the Knicks’ Madison Square Garden office.

“I guess you liked what you saw,” he said.

“A little,” Holzman said.

Looking back now, Reed could laugh about the quip as “typical Red.” But that day, he vowed (to himself, at least) to prove that the Knicks had made a mistake.

Whether it was a consensus decision—from Ned Irish, the Knicks’ president, at the top to Fred Podesta in the general manager’s seat to Donovan as the coach and Holzman the scout—to spend the first pick on Barnes, an African American who had played at Texas Western before that school’s five black history makers humbled Adolph Rupp’s all-white Kentucky team in the 1966 NCAA title game, or whether doing so came on Holzman’s recommendation alone, the rationale is of little relevance now. But it must be acknowledged: the organization got away with a blunder that could have spelled disaster.

What if the teams drafting behind them hadn’t been so enamored of players from the predominantly white or all-white universities and generally dismissive of those from all-black schools? What if Baltimore had taken Reed with the third pick, instead of the immortal Gary Bradds of Ohio State? What if San Francisco had resisted the charms of NYU’s Barry Kramer with the sixth pick? What if Red Auerbach, the NBA’s reigning Nostradamus, hadn’t gone for Mel Counts, a spindly seven-footer from Oregon State, with the final selection of the first round?

Granted, the system and standards of scouting amateur talent had been primitive before cable television turned the college basketball season into a blizzard of nightly matchups and the Internet connected the world and ushered in the age of national power rankings for pre-adolescents. Films were grainy black and white and not always easy to come by. Even the most itinerant scout could see only so much. Far from the year-round science it is today, the selection process was based on word-of-mouth sleuthing—on hunches, if not actual guesswork.

Maybe it was fate all along that nurtured and developed the concept of the Old Knicks. But from Reed’s point of view, the draft-day slight was just another slice of reality that, however objectionable, he could do nothing about other than prove it wrong.

Reed was so sure of himself that he made the Knicks an offer they couldn’t refuse when he sat down with Podesta and Donovan to negotiate his first contract (for $11,000, with a $3,000 signing bonus). “I was trying to bargain for an extra $2,500 as part of a bonus, but I told them I knew I would have a good year and would deserve it, so they could pay me after the season,” he said.