4

“Meminger’s Law”

1978–1979

Music producer Sylvia Robinson was looking for a new sound. It was 1979, and Robinson hoped to capitalize on the underground popularity of the hip-hop music created by deejays like Afrika Bambaataa and Grandmaster Flash in the South Bronx. What her label, Sugar Hill Records, produced became the first commercially successful rap album, Rapper’s Delight.¹ Robinson cared little about authenticity; instead of recruiting the pioneers of the movement like Bambaataa, Flash, or Kool Herc, she created her own hip-hop group and dubbed them the Sugarhill Gang.

Henry Lee Jackson, better known as Big Bank Hank, was working at a pizza shop when he got his big break, using lyrics borrowed from his buddy Grandmaster Caz to impress Robinson. When Caz heard “Rapper’s Delight” on the radio, he was furious. He, not Hank, was “Casanova Fly”! Deejays throughout New York City mocked the Sugarhill Gang’s hit single. DJ Disco Wiz called it “a total farce,” and Caz dubbed it “some cornball shit.” “Rapper’s Delight” lacked originality. It was stolen from Caz or, at the very least, pieced together using common street slang. Still, Michael “Wonder Mike” Wright defended his group’s song, arguing that “there’s no denying there’s a lot of shoutouts and phrases that were just like the common vocabulary at the time.”² And, in the end, it doesn’t really matter: whether original or not, “Rapper’s Delight” transformed—you might even say created—rap music.

“The game of hip-hop changed,” Grandmaster Flash admitted. “ ‘Rapper’s Delight’ just set the goal to whole ’nother level. It wasn’t rule the Bronx or rule Manhattan, or rule whatever. It was now how soon can you make a record.”³ “I did not think it was conceivable that there would be such a thing as a hip-hop record,” Chuck D, leader of the rap group Public Enemy, explained later. “I’m like, record? Fuck, how you gon’ put hip-hop onto a record?”⁴ Hip-hop was spontaneous and organic, and rapping was about quick thinking, not written lyrics. Still, regardless of its authenticity, “Rapper’s Delight” spread hip-hop music to the mainstream. As Whipper Whip of the Fantastic Five admits, “it was actually great. After a while, it became the phenomenon that set up a whole new genre. It showed the whole world what hip-hop was.”⁵

After the success of their debut, self-titled album, the Sugarhill Gang—Wonder Mike, Master Gee, and Big Bank Hank—had high hopes for their sophomore offering, 8th Wonder, an album featuring an ancient Egyptian–motif cover. Its reception was lukewarm. The group performed the title track on the television show Soul Train, and it reached number 82 on the Billboard Hot 100—and would be sampled twenty years later by Kobe Bryant in his short-lived, forgettable rap career. Another song, “Apache,” added lyrics to the tune made popular by the Incredible Bongo Band in the early seventies. It did a little better on the charts, reaching number 53 before falling off. The trio released two more albums for Sugar Hill, Rappin’ Down Town and Livin’ in the Fast Lane, before disbanding in 1985. Their place in hip-hop history is contentious, but, whether you believe them to be posers or authentic, they helped push rap to the mainstream, and even today “Rapper’s Delight” gets airplay.

“Rapper’s Delight” transformed hip-hop music, introducing to the mainstream something that had remained mostly hidden for half a dozen years in the parks and playgrounds of the South Bronx. Before Wonder Mike, Big Bank Hank, and Master Gee began rappin’ to the beat, deejays like Herc, Flash, and Bambaataa created a musical sensation. From the beginning, this new cultural movement—later dubbed hip-hop—connected rap music, graffiti, and B-boy dancing to urban playground basketball. It was no coincidence that “Rapper’s Delight” shouted out the New York Knicks and Rucker Park. By the time the Sugarhill Gang released their debut album, hoops and hip-hop were already becoming inseparable, Black-driven enterprises.

Like MCs and rappers, playground basketball players created their own vocabulary. In 1980, two sportswriters released The In-Your-Face Basketball Book: a hoops bible, almanac, atlas, and how-to guide rolled into one. “The pick-up game breeds colorful phrases and nicknames,” the authors explained, “truncating words like ‘competition’ and ‘reputation’ into ‘comp’ and ‘rep.’ ”⁶ Clearly the book was aimed at folks outside the city (mostly white, suburban teenage boys). Within the decade, many consumers of hip-hop would also be white, as both playground ball and rap music became packaged for mainstream consumption.⁷

Some of the slang in In-Your-Face is easy to pick up: to “take the train” is to travel and a “chump” is a “weak player.” But some of the terms are quintessentially New York City. “Meminger’s Law,” the book says, is “an edict promulgated by New York schoolyard product and former pro Dean Meminger. It decrees that, if you don’t play ball, you can’t hang out.”⁸ Decades later, the phrase “ball is life” became popular; in the early eighties, that was Meminger’s Law. “The asphalt was a meeting ground for my extended family,” Onaje X. O. Woodbine recalls. “During games we shed tears together, laughed, fought, and bonded; our whole lives were centered on the court.” Basketball was more than a game. It was, Woodbine explains, an “urban lived religion.”⁹

In addition to a vocabulary lesson, In-Your-Face included a primer highlighting the rules of the court. “The schoolyard is an unpoliced world,” it noted. “So many of the standards of conventional basketball go unenforced that the lesser felonies become accepted.”¹⁰ On the blacktop, players called their own fouls, leading to inevitable arguments—and sometimes fights—over disputed calls. Part of gaining ghetto celebrity status, or at least street cred, was the willingness to absorb punishment without calling a foul. No blood, no foul. Calling a weak foul led players on both teams to question your masculinity. Rap music was tough. B-boying was tough. So playground basketball had to be tough too.¹¹

Unlike hip-hop, basketball was not born in New York City. But eighty years after James Naismith drew up rules for a new game to teach his students at the International YMCA Training School in Springfield, Massachusetts, the center of the basketball world was squarely in the Big Apple.¹² The Garden of Eden Knicks won NBA titles in 1970 and 1973, and the New York Nets won ABA titles in 1974 and 1976. But decades before that, Nat Holman’s City College of New York teams ruled college basketball, winning both the NCAA and NIT titles in 1950, while USA Today later recognized Lew Alcindor’s Power Memorial team as the best high school basketball squad of the twentieth century.¹³ Even beyond these legendary teams, New York City was the mecca of the blacktop basketball world. Period. In 1970, Pete Axthelm wrote The City Game, exploring New York’s informal basketball scene. “There’s a love of the game in this city that is very difficult to put into words,” one playground baller told Axthelm. “You start off when you’re very young and you never get it out of your system. You might be married to a woman, but basketball is still your first love.”¹⁴

By the summer of 1978, basketball was still crucially important in New York City Black culture, and the Knicks once again had hard decisions to make to improve a team mired in mediocrity. They were on the periphery of the playoffs most years, unable to make a serious run at the NBA title or rebuild with high draft choices. Maybe the newest innovation in the NBA, free agency, could help them quickly turn their fortunes around. A year earlier, Gail Goodrich became the first big-name free agent to switch teams when the New Orleans Jazz signed him away from the Los Angeles Lakers. Hoping to keep deep-pocketed teams from buying a title, Commissioner O’Brien awarded the Lakers staggering compensation (three first-round picks, one of which became Magic Johnson) for the thirty-three year old Goodrich, who played just two and a half seasons for the Jazz before retiring from the NBA. Now several elite players might be available. Would the Knicks risk losing multiple draft choices to sign a superstar? They would certainly try.

The biggest prize was undoubtedly Denver Nuggets guard David “Skywalker” Thompson, a six-foot-four dynamo who, at age twenty-three, was already one of the league’s most exciting players. Thompson averaged 27 points per game in 1977–78, and Garden chairman Sonny Werblin was understandably attracted to what adding Skywalker might do, on the court and at the box office, for the Knicks. “I’ve watched Thompson since he was at North Carolina State,” Werblin told reporters, “I know he’s a great player.”¹⁵ With Monroe on his last legs and scheduled for free agency himself, Thompson seemed the ideal replacement. But before New York could make an offer, the Nuggets dropped a bombshell in mid-April, announcing a five-year, $4 million deal with Thompson, making him the highest-paid player in NBA history. The Knicks didn’t even have a chance to negotiate with the would-be free agent and now faced a familiar predicament: Plan B.

One rumor making the off-season rounds had Bob McAdoo and Lonnie Shelton headed to Los Angeles in exchange for Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, a native New Yorker. When asked about a potential return to the Big Apple, Abdul-Jabbar replied, “I would not be averse to it.”¹⁶ Abdul-Jabbar, of course, remained in L.A. and won five titles with the Showtime Lakers before retiring in the spring of 1989. So much for that as Plan B.

Without Thompson or Abdul-Jabbar, Burke and Donovan reviewed the list of potential college draftees and worked furiously to move up in the draft. Finding a willing partner across the river in New Jersey, the Knicks traded their own number 13 pick and reserve forward Phil Jackson, who wanted to retire and transition to coaching, for the Nets’ number four pick and a 1979 first rounder. The seemingly one-sided deal made more sense when the teams revealed that the Knicks also agreed to waive the $3.2 million indemnity still owed them from the ABA merger two years earlier.¹⁷ Giving up two first-round picks was a high price for the Nets to pay, but it finally ended the teams’ long-standing dispute over territorial concessions.

Now holding the fourth overall pick, New York brass crossed their fingers that University of Kentucky center Rick Robey, the stereotypical “big center” Reed wanted to play alongside McAdoo, would fall to them. With the first pick, the Portland Trail Blazers took Mychal Thompson, the first foreign-born top choice in league history. Next, the Kansas City Kings selected guard Phil Ford before the Indiana Pacers grabbed Robey. “We preferred the big man,” Reed admitted after the draft, “but couldn’t get one.”¹⁸

With Robey unavailable, the team chose guard Micheal Ray Richardson. Two choices later, the Boston Celtics selected a slow-footed underclassman forward from Indiana State. Yes, the Knicks and four other teams had a chance to take Larry Bird in the 1978 draft—and passed. (Bird would opt to stay in college for his senior season and signed with the Celtics in 1979.)¹⁹ New York fans were shocked. Few of them had ever heard of Richardson, who had started for four years at the University of Montana and became the first Grizzly drafted into the NBA. Robey’s Kentucky team won the NCAA Championship in 1978, but Richardson’s Grizzlies had failed to even gain an invitation to the NIT.

Knicks fans questioned the Richardson pick, but NBA super-scout Marty Blake loved Micheal Ray. “Super pick,” Blake said. “Super kid. He’s got great quickness.”²⁰ Reed desperately wanted Robey but said the right things about the newest Knick. “Richardson plays similar to Walt Frazier,” Reed said. “He can rebound, he can play big people, and he has a good knack for stealing the ball. He’s very mobile.”²¹ Micheal Ray was excited to join the team, although his response revealed a lot about what Knicks fans would come to expect from the eccentric Richardson. “I wanted the Knicks all along,” Richardson told reporters. “And when this guy, Elwood Donovan, called me, I just started screaming ‘yeah, yeah.’ ”²² Eddie (not Elwood) Donovan remained hopeful the team could still make some moves, telling reporters, “We’re still in the market for Robey.”²³

No Kareem. No Robey. And so the Knicks were once again desperate for a traditional center. One possible fit—the Knicks rarely aimed low—was reigning league MVP Bill Walton. Walton wanted out of Portland and included the Knicks on his list of preferred destinations. “If that’s true,” Donovan told reporters, “then we have to be interested.”²⁴ According to Walton’s advisor Jack Scott, a well-known sympathizer of the Symbionese Liberation Army linked to the Patty Hearst kidnapping, Walton liked New York’s progressive “medical policies.”²⁵ What that entailed was never very clear, but what the Blazers did make immediately clear was that they wanted a center in any trade for Walton. Portland shot down offers from the Knicks centered around McAdoo or Haywood, so the deal fell through. In the end, it was probably for the best. Walton signed with the San Diego Clippers after sitting out the entire 1978–79 season with injuries and only played fourteen games over the next three years before a brief career resurgence with the mid-eighties, Bird-led Celtics.

With Walton, Kareem, and Robey off the table, New York turned to Sonics center Marvin “The Human Eraser” Webster. Webster started his career in Denver where he played two unremarkable seasons with the Nuggets before being traded to Seattle. In the Pacific Northwest, he blossomed into one of the league’s best young centers, averaging 14 points, nearly 13 rebounds, and 2 blocked shots per game. At seven foot one, the Human Eraser was the traditional center that Knicks execs so desperately wanted. Webster flew to New York for dinner with Burke and Donovan and then had a three-hour meeting with Werblin before becoming the Knicks’ first-ever big free-agent signing after inking a five-year, $3 million contract.

On paper, Webster was a perfect fit for the Knicks. “It’s the first time I’ve played on a team with somebody bigger than me,” McAdoo admitted. “I won’t have to be responsible for blocked shots or defense on the tall guys.”²⁶ But some observers wondered how Webster would react to the bright lights of the big city. Webster grew up in Baltimore but attended tiny Morgan State University and seemed more comfortable out of the spotlight than in it. His wife had grown up down the block from McAdoo, and, like his new teammate, Webster preferred a slower-paced lifestyle. During his first training camp with the Knicks, Webster’s wife gave birth in Greensboro while Marvin was at practice. He had to be driven from training camp in West Long Branch, New Jersey, to Newark Airport to fly to North Carolina. “Drive myself?” Webster responded to reporters’ questions about his mode of transportation. “I don’t even know where Madison Square Garden is [much less the Newark Airport].”²⁷

Haywood, clearly jaded, watching the team bring in another big name, big-money frontcourt player, offered a dire warning for Webster. “I came here all alone, expected to replace Reed and DeBusschere by myself. I suffered,” Haywood said, “but it made me a better man.” The thing is,” he continued, “in New York, all the attention and the fans and the press can be so detrimental. Marvin’s got to learn they aren’t the archenemy. If he’s not ready for all of this, he could get crushed.”²⁸

As it turned out, Haywood could have been speaking about another new Knick when it came to dealing with big city life: their top draft choice, Micheal Ray Richardson. If anyone proved unready for the pressure of playing in the Big Apple, it was him. Richardson grew up in Denver and was lightly recruited as a six-foot-three high school forward. He ended up at the University of Montana, the only Division I school to offer him a scholarship, and quickly grew close to head coach Jud Heathcote. Having been raised, along with his five siblings, by a single mother, Richardson latched onto Heathcote as a surrogate father figure. While a freshman, Richardson and his girlfriend got pregnant, and the two quickly married. After the season, Heathcote bolted from Missoula for East Lansing, Michigan, where he led Michigan State to the 1979 NCAA championship. Losing Heathcote devastated Micheal Ray. “Don’t go!” Richardson begged his coach. “You’re like a father to me … You can’t leave me. I don’t have a father.”²⁹ Richardson was despondent and considered dropping out of school altogether but stayed and blossomed into an All Big-Sky performer, growing to six-foot-five while in college.

Despite having a wife and child at home, Richardson embraced the trappings of his relative fame. First, he gave himself the nickname “Sugar,” explaining to reporters it was because he had “so many girlfriends” or in homage to boxer Sugar Ray Robinson or even because he was “s-sweet on the court.”³⁰ A stutter and lisp bothered Richardson, despite his outward bravado. “Sometimes it was impossible for anybody to understand what I was trying to say,” Richardson later said.³¹

No speech impediment could keep Sugar from taking full advantage of his newfound celebrity, however. While some athletes from small schools, like Webster, avoided the spotlight, Richardson embraced his arrival in the Big Apple. As his sister later said, “It’s like they put Jethro in New York.”³² He bought a brand-new Mercedes-Benz 450SL, adding a custom stick shift with “Sugar” embossed in large gold letters.³³ Micheal Ray did everything at breakneck speed. “He must’ve been ADHD or something before that stuff was recognized,” teammate Mike Glenn recalls. “His whole life was that speed. He’d drive a car and even cabs would get out the way. His whole life was in that fast lane.”³⁴ “He was always traveling 90 miles an hour in a 45-mile zone,” trainer Mike Saunders remembers. “He drove this new Volkswagen Bug at one point, and I remember driving up [one-way] Eighth Avenue and he’s coming the opposite direction, coming down Eighth Avenue in reverse.”³⁵

Soon after joining the Knicks, Richardson grew close to fellow guards Glenn and Ray Williams. Calling themselves “The Family,” the trio of young Black guards soon became inseparable.³⁶ As Glenn remembers, “we had this little threesome; [if] you messed with one of us, you messed with all of us.” Glenn, who grew up in Georgia and then attended Southern Illinois University (Walt Frazier’s alma mater), and Richardson, a Denver native, were far from home in New York City. But Williams was from Mount Vernon, just north of the Bronx, and treated Richardson and Glenn like younger brothers. “We’d go out and party together,” Glenn said. “We’d go up to Ray’s house, and his mom would say ‘What do you want me to cook you, fish or chicken? And Ray’d say ‘Cook ’em all, Mama!’ ”³⁷ They found housing near each other in Flushing, Queens (a few miles north of where Run-DMC were then hooking up) and hung out constantly. Despite an age gap, the trio also bonded with McAdoo. “When the younger guys … came in,” McAdoo says, “the culture changed a little bit. And I would hang with those guys. Those guys wanted to hang with me. We’d see each other socially and stuff.”³⁸ Watch out, Studio 54!

While the Knicks played in Madison Square Garden in front of tens of thousands of fans, pickup games on asphalt courts around the city garnered few fans, and teams changed daily. Sure, kids on the playgrounds emulated their Knicks heroes and hoped to one day don the blue and orange. But they laced up their shoes for games played on hoops without nets and courts without painted lines.

Sometimes, though, the two worlds collided.

At Rucker Playground, at 155th Street and Eighth Avenue, across the Harlem River from the South Bronx, the best of New York streetball sometimes collided with the best of professional basketball. Today it is impossible to imagine elite pro players showing up at a playground in Harlem on a sweltering August afternoon to take on a crew of men who never even played college ball. But Rucker was different then. Annual tournaments began in 1946 and by the mid-seventies were fixtures on the playground scene. Blacktop heroes (ghetto celebrities) like Earl “The Goat” Manigault and Joe “The Destroyer” Hammond faced accomplished professionals like Wilt Chamberlain and Dr. J, who later described playing at Rucker as “a bone-chilling experience.”³⁹

On the streets of Harlem, unlike anywhere else in the world, Erving could play second fiddle to blacktop legends like Herman “The Helicopter” Knowings. “In a Rucker League game,” one report insisted, “Helicopter went for a ball fake in the lane. As his man waited for him to come down, Herman treaded air, witnesses swear, until the referee whistled a three-second violation.”⁴⁰ Bunyanesque descriptions of playground hoops are common: no cell phone footage can prove or disprove the play. As Nelson George writes in Elevating the Game, “The tales told of Rucker are not of team ball but of individual forays, not of careful geometric designs but of gravity defied and good sense ignored.”⁴¹ Rucker was “a place God designed to expose greatness,” legendary baller Pee Wee Kirkland explained. “It wasn’t corporate, it was real, man… . It was in your heart and in your soul and that’s the essence of street basketball, man.”⁴² Sounds a little like early hip-hop, doesn’t it?

By 1972, the Rucker Tournament featured a ten-team, round-robin schedule in which each squad played nine forty-minute games. This was its peak. By the late seventies, most pro players had stopped showing up. The arrival of free agency helped them make too much money to risk an injury.⁴³

Many streetball players dreamed of one day playing for the Knicks; few ever got a tryout, and only one ever made it all the way to Madison Square Garden.

Harthorne Wingo grew up in North Carolina but moved in 1968 to New York where he quickly established a reputation (“rep” for readers of The In-Your-Face Basketball Book) on the streets as an excellent baller. He lived in the Bronx, wheeling racks of clothing by day and dunking on fools by night (and on weekends). “Up here they take ball a little more serious at that time than they did in North Carolina,” he laughed decades later.⁴⁴ Wingo played against playground legends like Hammond and Kirkland as well as NBA stars like Dr. J and Tiny Archibald. Wingo played well enough in these games to gain the attention of the Allentown (Pennsylvania) Jets, a team in basketball’s minor leagues. A year later, Wingo traded his Allentown jersey for a spot on the bench of the title-winning 1973 Knicks. His NBA career lasted four seasons, but he personified the rare overlap between playground baller and professional athlete.

Like B-boys, who performed for ghetto celebrity status, elite playground ballplayers occupied rarified air. But the pressure on talented young Black New Yorkers was intense. “Dudes on the street will encourage a big-time ballplayer to be big-time in other ways,” one player remembers. “They expect you to know all the big pushers, where to buy drugs, how to handle street life… . [If] you’re not strong enough, well, you find yourself hooked.”⁴⁵ In the mid-seventies, journalist Rick Telander moved to Brooklyn and integrated himself into the hoops culture of the streets, later writing Heaven Is a Playground about his experiences. Telander got to know the players and joined them for hours of pickup basketball. “It is a common saying in the ghetto of Brooklyn,” Telander wrote, “that if a boy is bad he joins a gang; if he is good he plays basketball.”⁴⁶ Later, after hip-hop became an ingrained part of urban life, one street baller remembers, “Every boy in my neighborhood understood that there were three common routes of escape from the ghetto. You could become a gangster, a rapper, or a ballplayer … since I couldn’t fight or rhyme on the mic, basketball was my refuge.”⁴⁷

Among the young men Telander befriended was a talented teenager named Albert King. “Everybody’s trying to tell me what to do,” King told Telander at the time. “They try to compare me to Connie Hawkins, saying I’m the next Hawk and that I’ll get myself messed up the way he did.”⁴⁸ Hawkins was a Brooklyn playground legend whose pro career was cut short because of accusations of point-shaving, leading to an NBA ban that lasted until the Hawk was in his late twenties. After Telander’s book was published, King accepted a scholarship to Maryland and played nine seasons in the NBA. His older brother, Bernard, was even better and, nearly a decade after Telander roamed the asphalt courts of Brooklyn, became a demigod as a Knick.

New York newspapers in the late seventies regularly covered the battles between Yankees owner George Steinbrenner and manager Billy Martin. Unfortunately, by the fall of 1978, the relationship between Sonny Werblin and Willis Reed was threatening to become just as dysfunctional. “Werblin,” one journalist wrote, “is ticked off at Willis’ constant dictates to the front office on how to spend the Garden’s money on the Knicks.” Werblin, never one to be bullied, told the same reporter, “I can be as tough as Steinbrenner.”⁴⁹ Reed was hired before Werblin assumed control of the team and, despite a 43–39 record in 1977–78, his days coaching the Knicks bench seemed to be numbered. Sonny had made a coaching change for the other Madison Square Garden inhabitants, the Rangers, early in his tenure as Garden chairman, and it helped the team to ten more wins and a finals appearance.

Could a Knicks coaching change be far behind?

Only 12,075 fans showed up for opening night in the Garden in October 1978 to watch the Knicks host Houston. Rockets forward Rudy Tomjanovich, making his first appearance since nearly dying on the court ten months earlier as a result of an on-court fight with Kermit Washington later dubbed “The Punch,” scored twenty points to lead his team to an emotional 111–107 win. Two weeks after the Houston game, the Knicks, now 4–4, left for a six-game West Coast swing, which sent them from Phoenix on Halloween night through San Diego, Los Angeles, Portland, Seattle, and Denver.

Away from New York City, the relationship between Reed and Knicks management grew increasingly strained. “It hurts a team every time it hears or reads that the coach is going to be fired,” Reed admitted. “It hurts our gate and killed team spirit. Either I’m in or out. They should make that determination and tell you guys about it so you can stop asking me about it.” Prompted by reporters to respond to Reed’s comments, Burke told them, “everyone’s job is always on the line every day whether you work for Con Ed or the Knickerbockers.”⁵⁰ This was a nonanswer as far as Reed was concerned, so he asked for a vote of confidence, “a show of support from Sonny Werblin.”⁵¹ The back and forth in the papers continued. “He hasn’t spoken a word to me or to Mike [Burke] since he left on the road trip,” Werblin told the Daily News. “But we’ll be meeting Friday, as soon as he gets back into town.”⁵² The road trip ended on November 9 with a disheartening loss to the Denver Nuggets in which George McGinnis and David Thompson (both long coveted by the Knicks and the former recently traded by the Sixers to the Nuggets) combined for 57 points.

Back from the West Coast swing, Reed finally had his long-awaited meeting with Werblin, Burke, and Donovan. After just thirty minutes, Reed emerged, head hung low. All he would tell reporters: “You’ll have to get the details from Mr. Werblin and Mr. Burke.” Reed had been fired, and Werblin was more than happy to explain, insisting, “No coach gives me an ultimatum.”⁵³ In barely more than one full season as a head coach, Reed led the Knicks to a 49–47 record despite roster turnover and an influx of young players. “We, as players, couldn’t understand why they got rid of Willis,” McAdoo told me. “We thought Willis was doing a great job.”⁵⁴ Glenn agreed. “It was a surprise,” he told me decades later. “We thought it was Willis’s team. He was molding us, and we were around .500. We thought we were going to have a good year. Then Willis was gone.”⁵⁵ Hoping to set the record straight, Werblin sat down with reporters to explain his decision. “It wasn’t the won-lost record,” Werblin said. “We didn’t like the ‘we and they’ syndrome.” And he reiterated, “No coach gives me an ultimatum.”⁵⁶

Fortunately for Werblin, the Knicks had a championship-winning coach already on the payroll. Following his retirement in 1977, Red Holzman was paid as a team consultant, although he did little work. Now Werblin wanted him back on the bench. “But Sonny,” Red replied, “I’m enjoying retirement. I’m the women’s tennis champion of my club,” he joked. “I’m having fun.”⁵⁷ But Werblin was persistent and finally convinced Red to return.

The team Holzman inherited was much different than the one he had left just fifteen months earlier. When Red first retired, Walt Frazier and Earl Monroe joined Phil Jackson and Bill Bradley as holdovers from the ’73 title winners. Now Monroe was holding out for more money, Frazier was in Cleveland, Jackson played for the Nets, and Bradley was the junior US senator from New Jersey. “I took over a team I didn’t make,” Holzman wrote. “In a way they were a bunch of strangers.” Not only were these Knicks new to Red, they were also part of a younger generation. “The guys I was now coaching were a new breed, self-centered, and sometimes just plain selfish,” he said. In particular, Red noticed that there was a divide on the squad, and “the younger and older players were in constant contention with each other.”⁵⁸ On one side, young players like Richardson, Williams, Glenn, and Toby Knight were athletic and excelled in the open court with a fast-breaking style of play. On the other, vets like Haywood, Butch Beard, and Jim McMillian were unsure about where they fit into the team’s long-term plans. “The New York dream was fading for me,” Haywood wrote later. “I was closing in on age thirty and the Knicks were convinced that my savior days were behind me.”⁵⁹ Beard, expecting play regularly at guard, questioned the Knicks’ front office decisions. “After going out and spending all that money on [Marvin] Webster, they turn around and ignore the veterans. Who knows what their [sic] doing?”⁶⁰

When the Garden was Eden, Red allowed the players to police themselves; now he had to set a curfew. For a while, the Knicks rented hotel rooms across the street from the Garden so players could relax on game days after morning shootarounds. “Unfortunately,” Red recalled, “some of them abused the privilege. Some of the players didn’t use the rooms for the rest we intended.”⁶¹

The most notable clique on Holzman’s new Knicks, of course, was “The Family.” For his part, Glenn embraced the coaching transition. “Red told us about how to carry ourselves,” he told me. “ ‘The New York Knicks uniform needs to mean something to you because it means something to me. You wear that with pride and carry yourself in a certain way. You represent the New York Knicks.’ And no one coach in my whole career ever put it quite like that.”⁶² But Williams and Richardson were slower to accept the change. Williams was six foot three and a muscular 190 pounds; Richardson was a sleeker six foot five. Both had long arms and incredible quickness and terrorized opponents on defense. But, as Holzman later wrote of his starting backcourt, “[they] were not thoughtful players but they had so much talent that they were able to excel at times to get by on raw ability.”⁶³

Just hours after Werblin replaced Reed with Holzman, the Knicks re-signed Monroe, clearly intended to ease Red’s transition back to the bench. As Mike Lupica wrote in the Daily News of Monroe, “His basketball intelligence—the Knicks’ collective on-court IQ is approximately 48—is badly needed among Reed’s pre-schoolers.”⁶⁴

Fan expectations were high following the coaching change. More than 18,000 showed up for Red’s return, easily the highest attendance of the season. They were treated to a 111–98 win over their old rivals from Boston. Cleamons, stuck on the bench under Reed, played forty minutes in the win. “Willis did not know how to use me,” Cleamons told reporters later; he was not alone in this assessment.⁶⁵ “Willis wasn’t a very good coach,” Jim McMillian charged, while Haywood was more conciliatory, simply telling reporters that, “there was a lack of communication with Willis… . [Red] has explained it better. He says, if we lose, the team loses, not an individual.”⁶⁶

New York won its first five games under the new-old coach, and, with Holzman at the helm, Haywood finally looked like the man sent to save the Knicks three years earlier. “Red Holzman is the best thing that happened to Spencer Haywood right now,” Haywood told reporters after scoring 35 points in a win over the Jazz. “He’s gotten through to me that starting and scoring points is not everything.”⁶⁷

If movie scriptwriters wrote the story of the 1978–79 Knicks, Haywood would fulfill his promise to save the Knicks, Red would win his third title and retire again, and every other player would slide seamlessly into their roles. But this was not Hollywood; it was New York City in the era of Taxi Driver. So, while the Knicks did start to gel under Red, their short-lived fairy tale was over by the end of December. McAdoo missed almost a month with a toe injury, Haywood came back to earth after his hot start, and the team lost 10 of 14, capped by a 109–94 Christmas Day drubbing at the hands of Dr. J and the Philadelphia 76ers. “This isn’t a lost cause yet,” recently retired guard (and now assistant coach) Beard told reporters. “But if a lot of people begin to panic, it will be. This can become contagious.”⁶⁸

Lost in the transition from Reed to Red was the fragile psyche of Richardson, who found himself in the all-too familiar position of having to adjust to a new coach and father figure. Compounding the problem, Holzman seemed unsure about how to fit Richardson into the lineup. Sometimes he played backup guard, behind Cleamons, Glenn, Williams, and Monroe, and sometimes he replaced Knight at small forward. Theirs was a love-hate relationship as Holzman became another surrogate father for Richardson. Red called Richardson “Meshuggah,” Yiddish for crazy. ⁶⁹ “He liked that,” Holzman said later, “he was from Denver and must have thought I was speaking French.”⁷⁰ Still, Sugar was growing increasingly frustrated and called a press conference. Reporters made sure to pack an extra pencil; they knew Richardson would have something juicy for them to print.

He didn’t disappoint. “My first announcement,” Richardson later recalled telling them, “was that Holzman didn’t know what the fuck he was doing. My second announcement was I wanted the Knicks to trade me.”⁷¹ Even the Post toned down the language in its coverage of the conference, quoting Richardson saying, “I wanna get out of here. I’m being mistreated here. I wanna go somewhere where I can play. When I get back to the hotel, I’m gonna call my agent in Houston and see what he can do.”⁷²

Richardson was tired of being yanked in and out of the lineup, especially after playing just a dozen minutes in the team’s January 4 loss to the mediocre Cavaliers. He felt that the younger guys were being overlooked—outplaying the veterans but losing playing time to them. “We’d play lights out and get us right back in the game,” Richardson said years later, “then Holzman would reinsert the vets, and we’d go back to getting the shit kicked out of us.” Richardson by then regretted his trade request. “I was a young kid who never had a father to teach me how to be a man. I was impulsive, pig headed, and didn’t know what was right and what was wrong. Not only did I feel unloved, but I felt unlovable.”⁷³

And so, on January 5, the Knicks announced a trade.

No, they didn’t trade Micheal Ray. He was a young player with a team-friendly contract, unlike the man they traded, Spencer Haywood.

Haywood, whose clashes with Reed became a regular part of their player-coach relationship, had flourished in the twenty games he played under Holzman and was crushed to learn he had been traded. “I don’t want to leave,” he told reporters. “I only want to win with the Knicks.”⁷⁴ Later, though, he admitted he needed a fresh start. “I didn’t want to leave my wife [supermodel Iman], but I just had a bad experience in New York,” he explained. “The press was very mean to me. There were a lot of lies spread out about me.”⁷⁵

Holzman tried to spin the trade, which sent Haywood to the New Orleans Jazz for center Joe C. Meriweather, as a positive for both parties. “Spencer’s the kind of guy who should be playing,” Holzman said. “He can score a lot of points and he’ll probably get a good opportunity down there.”⁷⁶ On paper, exchanging a former All-NBA talent like Haywood for a role player like Meriweather seemed to make little basketball sense; Haywood was averaging almost 18 points and 6 rebounds per game while Joe C. averaged 6 and 5. But while Haywood needed the ball to excel, Meriweather was content boxing out, setting hard picks, and blocking shots. In his first game with New York, in fact, Meriweather sealed the victory by grabbing a key rebound, gaining him a cult following of fans who longed for a return to the grittiness of DeBusschere, Reed, and the old Knicks.

The Haywood trade ended a tumultuous era in Knicks history. From his first press conference (when he told reporters at first that if the team needed saving, then he’d save) to the team’s acquisition of McAdoo, and through near-constant battles with Reed, Haywood served as a cautionary tale for teams trying to buy a winner. For his part, Haywood was happy in New Orleans during his time there. A jazz aficionado, Haywood fell in love with the Big Easy and in thirty-four games with the team averaged 24 points per game. But in 1979, the Jazz moved to Utah and traded Haywood to the Lakers. In L.A., Haywood teamed with Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and rookie sensation Magic Johnson. “It’s like a dream situation for me,” he said at the time, “Here I am for the first time in my career with a bona fide, official team.”⁷⁷ But the drug habit he developed in New York soon reared its ugly head. “The Devil got in there, man, and it was controlling me completely,” he admitted later. “I wasn’t myself.”⁷⁸ Haywood added, “I wasn’t the only Laker doing coke. I got high at least once with eight other players on the team. But the others who indulged were either smart enough or lucky enough to get away from it.”⁷⁹

Some NBA players used cocaine recreationally and infrequently. Haywood, though, became a heavy user while with the Knicks and started mixing cocaine and heroin with alcohol and Quaaludes to stabilize the high. “It was like having sex and winning the lottery and scoring fifty points all at once,” he explained.⁸⁰ In the 1980 playoffs, Haywood would struggle with the pressure of prime time, and when he admitted his drug problem to interim Lakers head coach Paul Westhead, he was thrown off the team. Despondent, Haywood did eighteen hits of crack that night and paid a hit man to cut the brakes on Westhead’s car. Fortunately, Haywood’s mother found out and convinced Spencer to call off the attack.⁸¹ Informally blackballed from the NBA, Haywood played in the Italian League before retiring after a brief comeback with the Washington Bullets. Three decades later, Haywood earned induction into the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame, introduced by the eclectic trio of Lenny Wilkens, Bill Walton, and Charles Barkley.

After dealing Haywood to New Orleans, the team continued its up-and-down play under Holzman. Burke attributed their struggles to a lack of mental discipline; McAdoo thought they should play more up-tempo; Knight argued that the team should institute a full-court pressing defense.⁸² The Knicks were pulling in all directions at once, and fans were growing impatient. A six-game slide capped off by a 107–104 loss to Golden State at home was the final straw, and fans began loudly booing the home team. “I never got booed before I came to New York,” McAdoo complained afterward. “We’re out there trying to play and you can’t shut out the booing. We go on the road and you don’t hear the fans booing home teams. It’s just here.”⁸³ The loss dropped the team to 22–30. And so, after a seven-game losing streak, the front office decided it was time for another major shakeup.

On February 12, a reporter for the Post asked McAdoo about being traded to the Celtics for a backup center and three first-round draft picks. “If it’s true,” McAdoo told him, “it’d be a shock for me. No, it doesn’t make any sense at all.”⁸⁴

It was true. But McAdoo was right: it didn’t make any sense at all … for the Celtics.

Without consulting their coach or general manager, Werblin and Burke negotiated the McAdoo deal with Celtics co-owners John Y. Brown and Harry Mangurian.⁸⁵ “John and his fiancée [former Miss America and CBS telecaster Phyllis George], my wife and I and Harry and his wife were sitting around bemoaning the fate of our teams,” Werblin explained to reporters. “John Y. suddenly asked me, ‘What have you got to sell or trade.’ ‘Anybody and everybody on the team,’ I told him.”⁸⁶

In Boston the story was reported differently. In that version, George enjoyed watching McAdoo play and asked her fiancé to trade for him. “You want him, little lady?” Brown supposedly asked her. “You got him.”⁸⁷

No matter how the deal went down, McAdoo was livid. It was even worse because McAdoo found out secondhand. “Nobody called me or anything,” he told me. “I never went through anything like this. I thought I had found a home.”⁸⁸ Later McAdoo lashed out at the Knicks front office. “Me and Spencer have been scapegoats,” he told reporters. “We had team play, but we just weren’t winning.”⁸⁹

Boston fans were not happy that Brown shortsightedly traded three top draft choices for a sullen McAdoo. They flooded radio call-in shows and newspapers to complain.⁹⁰ As it turned out, the fans were right to question Brown’s decision; the Celtics had an even worse record than the Knicks at the time and already had an All-Star center, player-coach Dave Cowens, blocking McAdoo’s path to playing time. Still, in his short stint in Boston, McAdoo managed to average more than twenty points per game, although Celtics fans were less than pleased with his effort, serenading him with chants of “McAdoo; McAdon’t; McAwill; McAwon’t.”⁹¹ As Red Auerbach, Boston’s team president, later admitted, “Dave [Cowens] tried to teach him our system, the Celtic ways, but he was not interested in learning. He was only interested in his average and playing minutes.”⁹² McAdoo’s time as a Celtic was mercifully brief, and a few months after arriving in Boston he was the key piece in the deal that ultimately landed the Celtics the rights to Kevin McHale and Robert Parish.⁹³ Unlike Haywood, McAdoo enjoyed a career resurgence after eventually landing in L.A., transforming into a dangerous scorer off the bench. In fact, McAdoo became a key cog in the Lakers’ 1982 and 1985 NBA title teams, averaging double-figures as Abdul-Jabbar’s primary backup. Like Haywood, McAdoo eventually earned induction into the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame.

The spring of 1979 was déjà vu all over for Knicks fans; five years earlier New York lost multiple Hall of Fame frontcourt players almost overnight. But this time it was intentional and seemed to be part of a larger plan. “We have come to the conclusion that stars are less important,” Burke told reporters. “We have decided to build a winner with a group of players. We will try to have a balanced squad that will play as a team rather than as individuals.”⁹⁴ Following the Haywood and McAdoo trades, unheralded second-year forward Toby Knight became the team’s leading scorer, averaging better than 20 points per game, including a 30-point outburst against the Bulls in mid-March. The backup center the Knicks received from the Celtics, Tom Barker, lasted less than two dozen games in New York. When he arrived, the team didn’t have a jersey with his number on it, so trainer Mike Saunders wrote a big number six on the back of a blank jersey with a piece of chalk.⁹⁵

Flipping McAdoo and Haywood for a pair of backup centers and some draft picks was a long-term play. In the short-term, the Knicks were a young and inexperienced squad. Fortunately, Monroe took his role as elder statesman very seriously. “We lost one game at the Garden,” Glenn told me, “and Earl just blasted us out. He started yelling ‘You guys think it’s funny! This ain’t funny. They come up in the Garden and kick our butts in here. We should be ashamed. Have some pride.”⁹⁶ Now in his eleventh NBA season, Monroe put together a solid campaign, averaging about a dozen points per game in twenty minutes of playing time. It was a far cry from his halcyon days as a playground legend and NBA superstar in Baltimore, but, as Werblin admitted, “Earl had a good season… . He’s a great player.”⁹⁷ Monroe was frustrated, though, in the direction the team was headed. “I had always been a winner,” he said later, “then everything else just culminated here. Losing, losing, losing. It got to be unbearable.”⁹⁸

Harvey Araton, writing for the Post, best summed up the Knicks’ 1978–79 season in a column he penned in early April, after an eight-game losing streak ended the team’s slim hopes for a playoff berth. “Thirty-one wins, fifty-one losses, eight straight closing defeats,” he began. “The worst club record since 1966, the lowest attendance in 10 years, a declining TV audience, a deposed coach, two stars traded, the GM on the hot seat, and the ignominious experience of finishing behind the Nets.”⁹⁹ Interest in the Knicks was ebbing in the Big Apple, and everyone was pointing fingers. “The excitement’s gone,” Monroe told sportswriters. “People used to come here, and maybe the games weren’t so flashy, but they appreciate what the old Knicks did, and pretty soon they’d appreciate the game. Of course, that’s when teams would draft and trade to fill their needs. Now they draft and trade for names to fill their arenas.”¹⁰⁰

During the playoffs, as Knicks players sat at home watching the SuperSonics win the NBA title in a rematch against the Bullets, scouts prepared reports for the upcoming NBA draft. There was no question who the top pick would be. Michigan State guard Magic Johnson was a six-foot-nine whirling dervish fresh off leading the Spartans (under Richardson’s former coach Jud Heathcote) to the NCAA title. And, in a case of the rich becoming richer, Magic was headed to L.A., thanks to the Jazz having signed Goodrich a few years earlier.

It was not clear who would be drafted next, by the Bulls (second pick overall) and the Knicks (third pick). New York Times reporter Sam Goldaper asked fans to write in with their opinions, and they suggested Johnson’s Michigan State teammate Greg Kelser or perhaps DePaul guard Gary Garland, son of gospel singer Cissy Houston and half-brother of Whitney Houston.¹⁰¹ As it turned out, they drafted neither.

The NBA draft was nowhere near the media circus it would later become; in 1979, it was scheduled for noon on a Monday at the Plaza Hotel, and, for the first time in league history, it was open to the public. League execs scoffed at the idea of televising the proceedings, inviting fans to attend “in person because they wouldn’t have done well if it was on TV.” To their surprise, hundreds showed up more than half an hour before the first pick to witness the proceedings firsthand.¹⁰²

Holding the third overall selection, their highest choice since drafting Cazzie Russell in 1966, the Knicks chose University of San Francisco center Bill Cartwright after the Lakers took Johnson and the Bulls plucked forward Dave Greenwood out of UCLA. With their remaining first-round choices (thanks to the McAdoo deal), the Knicks selected Larry Demic (ninth overall) and Sly Williams (twenty-first).

“If Willis Reed had a love affair with New York,” Cartwright’s agent Bob Woolf told reporters, “then in a couple of years, Bill Cartwright will have a marriage.”¹⁰³ Knicks scout Hal Fischer loved Cartwright’s potential. “He is a great outside shooter … he has good moves to the basket. He’s very intelligent and unselfish … three years from now, he’ll be untouchable.”¹⁰⁴

Cartwright grew up near Sacramento, California, in the town of Elk Grove where, along with his parents and six sisters, he worked hard to make ends meet. His mother cleaned people’s houses, and his father was a farm laborer; at nine, Bill joined his dad in the fields. “If I never see another irrigation ditch,” he joked after being drafted, “it will be too soon.”¹⁰⁵ During Cartwright’s sophomore year in high school, he sprouted to six foot nine and started dating Sheri Johnson, the daughter of the school’s vice principal. Sheri was white, and Bill was Black, creating an interesting situation in Elk Grove, where less than 10 percent of the population was African American. “People didn’t say much to our faces,” Sheri recalled of their biracial courtship. “I guess if we hadn’t been ‘somebody’ things might have been a little different.”¹⁰⁶ Bill and Sheri married at the end of Bill’s college career, and she joined him in New York City after the draft. “First thing I thought was Wow, what a big frickin’ city!” Cartwright told me of his inaugural visit to New York. “But I felt I was ready for it. Wasn’t intimidated. Wasn’t worried. Wasn’t scared. Just ready to play.”¹⁰⁷

Drafting Cartwright made sense in a vacuum; he was a talented center in a league that valued quality big men. But there were some red flags. One was Cartwright’s agent. A few months before the draft, Woolf negotiated Larry Bird’s record-breaking rookie contract with the Celtics, calling for a hefty $650,000 annual salary and a no-trade clause, a rare commodity in the late seventies. “Let me say this,” Donovan told reporters the day after the draft, “no no-trade contracts.” Holzman agreed. “We won’t get into a no-trade situation with Cartwright. Marvin [Webster] has one and we’d like to keep our options open.”¹⁰⁸ Drafting Cartwright also guaranteed friction between the new draftee and the two incumbent centers: Meriweather (traded to the team in mid-season for Haywood), and Webster (signed to a huge contract nine months earlier). “I didn’t come here to play forward,” Cartwright said. “I don’t know about Webster’s condition. I just know he’s a good player from what I’ve seen on television.”¹⁰⁹ At the time, Webster was in Greece, vacationing and rehabbing his knee, when Holzman called to tell him about Cartwright. “I’m still the center,” Webster told reporters who tracked him down for comment. “I don’t plan on going anywhere, either.”¹¹⁰

All in all, 1979 was a pivotal year in New York City. The Sugarhill Gang’s “Rapper’s Delight” earned unprecedented mainstream play, placing Gotham squarely at the center of a new urban cultural phenomenon. And for the Knicks, the summer of 1979 led to more questions than answers. Who would start at center? Could Webster and Cartwright (and Meriweather) play together? Would Monroe come back for a twelfth season? If nothing else, one thing was sure: the Knicks were not going to buy their way out of this slump. They would rebuild as they had a decade earlier, through the draft and player development rather than buying stars. Well, unless one came up for sale.

• 1978–79 Knicks
• Record: 31–51
• Playoffs: Did not qualify
• Coach: Willis Reed (6–8); Red Holzman (25–43)
• Average Home Attendance: 13,310
• Points per Game: (107.7—18th of 22)
• Points Allowed per Game: (111.1—13th of 22)
• Team Leaders:
  • Points: Bob McAdoo (26.9 per game)
  • Rebounds: Marvin Webster (10.9 per game)
  • Assists: Ray Williams (6.2 per game)
  • Steals: Ray Williams and Bob McAdoo (1.6 per game)
  • Blocked Shots: Marvin Webster (1.9 per game)
• All-Stars: None
• Notable Transactions: Drafted Micheal Ray Richardson in the first round of the 1978 draft; signed Marvin Webster as a free agent and sent Lonnie Shelton to the Seattle SuperSonics as compensation; traded Spencer Haywood to the New Orleans Jazz for Joe C. Meriweather; traded Bob McAdoo to the Boston Celtics for Tom Barker and three first-round draft choices