Eleven Rings: The Soul of Success (4 page)

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 1969–70 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 championships. 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, Dick 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.”

Cazzie got a lot of teasing as well. He too had scored a big contract ($200,000 for two years) and had been such a dynamic scorer at Michigan that the school’s gym was dubbed “the House that Cazzie Built.” Nobody questioned his skill: Cazzie was an excellent shooter who had led the Wolverines to three consecutive Big Ten titles. What amused the players was his obsession with health food and alternative therapies. For once, there was someone on my team who had more nicknames than I did. He was called “Wonder Boy,” “Muscles Russell,” “Cockles ’n’ Muscles,” and my favorite, “Max Factor,” because he loved slathering massage oil on his body after workouts. His room was filled with so many vitamins and supplements that Barnett, his roommate, joked that you had to get a signed pharmaceutical note if you wanted to visit.

What impressed me about Bill and Cazzie was how intensely they were able to compete with each other without getting caught in a battle of egos. At first Bill had a hard time adjusting to the pro game because of his lack of foot speed and leaping ability, but he made up for those limitations by learning to move quickly without the ball and outsmart defenders on the run. Defending him in practice—which I often had to do—was nerve-racking. Just when you thought you had trapped him in a corner, he would skitter away and show up on the other side of the floor with an open shot.

Cazzie had a different problem. He was a great driver with a strong move to the basket, but the starting team worked better when Bradley was on the floor. So Red made Cazzie a sixth man who could come off the bench and ignite a game-turning scoring spree. Over time, Cazzie adjusted to the role and took pride in leading the second unit, which, in 1969–70, included center Nate Bowman, guard Mike Riordan, and forward Dave Stallworth (who had been sidelined for a year and a half recovering from a stroke), plus backup players John Warren, Donnie May, and Bill Hosket. Cazzie gave the unit a nickname: “the Minutemen.”

Not too long ago, Bill attended a Knicks reunion and was surprised when Cazzie, who is now a minister, came up to him and apologized for his selfish behavior when they were competing for the same job. Bill told Cazzie that there was no need to apologize because he knew that, no matter how driven Cazzie was, he never put his own ambition above that of the team.

—

Unfortunately I couldn’t be one of Cazzie’s Minutemen in 1969–70. In December 1968 I had a serious back injury that required spinal fusion surgery and took me out of the game for about a year and a half. The recovery was horrendous: I had to wear a body brace for six months and was told that I had to limit physical activity, including sex, during that period. My teammates asked if I was planning to have my wife wear a chastity belt. I laughed, but it wasn’t funny.

I probably could have returned to action in the 1969–70 season, but the team had gotten off to a great start and the front office decided to put me on the injured list for the whole year to protect me from being picked up in the expansion draft.

I wasn’t worried about money because I had signed a two-year extension deal with the club after my rookie year. But I needed something to keep me occupied, so I did some TV commentary, worked on a book about the Knicks called
Take It All!
with team photographer George Kalinsky, and traveled with the team as Red’s informal assistant coach. In those days most coaches didn’t have assistants, but Red knew that I had an interest in learning more about the game, and he was looking for someone to bounce new ideas around with. The assignment gave me an opportunity to look at the game the way a coach does.

Red was a strong verbal communicator, but he wasn’t that visually oriented and rarely drew diagrams of plays on the board during pregame talks. Every now and then, to keep the players focused, he would ask them to nod their heads if they heard the word “defense” while he was talking—which happened about every fourth word. Still, the players drifted off when he was talking, so he asked me to break down the strengths and weaknesses of the teams we were facing and draw pictures of their key plays on the board. This forced me to start thinking of the game as a strategic problem rather than a tactical one. As a young player, you tend to focus most of your attention on how you’re going beat your man in any given game. But now I began to see basketball as a dynamic game of chess in which all the pieces were in motion. It was exhilarating.

Another lesson I learned was about the importance of pregame rituals. The shootaround had yet to be invented, so most coaches tried to squeeze in whatever pregame instructions they had during the fifteen or twenty minutes before the players stepped out on the floor. But there’s only so much a player can absorb when his body is pulsing with adrenaline. This is not a good time for deep left-brain discussions. It’s the moment to calm the players’ minds and strengthen their spiritual connection with one another before they head into battle.

Red paid a great deal of attention to the bench players because they played such a vital role on our team, which was often weakened by injuries. In Red’s mind, it was just as important for the bench players to be actively engaged in the game as it was for the starters. To make sure the subs were prepared mentally, he’d usually give them several minutes’ warning before putting them in the game. He also constantly goaded them to pay attention to the twenty-four-second clock, so they could jump in at any moment without missing a beat. Red made each player feel as if he had an important role on the team, whether he played four minutes a game or forty—and this helped turn the Knicks into a fast-moving, cohesive team.

As the playoffs arrived in 1969–70, the Knicks looked unstoppable. We finished the season with a league-leading 60-22 record and muscled our way past Baltimore and Milwaukee in the early rounds. Fortunately, we didn’t have to worry about the Celtics, because Bill Russell had retired and Boston was in retrenching mode.

Our opponents in the championship finals were the Lakers, a star-studded team led by Wilt Chamberlain, Elgin Baylor, and Jerry West, who had a gnawing desire to win a ring after losing to Boston in six of the past eight NBA finals. But they weren’t nearly as quick or mobile as we were, and their biggest weapon, Chamberlain, had spent most of the season recovering from knee surgery.

With the series tied 2–2, Willis went down with a torn thigh muscle in game 5 in New York, and we had to resort to a small, no-center lineup for the rest of the game. That meant DeBusschere and Stallworth—a six-six and six-seven tandem—had to use stealth and trickery to handle the seven-one, 275-pound Chamberlain, probably the most overpowering center ever to play the game. In those days it was illegal to move more than two steps off your man to double-team another player, so we had to institute a zone defense, which was also illegal but less likely to get called in front of a raging Knicks home crowd. On the offensive end, DeBusschere lured Chamberlain away from the basket with his pinpoint fifteen-footers, freeing the rest of the team to move more freely inside. That led to a decisive 107–100 win.

The Lakers returned home and tied up the series in game 6, setting up one of the most dramatic moments in NBA history. The big question was whether Willis would be able to return for game 7 in Madison Square Garden. The doctors kept us in the dark until the last minute. Willis couldn’t flex his leg because of the muscle tear, and jumping was out of the question, but he dressed up for the game and took a few warm-up shots before retreating to the trainer’s room for more treatments. I followed with my camera and took a great shot of him being injected in the hip with a giant shot of Carbocaine, but Red refused to let me publish it because he said that would be unfair to the press photographers, who had been denied access to the room.

As the game was about to start, Willis hobbled down the center aisle and onto the court, and the crowd went berserk. Future broadcaster Steve Albert, who was the honorary ball boy for the game, said he was looking at the Lakers when Willis appeared on the floor and “they all, to a man, turned around and stopped shooting and looked at Willis. And their jaws dropped. The game was over before it started.”

Frazier moved the ball up court at the start of the game and hit Willis near the basket, and he knocked in a short jump shot. Then he scored again the next time up the floor, and all of a sudden the Knicks jumped out to a 7–2 lead, which usually doesn’t mean much in the NBA, but in this case it did. Willis’s commanding presence in the early going knocked the Lakers off their game and they never recovered.

Of course, it didn’t hurt that Frazier had one of the greatest unsung performances in playoff history, scoring 36 points, with 19 assists and 7 rebounds. Though Walt was disappointed about being overshadowed by Willis, he too tipped his hat to the captain. “Now a lot of people say to me, ‘Wow, I didn’t know you had a game like that,’” said Frazier later. “But I know if Willis didn’t do what he did, I wouldn’t have been able to have the game I had. He got the fans involved and gave us confidence just by his coming out onto the floor.”

The Knicks won 113–99 and we all became celebrities overnight. It was a bittersweet victory for me, however. I was grateful that my teammates voted me a full share of the playoff earnings and my first championship ring. But once the champagne stopped flowing, I felt guilty about not having been able to contribute more to the championship push. I was dying to get back in the game.

THE QUEST

The privilege of a lifetime is being who you are.

JOSEPH CAMPBELL

I
n the summer of 1972, my brother Joe and I took a motorcycle trip through the West that shifted the direction of my life.

I had returned to basketball two years earlier, but I still felt tentative on court and hadn’t found my rhythm yet. And my marriage to Maxine, my college sweetheart, was foundering. The six-month rehabilitation I had undergone after surgery hadn’t helped matters, and we had gone our separate ways—informally—earlier that year. Joe, who was a psychology professor at the State University of New York at Buffalo, had also separated from his wife. It seemed like a good time for us to hit the road.

I bought a used BMW 750 and met Joe in Great Falls, Montana, not far from my parents’ parsonage. We set out on a journey across the Great Divide to British Columbia that lasted about a month. Joe and I took it slow, traveling about five to six hours in the morning and setting up camp in the afternoon. At night we’d sit around a campfire with a couple of beers and talk.

Joe didn’t mince words. “When I watch you play,” he said, “I get the impression that you’re scared. It looks like you’re afraid of getting hurt again and you’re not throwing yourself into the game the way you used to. Do you think you’ve fully recovered?”

“Yes, but there’s a difference,” I replied. “I can’t play at the same level. I still have some quickness, but I don’t have as much power in my legs.”

“Well,” said Joe, “you’re going to have to get that back.”

As for the marriage, I said that Maxine and I had grown apart. She had no interest in the basketball world I inhabited, and I wasn’t ready to settle down and become a family man in the suburbs. Plus she was ready to move on and pursue a career as a lawyer.

Joe was blunt. He said that for the past two years I hadn’t put myself into my marriage, my career, or anything else. “Because you’ve been too afraid to really make an honest effort,” he added, “you’ve lost the one love relationship you’ve always had—basketball. You need to be more aggressive about your life.”

This was the message I needed to hear. When I returned to New York, I resolved to refocus my energy on my career, and for the next three seasons I played the best basketball of my life. Maxine and I made the split official and filed for divorce. I moved into a loft above an auto repair shop in the Chelsea district of Manhattan; Maxine settled with our four-year-old daughter, Elizabeth, in an apartment on the Upper West Side.

This was a wild, eye-opening time for me, and I lived the life of a sixties Renaissance man, complete with long hair and jeans, and a fascination with exploring new ways of looking at the world. I loved the freedom and idealism, not to mention the great music, of the countercultural wave that was sweeping through New York and the rest of country. I bought a bicycle and pedaled all over town, trying to connect with the
real
New York City. But no matter how much time I spent in Central Park, to me living in the city felt like living indoors. I needed to be someplace where I could feel a strong connection to the earth.

I also had a longing to reconnect with my spiritual core, which I’d been ignoring. During college, I’d studied other religions and been intrigued by the broad range of spiritual traditions from around the world. But that had been primarily an intellectual exercise, not a spiritually meaningful one. Now I felt compelled to go deeper.

My journey of self-discovery was filled with uncertainty but also alive with promise. Although I knew my parents’ regimented approach to spirituality wasn’t right for me, I was still intrigued with the idea of tapping into the power of the human spirit.

When I was a child, I had a number of curious health issues. At age two or so, I developed a large growth on my throat that baffled doctors and caused my parents great concern. They treated it with penicillin and it eventually went away, but I grew up feeling that there was something about me that wasn’t quite right. Then, when I entered first grade, I was diagnosed with a heart murmur and was told to avoid physical activity for a whole year, which was pure torture for me because I was such an active kid.

One night when I was about eleven or twelve, I was sick and battling a high fever. I was sleeping fitfully, when all of a sudden I heard a roar, like the sound of a railroad train, building and building until it grew so loud I thought the train was going to burst into my bedroom. The sensation was completely overpowering, but for some reason I wasn’t frightened. As the noise kept getting louder, I felt a powerful surge of energy radiating through my body that was much stronger and more all consuming than anything I’d ever experienced before.

I don’t know where this power came from, but I awoke the next day feeling strong and confident and brimming with energy. The fever was gone, and after that my health improved dramatically and I rarely got colds or flus.

However, the primary impact of this spontaneous experience was psychological, not physical. After that night I had a greater belief in myself and a quiet faith that everything was going to work out for the best. I also seemed to be able to tap into a new source of energy within myself that I hadn’t sensed before. From that point on, I felt confident enough to throw my whole mind, body, and soul into what I loved—and that, as much as anything, has been the secret of my success in sports.

I’ve always wondered where that power came from and whether I could learn how to tap into it on my own, not just on the basketball court but in the rest of my life as well.

That’s one of the things I was searching for as I set out on my journey of self-discovery. I didn’t know where I was going or what pitfalls I might stumble upon along the way. But I was encouraged by these lines from the Grateful Dead song “Ripple.”

There is a road, no simple highway,

Between the dawn and dark of night,

And if you go no one may follow,

That path is for your steps alone.

To be honest, I’d already been on quite a ride. Because my parents were both ministers, my siblings and I had to be doubly perfect. We attended church twice on Sunday, in the morning to hear my father’s sermon and in the evening to listen to my mother’s. We also had to go to another service midweek and be star students in Sunday school, which was taught by Mom. Every morning we did devotions before breakfast, and at night we often memorized passages from the Bible.

Mom and Dad met while studying for the ministry at a Bible college in Winnipeg. They had taken different paths to get there. My father, Charles, was a tall, handsome man with curly hair, dark eyes, and a quiet, understated demeanor. Our Tory ancestors had picked the wrong side in the American Revolution and after the war moved to Ontario, where they received a land grant from King George III that became the Jackson family farm. My dad always thought he would go to college, but after he failed the qualifying exams—in large part because of ill health—he left school in eighth grade and worked the farm. Along the way he also spent some time as a lumberjack in Hudson Bay. Then one day, while milking cows in the barn, he suddenly got the call to join the ministry.

My mother, Elisabeth, was a striking, charismatic woman, with crystal blue eyes, blond hair, and strong Germanic features. She grew up in Wolf Point, Montana, where Grandfather Funk had moved the family after World War I to avoid strong anti-German sentiment in Canada. All of her siblings were valedictorians in high school, but Mom missed out by two tenths of a point because she had to skip six weeks of school to work on the fall harvest. Later she was teaching in a one-room schoolhouse when she attended a Pentecostal revival meeting and was swept away. By her early thirties, Mom had established herself as a traveling preacher in the small towns of eastern Montana.

My father was a widower when they started dating. His first wife had died a few years earlier while pregnant with their second child. (Their first child was my half sister, Joan.) My parents were drawn together more by a profound spiritual connection than by a romantic one. They were both captivated by the Pentecostal movement, which had spread quickly in rural areas during the 1920s and 1930s, and its fundamental idea that one could find salvation by connecting directly with the Holy Spirit. They were also taken by the prophecy in the Book of Revelations about the second coming of Christ and talked about how important it was to prepare spiritually for His arrival because it might come at any moment. Their deepest fear was not being right with God. “If you died today,” my mother often asked, “would you meet your maker in heaven?” That was the big issue in our house.

My parents also strongly abided by St. Paul’s teachings about separating yourself from materialistic society by being
in
this world but not
of
it. We weren’t allowed to watch TV or movies or read comic books or go to dances—or even socialize with our school friends at the local canteen. Joan wasn’t allowed to wear shorts or a swimsuit, and my brothers and I wore white shirts everywhere, except when we were playing sports. When I asked Joe recently what scared him as a child, he said being laughed at in school when he made mistakes. The other kids teased us relentlessly, calling us “holy rollers” and making fun of what appeared to them to be a strange, antiquated way of life.

When I was about eleven, my mother told me it was time for me to “seek the infilling of the Holy Spirit.” My brothers and sister had already been “baptized” in the Holy Spirit and spoke in tongues. This was an important aspect of the Pentecostal faith. For years I’d watched other people go through this ritual, but it was never something I wanted to experience myself. But my parents really wanted me to do it, and they prayed with me every Sunday night after services, when I was actively seeking the gift of tongues.

After a couple years of devoted prayer and supplication, I decided that this wasn’t going to be my thing. I started desperately searching for school activities that would take me away from my nearly 24-7 life at church. I acted in plays, sang in the choir, worked on a class float, and was a sports announcer on the school’s radio program. When I was a senior in high school, my brother Joe snuck me out to my first movie,
Seven Brides for Seven Brothers
, when my parents were away at a conference.

But my real savior was basketball. In my junior year I grew four inches to six feet five and 160 pounds and started to really improve as a player. My height and long arms gave me a huge advantage, and I averaged 21.3 points a game that year, which helped my team, Williston High, make it to the final of the North Dakota state championship. But we had lost two times to our opponent, Rugby, during the regular season. I’d gotten into foul trouble in both games, so Coach Bob Peterson played a zone in the final game. We contained my high school rival, Paul Presthus, but Rugby shot the ball well enough to win by 12 points.

What I liked about basketball was how interconnected everything was. The game was a complex dance of moves and countermoves that made it much more alive than other sports I played. In addition, basketball demanded a high level of synergy. To succeed, you needed to rely upon everybody else on the floor, not just yourself. That gave the sport a certain transcendent beauty that I found deeply satisfying.

Basketball also saved me from having to go to church services most weekends. Our closest rival was 125 miles away, and we often took long overnight trips on the weekends to distant parts of the state. That meant I’d usually miss Friday-night and Sunday-morning services.

In my senior year I became a mini celebrity in the state. I averaged 23 points a game, and once again we made the state final, even though we didn’t have as strong a record as the previous year. The final game against Grand Forks Red River was televised, and midway through the first half, I stole the ball and raced down the floor for a dunk. It made me kind of a folk hero in the state because most viewers had never seen a dunk before. I went on to finish with 35 points and was named MVP on our way to winning the championship.

After the game I met Bill Fitch, who had just been hired as the coach of the University of North Dakota, and he promised to save a place for me on his team if I was interested. A few weeks later he showed up in Williston to give the keynote address at the team’s annual awards ceremony. At the end of his talk, he called one of my teammates and me up to the stage and handcuffed us together. “As soon as I finish this speech,” he joked, “I’m going to take these boys back with me to UND.”

Eventually my mother, who never attended any of my high school games, asked me how my spiritual life was progressing, and I had to tell her that I was struggling with my faith. This was a heartbreaking moment for her because she had already seen her older sons “stray” from the church. When I was a baby, my parents had made a pledge to their congregation that I would be brought up as a servant of the Lord, just like Charles and Joe before me. It must have been painful for them that none of us had lived up to their expectations. That’s why, I think, they never abandoned hope that someday one of us might return to our true calling, the ministry.

—

When I was in college, I had another rude spiritual awakening. I had been raised on the literal reading of the Bible. So when I was studying Darwin’s theory of evolution in biology class, it was disconcerting to learn that, according to the best estimates, humans had been walking upright on the planet for more than four million years. This revelation made me question a lot of what I’d been taught as a child and inspired me to try to resolve—in my own mind, at least—some of the inherent contradictions between religious dogma and scientific inquiry.

I decided to shift my major from political science to a combination of psychology, religion, and philosophy. That gave me the opportunity to explore a wide range of spiritual approaches from both East and West. I was especially taken by Nikos Kazantzakis’s humanistic vision of Jesus in
The Last Temptation of Christ
, which paralleled much of what I had been reading about the Buddha. I was also moved by William James’s
The Varieties of Religious Experience
, which not only helped me put my childhood experience in perspective but also showed me how my search to find a new, more authentic spiritual identity fit within the vast landscape of American culture.