7

“The Ship Be Sinking”

1981–1982

On August 1, 1981, less than a mile west of Madison Square Garden, television history was made when MTV launched from its studio on West Thirty-Third and Tenth Avenue. The Buggles’ “Video Killed the Radio Star” was the first music video aired—although only a limited number of households in New Jersey could watch on opening day.¹ Warner Communications (which once owned the Cosmos and brought Pelé to the United States in 1975) initially balked at the notion of a cable TV channel devoted exclusively to music videos, but MTV quickly became a cultural sensation. Among other accomplishments, MTV introduced mainstream white audiences to Black stars like Prince and Michael Jackson.

But even more influential locally was a different music television program: Video Music Box. Although it never gained the mainstream popularity of MTV, Video Music Box first aired in 1983 on WNYC (channel 31) and remains decades later, thanks to Brooklynite Ralph McDaniels.² “MTV … were obviously on some rock stuff,” McDaniels recalls, “it was dope, but I knew what my community wanted to hear.”³ Soon viewers could see not only mainstream groups like Madonna and Hall & Oates, but also hip-hop acts like Grandmaster Flash, Kurtis Blow, and Biz Markie.

That October, after months of tense negotiations, the Knicks parted ways with Ray Williams, refusing to match an offer sheet he signed with the New Jersey Nets. Ray showed up in poor shape when he arrived in the Meadowlands, and his new teammates immediately nicknamed him Boom Boom, Big Butt, and Mr. Butterworth because “he was so thick and rich.” Ray didn’t care, he was just happy to be out of New York, livid that “they [said] they can’t pay players.”⁴ Ray wanted $750,000 a year, but New York offered less than half that; in the end, he settled for half a million dollars a season with the Nets.

Williams was not the only member of the Family to leave in the fall of 1981, as Mike Glenn signed with Atlanta that October (it was a big mistake for the Knicks not to bring him back, Holzman later admitted).⁵ “We very much wanted to stay together,” Glenn told me of the trio, “and we thought we could make our mark. Then they decided to make some other moves and tried to leapfrog back up to the top again without continuing the step-by-step.”⁶ Losing his two closest friends was crushing to the team’s best, and most emotionally fragile, player, Micheal Ray Richardson. “They were connected,” Cazzie Russell explained to me. “Losing that took a lot out of Micheal Ray … and he did not want to play with those other guys.”⁷

Feeling abandoned and alone, Richardson turned inward and, for the first time in his life, experimented with cocaine. “When I was in college, I didn’t drink; when I was in high school I didn’t drink,” Richardson recalls. But in New York, as Richardson became a star, things changed. “You figure you’re in control of everything, that you can do whatever you want to do, that you’re invincible.”⁸ So he snorted a line of cocaine at a party. Just one. “That first hit felt like the best thing that ever happened to me,” Richardson said. “I was invisible and invincible… . I spent the next seven years trying to duplicate that very first high. And from the get-go, basketball didn’t seem as important as getting off.” “Man!” he recalled thinking at the time, “that shit was gooooood!”⁹

Losing Williams and Glenn was not the only major roster change that offseason. In fact, even before Williams signed with the Nets, the Knicks and Nets came together on a trade that sent second-year guard, and future Knicks head coach, Mike Woodson across the Hudson for Mike Newlin, coming off back-to-back seasons of over 20 points per game for New Jersey. Besides dealing a young player for an established veteran, adding Newlin meant the Knicks were no longer an all-Black team. That fact drew few headlines at the time, but looking back it was the end of a brief but incredibly important, pioneering era in NBA history. Replacing Woodson with Newlin made sense on paper (this would be a common theme in the years ahead for the Knicks), but ultimately even Holzman admitted that trading for the white shooting guard was a mistake. “Newlin never fit in,” Holzman wrote in his autobiography. “He lacked intensity except when it came to spending time taking what he told people were Bible lessons over the telephone.”¹⁰

A backcourt of Richardson, Newlin, and Randy Smith made sense to Knicks execs. Richardson was dynamic but erratic, and he might be steadied by Smith’s veteran poise, while Newlin’s silky outside shooting touch could only help. Without Williams, though, the Knicks were a much different team, especially on defense. “We went from being able to dominate most teams’ backcourts to not being able to do that anymore, with the speed, quickness, strength, offensive ability and defensive ability of those two guys,” Campy Russell told me.¹¹ As compensation for losing Williams in free agency, the Nets sent Maurice Lucas, a bull-strong three-time former All-Star in his late twenties, across the Hudson, giving the Knicks a bona fide power forward for the first time since Spencer Haywood left in early 1979. It helped that Lucas had a reputation as an enforcer, famously squaring off against Darryl Dawkins in the 1977 NBA Finals as a member of the Portland Trail Blazers. New York had lacked toughness in their series against Artis Gilmore and the Bulls; Lucas would provide that. He was also, as David Halberstam observed in Breaks of the Game, “acutely conscious of race and the double standards in both American life and his chosen profession.”¹² Another perfect fit on the almost-all-Black Knicks.

Losing Williams and adding Lucas would be a bust, but basketball insiders at the time praised the deal for New York. “It was a good trade for the Knicks,” Celtics coach Bill Fitch said in 1981, “It’s the missing link for them.”¹³ In the Post, Harvey Araton concurred, writing that “the Knicks needed a couple of vets like Archie [Bunker] needed Edith” and “needed a rebounder the way Ozzie needed Harriet.”¹⁴ For his part, Lucas was confident in his ability to help the team win. “I don’t see myself as any kind of savior,” he said, “but I think I can provide a missing element, one that’s been missing here for a while.”¹⁵ Sportswriter Roy S. Johnson wrote, referencing Reggie Jackson joining the Yankees in 1977, “So now, it is Maurice Lucas … who stirs this drink.”¹⁶

While sportswriters bandied pop culture references about the newest Knick, newspaper headlines focused on the upcoming mayoral election. Unlike four years earlier, when he came out of nowhere to take down incumbent Abe Beame to win the mayoralty, Ed Koch was a clear favorite to win reelection in 1981. When Koch was first elected, New York City was in crisis mode, and in the short term his austerity politics helped balance the budget. But in the long run Koch’s time as mayor shifted the city’s political outlook from the liberalism of John Lindsay and Beame to a neoliberal constituency, cutting budgets and city services while promoting business development. Key to Koch’s plans was future president, and Knicks’ season ticket holder, Donald Trump, whose extensive Manhattan developments helped “revive New York as a center of glitz and glamour.”¹⁷ Unfortunately, fiscal retrenchment created greater economic disparity than ever before in the Big Apple, and the percentage of the population under the poverty level jumped from 15 percent in 1975 to over 23 percent by 1985.¹⁸

In addition to economic austerity, Koch hoped to appeal to residents fearful of crime by embracing a law-and-order platform. Koch saw graffiti-writing and hip-hop culture as troubling signs of juvenile delinquency—a stepping-stone to criminal behavior and disorder—so he instituted anti-graffiti efforts to protect city subway lines. Abandoned buildings likewise reminded New Yorkers of turmoil and unrest. So city officials put huge decals in windows to make them look lived-in to commuters traversing the Cross-Bronx.¹⁹ And parks inhabited by nascent hip-hop artists became another target of the Koch administration. “Everything about hip-hop was illegal,” Paradise Gray of the Latin Quarter argues. “Do you know how many laws were broken just to do an average street jam? We broke into the light poles… . We cut the wires and we stole electricity… . We didn’t have no permits to do our jams… . And we dared the police to try to fuck with us.”²⁰

“Nine out of 10 times,” Gordon J. Davis, a Koch-appointed parks commissioner, said at the time, “what people mean when they say the park is lousy is not only that it’s not clean, but that there are kids smoking dope and there are graffiti and there are Blacks and Hispanics where there were once Italians and Jews.”²¹ Although rarely explicitly racist, Koch and his administration usually listened to those nine out of ten, promoting New York City as place that was safe for white people to work, live, and visit.

Another way Koch hoped to push through his agenda was through privatizing public space and encouraging gentrification.²² Brownstones and lofts in SoHo would become artist havens with the development of a bohemian gallery district and the Garment District, just northeast of Madison Square Garden, as the center of the fashion world. To residents of these gentrifying neighborhoods, though, it felt like an assault. “These invaders have already turned low-income, blue-collar neighborhoods on Manhattan’s West Side into havens of quiche-eating, boutique-shopping professionals,” an article in Ebony proclaimed.²³

In 1981, Koch earned nearly three-fourths of the vote citywide, even winning the Republican nomination. Flying high after achieving his sought-after mayoral landslide, Koch ran for the governorship of New York in 1982. But he failed to appeal to upstaters, and he withdrew, licked his wounds, and returned to his duties in New York City, beaten if not humbled. Writing about Koch’s 1984 memoir, Mayor: An Autobiography, his friend Dan Wolf calls it “the best love story since Tristan and Isolde, only Ed Koch plays both parts.”²⁴

Lost in the shuffle of an extensive on-court turnover and a headline-grabbing mayoral race was a key organizational change in the Knicks’ front office as president Mike Burke announced his retirement after six years at the helm. “The restless nature commands me to move along to a fresh challenge,” Burke told the Times.²⁵ True to his word, Burke left New York City for his cattle and sheep farm in County Galway, Ireland. Jack Krumpe, Sonny Werblin’s best friend and long-time business partner, replaced Burke in the Knicks front office, although no one could truly replace the silver-maned playboy in the New York City social scene.

Madison Square Garden’s non-sporting events continued no matter who was in charge. In 1979, Pope John Paul II had traveled to the United States, preaching to huge crowds across the country. Twenty-thousand people packed into Madison Square Garden that October 3 to see the pope; ten days later, half that number turned out for the Knicks’ home opener against the Bullets. The following summer, the Democratic National Convention met in New York City, calling for the reelection of President Jimmy Carter, who would be routed by Republican candidate Ronald Reagan. And in May 1982, long after Holzman and the Knicks were eliminated from playoff contention, Reverend Sun Myung Moon would marry more than two thousand couples in a “blessing ceremony” in the Garden; most of couples were matched by the reverend himself and had known each other a very short time.²⁶ Dubbed “Moonies,” a potentially derogatory term, adherents of the Unification Church of the United States drew a great deal of attention in the mid-eighties before trailing off in popularity by the 1990s.

Now way back in the days when hip-hop began

With Coke La Rock, Kool Herc, and then Bam

Beat boys ran to the latest jam . . .

—“South Bronx,” Boogie Down Productions, 1987

Boogie Down Productions released “South Bronx” in response to MC Shan’s song “The Bridge,” which seemed to promote Queensbridge as the true birthplace of hip-hop, causing a feud known as the Bridge Wars. It was just a decade after Coke La Rock, Kool Herc, and Afrika Bambaataa debuted, but already the history of hip-hop was important to the movement.

When it was released in 1979, “Rapper’s Delight” was widely panned by many in the hip-hop community as being inauthentic. But even before the Sugarhill Gang bang-banged the boogie to the boogie, hip-hop appeared to be a passing fad, headed the way of disco or punk rock.²⁷ Audiences who had packed apartment or playground parties in the mid-seventies to listen to La Rock, Herc, and Bam (Bambaataa) moved later in the decade to dance clubs where deejays spun records, bartenders slung booze, and peddlers dealt a little Panama Red. B-boying, graffiti art, and street deejaying had largely disappeared, replaced by club deejays who adopted Bronx-style techniques and raps, picking songs with a snappy beat and accessibility, like “Rapper’s Delight,” rather than scouring record stores for obscure albums.²⁸ Crowds at the clubs wanted to drink, smoke, and have fun, not watch or take part in a B-boy dance-off.

Created in the South Bronx by young, impoverished Black and Latinx women and men, hip-hop shifted to appeal to a broader demographic. During the early eighties, middle-class Black New Yorkers, working closely with white-dominated record labels, began creating music appealing to young white suburbanites (the NBA’s target audience too), providing, as one historian explains, “an age-old image of blackness: a foreign, sexually charged, and criminal underworld against which the norms of white society are defined.”²⁹ White kids in the burbs tried to “perfect a model of correct white hipness, coolness and style by adopting the latest black style and image.”³⁰ They watched Beat Street and Body Rock, memorized the lyrics of “Rapper’s Delight,” pulled on Adidas Superstar sneakers, and enjoyed the sanitized version of hip-hop, shined up to be as non-offensive as possible.³¹

And it wasn’t just white kids who embraced Black culture. In 1980, Louie Robinson, a prominent Black journalist, wrote a piece for Ebony magazine titled “The Blackening of White America,” exploring the phenomenon of white athletes embracing elements of Black culture. “Black athletes have not only brought to the playing fields fresh and awesome talents to thrill American sports fans,” Robinson wrote, “but they have also insinuated into the language of the locker room a pungency and coloration that could launch a new riot at Attica or San Quentin as White players have suddenly taken to speaking in the ‘mutha tongue.’ ”³²

In the eighties, rap music would become the voice of the youth, both white (Generation X) and Black (the hip-hop generation). Young women and especially men growing up in this era witnessed tremendous social dislocation and uncertainty. What resulted was a period of “rising alienation” in which “young whites were drawn to hip-hop” as “an appealing antiestablishment culture.”³³ In other words, hip-hop became Generation X’s answer to rock ’n’ roll. “Hip-hop was counterculture,” one Gen Xer recalls. “It gave youth a voice to tell the truth and exposed the ills of society, especially racism and our hypocritical government.”³⁴ One producer would say late in the decade, “Rap in the ’80s is equivalent to the Motown Sound of the ’60s.”³⁵

Rap during much of the eighties was subject to the same push-and-pull factors as the NBA and the Knicks. Record labels wanted to sell albums to both Black and white kids. And hip-hop pioneers like Afrika Bambaataa and Kurtis Blow always sought inclusiveness in their music and culture, just as pro basketball co-promoted the duo of Larry Bird and Magic Johnson—celebrating Black and white athletes. As Bakari Kitwana writes in Why White Kids Love Hip-Hop, “The NBA, second only to hip-hop, has been a primary source of cross-racial interaction.”³⁶ But this inclusiveness missed the point of rap-as-counterculture; it isn’t cool to listen to the same music as your parents or dress like your uncle. And watering down rap for mainstream consumption brought it to the cusp of urbaneness. As Charles Whitaker wrote in 1990, “Hollywood has co-opted it and so has Madison Avenue. Sanitized for mass appeal, rap is used to promote a wide range of products—from hamburgers to automobiles.”³⁷ Hardly the antiauthoritarian authenticity hip-hop promoted from its gritty origins in the mid-seventies.

By the mid-1980s, other elements of hip-hop would also diverge. Graffiti slowly disappeared from New York City subway cars, while B-boying found itself replaced by catchy, faddish group dances like the Wop and the Cabbage Patch. Only rap music continued as a stand-in for hip-hop culture. Sure, a few groups of legit B-boys like the New Rock Steady Crew remained. But they were, as author Jeff Chang says, “the last b-boys standing.” One member of this crew, Crazy Legs, tried to re-create the theme of many kung fu movies, traveling around the city to challenge the remaining B-boys to dance-offs.³⁸ But soon there was no one left to battle.

As rap continued to grow in popularity among white kids around the city, some white fans wanted to hear white rappers. In 1981, three middle-class Jewish New Yorkers, Michael Diamond (Mike D), Adam Yauch (MCA), and Adam Horovitz (Ad-Rock), formed a new group from members leaving a hardcore punk band called the Young Aborigines. They rechristened themselves the Beastie Boys and transitioned to hip-hop, releasing “Cooky Puss” in 1983. It became a huge hit in the city’s downtown club scene, and soon the trio worked with Rick Rubin, who formed Def Jam Recordings with Russell Simmons, on producing an album. The result, License to Ill, became the first rap album to reach the top spot on the Billboard 200, catapulting the Beastie Boys into the American mainstream and giving white rappers their first national stage. “Russell [Simmons] opened the door for Run-DMC to take over white America,” says Dante Ross, a music executive, “and now [with the Beastie Boys] white America had their own white boys. And he knew that that shit was going to go big.”³⁹

Like the Sugarhill Gang, the Beastie Boys encountered questions about their authenticity. “One of the first hip-hop shows we played was at this club called Encore in Queens,” Mike D remembers. “So we get there and we, this bunch of white kids from Manhattan dressed in Puma suits, step out of the limo. The first comment we heard was, “Who the f*ck are you guys, Menudo?”⁴⁰

The Beastie Boys eventually managed to transcend race, and Knicks execs hoped their new-look, no-longer-all-Black Knicks could do the same when they opened the 1981–82 season. Cartwright sat out opening night against the Nets with a knee ligament sprain, forcing Lucas, a member of the opposing team just a week earlier, into a prominent role. Lucas responded with 25 points and 12 rebounds to help his new team to a hard-fought 103–99 road victory. “No jump-shooting team has ever won an NBA championship,” Richardson told reporters after the game. “If you’ve got the guys to go inside, you go to them.”⁴¹ Early returns on Lucas were favorable. In his first month as a Knick, he scored in double digits in eleven straight games, highlighted by a dominant 28 points and 19 rebounds in a win over the Pistons to kick off December.

There were other instances of individual brilliance in the early going. On November 10, Richardson secured a triple-double with 20 points, 15 rebounds, and 12 assists, and a week later Cartwright tied a league record by sinking all nineteen of his foul shots. But overall the team was wildly inconsistent, and Holzman struggled to cope. He shuffled the lineup for the team’s November 19 game against Atlanta, starting Sly Williams and Randy Smith in place of Cazzie Russell and Mike Newlin, but the team lost 89–84. “The fans are down on us,” Smith said after the game, in which spectators at the half-full Garden roundly booed the Knicks. “I hope they would give us a little longer to prove ourselves.”⁴² By Thanksgiving, the team was 4–8 and playing like they had already written off the season. “After every defeat, the scene in the Knicks dressing room is the same,” Sam Goldaper wrote in the Times. “Campy Russell talks of the need for developing a half-court game, playing together and patience. Marvin Webster, the captain, tells of the necessity for more concentration and better response to pressure … [and] Coach Red Holzman trie[s] to say as little as possible.”⁴³

On Thursday, December 3, the team reached a new low. Little more than eight thousand fans filed into Madison Square Garden, less than half its capacity, to watch New York host the lowly Bullets and recently signed forward Spencer Haywood, back in the NBA for the first time since allegedly putting a hit out on his coach. Haywood only scored six points in a reserve role, but Greg Ballard dominated the Knicks forwards, scoring 33 points in a 114–88 drubbing. After the game, Werblin was livid. He stormed into the Knicks locker room and, according to several players, “told the team he was embarrassed by its showing.” “He said he was disappointed by the Knicks’ play, that the club was a ‘disgrace’ to New York and that the crowds at the Garden were growing smaller and smaller.” Then Sonny refused to speak to the media. “I agree with Mr. Werblin that we played very bad,” Webster told the Times. “I don’t know if we deserved him being that mad at us.”⁴⁴ Two nights later, whether inspired or embarrassed by Werblin’s outburst, the Knicks blew out Boston, the defending champs, in front of almost nineteen thousand fans.

With the team hovering around .500, stringing together a five-game winning streak and then losing four in a row, Richardson dropped a bombshell. After being ejected from a mid-December game against the Pistons for complaining too much to the referees, Sugar announced that he wanted a new contract, and, if the team refused to renegotiate, he wanted out. “I wish they would trade me,” he told the Times. “Maybe a change of scenery would help.” Told of Richardson’s request, Holzman said, “Sugar is a very intense player. He’s an emotional player.”⁴⁵ Donovan agreed. “When Sugar doesn’t have control of himself, it’s impossible for him to have control of the team. But when Sugar is under control … he is looking to make the play and for his shot secondly.”⁴⁶ Donovan also reminded reporters that Richardson had signed a new deal just one year earlier and that he still had several seasons under contract before he could leave via free agency.

A week later, after a Christmas Day loss to the Nets, Richardson was still frustrated about the direction of the team and his long-term contract. In the process, he gave perhaps the most quotable interview in league history.

“What do you think is happening to this team?” one reporter asked.

“The ship be sinking,” Richardson replied, deadpan.

“How far can it sink?” Nat Gottlieb of the Newark Star-Ledger chimed in.

Micheal Ray sighed. “The sky’s the limit.”⁴⁷

Even when Richardson and the Knicks did win, there seemed to be a steep price to pay. In January 1982, a gambler who usually wagered a few hundred bucks on Knicks games started laying down $10,000 bets on New York. And, unlike the Knicks, he was winning—beating the spread on six out of seven games. The FBI investigated, trying to determine whether any NBA players were on the take. “Hell no,” Richardson said later, “I never did anything like that.”⁴⁸ The FBI report tied their findings to the drug culture becoming prevalent in the league, citing a source who alleged that “none of the players receive any money for the tip, but simply do it as a courtesy to their dealer.”⁴⁹ Without any solid leads or corroborating physical evidence, the FBI closed its case. The bookie, whose identity was redacted along with the names of the suspected players in the released FBI documents, escaped unscathed.

Beyond allegations of gambling and FBI investigations to deal with, January was a rough month for the Knicks. Almost nightly the team set a record low for attendance in Madison Square Garden, bottoming out on January 10 when only 7,558 fans bothered to show up to watch the Bullets trounce the home team.⁵⁰ Newlin, who led the Nets in scoring the year before, was relegated to bench duty on a bad Knicks team and began venting to reporters. “My role is top cheerleader. There is nothing I can do about playing time, except be ready when I’m called… . It’s a comedy here.”⁵¹ This rubbed some of his teammates the wrong way. “There is no discipline on this team,” an unnamed player was quoted in the Times as saying. “Nobody is willing to make a sacrifice but everybody is looking to score.”⁵²

Another Knick upset with playing time was Sly Williams, who played outstanding basketball in 1980–81 as the nominal power forward in an up-tempo attack taking advantage of his athleticism. Now with Lucas on board, Williams was forced to the bench. And, like Newlin, he was unhappy in his new role. “I don’t think they’re giving me what is my correct amount of playing time,” Williams told the Sporting News, “I deserve to start.”⁵³ Making matters worse, Sly sprained his toe and struggled to recover while his agent, Joe Moniz, was negotiating a contract extension for him. With Sly on the mend, those talks stalled, and Moniz advised his client to avoid rejoining the team until his toe was completely healed. Injured and distracted by contract negotiations, Williams missed several practices, appointments with Knicks team doctor Norman Scott and trainer Mike Saunders, and the team plane bound for Boston on January 26. After fining him $100 for each event, Holzman finally suspended Sly indefinitely without pay.⁵⁴ “I was shocked,” Sly told the Post. “I wasn’t running out on them or anything,” he explained. “It was just bad timing on a situation that had to do with my contract.”⁵⁵

After just one game, Red reinstated his troubled forward. For some fans, this confirmed that Holzman was out of touch, and one Knick told reporters anonymously, “Red has lost all control of this team.”⁵⁶ When asked if he planned on replacing Holzman, recognized just six months earlier by Basketball Digest as the coach with the most job security in the league, Werblin shrugged his shoulders. “We’ll have to see.”⁵⁷

The Knicks’ struggles were minor when compared to those facing New York City in the early 1980s. Losing a few basketball games was nothing when weighed against the seeming disorder presented by trash and graffiti littering subway trains that were dangerous on their own. The murder rate had been steadily climbing (it would peaked in 1990, with 2,245 murders that year) but, perhaps more importantly, the public perception was that the city was unsafe.⁵⁸ “Anyone who uses the New York subway after 11:00 pm,” one reporter noted, “is either intrepid, without travel alternatives, looking for trouble, or plain dumb.”⁵⁹ Rather than being recognized as an organic, wild art form, graffiti was becoming more than an eyesore in some places. The Bronx County Courthouse, for example, is a limestone building in the Art Deco style built in the 1930s. But vandals marked the front to such an extent that one journalist, exasperated at the constant tagging, wrote, “How can we let a courthouse be overrun by barbarians? If it means repainting the facade of that building every day or having a twenty-four-hour guard detail, that courthouse must be reclaimed from the clutches of the barbarians who do not respect the law or public property.”⁶⁰

Despite negative perceptions by some New Yorkers, graffiti art was finding a new outlet: album jackets. In 1982, in preparation for the first international hip-hop tour—dubbed “The Roxy Tour”—Disc AZ and Celluloid Records released seven LPs, recorded by hip-hop groups like Fab 5 Freddy and PHASE 2. PHASE 2 was best known as a graffiti artist who popularized the use of bubble lettering, but he also rapped, performing at the Roxy in Chelsea, Manhattan, after which his song “The Roxy” was named. It was another graffiti artist, though, whose work graced the album jackets produced for the tour. Futura 2000 toured with the Clash in 1982, painting backdrops as the band performed. And when the seven albums produced for the Roxy Tour were lined up side-by-side, they formed a single piece of extensive and impressive graffiti art.⁶¹

Album covers represented the beginning of graffiti being recognized as legitimate and commercial art. In the 1970s, artists painted under the cover of darkness, with an ever-present threat of being arrested. Over the following decades, the idea of graffiti became chic, especially in gentrifying areas of the city where alley and building pieces were commissioned by property owners. During the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic, artists took to the streets again, painting without permission. “The streets were sanitized with pieces that were cool and nice and done with permission,” one graffiti artist recalls. “Now we’re back to the roots.”⁶²

With Sly sidelined, Newlin still sitting on the bench, and Red’s job in jeopardy, the Knicks began to slip down the standings. During the slide, Nets coach Larry Brown was reprimanded by the league for tampering after he sent a note to Marvin Webster that read, “Keep your head up; we’d still like to have you.”⁶³ On the heels of that message, rumors of Webster going to New Jersey made the rounds, as did talk of a blockbuster that would have seen Webster rejoin the Nuggets in exchange for guard David Thompson.

Thompson had been a superstar in the late 1970s but was now seen as damaged goods. Thompson first tried cocaine during the 1976 ABA finals as a twenty-two-year-old dealing with sky-high expectations and pressure. For several seasons in Denver, he managed to keep his drug use from drastically affecting his play and was rewarded with a then-record $800,000 per year contract. But by 1981, when he should have been in his prime, he was a shell of his former self, averaging career lows in every category. “Thompson became the most wasted talent—in a marketing, creative, aesthetic sense—the NBA has ever had,” Spike Lee would later assert.⁶⁴

Just behind Thompson on that list might have been Micheal Ray. Unbeknown to Knicks fans, Richardson managed to keep it together on the court while spiraling out of control off it, using marijuana and cocaine regularly to cope with his sense of isolation, boredom, and anxiety. Richardson reached a breaking point on February 21, 1982, with a game against Houston scheduled for the afternoon. “I’d gotten so high that I completely forgot about the game,” Richardson said. “I’d just smoked a bowl at 8:35 a.m. when I suddenly remembered that in less than five hours I’d be playing in a nationally televised game! Fuck me!” He showered, drank a quart of OJ, ate a quick lunch, and hustled to the Garden. “While I was loosening up,” he remembered, “I kept telling myself that I’d never do this again. ‘Please God. Get me out of this one and I’ll go cold turkey. I’ll check into a rehab clinic. I’ll do anything.’ ”⁶⁵ For the tens of thousands of fans watching the broadcast on CBS, Richardson put on a show and nearly earned a triple-double, scoring 20 points, pulling down 8 rebounds, and handing out 11 assists in leading the Knicks to an upset win over the visiting Rockets.

Did Richardson keep his pregame promise? Of course not. Instead, he celebrated his success, recalling later, “I got stoned for the next twenty-four hours.”⁶⁶ Richardson had no problem finding illicit drugs in the city. Conservative author Herbert London wrote, “Walking the streets of New York is like observing an open-air drug bazaar.”⁶⁷ Other players and coaches knew about the rampant drug use on the team and in the league, but even now players are hesitant to name names. “I had a friend in the city who would call me up and say, ‘Hey, man: so-and-so is up here buying drugs,” assistant coach Butch Beard recalls. “There were things I didn’t even bother telling [Holzman], because he wasn’t ready to hear that.” Holzman was hard-pressed to deal with this new generation of athletes—the forerunners of the coming hip-hop generation. As Beard remembers, “those early-eighties teams were wild as hell, and the city gobbled them up.”⁶⁸

Richardson was not the only Knick from this era to struggle with a drug addiction. Before Haywood moved to New York in 1975, he had used marijuana recreationally and had an occasional drink.⁶⁹ But with his wife, Iman, frequently out of town on photo shoots, Haywood began to experiment with harder drugs and soon was using regularly.⁷⁰

Haywood, Richardson, and Thompson were just a few of the high-profile Americans struggling with drug addiction at the time. In the summer of ’76, around the time Haywood began dating Iman, New York suffered through a “Great Dope Famine”—marijuana was hard to find, so dealers started to sling “Mexican brown heroin,” a minimally refined narcotic.⁷¹ Michael Weinreb writes, “In 1977, a Newsweek story compared cocaine to Dom Perigon and beluga caviar, and quoted Jimmy Carter’s drug czar, who claimed that ‘there’s not a great deal of evidence of major health consequences from the use of cocaine.’ (He was operating largely under the assumption that the drug was so prohibitively expensive most Americans couldn’t afford to get addicted.)” But movie stars, popular musicians, and big-time athletes had the cash to fund a drug habit.⁷² Richard Pryor famously set himself on fire freebasing while filming a movie in 1980, and two years later John Belushi died from an overdose after mixing cocaine and heroin. In sports, Montreal Expos outfielder Tim Raines slid headfirst into base so as not to break glass vials of cocaine he stored in his back pocket; Dock Ellis threw a no-hitter while tripping on LSD; and Utah Jazz forward Terry Furlow died in a car crash in May 1980 with traces of cocaine found in his system.⁷³

Three days before Furlow’s death, presidential candidate Ronald Regan clinched the Republican Party nomination. When he swept into office that fall, it was on the strength of white voters; just 10 percent of nonwhites cast their ballot for the former Hollywood actor. Reagan also declared a “war on drugs” at a time when Black men were explicitly linked to drug culture. Nationally, marijuana, heroin, and first-time cocaine use were actually on the decline by the time of Reagan’s inauguration. But his administration decided there was a drug crisis.⁷⁴

In the early eighties, many Americans connected hard drugs to Black men. So, as the NBA employed more and more Black athletes, the perception was that more and more players used coke and heroin. Historian Todd Boyd writes, “Indulgent actions of these players [drug users] had come to dominate perceptions of the league itself, one now being not so subtly touted as a collection of overpaid, underachieving, selfish, arrogant n-----s,” and “the NBA came to be thought of as simply another example of black criminality.”⁷⁵ League officials encouraged athletes struggling with addiction to voluntarily seek treatment. To counter drug users unwilling to come forward, they hired outside experts to authorize drug testing of suspected players, subjecting those players to as many as four tests over a six-week period. Any player testing positive three times, or convicted of a crime involving the use or distribution of cocaine or heroin, would be permanently banned any player with three positive tests.⁷⁶ Outside the NBA, punishments were even harsher. As Carol Anderson explains in White Rage, Reagan’s administration worked to “demonize and criminalize blacks and provide the federal resources to make incarceration, rather than education, normative.”⁷⁷ This became especially true in the mid- to late 1980s, when crack arrived in urban America, turning “Gotham into Gomorrah” and, in the words of artist and hip-hop scholar James “Koe” Rodriguez, “put New York City ghettos in a headlock.”⁷⁸ Richardson was one of those young men put in a headlock, and in 1987 he filed suit against an NBA-appointed psychiatrist who, Micheal Ray alleged, ordered him to buy crack to somehow help shake his drug habit.⁷⁹

Even with Richardson’s drug problem, frustrated bench players, and trade rumors swirling, the Knicks still had a shot to make the playoffs in the spring of 1982. So Donovan and Werblin began working the phones, targeting Supersonics guard Paul Westphal, still unsigned after suffering a stress fracture and unhappy with the Sonics’ contract offers as he rehabilitated. Werblin and Sam Schulman, the Sonics’ owner, had an acrimonious relationship dating to the Spencer Haywood deal, and this grew worse when, in mid-February, New York signed Westphal to an offer sheet that stipulated that the Knick would pay the former All-Star roughly $150,000 for the last third of the season. To prevent Seattle from matching, Werblin inserted several unique clauses, including a bonus if Westphal’s team won 40 games. The Knicks had almost no chance of winning 40 while Seattle, sitting at 36–18, was all but guaranteed to do so.⁸⁰ Per the collective bargaining agreement, Seattle had fifteen days to match the Knicks offer. Schulman was irate. “I’ll tell you this, ” he told KIRO radio in Seattle, “there is no way the Knicks are going to get Paul Westphal. Not only that,” he continued, “they’re going to suffer for what they’ve done.”⁸¹ Schulman demanded arbitration, certain he would beat Werblin this time.⁸² But on March 7 the arbitrator ruled in favor of New York, and Westphal became a Knick.

Four days after the arbitrator’s decision, the NCAA kicked off its high-profile postseason tournament, which ended in a Final Four featuring the Louisville Cardinals, the Houston Cougars (powered by the Phi Slama Jama duo of Clyde Drexler and Akeem Olajuwon), the North Carolina Tar Heels, and the Georgetown Hoyas. In the finals, the Tar Heels, led by James Worthy and Sam Perkins, pulled out a thrilling 63–62 win best remembered for the memorable buzzer-beater by a freshman guard named Michael Jordan. But the real blue-chip prospect who became a national sensation during the tournament was Georgetown freshman Patrick Ewing. Ewing finished the championship game with 23 points and 10 rebounds in a losing effort, but his performance put him on the radar of every NBA team.

In New York, Ewing was at the top of the list of collegiate players scouted by Dick McGuire, the team’s longtime head scout. But while McGuire would work for the Knicks until his death in 2010, changes were afoot in the Knicks front office. Holzman joined the Knicks in 1959 as a scout and became the team’s head coach in 1967 when Ned Irish flipped his role with that of McGuire. When Red started, most players made less than the coaches, and many held down off-season jobs to pay the bills. Over the years, Holzman had a few close friends on staff but was most comfortable around Frankie Blauschild, the team’s traveling secretary. “[Blauschild] was attached to Red like Velcro,” John Hewig, the Knicks’ director of communications at the time, recalls. “He always traveled with one of those Pan-Am plastic blue bags on his shoulder. And in it … they’d get those little bottles. Two-ounce bottles of scotch and vodka. And in that bag, that was all he had. It was filled right to the top. And they’d check in and Frankie would be in the other end of Red’s suite … and Frankie would come limping down through the hallway into Red’s suite and he’d sit down and pull out two or three bottles of that stuff. And Red and Frankie would drink scotch. Three or four bottles every night and sit around and talk. And they wouldn’t answer their door and Red wouldn’t take phone calls and stuff. That was their time.” Red agreed. “On the road I was prepared for any emergency,” he joked in his autobiography. “I always made sure I had a bottle of scotch in my bag for medicinal purposes.”⁸³

By the spring of 1982, Blauschild (and his son Keith, the ball boy) were still around, but Red knew his time as the Knicks coach was coming to a close. So he called Hewig and asked to meet him at a club located in the Garden.

“Red had a scotch,” Hewig told me. “It was about five o’clock in early March, and he said, ‘You know, I’m not coming back—I’m done.’ ” Before meeting with Hewig, Holzman had gone to Werblin, who asked his coach, “What’s it like in the morning after you lose, when you get up?” Red had responded, “I look at my wife Selma and thank God she’s still with me, and I know that my daughter Gail is well taken care of … so life’s pretty good for me.”⁸⁴

“This is the morning after a loss?” Werblin wanted to know.

“Yeah, or a win. Whatever. But I’m pretty happy,” Red replied.

And Sonny said, “Well, maybe you shouldn’t coach anymore.”

And Red said, “That’d be fine with me.”⁸⁵

After their cocktail and dinner, Red walked with Hewig around the Garden, before fans filed in for the game. “This is a very funny place,” Red told him. “You know, when this place is full it’s the most beautiful building in the world. It’s so loud and intimate, and everybody is putting their arms around you. But when there’s five thousand people in here like there will be tonight, it’s the ugliest place I’ve ever been.”⁸⁶

By the end of the season, five thousand wasn’t far off. Win or lose, the team continued to break low-attendance records at the Garden, including a record low (6,917) to watch the Knicks lose to the Bulls. As bad as the official numbers were, sportswriter Sam Goldaper believed the actual attendance was even worse.⁸⁷ “Really about half,” he wrote in the Times, “including Sonny Werblin, Eddie Donovan, and several seats with coats in them.” He estimated the actual total at closer to 2,000.⁸⁸ “I had bigger crowds in grade school,” Lucas joked, reasoning that maybe a lot of people were in church on Wednesdays. For his part, Richardson was not in a joking mood about the lack of spectators, but he understood. “Who wants to come out and see losers?” he asked the Post.⁸⁹

Knicks management hoped Westphal might turn around the team’s fortunes on the court and at the box office, giving them a white star they had lacked since Bill Bradley’s retirement half a dozen years earlier. At thirty-one, Westphal might not have been the same player he was when he made four straight All-NBA teams for the Suns in the late seventies, but he still knew how to put the ball in the basket and how to run an offense, both of which the Knicks desperately needed.

Before signing with the Knicks, Westphal had an impressive pedigree dating back to his high school days in California. Instead of joining UCLA, which was in the middle of winning nine NCAA titles in a ten-year stretch, he shocked everyone by signing to play college ball at USC.⁹⁰ Westphal helped turn the Trojans around, and in 1972 he became a Boston Celtic. Three years later a trade sent him to Phoenix. In Arizona, the ambidextrous guard became a superstar, drawing many comparisons to retired Lakers legend Jerry West. Westphal did not fit the stereotypical profile of a white guard in the seventies, though. “He loved to dunk,” wrote Boston sportswriter Bob Ryan, who called him “one of the true white leapers in the game.”⁹¹ In 1979, Westphal peaked athletically: he not only earned first-team All-NBA honors but also won the league’s “HORSE” competition, reached the finals of the Dewars’ Celebrity Tennis Classic in Las Vegas, and won a made-for-TV three-on-three half-court tournament with teammates Sam Jones (a retired Boston Celtic) and David Steinberg (a well-known comic). Westphal was so competitive that Jimmy Walker (better known as J. J. on Good Times) threatened to sue the then-Phoenix guard after suffering a cheek bruise from a rough Westphal drive.⁹² A year later, unhappy with the Suns organization, Westphal asked for a trade. He ended up in Seattle, who sent guard Dennis Johnson to Phoenix, in what was supposed to be a win-win, that rare NBA deal where both sides benefited. Instead, Johnson led the Suns to a 57–25 record while injuries derailed Westphal, who played in less than half the games for the 34–38 Sonics. So, when the Knicks called to express interest in Westphal, he jumped at the chance for a fresh start.

Westphal debuted for the Knicks on March 13, 1982, but Sly Williams—recently returned from his one-game suspension—was once again nowhere to be found. The Knicks tried to reach him, but his phone was out of order; later his brother called the team, explaining that Sly had eaten some bad Italian food. And so the Knicks suspended him again. Sly rejoined the team for five games in late March before being suspended for the third time of the season.⁹³

With Sly missing, New York dropped eight of its last nine games to finish a dismal 33–49, last place in the Atlantic Division and far out of playoff contention. “When you don’t have anything to play for,” Webster told the Times, “it’s difficult to go out onto the court. You can only play for your own pride.” Campy Russell was also frustrated. “I had high expectations,” he said. “But we never really materialized… . This is the biggest disappointment of my eight years in the league.”⁹⁴ Westphal played serviceably for the Knicks, averaging a shade under twelve points per game, but the team was just 4–14 after his signing. Years later Westphal lashed out at the lethargy of the Knicks teams he played for, charging that Coach Holzman canceled practices because of poor attendance. “To not have practices because you know guys won’t even bother to come to them?” Westphal remembered. “It was certainly a low point in Knicks history.”⁹⁵

Interviewed leaving the season’s last game, a fan summed everything up with one simple phrase: “Thank God it’s over.”⁹⁶

To be fair, there were a few bright spots in the dreary season besides Richardson’s “ship be sinking” quote. Sugar made his third-straight All-Star team and finished seventh in the league in assists, while once again leading in steals. And Russell led the NBA in three-point percentage, shooting an impressive 44 percent from behind the arc. “That was the last thing in the world I expected,” Russell laughed as he told me decades later. “When they called me and told me that, I said ‘What?’ I didn’t take three pointers. The three-point shots I took were primarily because we were down and were trying to get back in.”⁹⁷ For the season, Campy connected on 25 of his 57 three-point attempts, the lowest total made shots for a three-point percentage leader in NBA history. (As of 2023, a minimum of 82 three-pointers made is required in order to qualify for league leadership.)⁹⁸

Once again, uncertainty surrounded the team in the 1982 off-season. Everyone knew Holzman was done coaching, but would he move back into a consulting role? Or would he retire with Selma to their Long Island home? And who would replace him on the bench? Rumors mentioned Dave DeBusschere, but what about Jerry Colangelo, recently named Executive of the Year as the general manager of the Suns? Or maybe Dave Gavitt, a former coach of Providence College and then commissioner of the Big East Conference?

• 1981–82 Knicks
• Record: 33–49
• Playoffs: Did not qualify
• Coach: Red Holzman
• Average Home Attendance: 10,834
• Points per Game: (106.2—16th of 23)
• Points Allowed per Game: (108.9—12th of 23)
• Team Leaders:
  • Points: Micheal Ray Richardson (17.9 per game)
  • Rebounds: Maurice Lucas (11.3 per game)
  • Assists: Micheal Ray Richardson (7.0 per game)
  • Steals: Micheal Ray Richardson (2.6 per game)
  • Blocked Shots: Marvin Webster (1.1 per game)
  • All-Stars: Micheal Ray Richardson
• Notable Transactions: Received Maurice Lucas as compensation for the New Jersey Nets signing Ray Williams; signed Paul Westphal