When the Garden Was Eden by Harvey Araton

Author:Harvey Araton
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins

PART III

FALLOUT

11

BULLETS OVER BROADWAY

TWO WEEKS AFTER THE SHOOTINGS, KENT STATE STUDENTS RETURNED TO collect their possessions. The retrieval was done alphabetically, which meant Steve Albert was among the first to go. He got a ride with his roommate’s father, packed up in one day, and did not return until the following fall.

“It was a changed campus, very somber,” he said. “On the other hand, this horrible thing had put the school on the map. Who had ever heard of Kent State? Suddenly we were a symbol. The Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young song—which still makes me emotional every time I hear it—was everywhere. And all these entertainers wanted to come—George Carlin, Bob Hope, Sinatra.”

Albert went to a few events, all of them haunted and spiritually numbing. For him, nothing could match the gift he’d been given by Whelan: the chore of running warm-ups and towels to and from players, of being inside Madison Square Garden on the night it was also united by pain—just not enough to keep a man like Willis Reed down.

Steve Albert had seen Game 7 with his own eyes. For him, even more than Sinatra could vocalize, that would always characterize the recuperative powers of New York, New York, and the night his college town blues began melting away.

“To experience that after what had happened at school was the best medicine I could have gotten. In the midst of all the tumult in the country, all the unrest, I think there was some poetic justice to having that feel-good story in the media capital and having it end as dramatically and inspirationally as it did after Willis came out.”

As defending champions, the Knicks were officially the darlings of New York City, regularly drawing packed houses of 19,000-plus to Madison Square Garden. But the crowning glory of the New York franchise—what Ned Irish had strived for seemingly from the beginning of time—also unearthed an issue that would plague the NBA for decades: the profit disparity between large- and small-market teams.

Owners like the Bullets’ Abe Pollin, a Washington builder who purchased the team with two partners for $1.1 million in 1964 and gained full control four years later, believed teams like the Knicks and Lakers should be forced by the league to share home gate receipts. (Founded in 1961 as the Chicago Packers and soon after renamed the Zephyrs, the Bullets moved to Baltimore in 1963. They played in the Baltimore Civic Center, opened in 1962—often far short of its 12,500 capacity.) That socialist notion, which had also been championed by the smaller markets when the league set sail in 1946, was quashed, largely by Irish.

When Irish made his presentation for league membership, the first words out of his mouth were that he represented a corporation worth $3.5 million. Most of the others, virtual paupers by comparison, resented Irish and his braggadocio. But he got his way. The league would base itself in New York and be driven by large urban centers and their handsomely compensated stars, and

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