Epilogue

The Ewing Era

More than a month passed between the draft lottery and the actual NBA draft. Powered by Magic Johnson and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar—who won Finals MVP honors for the second time (fourteen years after his first Finals MVP with the Bucks)—the Lakers beat the Celtics in a classic six-game series. Now the Knicks were center stage as the draft neared. But not everything was rosy in the Big Apple. David Falk, who grew up in Long Island and whose mother Pearl was a huge Knicks fan, represented Patrick Ewing as his agent, bringing his experience negotiating rookie contracts for James Worthy and Michael Jordan to bear in dealing with the Knicks. “It’s not going to be as easy signing Patrick as everyone has publicly suggested,” Falk cagily told reporters. “In 11 years of negotiations, I have never had one negotiation that I would say has been easy. And a center like Patrick Ewing comes along about once every 20 years.”¹ There was no upper limit on what the Knicks could pay Ewing, except that they had to fit his contract under the existing salary cap, which was in flux because most of the Knicks’ roster was eligible for free agency. “If they sign their free agents first,” Falk warned, “they may not have enough left for signing Patrick.”²

On June 18, at 1:08 p.m., Commissioner Stern announced the Knicks selection. To the surprise of no one, with the first overall pick of the 1985 draft, the New York Knickerbockers selected Patrick Ewing out of Georgetown University. Although the Knicks refused to comment on Ewing’s salary after the sides agreed to a contract nearly three months later, Falk was only too happy to leak it to the press. Ewing was set to earn $17 million over six years, with the potential to earn $30 million if he stayed in New York for a decade.³ It made Ewing the highest-paid rookie in NBA history. By 1987, he would be the highest-paid player in the league, and that did not include his multimillion-dollar shoe deal with Adidas, which released the Rivalry Hi in 1986.

Outside of adding Ewing, the Knicks had a quiet off-season in 1985. With all eyes turned toward their rookie center, King was happy to rehab his knee in peace. In August, five months after the injury, reporters caught up to Bernard at the “Bernie and Ernie All-Pro Basketball Camp” at St. Paul’s School in Garden City, Long Island. Asked about his injury, King replied, “I don’t want to talk about it. When I have something to say I will.” He converted part of his home into a therapy center, so he could rehab away from the team and, more importantly, the media. “It is difficult for Bernard to go out places without people asking him questions,” Norman Scott told reporters checking in on his famous patient. Scott also informed them that the rehab was “well ahead of schedule,” but he cautioned, “The issue of when Bernard will be able to play is very unscientific.”⁴ Put bluntly, no pro basketball player had ever fully recovered from the knee injuries King suffered. Still, Scott remained optimistic. “I have never seen a person so dedicated. I never understood the game face he wears, but now I see it is real. He approaches his rehabilitation with the same game face.”⁵ Thirty years later, King would title his autobiography Game Face; it was a fitting description for his on-court and off-court stoicism.

With Ewing aboard, and seeing how well the pairing of Ralph Sampson and Akeem Olajuwon had performed for the Houston Rockets (a 48–34 record and, in 1986, an NBA Finals appearance), Hubie Brown decided to experiment with his own Twin Towers, inserting both Ewing and incumbent center Bill Cartwright into the starting lineup. Cartwright, who had missed the entire 1984–85 season with foot injuries, was a free agent but re-signed with the Knicks. “Free agency is something you should go through once,” Cartwright said, “but it should also be avoided.”⁶ The pairing of Cartwright and Ewing got off to a rough start as the veteran busted the rookie’s lip open in the team’s first practice, on a hard collision near the rim. But the next day Cartwright smoothed everything over, telling him “Patrick, look, we’re two aggressive centers and I want us to work together. We’re going to have some collisions, but it’s not personal.” And the two became great friends. Cartwright reinjured his foot in a preseason game against Washington, but fortunately X-rays came back negative, and he was able to stay mostly healthy. Unfortunately, his teammates continued to fall to injuries. Walker sprained his wrist, and Tucker injured several ribs and his pelvis diving for a loose ball. Hubie admitted Tucker “could be hurt very badly.”⁷

As his teammates battled through injuries, Ewing had struggles of his own. He was an intimidating presence on defense—Hubie joked that “I’ve seen guys drive the lane and start double-clutching and jerking around when Patrick’s over sitting on the bench. Now that, my friend, is intimidation”—but he also had to adjust to the physicality of the pro game. In his first three preseason games, Ewing committed 17 fouls and was ejected for cursing out veteran ref Bennett Salvatore. Micheal Ray Richardson, suddenly Sugar the Sage, said, “He’s got to learn that this ain’t the Patrick Ewing League. These aren’t kids. They’re men.”⁸ Patrick also was part of a bench-clearing brawl when Pacers center Steve Stipanovich threw Ewing to the floor after the rookie caught him with an elbow to the throat. Both benches cleared, and both centers were ejected. Sparrow tried to intervene and earned a $500 fine for his efforts. “I went in to break up the fight,” he joked, “not to be Hulk Hogan or the Iron Sheik.”⁹ Still, Ewing’s teammates and coaches remained supportive. “I’m not going to tell the man to turn the other cheek,” Hubie told reporters, and forward James Bailey said, “I’d hate to see Patrick draw his guns every night, but it’s almost gotten to that point. We, as teammates, have to help him out a little more.”¹⁰

With expectations that he would be an NBA superstar, Ewing had a giant bullseye on his back every game. But he had a better rookie season than the Knicks could have hoped for. He drew rave reviews everywhere he went and was constantly compared to Bill Russell. Throughout this, Ewing remained humble. “I don’t consider myself a savior,” he told reporters. “I want New Yorkers to think of me as somebody who works hard for a living, just like they do.”¹¹ Ewing played 50 games in his rookie season, cut short by an injury in March, but earned an All-Star berth and Rookie of the Year honors, averaging 20 points, 9 rebounds, and 2 blocks a game for the season.

Despite his strong play, by the time Ewing went down in March the team’s season was already in shambles. Cartwright, fresh off the preseason foot scare, refractured his foot in late October and some fans (and even players) started calling him Medical Bill.¹² Cartwright played only two games the entire season as the team once again set a league record for missed games due to injury, and Brown never got the opportunity to see how his team might fare starting both big men together.

The low point might have come on December 10 when, despite winning 82–64 over the Pacers, the Knicks committed 32 turnovers. Only complete ineptitude from the Pacers, who shot just 25 percent from the field, gave the Knicks the win. The crowd booed unmercifully, and afterward DeBusschere told reporters, “I was both embarrassed and disappointed by our play.”¹³

A few days later, King held a press conference—his first willing conversation with the media in nearly nine months. Flanked by his physical therapist, Dana Sweitzer, and team physician, Dr. Scott, King was confident. “I am a fighter,” King told them. “Don’t ever count Bernard King out.” Scott agreed. “I asked Bernard about wearing a brace, but he doesn’t need it,” he told them. Sweitzer chimed in, “He has never had a plateau. He has made constant progress.”¹⁴

With King on the mend, Cartwright rehabbing (again), and Ewing demonstrating that he could be a generational talent, there was reason for optimism in the Big Apple. But the Knicks of 1985–86 would end at 23–59, a virtual repeat of the preceding season, which meant that someone had to pay. The first to be shown the door was DeBusschere, fired and replaced by Scotty Stirling, a former executive with the Golden State Warriors, best known for engineering the trade netting Joe Barry Carroll for Robert Parish and Kevin McHale. A few months later, general manager Eddie Donovan followed DeBusschere out the door.

In the fall of 1986, the Knicks opened training camp at Upsala College in East Orange, New Jersey—a place Butch Carter called “complete shit” (“I hadn’t played on a floor that bad since seventh or eighth grade”).¹⁵ Before camp, the Knicks held a preseason meet-and-greet to introduce the new players and coaches. Kenny “Sky” Walker, a forward from Kentucky, was this season’s high-profile rookie, and assistant coach Brendan Malone joined Bob Hill on Brown’s coaching staff. As Malone explained to me three decades later, “[Hubie] introduced me and the staff and started introducing the players. Introduced Cartwright as a center. Introduced Ewing as a power forward. And Ewing said, ‘I’m not a power forward, I’m a center.’ And I said, ‘Uh-oh, this is going to be very interesting.’ ”¹⁶ Later Hubie shrugged it off, telling reporters that it didn’t matter which position one played, but the meeting was off to a bad start.¹⁷

As Hubie continued around the room making introductions, he finished up with King, still rehabbing from his knee injury suffered a year and a half earlier. Hubie asked Bernard when he’d be back, and, as Malone told me, King said, “I’ll be back in January.”¹⁸ Hubie was shell-shocked. He hoped to have his All-Star forward in the lineup on opening night and knew that a bad start to the season might mean he would become the Knicks’ newest former head coach. As it turned out, Bernard was out even longer than January, and, after a 4–12 start to the season, Hubie was gone, replaced by Hill, who likewise received a pink slip at the end of the year. Former Knicks assistant Rick Pitino would be hired as head coach in July 1987.

Also gone was Darrell Walker, traded to the Denver Nuggets, just before the 1986–87 training camp opened, for a 1987 first-round draft pick, which the Knicks promptly shipped to the Bulls for Jawann Oldham (a journeyman center). Chicago would use that pick to trade for a skinny small forward from the University of Central Arkansas named Scottie Pippen. Walker, though, was happy to leave the Big Apple. “Hubie and I wasn’t going to work,” he explained to me years later. “I wasn’t going to be talked to like I was a dog and wasn’t going to accept that treatment. It was time to move on before it became a physical altercation.”¹⁹ The low point of their relationship came in January 1986, when Walker and Hubie started yelling at each other during practice, prompting the guard to commit an impromptu sit-in—right in the middle of the lane.²⁰ In hindsight, it is amazing the two never came to blows.

In 1986–87, with King playing just six games, the Knicks would duplicate their two preceding seasons, finishing 24–58. But things were about to improve. General Manager Al Bianchi, replacing Donovan, started to turn the team around, selecting Brooklyn point guard Mark Jackson from St. John’s University in the first round of the 1987 draft.²¹ Jackson brought fans back to the Garden with his moxie and grit, and under Pitino the Knicks would improve to 38–44 in 1987–88 and win the Atlantic Division of the Eastern Conference in 1988–89 with a record of 52–30. But Pitino would leave after two seasons to become the head coach at the University of Kentucky, and Jackson’s play would decline after signing a contract extension in 1990 (he would be dealt to the Clippers in 1992).

Another big change took place in the office of New York City’s mayor. Ed Koch served in that role until 1989, when he lost the Democratic primary election to David Dinkins, New York City’s first Black mayor. During the last years of his tenure, Koch suffered a stroke that he blamed on scandals in his administration. Hundreds of officials serving under Koch were convicted of crimes related to payoff rings, using bribes to extend their political influence.²² Yet Koch would remain an iconic figure in the city for decades. At the former mayor’s eightieth birthday celebration at Gracie Mansion in 2004, then-mayor Michael Bloomberg would roast his predecessor. “When I was just a lowly millionaire in the 1970s,” Bloomberg joked, “I wanted to be like Koch if I went into politics. I’d be tall, I’d be loud, and I’d be both a Democrat and a Republican.”²³

Koch truly embodied New York City during the seventies and early eighties, just as he symbolized the struggles in the Knicks organization, swinging wildly between hope and abject disillusionment. Koch’s legacy, one biographer explains, is—at least in part—his “cockiness and racial divisiveness.” But he also “bravely faced one of the worst crises in New York’s history, restructured the city with minimal help from the federal government, and kept it solvent and growing for a generation.”²⁴ In short, Koch prepared New York City for the Ewing era.

In early 1987, Ewing went down with a season-ending knee injury. ²⁵ A dozen games later, King made his long-awaited return to the Knicks, more than two years after his own devastating knee injury. King checked the New York sports calendar to maximize exposure for his return. As he would later write in his autobiography, “With no one to share the stage on April 10, the spotlight would be turned squarely on Madison Square Garden for my comeback.”²⁶ When Bernard checked into the game, Knicks fans gave him a three-minute-long standing ovation, shouting “We want Bernard!” at the top of their lungs. Unfortunately for Knicks fans, the Bucks ruined King’s return, limiting Bernard to just 7 points in twenty-three minutes off the bench. As it would turn out, Ewing’s injury meant that no one ever had the opportunity to see if Patrick and Bernard could be the long-awaited co-saviors of the Knicks. “I wanted to be a Knick until I retired,” King wrote later. “I was sure that if I stayed with the team and had a chance to play with Patrick Ewing, we would win a championship together.”²⁷

Instead, the Knicks declined to offer King a new contract that offseason. His agent, Bob Woolf, said, “It seemed that they were afraid to, that we might accept it.”²⁸ Stirling, Bianchi, and the new Knicks brass didn’t trust King’s knee and wanted a clean break with the team’s past. Despite Knicks fans chanting “We want Bernard!” through the entire preseason, in the fall of 1987 King signed a free agent contract with the Washington Bullets and would then enjoy a career renaissance. While he never regained the explosiveness that made him one of the NBA’s best in 1984, he became an even smarter and more determined player, peaking in 1990–91 when he was named third-team All-NBA after averaging over 28 points per game as a thirty-four-year-old. Watching closely was a young Brooklynite named Carmelo Anthony, who would come to pattern his game after King. More than two decades later, Anthony would break King’s record for most points scored by a Knick in Madison Square Garden by dropping 62 in a 2014 game against the Charlotte Bobcats.

Despite their mandate to build around Patrick, the Knicks struggled to surround Ewing with talent, and he nearly left as a free agent in 1991 to become a member of the Golden State Warriors, where he would have teamed up with the high-scoring trio of Tim Hardaway, Mitch Richmond, and Chris Mullin.²⁹ Instead, he re-signed in New York and became the highest-paid player in the NBA.

Golden State played a fast-paced style under coach Don Nelson, and Hardaway, Richmond, and Mullin gained the joint nickname Run TMC. The name was a nod, of course, to the hottest hip-hop group in the country at the time, Run-DMC, the Queens-based trio founded in the early eighties. After their self-titled debut record in 1984 went gold, Run-DMC kept releasing hit after hit. Their 1986 album Raising Hell, might have been the peak of their success, featuring a collaboration with Aerosmith on “Walk This Way,” a song first recorded by Aerosmith and released on the band’s 1975 album Toys in the Attic. This new rock and hip-hop fusion of “Walk This Way” would reach number 4 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart. The trio from Hollis, Queens, became the first rap group to reach the top five on that chart. Although Run-DMC had struggles, including differences over their creative direction, battles with substance abuse, and—most tragically—the death of Jason Mizell (Jam Master J) in 2002, they revolutionized the hip-hop world, becoming the first act to have their music videos shown on MTV and the first to earn a Grammy Award nomination.

Despite their growing fame, Run-DMC recognized the importance of authenticity. “New York in the ’80s was one of the most influential and innovative periods in history,” Darryl McDaniels (DMC) said in 2019. “The punk rock, hip-hop and art scene were consistently producing some of the edgiest and most culturally relevant work from Uptown to Downtown.” He name-checked Lou Reed, the Ramones, and Blondie in noting his influences. “When we were starting out, we were inspired by the artists and culture of our time.”³⁰

One of the songs on the Raising Hell album is “My Adidas.” When Run-DMC cued it up, fans would pull off their Superstar sneakers and wave them in the air. For one Madison Square Garden show, Run-DMC convinced an Adidas exec to attend, and he was astounded at the response to the song. A few weeks later, Adidas—hoping to capitalize on the popularity of this group from Queens—signed the trio to a million-dollar endorsement deal, the first of its kind. After signing, Adidas called on their biggest superstar to help promote Run-DMC, and Patrick Ewing appeared in several cross-promoted events to hype the song (and, more importantly, the shoes).³¹

The connection between basketball and hip-hop continued to develop during the 1980s. In 1989, on their second album, Paul’s Boutique, the Beastie Boys released the song “Lay It on Me,” rapping, “More updated on the hip-hop lingo / My favorite New York Knick was Harthorne Wingo.”³² The EBC streetball tournament continued to grow at Rucker Park; NBA stars like Allen Iverson and Shaquille O’Neal released rap songs; and events like All-Star Weekend became a blend of hip-hop and hoops. Yet at the same time, in part due to the success of the Queens-based Run DMC, the center of rap music continued to shift away from the Bronx, as the East Coast versus West Coast battles of the 1990s pitted Californians Dr. Dre, Snoop Dogg, and Tupac Shakur against Brooklyn-born Notorious B.I.G. and Mount Vernon–raised Sean “Puff Daddy” Combs. East Coast versus West Coast lasted for most of the decade, finally ending with the tragic murders of Tupac and B.I.G. Hip-hop outgrew the South Bronx, moving away from its birthplace as it became increasingly mainstream.

Ewing never released a rap album, nor did he develop into the dominant defensive player envisioned by DeBusschere and Brown when the Knicks drafted him in 1985. Instead, he became a consistently strong offensive player, with a reliable turnaround jump shot, and a very good defender who earned three All-Defensive second-team nods. Flanked by Charles Oakley and John Starks, and coached by Pat Riley, Ewing finally reached the NBA finals in 1994 and again made the finals under Jeff Van Gundy in 1999, but he never raised a banner in Madison Square Garden. Oakley, a bruising six-foot-seven forward, was the closest to a kindred spirit of the late seventies Knicks as the team could identify by the ’90s. Oakley hung out with Tupac Shakur (2Pac) and regularly partied with Chuck D (of Public Enemy), Kid ’n Play, and Grand Puba. Oakley also counted LL Cool J among his good friends, and teammate Anthony Mason—a chiseled 250-pounder—served as a bodyguard for Cool J when he performed in Queens.³³

Between winning the 1973 title and the arrival of Patrick Ewing a dozen years later, the Knicks struggled to achieve and sustain on-court success. Still, they served as pioneers in this transitional era in the NBA. They fielded the first all-Black team in 1979, had several of the most prominent drug users on their roster when the NBA instituted an ambitious anti-drug policy, led the charge in pursuing free agents, and butted up against the salary cap when it was put in place.

Their efforts mirrored the circumstances facing New York City between the mid-seventies and mid-eighties. Crippling economic conditions forced Mayors Abe Beame and Ed Koch to reevaluate and reprioritize municipal funding, while work done to reclaim Times Square and the Statue of Liberty emphasized a renaissance in the Big Apple (set to Old Blue Eyes singing “New York, New York”). At the same time, from the ashes of the burning Bronx, a new musical genre and Black culture emerged whole cloth, linked to basketball and taking the nation—and the world—by storm.

Although it took place after the glory days of the Knicks—when Madison Square was the Garden of Eden—this period marked a watershed moment in cultural history as basketball, Black culture, and the New York Knicks became inseparably linked.

Just a few years later, a white suburban teenager plugged Tecmo NBA Basketball into his Nintendo (blowing on the cartridge first, of course), selected Ewing and the Knicks as his team, and turned on some Dr. Dre (quietly so the parents wouldn’t hear). That young man, who was me, made a connection between the New York Knicks, Black culture, and professional basketball without knowing one existed before—in New York City more than a decade earlier.