5

“Black, White, Green, or Red”

1979–1980

On October 10, 1979, the New York Knicks released backup forwards Glen Gondrezick and John Rudd, cutting their roster down to the league-mandated eleven. Releasing Gondrezick and Rudd, both white, left the Knicks with eleven players. Eleven Black players. And so, when they took the court two days later in Atlanta against the Hawks, the 1979–80 Knicks became the first all-Black team in NBA history.

Cutting Gondrezick and Rudd bucked a long-standing tradition in professional basketball. As David Halberstam explains in Breaks of the Game, “on many teams the lower bench positions were often filled by marginal white players, kept aboard principally as a bone to the fans. The blacks resented this,” Halberstam wrote, “and they had a word for it, when a white was kept instead of a black. He’s stealin’, they would say, just stealin’ it.”¹ Walt Frazier agreed. “The unstated ‘rule’ in the NBA at the time,” he said, “was basically that if you were black, you were playing.”² When Frazier joined the league in the late sixties, “the ratio was supposed to be about 60 percent white and 40 percent black.” A decade later, nearly three out of four NBA players were Black, and even end-of-the-bench spots were now open to more talented African Americans.

Publicly, Knicks executives—all of whom were white—downplayed the historical significance of an all-Black roster. General Manager Eddie Donovan told reporters that “if we had kept Gondo [Gondrezick] and Rudd just because they were white, we would have lost the respect of our other players.”³ Madison Square Garden chairman Sonny Werblin agreed. “When you’re bad, you worry about getting good players,” he said. “You don’t care whether they’re black, white, green or red. There was no black-white decision to make, none whatsoever.”⁴ Werblin’s best friend and right-hand man, Jack Krumpe, argued that it was the media who created a controversy. “It was a merit system,” he told me, “we didn’t have good players, but it wasn’t because of their color.”⁵ And team trainer Michael Saunders recalls “no issues whatsoever. I was very happy with management that we didn’t keep a token white player or anything like that.”⁶ In fact, Krumpe insisted in telling me that they never even “used words like ‘token.’ ”⁷

Even Philadelphia 76ers star Julius Erving, probably the most high-profile Black player in the NBA at the time, said much the same when asked about the all-Black Knicks by Jet magazine reporters. “The game transcends color,” he told them, “when the ball drops into the net from 20 feet out, nobody thinks of the color of the man who tossed it. The ball is brown,” Erving continued, “but what fan is conscious of it?”⁸

A week after cutting Rudd and Gondo, on October 18, 1979, the Knicks traveled to Detroit to play the Pistons in the first NBA game featuring only Black players (the Pistons had one white player, but he never left the bench). Asked about the historical significance of the contest afterwards, Coach Holzman shrugged his shoulders and said, “so?”⁹ “What if we had 10 blacks and one white?” Red asked a reporter. “Or nine and two? Is that going to change people’s opinions? What if the 11 best players turned out to be all white? Would the same people then want me to keep a token black or two?”¹⁰ Still, before making final cuts, Red drew up a list of his top eleven players and instructed his assistant coach, Butch Beard—who was Black—to do the same. Both chose the same eleven.¹¹ Beard asked Holzman if he realized every player was Black. “Red looked at me,” Beard remembered, “and said, ‘We are choosing the best team in talent, not in color. I don’t care if they are all green.’ ”¹² Red also told the New York Amsterdam News, a local Black newspaper, that playing time was entirely up for grabs. “Every job is open,” Holzman said, “even women are welcome if they can cut the mustard.”¹³

Still, not everyone was standoffish or interested in sexist joking when it came to discussing race. And soon a high-profile personality connected to the team publicly addressed the racial situation of the 1979–80 Knicks. Ex–head coach Willis Reed, fired almost exactly a year earlier, told Jet magazine that he didn’t feel New York was ready for an all-Black team. Although he did not elaborate on his reasoning, he admitted he “would have kept one White player.”¹⁴

Privately, though, the debate was more delicate. “It was a very contentious situation,” Mel Lowell recalls. “I’m not going to discuss the hate mail and other things that would come in.” In fact, Werblin called Lowell, one of the Knicks’ vice presidents, into his office, and told him the team needed a “home run hitter who was white.” Lowell and Werblin flew to Los Angeles to meet Sam Schulman, the owner of the Seattle SuperSonics, to discuss a potential deal for Jack Sikma, a young center nicknamed Goldilocks for his long blonde hair. “Mr. Werblin wanted Sikma to be on the Knicks,” Lowell told me, “we must have done about ten permutations of trades and draft picks” before Schulman called off the deal. So Werblin and Lowell flew back home, right into a media firestorm.¹⁵

Issues of race became inseparable from discussions of the NBA in the late seventies. During the decade, the racial makeup of the league changed from about half the players in the league being Black, to more than three in four. “There is a ‘checkerboard’ in the NBA,” Milwaukee Bucks’ owner Marvin Fishman wrote in his 1978 book Bucking the Odds, “and everyone is aware of it—the players, the owners, everybody. For best results at the gate, you want a mixture.” In 1968, the Bucks almost selected Bill Hosket from Ohio State (the Knicks chose him tenth and he ended up as a member of the 1970 title team); instead, Fishman recalled, “we decided that we really didn’t want to draft the best white player. We wanted to draft the best player.” The Bucks chose Charlie Paulk, an African American forward. But two years later, they chose Hosket’s white teammate Gary Freeman, passing on future Hall of Famers Tiny Archibald and Calvin Murphy in the process.¹⁶ “White people have to have white heroes,” Cavaliers owner Ted Stepien told reporters. “I myself can’t relate to black heroes, I’ll be truthful—I respect them, but I need white people.” Like Fishman, Stepien insisted that “you need a blend of black and white. I think that draws and I think that’s a better team.”¹⁷ Interviewed for a Basketball Digest article a few months after the debut of the all-Black Knicks, commissioner Larry O’Brien fielded several questions about the racial makeup of the NBA. “I don’t think that the owners think in terms of color,” O’Brien said. “I just don’t find anyone focusing on how many blacks and whites are on the floor … [and] I feel the fan and viewer basically is color-blind.” Asked specifically about the Knicks, O’Brien insisted, “When the Knicks wound up with an entirely black team … lots of stories were written that it would adversely affect the team.” “When they move into playoff contention,” he said, “it will be reflected in attendance.”¹⁸ O’Brien hoped to cultivate Black attendance at NBA games but also to grow the league’s market share of Black viewers on television.¹⁹

TV viewers in the late seventies and early eighties were bombarded with issues of racial tension. The 1977 miniseries Roots revolutionized television broadcasts with its portrayal of Kunta Kinte and his offspring through generations of slavery, while sitcoms with predominantly Black casts like Sanford and Son and The Jeffersons addressed institutional racism in a humorous, if often crass, manner.²⁰ And in a 1981 episode of Diff’rent Strokes, Willis Jackson charged his white coach with racism after being cut in favor of a white player and sued the school because of its affirmative action policy.

And then there was Archie Bunker. In a 1980 episode of Archie’s Place, a spin-off of All in the Family, airing just two days before Americans elected Ronald Reagan to the presidency, Bunker was convinced that “Zimbabwe” was “a forward for the Knicks. Big tall colored guy.” Not every New Yorker was as culturally insensitive as Archie or George Jefferson or Fred Sanford, of course. But in an era when Bunker symbolized blue-collar white Americans, an all-Black basketball team on the nation’s biggest stage created many uncomfortable conversations about race and pro sports.

By the time Archie’s Place had its short TV run, the hip-hop scene, centered just a few miles from Bunker’s fictional Queens residence, had already changed dramatically. When DJ Kool Herc started mixing James Brown music on his turntables in the early 1970s, B-boys and B-girls downrocked on the dance floor while the Herculord sound system shook walls of nearby buildings. Now rappers took center stage. “B-boying was the main thing about a Kool Herc party,” Kurtis Blow recalls, while “a Flash party was more about Flash and you standing out in front of a stage watching Flash on those turntables cut it up.” So popular were people like Flash, Melle Mel, and DJ Hollywood that, Blow says, “all the breakdancers became MCs.”²¹

But for several years after DJ Kool Herc hosted his first party on Sedgwick Avenue, this movement lacked a unifying name. The first person to use the term “hip-hop” was probably Keith “Cowboy” Wiggins around 1978, while Lovebug Starski began using it in his performances around the same time, and Afrika Bambaataa adopted it as a cultural signifier.²² And Michael Holman, writing in the East Village Eye, was the first to use the term in print when, in 1982, he called it an “all inclusive tag for the rapping, breaking, graffiti-writing, crew fashion wearing street sub-culture.”²³ Yet Holman’s inclusive tag fell just a little short. Because by the time he used the term “hip-hop,” there was another central element to that culture: basketball.

Rucker Park in Harlem best exemplified this connection. In their 1979 hit, the Sugarhill Gang name-dropped the Knicks and Rucker, which had tournament games featuring an MC hyping the participants. The MC boasted, rapped, and rhymed on the microphone, and often tried out nicknames on star players—Julius Erving was “The Claw,” “Black Moses,” “Magic,” and “Little Hawk” before instructing the MC to “just call me the Doctor.”²⁴ Likewise, several Knicks players had playground nicknames. Earl Monroe, as already noted, was “Black Jesus,” “Black Magic,” and “Earl the Pearl,” while Harthorne Wingo was “Wingy,” and Dean Meminger was “Dean the Dream.”

The connection between hip-hop and playground basketball was made stronger in 1982, when Harlem rapper Greg Marius created the Entertainer’s Basketball Classic (EBC). The next generation of streetball players gained their reps in the EBC, as Rafer “Skip-2-My-Lou” Alston and Ed “Booger” Smith became legends for their ball handling wizardry. By the 1990s, the And1 crew was making waves with their streetball mixtapes, and hip-hop sensation Puff Daddy and Def Jam Recordings sponsored teams in the EBC.²⁵

Big-time tournaments like the Rucker and EBC featured MCs with microphones. But even pickup games on hot asphalt courts required the perfect soundtrack. “Basketball and music were founded on rhythmic schemes,” the 1980 edition of the In-Your-Face Basketball Book informed readers. “Pop music is the food of face,” its authors argued, “and live music always beats the [boom]box.”²⁶ Deejays like Disco Wiz practiced their craft on basketball courts while b-boy and b-girl crews worked up new dance moves. It was part of the same culture, accessible to anyone who could lace up a pair of sneakers (required footwear for anyone interested in the hoops or hip-hop scenes).

Rucker Park is the most important and well-known asphalt court in the United States. In the era of the rise of hip-hop, it was available only to the best of the best. “Unless you’re All-World, or at least All-City, plan to watch, not play,” In-Your-Face advised. Everyone else had to find a different spot to ball. Some ended up at the Cage on West Fourth Street and Sixth Avenue in Greenwich Village; others at the Valley in the Bronx, where 107.5 FM (WBLS, the city’s top R&B station) played on boomboxes. Still others dropped in at the Hole in Brooklyn, on Monroe and Sumner (WXLO 98.7 FM, playing disco and R&B, was the preferred radio station there), or joined former Knicks guards Dean Meminger and Dick Barnett at the Stuyvesant Town Courts on Eighteenth Street and First Avenue in Manhattan.²⁷ Players of all ability levels could find someplace to play in the city.

Like hip-hop music, playground basketball in New York City was dominated by Black men, but white players from both inside and outside the city made pilgrimages to sites listed in In-Your-Face. A few years after writing In-Your-Face, the authors published a sequel: The Back-In-Your-Face Guide to Pick-Up Basketball, including descriptions of even more courts and additional info about the games played there. The sequel described the level of play, number of courts, roughness of the games—and the racial makeup of the regulars. Using seasonings as a stand in for race (“salt stands for white; pepper for blacks”), the authors emphasized that its racial descriptions were “in no way endorsing the epidermal status quo” and encouraged readers: “if more white dudes sought out pepper places, and more bros took their games to salty locales, the world would be … you know what we’re saying.”²⁸

Whether playing on a salty or peppery court, ballers of all races were concerned with their shoes. And they weren’t alone; B-boys and B-girls had to make sure their kicks were scuff-free and stylish before they danced. ²⁹ In the early seventies, Adidas ruled both hip-hop and basketball fashion. Most college and pro players wore white leather Adidas Superstars, following the lead of Adidas pitchman Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. In New York, Superstars were so highly sought that potential buyers had to prove they played high school basketball to purchase a pair (at Carlsen Imports on Lower Broadway, the only store in the city that sold them).³⁰ But then Walt Frazier, the most famous of the celebrated Knicks, signed with Puma to launch the Clyde, a colored suede shoe with thick rubber outsoles. The Clyde, for which Frazier earned $0.25 per pair sold, instantly competed with the Superstar as the most sought-after kicks in the city, for both basketball players and B-boy dance crews.³¹ “If you got into hip-hop, you would get into sneakers,” SLAM magazine editor-in-chief Russ Bengtson explains, “and through sneakers you would maybe get into basketball.”³² Wearing the wrong shoes was like wearing the wrong gang colors. If you wanted to be authentic, a pair of sweet suede Clydes or leather Superstars better be on your feet. Keep those raggedy-ass canvas Chuck Taylors in the closet.

October 1979 (just a few weeks after the release of the Sugarhill Gang’s “Rapper’s Delight) was a busy month on the sports calendar: the “We Are Family” Pittsburgh Pirates beat the Baltimore Orioles in a thrilling seven-game World Series, legendary distance runner Bill Rodgers won his fourth-straight New York City Marathon, rookie quarterback Phil Simms debuted for the hometown Giants, and Larry Bird and Magic Johnson kicked off Hall of Fame NBA careers. With so many distractions, the all-Black Knicks might have been forgotten to history but for a pair of columns published that month in a local newspaper.

Two weeks after opening day, journalists Harvey Araton and Peter Vecsey penned side-by-side articles in the Post addressing fan reaction to the all-Black Knicks squad. Araton was generally optimistic about New Yorkers’ responses. “Not one ‘give us a White Hope’ banner has appeared” in Madison Square Garden, he wrote. “The other night, there were 17,000 people to watch the Knicks play the 76ers, and to those who had insisted that New York will not support an all-black team, I say you have lost Round 1.” Years later, Araton regretted downplaying the significance of the moment. “I should have been whistled for flagrant naivete,” he wrote, “race was the elephant in the arena, the microcosm of the society at large, whether people were willing to see it or not.”³³

The fall of 1979 marked the arrival of Reagan’s America, even though his election as president was a year away. Many Americans were already tired of the economic stagflation, expanding governmental bureaucracy, and racial unrest that dominated national politics in the late seventies. Reagan provided a symbol of change, popularizing the term “welfare queen” and demonstrating a willingness to engage in targeted anti-Black efforts by framing racial discontent in terms of states’ rights. The implication was that hardworking whites were funding government programs benefiting lazy people of color. When Reagan visited the South Bronx in 1980, he told reporters that he “hadn’t seen anything like this since London after the Blitz.”³⁴ For Reagan, like Carter before him, the South Bronx—the birthplace of one of the most important American cultural exports in the nation’s history—was less a real place than a cautionary tale. You can imagine, then, how an all-Black team in the largest city in the nation might rankle its (mostly white) fan base.³⁵

Still, Araton’s column reflected his hope that color-blind New Yorkers would embrace an all-Black NBA team. Vecsey, though, was far more negative about hometown support of the new-look Knicks.

“Judging from my mail,” Vecsey wrote, “a number of fans have no desire to watch only blacks perform. Especially when it costs big bucks. Several bigots have gone so far as to suggest they be renamed the ‘N-----bockers.’ ”³⁶

Yes, Peter Vecsey dropped the N-word in a newspaper column. In 1979.

To be fair, Vecsey couched his own statements in anonymity, identifying these “bigots” only as “a random sampling of season-ticket holders” to distance himself from use of the offensive term.³⁷ “I had heard people on the street use it,” Vecsey insisted, although Araton said “nobody ever called them that.”³⁸

Knicks players were privately livid after reading Vecsey’s column. “Nobody wanted to be called that,” Hollis Copeland said. “I thought it was in poor taste. But we just kind of let it go. We didn’t want to make a big stink.”³⁹ “It wasn’t like it was celebrated,” former Knick Rory Sparrow told me decades later. “It was more negative press than congratulatory.”⁴⁰ Bill Cartwright, the team’s first-round draft pick, agreed. “You would think New York, which is a mecca for folks to enter from different countries around the world, wouldn’t have any problem.”⁴¹ Two members of the Family blamed the media. Ray Williams said, “The press made a big deal out of it, and the guys on the team thought that was unfair.” Mike Glenn agreed: “It’s only the press who makes something out of it.” Turning the question back at Vecsey, Glenn asked, “Do you write stories about how there’s all white guys on the Boston Bruins?”⁴² As Spike Lee, then finishing up his degree from Morehouse College, remembered, “I don’t know how that thing started, but it wasn’t started by black people.”⁴³

Howie Evans, a reporter for the New York Amsterdam News provided an alternative view of the importance of the Knicks from the perspective of a Black journalist. “This is a team that absolutely must prove itself,” he wrote. “All eyes will be on the New York Knicks. They have taken a bold step. In the greatest city in the world, racism is rampant and growing more blatant each passing day … minorities in this city are in a death-struggle for survival.”⁴⁴ Maintaining a roster composed entirely of Black players meant more than just wins or losses. The eyes of the nation would be on these Knicks, tracking every win as not only a victory against another NBA team, but as a triumph for the Black race. Just as Billie Jean King’s “Battle of the Sexes” win over Bobby Riggs was a boon for women’s rights; the success or failure of the 1979–80 Knicks could advance or hamper the cause of Black people in New York City and indeed across the country.

While it is impossible to know whether Vecsey actually heard people on the street use the slur as he reported, its racist underpinnings certainly fit the attitudes among some New York City whites at the time. A few months after the debut of the all-Black Knicks, Dr. Frank T. Bannister Jr. penned an article for Ebony magazine titled “Search for ‘White Hopes’ Threatens Black Athletes.” “White fans are beginning to show their uneasiness,” Bannister wrote. “They are searching for reassuring White symbols of power in the sports world.” Not only were most NBA superstars Black. Bannister said, “Resentment surfaced early this season in pro basketball when the New York Knickerbockers became an all-Black team.”⁴⁵ League-wide, Bannister continued, “91 per cent of the fans during the regular season are White, and these fans are demanding more White players—good, bad, or indifferent.” During the 1980s, he predicted, there would be a greater number of white players, as white owners and general managers would acquiesce to fans demanding greater racial representation. He was wrong; in fact, the proportion of Black players in the league grew to over 80 percent by the mid-1990s before an influx of European white players brought the figure back down to around 75 percent.⁴⁶

It is significant that this blackening of the Knicks took place as the Black population of New York City was shifting throughout the five boroughs. In his study of Canarsie, a neighborhood in southeastern Brooklyn, Jonathan Rieder explains that local residents experienced a “time of danger and dispossession” as their Jewish and Italian ethnic whiteness was reinforced by “the fear of external dangers.” Graffiti, an important aspect of hip-hop culture, as well as rap music, demonstrated to local residents a “sign of blacks’ reluctance to observe the most basic proprieties” and “added to the visual estrangement.” These were white, ethnic Americans claiming to be victims of reverse racism; it was their neighborhood under attack from an invading, dark-skinned menace—“hoodlum blacks [who] act like animals” one resident complained—just like white players clinging to spots on NBA rosters. “When the blacks say ‘Black Power,’ ‘Black this,’ ‘Black that,’ ” one Canarsie resident said at the time, “it has a religious connotation… . We are white, and we have to fight for what they are taking from us. White is also a religious term. Let’s take back what is ours.”⁴⁷ It isn’t hard to imagine white residents of Canarsie—or Flatbush or Bed-Stuy or Tribeca—dropping the N-word when describing their local, all-Black basketball team.

Players’ skin tone was the most controversial issue facing the Knicks that fall, but it was not the only contentious issue for the franchise. In 1946, New York joined the Basketball Association of America (BAA) using a logo featuring a cartoonish Knickerbocker decked out in royal blue and orange—the official colors of the city since its birth as part of the Dutch colony of New Amsterdam. The name “Knickerbocker” can be traced to Washington Irving, best known for his short stories “Rip Van Winkle” and “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” who also wrote under the nom de plume Diedrich Knickerbocker.

For thirty-two seasons, the Knickerbockers embraced this manufactured heritage and used some variation of Dutch national colors—wearing white jerseys at home and blue on the road, trimmed in orange. But in 1979, the team introduced new kits, swapping out the royal blue and orange for dark blue and maroon. “I was tremendously offended by it,” trainer Michael Saunders told me, still incensed forty years later. “I think it was Mike Burke … what college has those colors? The University of Pennsylvania. That’s where he went to school.”⁴⁸ Also for the first time, the word “Knicks” replaced “New York” across the stomach, below the players’ number. It was a radical change and lasted until 1983, when the team quietly switched back to a more traditional look.

Knicks’ execs hoped the new uniforms would help their young team establish their own identity separate from the Golden Age Knicks. But who would lead this new generation of Knicks? Ray Williams, entering his third year, told reporters “I believe I can be that leader,” but he remained inconsistent as the lead guard.⁴⁹ Maybe Micheal Ray Richardson, a nightly triple-double threat and purveyor of countless “Sugarisms” in interviews. Or maybe it could be Cartwright, drafted third overall that summer. Moving east certainly marked a major life change for Cartwright, relocating from Sacramento into an apartment in Weehawken, New Jersey. During training camp, he also learned that adjusting to life in the NBA was about more than just learning a new offense. “Really kind of finding your way around” was a challenge for Cartwright, who latched onto a quartet of fellow rookies: Larry Demic, Sly Williams, Geoff Huston (from Brooklyn), and Hollis Copeland. ⁵⁰

The young, all-Black Knicks started the 1979–80 season with three wins and three losses in their first six games but looked more like a cohesive team than they had in years. Yet only 7,911 fans turned up to watch the Knicks defeat the Indiana Pacers on October 23, the lowest total since the new Garden opened in 1968. Those in attendance saw lanky forward Toby Knight score 34 points, Cartwright add 24 points and 11 rebounds, and Richardson finish one assist shy of a triple-double, contributing 17 points, 11 rebounds and 9 assists in the team’s 136–112 drubbing of the Pacers. “When the public realizes that we’re for real,” Werblin predicted, “they will be back.”⁵¹

The young Knicks showed glimpses of being real, hovering around .500 all season despite an inexperienced roster, but the public stayed away. Given that attendance was down league-wide, it is probably wrong to ascribe the downturn in New York City solely to the racial makeup of the Knicks. Sure, the NBA was becoming increasingly populated by dark-skinned players, but does that entirely explain fan apathy? And why did fans stay away even as the team was young, exciting, and reasonably successful? The neighborhood around Madison Square Garden was no more dangerous than it had been for most the 1970s. Ticket prices were not significantly higher than when the team was a perennial title contender. Yet fewer and fewer fans turned out for the games.

Whatever the cause, Garden was pitifully empty for most of the winter. In front of fewer than 9,000 fans—in an arena seating more than twice that—the Knicks pulled out one of their most memorable wins of the season on November 20. With one minute left to go in the third quarter, New York trailed the visiting Houston Rockets 98–75. The game seemed virtually over, thanks to Rockets’ All-Stars Calvin Murphy and Moses Malone, and New Yorkers began filing out, deciding that a drink at Charley O’s was preferable to watching the Knicks that night. A few hundred fans stuck around, and with eight minutes left the Knicks still trailed by 18. Six minutes later, New York had sliced the lead to 7. A final rebound and layup tied the game at 117–117, and in overtime the Knicks pulled out an unlikely 130–125 win. It was Red Holzman’s six hundredth career win as a head coach.⁵²

Hoping to give the Knicks’ young guards more playing time, Burke traded guard Jim Cleamons to Washington in early December. Two years earlier, Cleamons’s arrival had marked the end of the Walt Frazier era. Now he was dealt a few days before the Knicks celebrated Walt Frazier Night, honoring the recently retired Clyde. “When I saw that [announcement of Walt Frazier Night],” Cleamons told me decades later, “I said I wouldn’t be around to see that happen.”⁵³ He was right. A day after trading Cleamons, the Knicks traveled to Washington, and Richardson scored the game-winning three-point play after driving around Cleamons, his teammate a day earlier. This time, Richardson did get a triple-double, finishing with 16 points, 10 rebounds, and 10 assists.⁵⁴ Williams might have been the locker room leader of the young Knicks, but Micheal Ray was emerging as the team’s best player.

While Richardson and Williams began to gel in the absence of Cleamons, another veteran, this one with a long and storied history as a Knick, was on his last legs. After the Cleamons trade, Earl Monroe was almost eight years older than his next-oldest teammate, Marvin Webster, but still occasionally showed glimpses of his electrifying one-on-one ability. “You see a lot of guys trying to emulate him,” former Bullets teammate Wes Unseld told reporters. “They try to shoot like him, spin off the ball. He has kids everywhere trying to be like him. He was the first ‘Magic.’ Anyone after him is second-rate.” Glenn agreed. “You call Earvin Johnson ‘Magic’ and he’s not even ‘Magic Jr.’ ”⁵⁵ Glenn and Unseld clearly undervalued Johnson, but their points stand. It was time to honor the great Earl Monroe, to remember him not as a hobbling backup guard for a middling team dominated by younger players, but as “The Pearl,” “Magic,” “The Lord’s Prayer,” and “Black Jesus,” the playground legend and basketball superstar.

Monroe played his last game as a Knick on March 27, 1980. But a day earlier, fans got one last taste of the Monroe of old. Against the resurgent Boston Celtics—powered by rookie forward Larry Bird—Pearl came off the bench and, in fifteen minutes of action, poured in 25 points, including a 10-for-12 performance from the field. Boston won by eight, but it was vintage Pearl.

By the end, Monroe was clearly of a different generation than most of his teammates: the last remaining link to the old Knicks. “Earl kind of went to the beat of his own drum,” Saunders told me. “Earl would go to the airport on his own, wouldn’t necessarily take the team bus to the airport.”⁵⁶ He had arrived in New York in 1971 following four outstanding seasons in Baltimore where he averaged over twenty points per game. But after the trade to the Big Apple, Monroe set aside individual success for the good of his new team. He averaged 15.5 points per game in helped the Knicks win an NBA title in 1973.

Monroe rarely talks about his last years as a Knick, preferring to discuss the days when the Garden was Eden or his time as a young superstar with the Bullets. Woody Allen, a lifelong Knicks fan who watched Monroe play hundreds of times from his seat behind the scorer’s table, later reflected about Pearl’s time in the Big Apple. “I, amongst all my friends, couldn’t help wondering if Earl Monroe’s great sacrifice, the voluntary reigning in of his flamboyant theatrical court genius to become a cog in an organized unit, wasn’t too high a price to pay for a ring.”⁵⁷ Monroe won a ring but never became the once-in-a-generation superstar he had seemed destined to become in Baltimore.

As a Knick, Monroe developed numerous outside interests. In 1972, he started in the entertainment business managing the Aleems, a Harlem-based duo who had performed with Jimi Hendrix a few years earlier. Under Monroe, they released an album as the Prana People, which realized modest success in dance clubs around the city. More importantly, Monroe was hooked on being a part of the music business. He founded Pretty Pearl Records, which evolved into Reverse Spin Entertainment, eventually moving to an office in Studio 902, nine floors above West Thirty-Eighth Street.⁵⁸

Many of Monroe’s forays into music were in promoting R&B, soul, and funk. Some of the bigger acts he worked with were Joe Simon, whose 1972 hit “Power of Love” sold more than a million copies and reached the top of the R&B charts, and Millie Jackson, known for her 1974 soul album Caught Up.

But Monroe was also involved in early hip-hop recordings. He helped promote the Fatback Band who in 1979 released their hit single “King Tim III (Personality Jock),” one of the first commercially successful hip-hop songs: rap in its earliest form.⁵⁹ A slight reference to basketball appears in the song’s first lines, when Tim Washington (King Tim) raps, “Slam dunk, do the jerk / Let me see your body work.”

By the time the Fatback Band released their album XII, rap was making occasional appearances on pop charts. “King Tim III” peaked at number 26 on the R&B chart, while “Rapper’s Delight” made it all the way to number 36 on the pop chart (the Billboard Hot 100) that summer. Despite some success, the folks at Billboard predicted that rap was “a passing novelty that will soon go the way of all fads.”⁶⁰ Yet in the Bronx, the hip-hop scene was exploding. Performers expanded their reach beyond the borders of the South Bronx and began engaging in verbal battles for street cred across the city. The Cold Crush Brothers and Fantastic Five engaged in a legendary rivalry, peaking when the two sides battled in July 1981 for a $1,000 prize. Tapes of the battle circulated through the city, and soon their notoriety reached filmmaker Charlie Ahearn, working on a documentary about hip-hop.

Connecting music to sport was not unique to the playgrounds of urban New York City. Before rap and hip-hop, basketball was most often linked to jazz: improvisational and with room for both group performance and solo work.⁶¹ Basketball and jazz were also—as historian Todd Boyd points out—“two arenas where Black people have had the best opportunity to express themselves.” With the pioneering work of DJ Kool Herc on the soundboards and Earl the Pearl on the courts, hip-hop and basketball both thrived in urban environments. Especially in the seventies hip-hop symbolized Black culture, providing a “soundtrack to a lifestyle.”⁶² “Rap,” journalist Pete Croatto writes, “connected with basketball and the NBA on a deeper level … rap’s popularity came from kids, the same group that the NBA would ultimately target.” Ron Thomas, USA Today’s basketball editor, “The NBA decided that it was going to make being a black league, it was going to accept it as its culture—what we could call now its brand.”⁶³

Instead of pushing back from identifying as a predominantly African American league, in the mid-eighties the NBA began embracing the connection between its players, fans, and hip-hop culture. “They wanted to appeal to the youth,” Christopher “Play” Martin (from the group “Kid ’n Play”) remembers. “That was the sound of the youth. That’s what they loved. That’s what appealed to them. That was the language, the style, the culture.”⁶⁴

Basketball also, inadvertently, created perhaps the best-known New York–based hip-hop group of the generation: Run-DMC. As the story goes, Joseph Simmons (DJ Run) hung out with Darryl McDaniels (DMC) at the Two-Fifth Park in Hollis, Queens, the center of the neighborhood’s social life. In the summer of 1978, the duo played ball all day long at Two-Fifth or Jamaica Park and then went home for quick showers before returning to listen to MCs rap and deejays spin records on turntables brought from home. The two remained close in high school, even as they moved apart from each other. Joseph fought with his older brother, promoter Russell Simmons, to get a shot at producing a record while Darryl (enrolled in a private school in Harlem) was exposed to jam tapes of Afrika Bambaataa and Grand Wizzard Theodore. A few years later, they added Jason Mizell (Jam Master Jay), the leader of the Hollis Crew, and began performing around the city.⁶⁵ The rest, as they say, is history.⁶⁶

While Run-DMC were just emerging onto the scene, the NBA geared up for its annual All-Star game in 1980. More than 19,000 fans showed up in Washington, D.C., to cheer on three superstar rookies: Larry Bird, Magic Johnson, and Bill Cartwright. Not since 1954, when Ray Felix, Don Sunderlage, and Jack Molinas took the court, had three first-year players suited up for an NBA All-Star Game. This time Magic scored 12 points for the West squad, while Bird and Cartwright scored 7 and 8 respectively in helping the East to a 144–138 win.

Cartwright was slowly gaining recognition as an elite offensive center. In mid-March, he scored a last-second basket to give the Knicks a 111–110 win over the visiting Atlanta Hawks, capping an outstanding 21-point, 16-rebound effort. Sport magazine argued that he was a contender for Rookie of the Year, favorably placing Cartwright with “Bird and Johnson at the head of the freshman class.” Statistically, Cartwright certainly merited that recognition; after all, he finished the season as the rookie leader in points scored, field goal percentage, and minutes played—the first player to pull that off since Abdul-Jabbar (then known as Lew Alcindor) a decade earlier.⁶⁷

Shortly after his heroic performance against the Hawks, Bill Cartwright and his wife, Sheri, celebrated their most important moment of the season—the arrival of their first child, a son named Justin. Before and after Justin was born, the Cartwrights spent a lot of time listening to their home stereo, which played records from their favorite bands: James Brown, the Platters, and the Shirelles. Road trips meant time away from Sheri and Justin, so Bill brought a portable cassette player, which he hummed along to while listening through his headphones.⁶⁸

Bill and Sheri were also adjusting to living on the East Coast and in a much bigger city than where they had grown up (Elk Grove, California, population 11,000). “Country folks have their problems for sure,” Bill admitted. “Like their tendency toward complacency when they have big problems. City people, on the other hand are too competitive,” he told reporters. “They’re uptight and sometimes blinded by their competitiveness. Yeah, I’ll take that country life.”⁶⁹ Maybe not the most comforting words for Knicks fans, but Bill had already demonstrated a willingness to mix it up on the court, including a preseason dust-up with Golden State Warriors center Robert Parish. “He hit me, and so I hit him back, and we squared off, and that was it,” Cartwright told me. “Got to let people know that you’re coming and that you’re not scared. If you want to throw some punches, we’ll do that. If you want to play, we’ll do that.”⁷⁰

Cartwright was a rock for the Knicks, but race remained an all-encompassing aspect of the season for the all-Black squad. “If you get the lead and didn’t keep the lead, it was implied that our players weren’t smart enough to keep the lead,” assistant coach Beard recalls. “That’s how things were said.”⁷¹ The team lost plenty of leads that season and hovered around .500 for most of the year; in fact, Cartwright’s last-second basket against the Hawks pulled the Knicks to 38–38 with six games left on the schedule. The Knicks only needed to win two or three games to guarantee themselves a playoff spot. Instead, they dropped three in a row.

“We have to be synergetic,” Hollis Copeland said following their latest loss. “I don’t know how you spell it, but it means we have to be together.”⁷²

After a win over the Cavs, New York traveled to Boston for an incredibly important game against the despised Celtics. Both teams played with solid “synergetic-ism,” to steal a phrase from Copeland, in an old-school, physical Boston–New York classic. Two old-timers suited up for the game: Monroe for the Knicks and Dave Cowens for the Celtics. But neither of the two got involved in the game’s physicality. Early in the first quarter, Toby Knight fouled Bird, knocking the rookie into the basket support. As Bird limped off the court, Celtics coach Bill Fitch called on little-used reserve Jeff Judkins. As soon as play restarted, Judkins grabbed Ray Williams in a bearhug and tried to wrestle him to the ground. Officials called a foul and Judkins checked back out, spending the rest of the game on the bench. Later, Richardson and Nate Archibald got into a shoving match, as did Knicks reserve forward Larry Demic and former apple of the Knicks’ eye Rick Robey. New York somehow led by four points late in the game, but another long-toothed Knicks-killer, Pistol Pete Maravich, in his only season as a Celtic, poured in twelve fourth quarter points to lead Boston to a 129–121 victory.

Playing the Celtics tight was great, but the Knicks needed more than a moral victory and now their final game—against the division-leading Philadelphia 76ers—was a must-win if they wanted to make the playoffs.

In front of 19,591 screaming fans (they could still pack the Garden for important games), the Knicks clung to a 101–99 lead with just eleven seconds left on the clock. Philly scored to tie the game at 101, and Holzman called a timeout. Richardson threw away the inbounds pass and Dr. J collected it and drove hard to the basket, colliding with Knight as he flipped in the game-winning layup. “It was an obvious offensive foul,” Holzman complained afterward. “He stuck his knee in Toby’s chest … it was an offensive foul.”⁷³ Despite Holzman and 19,591 referees screaming for a foul, the official officials kept their whistles silent, and Philly escaped with a two-point win. “If this is the end for us, then it’s some damned way to finish,” Demic told reporters.⁷⁴ “Our last game of the year,” Holzman recalled later, “kind of symbolized the season for us.”⁷⁵ Once more, the Knicks’ slim playoff hopes rested with another team. If the Nets beat the Bullets, the Knicks were playoff-bound; but if Washington won, New York was out of luck.

Of the Knicks’ players and coaches, only Richardson, joined by an older brother and their girlfriends, traveled to Piscataway, New Jersey, and the Rutgers Athletic Center to watch the Bullets-Nets game in person. The rest of Richardson’s teammates sat around the radio listening to WVNJ’s John Sterling’s play-by-play. Midway through the fourth quarter, the Nets cut the Bullets lead to one, giving New York hope. But a late Washington run, powered by ageless center Wes Unseld’s 14 points, 20 rebounds, and 5 assists, gave the visiting team a 93–87 win. “It’s all over now,” Richardson grumbled in an interview.⁷⁶ “There ain’t nothing to think about. There ain’t nothing to say. It’s been rough.”⁷⁷

The next day, Holzman called a team meeting. It was short and sweet but not well-attended. Webster and Monroe were no-shows, both unhappy with their roles on the team. Holzman ignored his absentee veterans and heaped praise on their young teammates. “These kids deserve credit,” Red told reporters. “I’ve got a good feeling about these kids.”⁷⁸ In particular, Holzman pointed out Richardson’s efforts in earning his first All-Star nod. Micheal Ray “did everything but take tickets this year,” Holzman said.⁷⁹ He wasn’t far off. For the first time in league history, a player led the NBA in three categories as Richardson paced the circuit in assists and steals but also (uh-oh!) turnovers.

The 1979–80 Knicks, best known for being the first all-Black team in NBA history, finished the season 39–43. It was an eight-game improvement over the previous year, and only a series of unfortunate breaks—a no-call on a Dr. J charge, a fourth-quarter explosion from gimpy-kneed “Pistol Pete,” and a last-minute Bullets win—kept them from postseason play.

It was also a young team. Richardson and Cartwright rightfully earned most of the accolades for the Knicks’ modest success. Cartwright averaged almost 22 points per game as a rookie while shooting nearly 55 percent from the field. But Toby Knight and Ray Williams were almost as important. Knight averaged 19 points on 53 percent shooting from the field as a slashing small forward, while Williams finished second on the team (and seventeenth in the league) with 21 points per game while handing out 6 assists and grabbing 5 rebounds per game. Ray also began to feel more comfortable in this, his third NBA season, and he seemed poised to assume the leadership of the team as Monroe was phased out. “It’s a whole new atmosphere here this year,” Williams said after the season. “This year we socialize more and we’re closer. I think maybe because it’s such a young team and so many of the guys are single that we’ve had the time. I feel,” he continued, “like I’ve finally found my place here.”⁸⁰

• 1979–80 Knicks
• Record: 39–43
• Playoffs: Did not qualify
• Coach: Red Holzman
• Average Home Attendance: 12,405
• Points per Game: (114.0—4th of 22)
• Points Allowed per Game: (115.1—20th of 22)
• Team Leaders:
  • Points: Bill Cartwright (21.7 per game)
  • Rebounds: Bill Cartwright (8.9 per game)
  • Assists: Micheal Ray Richardson (10.1 per game)
  • Steals: Micheal Ray Richardson (3.2 per game)
  • Blocked Shots: Joe C. Meriweather (1.8 per game)
• All-Stars: Bill Cartwright and Micheal Ray Richardson
• Notable Transactions: Drafted Bill Cartwright in the first round of the 1979 NBA draft