Part 3 (2/2)
That's when I knew I'd found my mentor.
When I arrived at training camp in October, the Knicks were in a holding pattern. We were still waiting for our new star forward, Bill Bradley, to show up after finis.h.i.+ng Air Force Reserve boot camp. In fact, we were conducting training camp at McGuire Air Force Base in the hope that he would be able to break away at some point and start practicing with the team.
Although our roster was loaded with talent, the leaders.h.i.+p structure hadn't yet been established. The putative top man was Walt Bellamy, a high-scoring center and future Hall of Famer. But Walt was constantly battling with Willis, who was much better suited for the lead role. At one point in the previous season, the two of them had run into each other and literally knocked themselves out fighting to establish position in the post. d.i.c.k Van Arsdale was the starting small forward, but many thought that Cazzie Russell was more talented. Meanwhile, d.i.c.k Barnett and Howard Komives made up a solid backcourt, but Barnett was still recovering from a torn Achilles tendon the year before.
On top of all that, it was clear that the players had lost confidence in coach d.i.c.k McGuire, whose nickname, ”Mumbles,” said a lot about his inability to communicate with the team. So it wasn't surprising when Ned Irish, president of the Knicks, moved McGuire to a scouting position in December and appointed Red head coach. Holzman was a tough, reserved New Yorker with a wry sense of humor and a strong basketball pedigree. A two-time All-American guard at City College of New York, he played for the Rochester Royals as a pro, winning two league champions.h.i.+ps, before becoming head coach of the Milwaukee/St. Louis Hawks.
Red was a master of simplicity. He didn't espouse any particular system, nor did he stay up all night inventing plays. What he believed in was playing the game the right way, which to him meant moving the ball on offense and playing intense team defense. Red learned the game in the prejump shot era when five-man ball movement was far more prevalent than one-on-one creativity. He had two simple rules, which he shouted from the sidelines during every game:
See the ball. Red focused much more attention on defense in practice because he believed that a strong defense was the key to everything. During one practice, Red, who could be extremely graphic when he needed to be, took copies of our plays and pretended to wipe his b.u.t.t with them. ”This is about how much good these things are,” he said, dropping the pages on the floor. That's why he wanted us to learn to play defense together better, because once you did that, he believed, the offense would take care of itself.
In Red's view, awareness was the secret to good defense. He stressed keeping your eye on the ball at all times and being acutely attuned to what was happening on the floor. The Knicks weren't as big as other teams; nor did we have an overpowering shot blocker like the Celtics' Bill Russell. So under Red's direction, we developed a highly integrated style of defense that relied on the collective awareness of all five players rather than one man's brilliant moves under the basket. With all five men working as one, it was easier to trap ball handlers, cut off pa.s.sing lanes, exploit mistakes, and launch fast breaks before the other team could figure out what was going on.
Red loved using full-court pressure to throw opponents off their games. In fact, in my very first practice, we implemented a full-court press for the whole scrimmage. That was perfect for Walt Frazier, Emmett Bryant, and me, because we'd played full-court defense in college. My teammates dubbed me ”Coat Hanger” and ”Head and Shoulders” because of my physique, but I much preferred the name broadcaster Marv Albert gave me: ”Action Jackson.” I knew that by playing forward instead of center, I was giving up my biggest strength-post play-but I could help the team out and get more time on the court by concentrating on defense. Besides, I didn't possess a fifteen-foot jumper yet and my ball-handling skills were so sketchy that Red later gave me a two-dribble rule.
Hit the open man. If Red were coaching today, he would be appalled at how self-absorbed the game has become. For him, selflessness was the holy grail of basketball. ”This isn't rocket science,” he would proclaim, adding that the best offensive strategy was to keep the ball moving among all five players to create shooting opportunities and make it hard for the other team to focus on one or two shooters. Even though we had some of the best shot creators in the game-notably Frazier and Earl ”the Pearl” Monroe-Red insisted that everybody work together in unison to get the ball to the player with the best shot. If you decided to go solo, which few players ever attempted, you'd soon find yourself exiled to the end bench.
”On a good team there are no superstars,” Red insisted. ”There are great players who show they are great players by being able to play with others as a team. They have the ability to be superstars, but if they fit into a good team, they make sacrifices, they do things necessary to help the team win. What the numbers are in salaries or statistics don't matter; how they play together does.”
Few teams in the NBA have ever been as balanced offensively as the 196970 Knicks. We had six players who consistently scored in double figures and none who averaged much higher than 20 points a game. What made the team so hard to defend was that all five starters were clutch shooters, so if you double-teamed one man who happened to be hot, it would open up opportunities for the other four-all of whom could hit big shots.
One thing that fascinated me about Red was how much of the offense he turned over to the players. He let us design many of the plays and actively sought out our thinking about what moves to make in critical games. Many coaches have a hard time giving over power to their players, but Red listened intently to what the players had to say because he knew we had more intimate knowledge of what was happening on the floor than he did.
Red's singular gift, however, was his uncanny ability to manage grown men and get them to come together with a common mission. He didn't use sophisticated motivational techniques; he was just straightforward and honest. Unlike many coaches, he didn't interfere in players' personal lives unless they were up to something that would have a negative effect on the team.
When Red took over as coach, practices were laughably chaotic. Players often arrived late and brought their friends and relatives as spectators. The facilities had broken floors, warped wooden backboards, and showers without any hot water, and the practices themselves were largely uncontrolled scrimmages without any drills or exercises. Red put a stop to all that. He inst.i.tuted what he called ”silly fines” for tardiness and banished from practices everybody who wasn't on the team, including the press. He ran tough, disciplined practices focused primarily on defense. ”Practice doesn't make perfect,” he used to say. ”Perfect practice does.”
On the road, there were no curfews or bed checks. Red had only one rule: The hotel bar belonged to him. He didn't care where you went or what you did as long as you didn't interrupt his late-night scotch with trainer Danny Whelan and the beat writers. Although he was more accessible than other coaches, he felt it was important to maintain a certain distance from the players because he knew that someday he might have to cut or trade one of us.
If he needed to discipline you, he rarely did it in front of the team, unless it was related to your basketball play. Instead he would invite you to his ”private office”: the locker-room toilet. He usually called me in to the toilet when I'd said something critical in the press about the team. I had good rapport with the reporters after years of playing cards together, and sometimes I had a tendency to be overly glib. Red was more circ.u.mspect. ”Don't you realize,” he'd say, ”that these newspapers are going to be lining somebody's birdcage tomorrow?”
Red was notoriously sphinxlike with the media. He often took reporters out to dinner and talked for hours, but he rarely gave them anything they could use. He never criticized the players or any of our opponents. Instead he often toyed with reporters to see what kind of nonsense he could get them to print. Once after a particularly hard defeat, a reporter asked him how he managed to be so calm, and Red replied, ”Because I realize that the only real catastrophe is coming home and finding out there's no more scotch in the house.” Of course, the quote made the papers the next day.
What I loved about Red was his ability to put basketball in perspective. Early in the 196970 season, we went on an eighteen-game winning streak and pulled away from the rest of the pack. When the streak ended with a disappointing loss at home, reporters asked Red what he would have done if the Knicks had won, and he replied, ”I'd go home, drink a scotch, and eat the great meal that [his wife] Selma is cooking.” And what would he do now that we had lost? ”Go home, drink a scotch, and eat the great meal Selma is cooking.”
The turning point for the Knicks was another brawl, this time during a televised game against the Hawks in Atlanta in November 1968. The fight was ignited by Atlanta's Lou Hudson in the second half when he tried to dodge around Willis Reed's hard pick and ended up slugging him in the face. All of the Knicks got up and joined the battle (or at least pretended to), except for one player, Walt Bellamy.
The next day we had a team meeting to discuss the incident. The conversation revolved around Bellamy's no-show, and the consensus among the players was that he wasn't doing his job. When Red asked Walt why he hadn't supported his teammates on the floor, he said, ”I don't think fighting is appropriate in basketball.” Many of us may have agreed with him in the abstract, but fighting was an everyday reality in the NBA, and it didn't give any of us comfort to hear that our big man didn't have our backs.
A few weeks later the Knicks traded Bellamy and Komives to the Pistons for Dave DeBusschere-a move that solidified the starting lineup and gave us the flexibility and depth to win two world champions.h.i.+ps. Willis took over as center and established himself as team leader and Red's sergeant at arms. DeBusschere, a hard-driving, six-six, 220-pound player with great court sense and a smooth outside shot, stepped into the power forward position. Walt Frazier replaced Komives at point guard, teaming with Barnett, a gifted one-on-one player. Bill Bradley and Cazzie Russell shared the final position-small forward-because our starter, d.i.c.k Van Arsdale, had been picked up by the Phoenix Suns in that year's expansion draft. But Bill got the upper hand when Cazzie broke his ankle two months after the DeBusschere trade.
It was interesting to watch Bill and Cazzie compete for that position when Russell returned the next year. Both of them had been stars in college and prized picks in the draft. (Bill was a territorial selection in 1965, and Cazzie was the number one pick overall in 1966.) Bradley, who was nicknamed ”Dollar Bill” because of his impressive (for that time) four-year, $500,000 contract, had averaged more than 30 points a game three years in a row at Princeton and led the Tigers to the NCAA Final Four, where he was named the tournament's most valuable player. After being drafted by the Knicks in 1965, he had decided to attend Oxford for two years as a Rhodes scholar before joining the team. There was so much hype about him that Barnett started referring to him sarcastically as ”the man who could leap tall buildings with a single bound.”
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