June 18, 1985—Madison Square Garden: Manhattan

“The New York Knicks, with the first pick,” Commissioner David Stern began, a slight smile creasing the corners of his clean-shaven face, “select Patrick Ewing of Georgetown.” Cameras cut away to a packed Felt Forum in Madison Square Garden for the 1985 National Basketball Association (NBA) draft, where Knicks fans cheered, pumped their fists, and broke into spontaneous chants of “Pa-trick! Pa-trick!”

Ewing, seated in the front row, unfolded his seven-foot-tall frame and walked to the stage, where he posed for photographs with Stern and Knicks executive Dave DeBusschere, holding a white number thirty-three jersey in front of his tailored gray suit. Over the next fifteen years, Ewing would lead the Knicks to a pair of NBA Finals appearances while carving out a career that ended in eleven All-Star appearances as well as a spot on the league’s 50th Anniversary All-Time Team.

Looking back, for Knicks fans the Ewing Era would be a Silver Age: an almost dynasty.

May 5, 1973—The Forum: Inglewood, California

A dozen years before Ewing arrived on the scene, the Knicks were on top of the basketball world after winning their second NBA title in four seasons. Their victims in 1973, just as they had been three years earlier, were the flashy Los Angeles Lakers of Jerry West and Wilt Chamberlain. These Knicks, led by Willis Reed, Bill Bradley, Earl Monroe, Walt Frazier, and DeBusschere himself, who was then an all-star power forward, captivated New Yorkers with their unselfishness and moxie.

Madison Square Garden (a metaphorical Eden) was always full for home games, as fans incessantly chanted “De-fense! De-fense!” to urge on their hometown heroes. Dozens of books, headlined by Harvey Araton’s When the Garden Was Eden (and Michael Rapaport’s ESPN documentary of the same title), chronicle this period: the Golden Age of Knicks basketball.

In the decade or so between the end of the Golden Age and the beginning of the Silver Age, the Knicks struggled to maintain consistent on-court success. As Thomas Rogers wrote in the New York Times, “Madison Square Garden, which used to be a sort of Garden of Eden for the Knicks seems now to have turned into a torture chamber.”¹ From 1973 to 1985, the franchise failed to return to the finals and missed the playoffs about as often as they made them. Player turnover hurt team chemistry while retirements of core Knicks players and replacements unable (or unwilling) to embrace the Knicks’ style of play marked the end of a short-lived dynasty. And in the front office, the combined efforts of dozens of team executives failed to continue the success of the franchise as the league expanded from seventeen teams to twenty-three in the post-ABA-merger era. The Knicks were not alone in their ineptitude; many teams failed to adjust, and the era became largely remembered (if at all) for its lack of dynasties and star power, resulting in relative parity and fan apathy. Simply put, what had worked to build a dynasty in the early seventies did not work as free agency arrived mid-decade.

During this in-between era, no NBA team better epitomized the struggles of a developing Black culture in the United States than these Knicks. By the late seventies, most pro basketball players were African American; in 1979, the Knicks fielded the first all-Black team in NBA history. Locally, sportswriter Peter Vecsey quoted an unnamed source who called the team the “N-----bockers,” an offensive term with which many white ethnic New Yorkers might have agreed; nationally, NBA owners debated the pros and cons of having so many dark-skinned players on their rosters while trying to appeal to their (mostly white) fan base as white backlash in opposition to measures like affirmative action propelled Ronald Reagan to the Oval Office. NBA attendance and TV ratings plummeted in this era, and no team witnessed a larger downturn than the Knicks. Free agency arrived, and the Knicks spent lavishly (and usually screwed up). Player salaries skyrocketed—again New York set the pace. Drug use among African Americans rose in the late seventies and early eighties, peaking with the crack epidemic of the mid-eighties, so it is fitting that two of the most high-profile drug users in the NBA, Spencer Haywood and Micheal Ray Richardson, developed cocaine habits in New York City as members of the Knicks.

This was a gritty period in the Knicks’ hometown as well. Films like Taxi Driver and Fort Apache: The Bronx impart a sense of impending apocalypse in Gotham, particularly in the South Bronx, which came to symbolize “America’s ‘inner city’ … an iconography of urban ruin in America.”² The nation was facing a rising tide of conservatism, a drug epidemic, and a perceived urban crisis. In 1975, disgruntled cops handed out pamphlets that read “Welcome to Fear City,” guidebooks for tourists hoping to escape Manhattan alive and unmugged.³ Mayors Abe Beame and Ed Koch struggled through a crippling financial crisis while middle-class families continued their decades-old abandonment of the city for suburban safety. President Gerald Ford famously refused to bail out the near-bankrupt municipality, prompting the Daily News to print a headline proclaiming, “Ford to City: Drop Dead.” An electrical blackout in July 1977 resulted in widespread looting, and arson that fall led to the apocryphal call that that the Bronx was burning. Crime, drugs, and white flight gutted the inner city while flashing neon signs advertising peep shows and X-rated movies lit up a lurid Times Square.

Still, not all was doom and gloom. Although disco music would later become a target of ridicule and scorn, it blossomed in downtown clubs like Studio 54 and reached its zenith with the 1977 hit movie Saturday Night Fever, set in Brooklyn. The influence of disco stretched far beyond wearing white polyester leisure suits and dancing the Hustle, however. It helped inspire a generation of impoverished young Black and Latin American men and women in the South Bronx to create a musical genre, later dubbed rap, within a new cultural phenomenon known as hip-hop. Deejays remixed disco records and competed against one another for turf, wiring their sound systems into the light poles of city parks so parties could last late into the night. Within a decade, this antiestablishment, countercultural musical style blending disco, funk, and R&B became the voice of a generation—much like rock ’n’ roll or Motown in previous decades—exported globally and becoming as recognizably American as McDonald’s and Michael Jordan.

By the early eighties, the two most forward-facing outlets of Black culture were professional basketball and hip-hop. Each was a potential avenue of advancement and recognition for young men of color.

On outdoor basketball courts, like Rucker Park in Harlem or The Cage in Greenwich Village, near the deejay stands where musical history was being made, another element of this evolving Black culture developed. There legendary basketball playground battles took place, sometimes featuring Knicks players in attendance or even lacing up sneakers to play. Knicks legend Earl Monroe was dubbed “The Pearl” by white media seeking an alliterative nickname, but on the playground, among Black fans and commentators, Monroe was known as “Black Magic.”

Monroe was just one of the future Hall of Famers on the Knicks teams in the era after Eden. Although the franchise lacked consistent success, there were moments of transcendent individual brilliance. As a Knick, Monroe showcased his refined playground style, dipping, ducking, and spinning his way to more than seventeen thousand career points while Walt Frazier—the undisputed king of style in the league during the seventies—earned nearly a dozen All-NBA and All-Defensive team honors. Bob McAdoo was one of the greatest shooters in league history and, at six foot ten, was far ahead of his time as a “stretch center.” When sober, Haywood was a nightly double-double threat, and Richardson became the first player in league history to lead the NBA in both assists and steals for a season. And then there was Christmas Day, 1984, when Bernard King dropped 60 points on the New Jersey Nets, setting a franchise record that would last for nearly three decades.

The cast of characters (Black and white) the Knicks employed during this era is almost unbelievable. Haywood told reporters he would save the Knicks when he arrived in ’75; five years later, he was playing for the Lakers and, struggling with a cocaine addiction, arranged to have someone murder his head coach. Frazier and Monroe formed the celebrated Rolls-Royce backcourt, epitomizing style on and off the court. Bill Bradley would convey his popularity as a Knick who was supposed to be a white savior into a US Senate seat and a run for the presidency; his good friend Phil Jackson would win eleven championship rings coaching the Chicago Bulls and Los Angeles Lakers. King electrified New Yorkers with his near superhuman scoring skills but also faced allegations of alcoholism and sexual assault and, just three months after his prolific Christmas night scoring outburst, blew out his knee and played only six more games as a Knick. Richardson, nicknamed Sugar, struggled with a pronounced stutter and once told reporters, in response to a team losing streak, “the ship be sinking.” When asked how low it could sink, he shrugged and said, “The sky’s the limit.” A few years later, Richardson would become one of the first players banned from the NBA for violating the league’s substance abuse policy. He claimed his suspension was racially motivated to scare white players into quitting.

Team executives and coaches were no less colorful. Sonny Werblin managed the club on behalf of Gulf & Western for most of the decade after a career spent running a multimillion-dollar talent agency. He also once owned the American Football League’s New York Jets and famously signed Joe Namath to an AFL contract in 1965. Werblin was energetic and blunt, firing one head coach for supposedly issuing him an ultimatum, and remained close friends with President Reagan during the ex-actor’s time in the Oval Office.

Mike Burke, another team executive, led an almost unbelievable life; he tried out for the Philadelphia Eagles in 1941, served in the navy during World War II, married into the Ringling family (of circus fame), spied in Europe for the CIA during the Cold War, helped produce the film Cloak and Dagger based on his wartime experiences, battled Jimmy Hoffa’s Teamsters on behalf of his family’s circus, and bought and sold the Yankees (to George Steinbrenner) before running both Madison Square Garden and the Knicks.⁴

Red Holzman was a Jewish man from Brooklyn who played pro basketball even before there was an NBA. Red had two stints as the Knicks’ head coach before being replaced by Hubie Brown, now best known as an analyst but then a fiery, gravelly voiced coach who yelled and cursed unmercifully at his players.

I was fortunate enough to interview dozens of these Knicks players and executives, and their voices, augmented by extensive newspaper and magazine reports, provide an authentic, firsthand account of a team during a time of transformation in New York City.

Between 1973 and 1985, the Knicks fell from the top of the league to the bottom before slowly rising back into contention. They never attained the success of their championship squads as roster turnover, underperforming superstars, and a desire by the front office for short-term success trumped long-term franchise building. In some ways, their struggles mirrored those facing New York City over the same span. In the mid-seventies, as the Knicks lost more games than they won, the city was on the brink of bankruptcy thanks to short-sighted city officials, while street gangs and urban disinvestment created what Ebony magazine called “the crisis of the Black spirit.”⁵ By the end of the decade the budget was balanced, the Knicks were an all-Black squad, and rap music spilled out of the South Bronx and became the musical expression of the young, Black hip-hop generation. By the end of this era, the Knicks and the NBA began using hip-hop as integrationist music to appeal to both Black and white fans as the league emerged as a global enterprise. During the 1980s, Black men helped spur two global cultural phenomena, hip-hop and professional basketball, which became dominant elements of Black culture. In both, Black men provided creativity, maintained positions of leadership, and promoted commercialism around the world. The nexus of this story is the Knicks and New York City between the mid-seventies and mid-eighties.

But just as the Knicks’ efforts at creating a new dynasty fell short, so too did this vision of unification through music and sports. People of color remained impoverished in the South Bronx; Mayor Koch’s neoconservative politics targeted poor Black families; and the crack epidemic of the late eighties “turned Gotham into Gomorrah,” even as Knicks players struggled through their own drug addictions.⁶ And so, as both New York City and the Knicks struggled against many setbacks during the era after Eden, they came to collectively symbolize all that was right (and wrong) with the league, city, and nation.