9

“To the Hoop, Y’All”

1983–1984

On October 15, 1983, Knicks head coach Hubie Brown, who had celebrated his fiftieth birthday a few weeks earlier, checked into Lenox Hill Hospital on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, complaining of chest pain and left arm stiffness. Although doctors diagnosed him with angina, Hubie told reporters he came “from a family with a high rate of heart attacks” and admitted a “need to slow down.” Brown was always animated on the sidelines while coaching, stomping up and down the court, yelling at players and referees in usually equal measure. Part of the problem, at least as his wife Claire saw it, was his lack of hobbies. “I always tell her,” Hubie said, “my hobbies are: I read, I do clinics and give talks like crazy. I’d much rather do those things than play golf or tennis.”¹

Some of Hubie’s coworkers, though, were concerned that other stresses might have contributed to the health scare. A few days before he checked into Lenox Hill, an issue of Sports Illustrated hit newsstands with a profile on Hubie in which several NBA coaches took shots at him. Cotton Fitzsimmons said, “Sometimes when you talk to Hubie you get the impression that he invented the game,” while Doug Moe called him “an average coach who happens to be great at promoting himself.” Most problematic for Hubie, though, was the piece’s quotation of comments he had made about Stan Albeck, one of his former assistants and now Larry Brown’s replacement as head coach of the Nets. “Albeck is a washerwoman,” Hubie was quoted as saying, “who calls six people every day to find out the latest gossip.”² Hubie claimed the interview had been done off the record and that his comments were taken out of context, but director of communications John Hewig told me years later, “That whole year, wherever we went, the first question in the postgame press conference would be, ‘Hubie, how could you say those things?’ ”³

Maybe it was a lack of hobbies or a magazine article that had induced Hubie’s chest pains. Or maybe it was the usual on-the-job stress of being the Knicks head coach. But it was becoming increasingly obvious to Knicks insiders that Hubie and Dave DeBusschere were like oil and water. One NBA official joked, “[They] have about as much in common as a brown sock and a black sock.” Publicly, both men continued to toe the party line, insisting that everything was fine. “You don’t have to be friends,” DeBusschere told reporters. “You don’t have to have a relationship where it’s one of bosom buddies. What we have is a professional relationship.” Brown agreed. “An awful lot of people do not want us to succeed,” he said (a classic Brown line—he loved being the underdog). “I think an awful lot of people were kind of shocked with our results last year.”⁴

More troubling in the long run was word that Gulf & Western wanted to raze Madison Square Garden and build an office tower above Penn Station. A spokesman for Gulf & Western denied the rumors and reminded reporters of the deal the company had signed in 1982 agreeing to keep their teams (the Knicks and Rangers) in the city for at least a decade, accepting losses up to $3 million annually in exchange for a large tax abatement and union concessions. Recent reports that the Garden lost around $2 million annually then, while troubling, fit the criteria G&W had established earlier. Governor Mario Cuomo, in his first term in office, was not satisfied. “Over the years we’ve lost the Dodgers from Brooklyn, the Giants and the Jets to the Meadowlands,” he told reporters. “That’s wrong. We’ve done something wrong.”⁵

For better or worse, Brown and DeBusschere’s 1983–84 Knicks started the season with a similar roster to the group that took the 76ers to four hard-fought games in the ’83 playoffs. The only significant losses were Paul Westphal, who had signed with Phoenix and retired as a Sun, and Sly Williams, who was shipped to the Atlanta for Rudy Macklin. The Knicks had added first-round draft pick Darrell “Junkyard Dog” Walker, whom NBA coaches, somewhat ironically, compared to Micheal Ray Richardson for his defensive ability and length.⁶ Then, in mid-September, the Knicks welcomed back Ray Williams. In the fall of 1981, Williams had left New York for a huge multiyear deal with the Nets. But showing up to his first training camp in New Jersey in such poor condition that teammates dubbed him “Mr. Butterworth” was not a good sign. Journalists would saddle him with the nickname “The Big Apple Turnover.” Less than a year later, the Nets traded him to Kansas City, and now he was back for a second tour as a Knick.

In 1981, New York had replaced Williams with veterans like Westphal, Randy Smith, and Mike Newlin. Now Williams was expected to be a locker room leader. “I’ve changed since I first came into the league,” Williams told reporters. “In my first years I know people criticized me for being out of control.” Williams reigned himself in on the court and off it as well. “When I was younger and with the Knicks, [Richardson] and I used to stay in the street until the street told us to go home. We’d be out all night and then we might go straight to practice, me and Mike. And we still had plenty of energy to practice.”⁷ When asked about Williams’s comments, Richardson agreed. “We were young and living in New York,” Sugar said, adding wistfully, “if only we could have stayed together a little longer, until maybe we were both a little wiser.”⁸

While one-third of the Family was back with the Knicks, the others had veered off in different directions. Mike Glenn was a role player for the Hawks before transitioning into the business world as a consultant for Merrill Lynch. Glenn had also started the Mike Glenn All-Star Basketball Camp for the Hearing-Impaired, described in chapter 6. Richardson, however, was not doing so well. He would play sporadically for the Nets from 1982–84 before bouncing back and playing regularly again in 1985, when—despite a continued drug problem—he would earn a spot on the All-Star team as well as the NBA’s Comeback Player of the Year Award after averaging more than 20 points per game. “Once again, I was hobnobbing with the A-list,” Richardson recalls. “But once or twice every week, I was dashing up the stairs and swivel-hipping my way past needled-out junkies on my way to score.”⁹

Drug-related problems ultimately caught up with Richardson, and by the end of his comeback year, his marriage was crumbling, he was working with his seventh different agent, and was driving his seventeenth different car. The next year, his wife Leah issued a restraining order. Richardson was arrested trying to break into her house, and the NBA demanded a drug test. When Richardson failed, Commissioner David Stern banished the once-promising Richardson from ever again playing in the NBA. “This is a tragic day for Micheal Ray Richardson,” Stern said at the time. “Nothing less than the destruction by cocaine of a once-flourishing career.”¹⁰

Richardson was devastated and blamed the NBA for making an example of him to scare its white players into getting clean. “Getting kicked out of the NBA was the lowest point of my life,” he recalls. “I was a punk-ass kid from nowhere, so the NBA thought I was expendable … Believe me, when I got kicked out, all of them white druggies threw away their pipes and got clean in a hurry. The NBA got exactly what they wanted.” After being blacklisted, Richardson played overseas for a more than a decade, finishing his pro career at the age of 47 for a French team.¹¹ “I don’t know if moving to Europe saved my life, but I know it helped me,” Richardson admitted. “It got me out of the environment I was in.”¹² He divorced his wife, remarried, and sobered up, finally turning his life around. Fifteen years after he was banned from the NBA, Stern quietly helped Richardson find a position with the Nuggets in their community relations department, although Sugar still feels unwanted by the league that once welcomed him with open arms.¹³

When Micheal Ray played for the Knicks, Stern was the league’s legal counsel. That changed in November 1983 when Madison Square Garden’s media room hosted a historic press conference. Despite some behind-the-scenes grumbling about promoting from within, rather than making a splashy headline–grabbing hire, the NBA announced that Stern would be replacing Larry O’Brien as the commissioner of the NBA in February 1984. O’Brien was succinct in his statement to reporters, telling them simply that “I think my job here is done.”¹⁴ Fittingly, Stern, who grew up in the city, took the subway to the announcement.¹⁵

After taking office in 1978, Mayor Koch embraced austerity politics to shrink New York City’s financial deficit. He also proved confrontational in battling unions and striking workers while striving to balance the budget.

Koch’s administration faced other challenges during his second term in office that were less tangible than bankruptcy. The New York Times first reported an outbreak of what doctors deemed a “rare and often rapidly fatal form of cancer,” primarily afflicting young homosexual men, in 1981.¹⁶ Soon this epidemic, now known as AIDS, gained national attention, although Larry Speakes, the press secretary for President Reagan, blew off questions about the disease and dubbed it the “gay plague.”¹⁷ Likewise, Koch, who later acknowledged that “its effect on the public psyche with respect to contagion could be compared to that of leprosy of yesteryear, an uncontrolled irrational fear,” remained publicly silent as the epidemic spread throughout the city.¹⁸ By early 1984, tens of thousands of New Yorkers were infected, and the city’s hospitals soon filled with patients afflicted with AIDS. Although privately concerned about the spread of the disease, Koch’s administration responded only sporadically and then seemed more intent on shutting down gay movie theaters in Times Square than in combating the epidemic.¹⁹ The NBA too did little publicly about AIDS until, in 1991, Magic Johnson suddenly retired from basketball, announcing that he had tested positive for HIV, a virus that can lead to AIDS. Before this, AIDS and pro basketball occupied two different worlds, but Johnson’s announcement threw them into sharp relief as players grew immediately concerned about issues of blood contamination and unprotected sex.

Besides AIDS, the other hot-button issue Koch dealt with particularly poorly during his tenure was race. No one would ever accuse Koch of being politically correct. During his 1977 campaign, he used the term “poverty pimps” and argued that the governor should have called out the National Guard during the blackouts to violently curb the looting.²⁰ As mayor, Koch claimed color-blindness. He simply assumed people of color could, like his Jewish family had done in the 1950s and 1960s, overcome societal difficulties. What he overlooked, though, was the government assistance his family had received to succeed. So, when racial conflict escalated in the seventies and eighties, Koch’s Archie Bunker–like approach seemed out of touch.

In the fall of 1983, the Knicks’ PR department compiled their annual yearbook, which included a couple of gems about current players. Truck Robinson told a story about how he got his nickname from a teammate as a rookie with the Washington Bullets in 1974, Ernie Grunfeld shared his love of antique quilts, and Darrell Walker revealed his dream to play in the NHL. “Growing up in Chicago,” he said, “the Black Hawks were really super tough. Everybody wanted to be a Black Hawk, including me.”²¹

The yearbook also gave Knicks fans a chance to learn about newcomer Rudy Macklin, acquired from the Hawks in exchange for Sly Williams. Macklin was an avid video game player, and, when he joined the Knicks, Centipede was his game of choice. Released first as an arcade game in 1980, Centipede moved over to home video game consoles like the Atari 2600 and Apple II computer a few years later. In 1984, Electronic Games magazine released their fifth annual Arkie Awards, recognizing Centipede as the year’s best computer action game, edging out Jumpman for the honor. Like Macklin, Truck Robinson was a gamer. “When I was younger, I found those games helped my shooting, because it was an instinctive thing,” he told reporters. “After nine years of pro basketball and traveling, the games still help develop patience and help the eye and hand coordination. I find it relaxes me. But most important, it gets me away from the basketball world.”²²

What most people knew about Macklin was that he had made headlines in college at Louisiana State University because of his response to a huge national event. During the 1981 NCAA Final Four, President Reagan miraculously survived being shot by would-be assassin John Hinckley Jr. At the time, Macklin and his Tigers teammates wondered if the third-place game, scheduled for that evening, would even take place. It did, and LSU lost in the consolation round to Virginia, led by superstar center Ralph Sampson. After the game, a reporter asked Macklin if the attempt on Reagan’s life affected his play. Macklin was upset about losing and tried to sidestep the question. But the reporters kept asking, and finally Macklin snapped. “He’s no kin to me, OK?” he said. His quote made national headlines, and his family was inundated with hate mail from angry Americans across the country. “They’re calling me a lot of vulgar things,” he told reporters at the time. “They say I’m not American, that I shouldn’t be allowed to play ball anymore.”²³ “I was really down, and I was hurt, mentally and physically,” Macklin explained to me decades later.²⁴ Macklin graduated as the all-time leading rebounder in LSU history and its second-leading scorer (behind only Pete Maravich), but all anyone could talk about during his post-collegiate career was his lack of patriotism.

Behind Walker, Grunfeld, Robinson, Macklin, and the rest of the Knicks, the team started the season with back-to-back wins over the Cavaliers and Bullets, despite inconsistent play. On opening night, the Knicks led by 22 in the third quarter but only won by seven. “When we were good, we were very, very good,” Brown told reporters after the game. “And when we were bad, we were very, very bad.”²⁵ The next night, the Knicks were again very, very bad as they missed seventeen straight shots during a 12-point second quarter but still hung on to win by three.

Four straight losses on an early West Coast swing dropped their record to 2–4, but Brown was unconcerned. “What we’re demanding to do,” he told the Post, “is press at 75 feet, man to man. Deny. Do all that, plus fastbreak offense after every score.”²⁶ He understood that took a lot out of his players physically but counted on his ten-man rotation to eventually wear down and outlast their opponents. Over the course of the season, Hubie’s method began working, and the Knicks were able to clamp down defensively, leading the league in defensive rating and allowing the third-fewest points per game in the NBA. “I always want 10 guys to play,” Hubie explained. “I want 10 guys to be happy and to develop their talent while young. Also in case of injury, we do not have to make any major adjustments.”²⁷ Fortunately, the Knicks remained reasonably healthy through the fall and winter of 1983 and at the end of December had a 17–14 record, good for third in the Atlantic Division. “As the season went on,” Cartwright remembers, “we played better and better.”²⁸

At the end of January 1984, New York started a three-game swing through Texas that would become part of Knicks legend. On January 31, they traveled to San Antonio to face “the Iceman” George Gervin and their old nemesis Artis Gilmore (now a Spur). The first half was an Old-West-style shootout, and the Knicks led by one: 67–66. Amazingly, King had scored nearly half the Knicks points by himself. “Bernard is Bernard,” Hubie said later. “You don’t even realize he’s getting all those points. When (trainer) Mike Saunders turned to me near the end of the first half and said ‘Bernard’s got 29,’ I nearly fell of the chair.”²⁹ King kept rolling in the second half, and led the Knicks to a 117–113 win. Gervin scored 41 points in the loss, but King topped him, finishing with 50. He hit 20 of his 30 shots from the field, including a dunk at the buzzer, and 10 of his 13 free throws.

Hubie’s system was supposed to emphasize depth, platooning two-deep at every position without bending to the will of individual stars. But King was different. “He does not freelance or razzle-dazzle or break plays or call for the ball or yell at his teammates,” Hubie explained. “He just takes good shots when they are there.”³⁰ Before the game against the Spurs, King ate a turkey sandwich and drank a vanilla milkshake, and, while basketball players might not be as superstitious as their baseball counterparts, no one blamed King when he ordered the same before his next game, against the Dallas Mavericks.

The Mavericks were well aware of King’s 50 points the night before and were determined to hold the forward in check. When asked how to stop King, Mavs assistant coach Bob Weiss joked, “Tell him the tipoff starts at 9:05 [for the 7:30 game].” He promised reporters, “We’ll do better against him. We’ll hold him to 49.”³¹ King, though, was in no mood to joke. He rarely was. He knew the last Knick to get 50 points in a game had been Willis Reed in 1967 and that no Knick had ever scored 50 in back-to-back games. In fact, only three players in NBA history had accomplished that feat: Elgin Baylor, Wilt Chamberlain, and Rick Barry. Could King pull it off?

The Knicks trailed the Mavericks by eight at halftime, but King was again on fire, scoring 31 of his team’s 50 points. And again Hubie had no idea that King was scoring so prodigiously. “He does it so quietly. I wouldn’t have known it,” Hubie said, “except that [assistant coach Rick] Pitino was yelling it in my ear.”³² With nine seconds left in the game, Sparrow held the ball out front, the Knicks now safely ahead by five. King had 48 points (on just 27 shots), but the Knicks on the bench weren’t going to let Sparrow run out the clock. “Rory was dribbling and the bench was like ‘Get B the ball!’ ” King said later. “Finally he dribbles over, he passes me the ball. I drive against Jay Vincent—never forget it—and I spun and he cut me off and I said ‘I’m not gonna miss this shot.’ ”³³ Sparrow laughed. “If I didn’t give it to him, my teammates would have killed me.”³⁴ King’s off-balance 22-footer gave him 50—again.

“King: 50 More!” the Daily News proclaimed in huge type the next day. “I’ve never seen anything like it,” Hubie gushed. “Never. In high school, college, or the pros. There are just no words to describe him.”³⁵ Trent Tucker told Darrell Walker after the second game, “This is something we can tell our kids, our grandchildren. We can tell them we were there when Bernard did it.” Walker was stoked. “Bernard’s a nightmare,” he said. “You’re worse-est nightmare. Woo-eee, it’s a good thing he’s on our side.”³⁶ Even the Mavericks were impressed. “He’s right up there with Larry Bird and Julius Erving,” Mavs forward Mark Aguirre admitted.³⁷ “He was unbelievable. Unstoppable. To score 50 back-to-back on the road, that’s a roll. He is on a roll. Rolling. Rolling Rolling.”³⁸

After a well-deserved day off, the Knicks took the court for their third game in their run through Texas, this time facing Houston and their rookie center Ralph Sampson. “We haven’t had anything come through Texas like this since Santa Anna,” Rockets forward Elvin Hayes joked. “King got ’em at the Alamo, then he went to Dallas and tore ’em up there. We can’t just let him come through and rip up the whole state like a tornado.”³⁹ Hayes and the Rockets did limit Bernard to less than 50 (25 less, to be precise), but the Knicks still won, 103–95. During King’s three-game Texas swing, he scored 125 points on just 78 shots from the field. “Right now,” Werblin told reporters, needing none of his usual hyperbole, “Bernard is as good a player as there is in the league.”⁴⁰

The 1984 All-Star Game, played for the first time in Denver, was a watershed moment in NBA history. For one, it marked the end of O’Brien’s ten-year tenure as league commissioner. Stern stepped into the role the following week and would hold it for the next thirty years. But it also proved to be a step toward transitioning into the All-Star weekend extravaganza it would later become. A year earlier, Marvin Gaye’s rendition of “The Star-Spangled Banner” shocked the crowd (and the players) assembled at the Forum in Inglewood. He sang it with soul. As Kareem Abdul-Jabbar explained, “It was so different that it reminded me of Jimi Hendrix’s anthem at Woodstock. Marvin changed the whole template, and that broadened people’s minds. It illuminated the concept ‘We’re black and we’re Americans. We can have a different interpretation, and that’s okay.’ ”⁴¹ In ’84, the Temptations sang the anthem (to far less fanfare), and the East defeated the West 154–145 in overtime, thanks in part to 18 points from Bernard King, the only Knick on the squad.

The ’84 All-Star Weekend also reintroduced the Slam Dunk Contest, dormant since Darnell Hillman won seven years earlier. This time, Suns forward Larry Nance beat crowd-favorite Dr. J in the finals with a dunk nicknamed “Rock-the-Cradle.” None of the Knicks participated in the contest.

The NBA also honored its history that weekend, as twenty-one retired greats took the floor for the Old Timers’ Game. Fifty-eight-year-old Bill Sharman was the oldest player, while his teammate Pete Maravich was only thirty-five. Former Knick legend Earl Monroe led the West to a 64–63 victory, but the real winners were the legends who avoided injuries. Later renamed the All-Star Legends Game, the annual contest between retired players lasted another decade before they were canceled due to too many sprained ankles, pulled hamstrings, and bruised egos.

Under Stern, All-Star Weekend would transform into a cultural phenomenon over the coming decades, eventually serving as an event where hip-hop artists and NBA stars rubbed elbows. It became, as sportswriter and educator J. A. Adonde dubbed it, “the Black Super Bowl.”⁴² Eventually it would also link hip-hop and the NBA in a strong partnership.

In the early eighties, the most explicit mainstream link between basketball and hip-hop was Kurtis Blow’s hit single “Basketball.” Beyond its catchy lyrics (“Basketball is my fav-o-rite sport. I love the way they dribble up and down the court”), the song’s music video became iconic after it aired on MTV, showcasing Blow in a blue track suit, a basketball game that turned into a karate showdown (Bruce Lee films were still all the rage), and a group of rapping cheerleaders. The song referenced Knicks greats Reed, Monroe, and King, while the music video featured photographs of Micheal Ray Richardson.⁴³ Blow was a pioneering voice in rap music, not only by spinning lines about the connections between basketball and hip-hop (“to the hoop, y’all!”) but also as an alternative to other popular Black music in the 1980s, like that of Michael Jackson, Whitney Houston, and Tina Turner. Even Blow’s light-hearted rap reflected, as one historian reminds us, “the hard times and hardships African Americans faced during Reagan’s presidency.”⁴⁴

The two most forward-facing outlets of Black culture were basketball and hip-hop. Collectively, they were potential avenues of advancement and recognition for young men of color. On the court, Black players came to dominate play—the 1984 All-Star game featured nine Black starters as Larry Bird was the only white player on the court at tip-off—and hip-hop was growing in popularity, emerging as “a way of being seen and, more importantly, of being heard when all other forces attempted to suffocate the Black voice.”⁴⁵

By mid-March 1984, the Knicks (who had only two white players; Grunfeld and little-used reserve Eric Fernsten) were rolling. At 41–25, they were just a half-game behind the 76ers for the third-best record in the Eastern Conference. King was clearly the Knicks’ star, but his teammates were becoming increasingly comfortable in their roles, especially the team’s five-man bench group. “When we come into the game,” Grunfeld explained, “it changes the tempo. The first unit plays a power game with the offense geared to Billy Cartwright and Bernard King. When we come in, we’re supposed to harass and force opposing teams into taking the quick shot. We’re supposed to try and score off the breaks.”⁴⁶ Starters King, Cartwright, Williams, Sparrow, and Robinson played more traditionally; reserves Grunfeld, Louis Orr, Tucker, Walker, and Marvin Webster offered a change of pace and, as Hubie anticipated earlier in the season, fit in flawlessly when minor injuries—like a Robinson ankle sprain in late February—forced the team to adjust on the fly. The only troubling medical report was that King dislocated both middle fingers in the span of a few games in late March and early April. But he came back strong, exploding with 44 points against the Detroit Pistons in his return.

The Knicks easily made the playoffs (eight of eleven Eastern Conference teams qualified), finishing the season with a 47–35 record, which earned them a first-round matchup against the 49-win Pistons. Five years later, Detroit’s “Bad Boys” would win their first of two straight NBA titles powered by Isiah Thomas, Bill Laimbeer, Mark Aguirre, Rick Mahorn, Joe Dumars, and Dennis Rodman. Now they were led by Thomas and high-scoring forward Kelly Tripucka, but Laimbeer was already well on his way to becoming a Bad Boy. “Early in the first game,” King said later, “I went up for a layup, and [Laimbeer] smashed my hand against the backboard. I know he did it on purpose … he was a dirty player.”⁴⁷ Thanks to Laimbeer’s physical play and 26 points from Tripucka, Detroit led by as many as 14 in the second half. Hubie was so irate at the officiating that he was ejected in the middle of the fourth quarter—his fourth ejection of the season—turning the team over to assistant coaches Richie Adubato and Rick Pitino.

Brown’s ejections provided Pitino with the first NBA head coaching experience of his career. Prior to joining Brown’s staff in 1983, Pitino led Boston University to the NCAA tournament. After two years on the sideline with Hubie, Pitino would return to the college game as the head coach of Providence College. After earning acclaim for taking the Friars to the Final Four in 1987, Pitino would return to New York as the new head coach of the Knicks for another two-year stint in the Big Apple before resigning to join the staff at the University of Kentucky where he would gain godlike status in the Bluegrass State.

But in 1984, whether spurred by Hubie’s tirade, Pitino’s tactical brilliance, or general chutzpah, the Knicks roared back in game one against the Pistons, and Walker stole the ball twice in the last two minutes (giving him seven for the game) to lead the Knicks on a late 9–1 run to pull out a 94–93 win. “Can we come back?” Thomas sullenly asked reporters after the game, “I don’t know.”⁴⁸

Two nights later, the teams met again in Detroit. King, who scored 36 in the first game of the series, exploded in game two. He scored 46 (on 35 shots) and pulled down 6 rebounds. But late in the game, King lost his cool when one heckler yelled “isn’t it time you had a drink?” and another came out of the stands to stand right behind the Knicks bench, touching King on the shoulder. King was enraged and took off after the fan; fortunately, Norman Scott, the team physician, got Bernard to stop.⁴⁹ King’s demons obviously remained a touchy subject for the Knicks’ forward, who had run afoul of law enforcement several times in the late seventies and early eighties. Dave DeBusschere told reporters, “I talked to a lot of people, and they all told me he had straightened himself out.”⁵⁰

Perhaps channeling his anger at Detroit fans into his on-court play, King averaged more than 40 points per game over the series. The Pistons had no answer. “We tried fronting him, backing him, everything,” Detroit coach Chuck Daly recalled. “He was utterly magnificent. He shoots the ball on the way up and gets the shot off so fast he leaves you flat-footed.”⁵¹ But for all King’s individual brilliance, the Knicks split the two games in Detroit and then the two at home to set up a decisive fifth game, scheduled for April 27 in the Motor City.

While the Pistons played in New York, the Pontiac Silverdome was being filled with dirt for a motocross event. So, instead of playing at their usual arena, the Pistons had to change venues for game five, moving thirty miles southeast to downtown Detroit’s Joe Louis Arena. The Pistons had never played in Joe Louis, which was primarily used to host the NHL’s Red Wings, and Detroit’s team trainer had to give his players directions to find the facility.⁵² More than twenty thousand Detroit fans, however, knew precisely where Joe Louis was and packed the historic arena to watch the Knicks and Pistons play in the winner-take-all fifth game.

King showed up battling flu and riding a streak of three straight 40-point games. The air was stifling in the arena—King compared it to playing in a sauna, and Sparrow called it “very intense.” Fittingly, the teams went after one another like they were re-creating Joe Louis’s immortal match against Max Schmeling. “It was like a 15-round championship fight, and the guy on his feet at the end wins,” Daly recalled decades later.⁵³ Brown too would still vividly remember that game. “It was a hundred degrees outside and inside it was worse,” he joked. “After five minutes I had my jacket off, had water in my shoes—I have a little short-sleeved shirt on. Chuck Daly, dressed impeccably at the other end, has a Brioni suit on that costs $5,000 and he’s not taking it off.” Brown chuckled at the memory. “I asked if he ever wore it again and he said ‘I’d soaked it through the back so it looked like a navy blue suit.’ So, they couldn’t resurrect that suit.”⁵⁴

With two minutes left, it looked like the Knicks were going to win the fight on points, with a 106–98 lead after King scored points 33 and 34. But then Thomas, the Pistons’ third-year point guard, took over. First he hit a pair of jump shots from the lane, then drew back-to-back fouls from Sparrow. With less than a minute left, Thomas took the ball and drove the length of the court, dribbling around and through all five Knicks defenders to score a layup and draw a foul; his free throw pulled the Pistons to within three, 112–109.

King and Thomas traded baskets before Isiah hit a three-pointer to tie the game at 114 with 23 seconds left. The crowd’s roar became deafening. Walker turned the ball over on the inbounds pass, and suddenly the Pistons had the ball with a chance to win the game in regulation. Everybody at Joe Louis Arena—hell, everyone watching the game on television or listening on the radio too—knew the ball was going to Thomas. So did the Knicks. Walker was just a rookie but was also a dogged defender with long arms who stood three inches taller than the Pistons’ lead guard. Thomas took the pass as his teammates fanned out around the perimeter. The crowd stood in anticipation, cheering and screaming as Isiah pounded the ball rhythmically against the hardwood. He then started his drive to the basket, hoping to make a shot or draw a foul. But Walker suddenly snaked his hand out and tipped the ball away as the clock ticked to zero, ending regulation.

More than twenty thousand fans sat down. This heavyweight fight was headed into overtime. “That game was the most intense I ever played,” King later admitted, “it was the greatest.”⁵⁵ Even though the Pistons missed eleven straight shots in the extra period, and Laimbeer fouled out, Thomas refused to give up, willing the Pistons back into the game with five quick points on a three-pointer and layup, pulling his team to within two. With less than a minute left, the Knicks worked the ball to Cartwright. Thomas tried to steal the ball from the Knicks center but was called for his sixth foul, sending him to the bench. Cartwright hit both free throws, icing the game and closing out the series. “I’ll never forget this game,” Tripucka said afterward. He was obviously exhausted, playing 47 of the games 53 minutes, and scoring 23 points in a losing effort. Asked by reporters what he was going to do after the game, Tripucka joked, “I guess I’ll drink beer, eat Wendy’s and get fat again.”⁵⁶ Six years later, the Pistons would eliminate the Knicks from the playoffs en route to their second straight title. But in ’84, it was New York moving forward.

In the summer of 1984, Los Angeles hosted the Olympic Games. Perhaps most known for the Soviet boycott, the Games nonetheless provided many memorable moments. Rafer Johnson became the first Black man to light the cauldron opening the Games, Carl Lewis won four gold medals in track and field, Mary Lou Retton won the gymnastics all-around competition, and the men’s basketball team—coached by Bob Knight—won the tournament, powered by Michael Jordan and future Knick Patrick Ewing. And during the closing ceremonies, hip-hop was broadcast worldwide. As Lionel Richie performed “All Night Long,” hundreds of young men (including future actor Cuba Gooding Jr.) conducted an extended, and extensively choreographed, breakdancing routine, complete with head-spins, toprock, ass-spins, and even some downrock.

B-boy dancing (called breakdancing by mainstream media, much to the chagrin of real B-boys and B-girls) witnessed a brief resurgence in popularity from 1983 to 1984. Part of its appeal was the hit 1983 film Flashdance, featuring Jennifer Beals as a ballet dancer who embraces street dancing to succeed in her audition. In that film, the Rock Steady Crew performs on the sidewalk as Beals’s character is joined by a growing group to watch, spellbound. The next year, Breakin’ and its sequel Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo, both set in California, recognized modest box office success but became cult hits. (The soundtrack for the sequel included the first album credit for a very young Ice-T.)

For Beals, and for kids who took up the B-boy mantle, hip-hop dance became a form of expression, a way “to use your body to inscribe your identity on the streets … a physical version of two favorite modes of street rhetoric: the taunt and the boast.”⁵⁷ Dancing paralleled rap, using sharp moves instead of sharp words as a means of self-expression. Soon it was a national phenomenon, even featured on the cover of Newsweek, but it would be a short-lived fad. The problem, as one journalist wrote, was that “rap had product. It had something you could sell.”⁵⁸ Breakdancing didn’t. And so, despite its popularity that summer, B-boying once again faded from the national conscious by the end of the year.

Heading into their second-round playoff series with Boston, a few months before those Olympic Games, the Knicks knew they were in for a battle. The Celtics, who would probably peak two years later with their legendary 1986 title-winning team, boasted a 62–20 record. League MVP Larry Bird (who averaged 24 points, 10 rebounds, and nearly 6 assists per game—and had been passed up by the Knicks in the 1978 draft) led a potent frontcourt, joined by Sixth Man of the Year Kevin McHale, Cedric “Cornbread” Maxwell, and All-Star center Robert Parish. Their backcourt, bolstered by the recent addition of Dennis Johnson from the Suns, played strong defense and fit perfectly around Bird and company. During the regular season, the Knicks and Celtics split their six-game series, with each team winning twice on the road, and a thrilling double-overtime Knicks win in late November was still fresh in both team’s minds.

Before game one of the Eastern Conference semifinals, several Celtics provided the Knicks with quality bulletin board material. Reserve forward M. L. Carr told reporters, “Bernard has scored his last 40 points,” while Maxwell promised, “We’re going to stop the bitch.”⁵⁹ Yet King remained serene. “The game’s played on the court, not in the newspapers. Good players don’t talk that way,” he said.⁶⁰ McHale was usually a prankster and instigator but this time tried to smooth everything over. “Max didn’t mean anything by the remark,” he told the Times, “everyone on this team talks funny.”⁶¹ But Bird also got in a few jabs, telling reporters, “I don’t feel I get the calls Bernard gets and he always complains. If I get half the calls he gets and got to the line 10 times a game, I could average 30, too.”⁶² The bad blood went beyond verbal sparring, of course, and tensions flared early in the first game. It was clear—as Grunfeld said later—the Celtics and Knicks “really hated each other.”⁶³

Boston won game one, 110–92, as Maxwell held King to 26 points. As usual, it was Bird carrying the load for Boston, flirting with a triple-double, scoring 23 points, hauling down 9 rebounds, and handing out 12 assists, many of them to McHale, who led Celtics scorers with 25.

Game two followed a similar script, with the Celtics pulling out another win in Boston behind 37 points from Bird and 24 from McHale. King managed only 13 and, while it was great that Cartwright suddenly came alive and dropped in 25 points against arguably the best frontcourt in NBA history, the 116–102 loss put the Knicks halfway toward elimination. “I don’t have a calculator,” Maxwell told reporters after game two, “but for [King] to average 40 or more, he’s got to score 60.” Up two games to none, McHale—who had downplayed Maxwell’s pre-series comments—came up with his own analogy. “Right now they’re lying down in the grave,” he boasted. “We’ve got the shovel in our hands. They’ve got the heartbeat. We have to keep throwing dirt on them.”⁶⁴

For game three, hoping to stave off the gravedigger, Hubie made a few adjustments, playing the starters a little more and the bench unit a little less. He also decided to bring Ray Williams off the bench, using Tucker in the starting lineup instead. But maybe most importantly, the battle shifted from the parquet in Boston Garden to the hardwood of Madison Square. Vendors teemed outside the arena, hawking T-shirts and hats that read “St. Bernard” on the front and “Our Savior—1984 Season” on the back.⁶⁵ Everyone in the Garden for game three expected King to put the Knicks on his shoulders and carry them to victory. Instead, three Knicks scored more than 20 apiece; Ray Williams chipped in 22 off the bench, King scored 24, and Cartwright poured in 25, including 11 of 12 from the free throw line. But the real stars might have been the fans. “Our crowd was so raucous,” King later explained, “you’d have thought an earthquake tremor was rumbling through the arena.”⁶⁶ Maybe the Garden could be Eden again?

Boston remained confident going into the fourth game of the series, but the Knicks came out hot, racing to a double-digit lead in the first quarter, and never looked back, winning 118–113 thanks to 43 from King. Bird complained that New York was playing a zone defense. Pitino fired back. “If you watch what we’re doing, we’re going after the ball. We’re rotating our defense. That’s not a zone,” he told the Daily News.⁶⁷ Bird was clutching at straws, trying to distract the Knicks, who clearly had the momentum after their second straight win. Later, when asked about a rivalry between him and King, Bird admitted that he didn’t guard Bernard. “I had no chance guarding Bernard,” he laughed. “Maxwell didn’t either, by the way.”⁶⁸ Maxwell was curiously quiet after King’s scoring outburst in game four. “They can dig all the graves and throw all the dirt they want,” Williams told reporters.⁶⁹ McHale allowed, “Now we’re fighting over the shovel,” but he added, “If it takes me to get them motivated, then they’re in the wrong league.”⁷⁰

Game five of the 1984 Eastern Conference semifinals might have been the most memorable blowout loss in Knicks history. Boston jumped out to an early lead and led by a dozen after the first quarter. By halftime, they had extended it to 21 points: 66–45. But the Knicks chipped away early in the third and pulled to within 13. Driving down the court on a fast break, Williams found Walker near the basket with a picture-perfect pass. Celtics’ guard Danny Ainge, who gained quite a reputation for his sneakily dirty play, flew into Walker, forearms extended into his face—one reporter called it a “double-forearm shiver.”⁷¹ “I fouled him unintentionally,” Ainge insisted, “I wasn’t trying to hurt him. I was trying to prevent a three-point play. I wouldn’t call it a flagrant foul.”⁷² The Knicks saw it differently. “He hit me in the chin and neck,” Walker said, “and I just retaliated.”⁷³ Walker threw wild punches at Ainge, and both benches cleared. Carr got in a few cheap shots, which nearly set off Bernard. “That’s dirty basketball. He’s a dirty player. That’s unacceptable, especially from someone as insignificant as him,” King told the Post afterward.⁷⁴ Referees ejected Walker and Ainge, and even Hubie got in on the action, although he ended up on the floor in the melee. “It makes you feel young to go out there,” Hubie explained later, “but as soon as you bounce off one of those guys, you know why you should’ve stayed on the bench.”⁷⁵ The NBA fined the two instigators ($500 for Walker, $750 for Ainge) and seventeen other players for leaving the bench ($150 apiece).⁷⁶ New York lost 121–99, but clearly the bad blood was running hot with two must-win games for the Knicks looming.

On May 11, almost twenty thousand fans packed Madison Square Garden to watch game six of the best-of-seven series. It was the rowdiest crowd the Knicks had seen in a decade. “The fans will be ready for a boxing match,” King said. “They will be pumped up, and so will we. It’s do or die. We don’t want to die.” Maxwell and his Celtics teammates knew they needed to jump out to an early lead to deflate the home crowd. “They’re the most vocal in the league with their chants. It’s really getting more intense,” he admitted.⁷⁷ Maxwell’s fears came to fruition, though, as New York, not Boston, jumped ahead early. “As we grew our lead,” King remembered, “the fans’ war cry got louder. We could hear it reverberating through the Garden: ‘Boston sucks! Boston SUCKS! BOSTON SUCKS!” Despite the loud crowd, Bird scored 35 points, pulled down 11 rebounds, and handed out 7 assists. McHale added 16 points and 10 rebounds, and Gerald Henderson, often overshadowed by the Celtics’ dominant frontcourt, scored 20. But it was not enough. King led all scorers with 44 points, and Cartwright again played like a man possessed (14 points and 14 rebounds) as the crowd “threatened to roar the roof off the Garden, and send it spinning into space.” Even Maxwell had to admit that King was operating on another level. “He wasn’t running down the baseline, he was flying,” Cornbread told the Daily News.⁷⁸ King was at the peak of his powers. His quick first step forced defenders to back away from him on the perimeter, but, even when they knew it was coming, he would blow by them or bully them toward the basket for an easy turnaround jump shot. The fans were rabid after the game, charged up about the Knicks forcing a winner-take-all seventh game. “We needed a police escort to get away from Madison Square Garden,” Bird remembered. “The bus driver had to drive the wrong way on a one-way street to get us out of there.”⁷⁹

Facing game seven, this time in Boston, both teams were on edge. “You always want to avoid a one-game series, especially with Bernard as hot as he is,” McHale told reporters. “Getting into a situation like that, he can single-handedly get 100 points.”⁸⁰ Looking back, the idea of King dropping 100 on the Celtics in 1984 seems laughable. But in the moment, anything seemed possible. King was scoring 40-plus by taking 25 or 30 shots. What if he shot the ball twice as much? King usually scored quietly, letting the points pile up in small groups of two or three baskets at a time. What if he simply told his teammates to clear out and let him take Maxwell or Bird or McHale off the dribble every time?

Stories about playoff games in Boston Garden during Red Auerbach’s time as president of the Celtics are legendary. No hot water in the visitors’ showers. Locker rooms so hot they felt like saunas. You name it, Auerbach probably tried it. So, with game seven looming, the Celtics made sure to tweak the Knicks at least a little. John Hewig vividly remembers that afternoon:

We get there, and our dressing room is locked, and Hubie says to me, ‘John, go get the maintenance guy to open the fucking door,’ and his veins are popping. Its two hours before the game. So I’m walking around the bowels of the old Boston Garden. In maintenance, there’s a young guy sitting with his feet up on the desk, and he’s not the head guy, and I kind of knew the head guy a little bit… . I looked at the guy, and he said, “Can I help you?”

I said, “I’m John Hewig from the Knicks, and I’m looking for Joe.”

He said, “Oh yeah, Joe. He’s a good Catholic. He’s at church, you know.”

I said, “We’ve got to get our dressing room door unlocked. Can you help me?”

And he said, “No, the only one with the key is Joe.”

I said, “You don’t have a key?”

And he said, “No, but he’ll be back at eleven.” And this is like at ten fifteen.

I said, “well, what am I supposed to tell my coach?”

He said, “I don’t know. You’re from New York, aren’t you?” And he knew all this. He’d been coached by Red Auerbach. He knew all this. So he says, “You know, I might have a solution. I’ve got keys to these two other dressing rooms that are on the other side of the building. They’re small, but you guys could fit into them. Like six and six, if you wanted to do that.”

I said, “You’re kidding, right?”

He said no, he wasn’t kidding

And I said, “Okay, come with me, you’re going to tell my coach this.” Hubie is ranting and raving in the hallway: “What the fuck is going on?” And he’s stomping around as I’m walking up there with this guy. I said, “Hubie, the guy who has the key is at church. He’s not going to be back until eleven. But this guy here has a solution.” And he tells Hubie what it is. And Hubie says ‘Okay, all right, boys, let’s go. Follow me.”

And we follow the guy, and we go halfway around the building, and he gets to the dressing room doors, and they’re next to each other. And he opens them up with this key, and he says, “You guys gonna be fine in here,” and the stink in there in both of them was horrendous.

And I’ve always said Red Auerbach had every employee in the Boston Garden go in there and take a shit Friday night, and then they turned the water off and closed the doors. And we went in, and the players and Hubie and everybody was like “oh God, what is this stink?”⁸¹

Across the arena, in their own locker room, the Celtics had no idea of what New York’s players were dealing with. They just knew they had to win one more game against a hot Knicks team. Bird, normally confident to the point of cockiness, sat by his locker wringing his hands. “Very often I have strong positive feelings before big games,” he remembered later. “But I wasn’t sure about that seventh game. I knew that if Bernard stayed hot, it would go down to the wire. The only thing making me feel good at all was that we were playing in the Boston Garden.”⁸²

Thanks to Bird, Boston jumped out to an early 22–4 lead and by halftime still led 67–52. The Celtics breezed in the second half, winning by 17. “New York’s M.V.P. won it for the Knicks Friday night [game six] in New York and the N.B.A.’s M.V.P. won it for us today,” McHale smugly told reporters.⁸³ Maxwell, though, was drained. “I’m sick of Bernard King. I don’t want to see him anymore … after seven straight games of Bernard King, I’m having nightmares about the guy.”⁸⁴ Less than a month later, the Celtics defeated the Lakers to win the NBA title.

May 1984 seemed to be the start of something great for Knicks fans. Their team took the eventual champs to seven hard-fought games in the playoffs, King was one of the best players in the NBA, and most of his teammates were just entering their primes. Instead, the season marked the highpoint in the era after Eden.

• 1983–84 Knicks
• Record: 47–35
• Playoffs: Won Eastern Conference first round versus Detroit Pistons; lost Eastern Conference semifinals versus Boston Celtics
• Coach: Hubie Brown
• Average Home Attendance: 12,096
• Points per Game: (106.9–17th of 23)
• Points Allowed per Game: (103.0–3rd of 23)
• Team Leaders:
  • Points: Bernard King (26.3 per game)
  • Rebounds: Truck Robinson and Bill Cartwright (8.4 per game)
  • Assists: Rory Sparrow (6.8 per game)
  • Steals: Ray Williams (2.1 per game)
  • Blocked Shots: Bill Cartwright and Marvin Webster (1.3 per game)
• All-Stars: Bernard King
• Notable Transactions: Drafted Darrell Walker in the first round of the 1983 NBA Draft