ELEVEN RINGS Part 4

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." n.o.body questioned his skill: Cazzie was an excellent shooter who had led the Wolverines to three consecutive Big Ten t.i.tles. 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," "c.o.c.kles 'n' Muscles," and my favorite, "Max Factor," because he loved slathering ma.s.sage 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 196970, 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 196970. 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 s.e.x, during that period. My teammates asked if I was planning to have my wife wear a chast.i.ty belt. I laughed, but it wasn't funny.

I probably could have returned to action in the 196970 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 a.s.sistant coach. In those days most coaches didn't have a.s.sistants, 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 a.s.signment 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 196970, 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 champions.h.i.+p 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 22, 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 inst.i.tute 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 107100 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 72 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 a.s.sists 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 11399 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 champions.h.i.+p ring. But once the champagne stopped flowing, I felt guilty about not having been able to contribute more to the champions.h.i.+p push. I was dying to get back in the game.

CHAPTER 4

THE QUEST

The privilege of a lifetime is being who you are.

JOSEPH CAMPBELL

In the summer of 1972, my brother Joe and I took a motorcycle trip through the West that s.h.i.+fted 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 relations.h.i.+p 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 br.i.m.m.i.n.g 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 pa.s.sages 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.