This Day in Sports History (Reed-Inspired Knicks Win Championship)

May 8, 1970—In retrospect, it seems clear now, the Los Angeles Lakers lost the National Basketball Association (NBA) championship even before the opening jump ball of the seventh and deciding game. They were flattened by the gimpy but heroic captain of the New York Knicks, Willis Reed (pictured), who sent the capacity crowd at Madison Square Garden into ecstasy as he walked gingerly from the locker room onto the court—then brought everyone to their feet by sinking the first two jumpers of the game.

The Knicks won going away, 113-99, for their first NBA title.

If my experience is any indication, the allegiance formed with a team in youth is tenacious enough to endure the worst setbacks. So it has proven with the Knicks, who have not won a championship in 40 years and, more often than not under current owner James Dolan, have been embarrassing.

But the particular magic of the Knicks’ 1970 run lingers with me still. In some ways, the ’73 team, with the addition of Jerry Lucas and Earl Monroe, was better. (See my account of that later squad.)

But the earlier version reversed years of being doormats; they had a compelling storyline, in the form of Reed, in a battle against the odds; and—no small matter—I had to create the scene occurring in the Garden in my own head, since the game was not being shown in real time on network TV.

That’s right, for any youngsters reading this post. In that pre-Magic, pre-Bird, pre-Showbiz era, the NBA looked to maximize every dollar, which meant that, on the channels then generally extant in the New York market, the game was tape-delayed. Without cable (and nobody I knew had it at the time), you were out of luck.

Except that you weren’t if you were listening to radio. There you had the young Marv Albert, toward the start of his career as “The Voice of the Knicks,” catching the aural equivalent of a wave, his voice rising with astonishment to match the roar of the crowd at the preposterous sight before them at shortly after 7:30 pm: “Here comes Willis!”

I was 10 years old that spring. The sports team my family had long rooted for, the New York Yankees, was in the middle of a seemingly endless interregnum between dynasties/ I had formed no significant other franchise attachments until I became enthralled with the team that had reeled off 18 consecutive wins over the winter.

And now, listening to Albert, I might as well have been in the Garden with that crowd as Reed, hoisting up a left-handed jump shot that had already devastated the Lakers when he had been healthy in games 1 through 4, raised the roof in the arena as the ball sank through the net. Then he proceeded to do it again.

I hung on every word of Albert’s as the night wore on, thrusting my fist in the air every time I heard the short word he turned from an affirmation to an exultation: “YES!!!!”

With three future Hall of Famers in the starting five (Wilt Chamberlain, Jerry West and Elgin Baylor) and with Reed out for Game 6, the Lakers had looked ready to take the series. But after the Knicks—who hadn’t even known if Reed would even be able to play—whirled around to see their center, captain and emotional heart, they were a team transformed. "When Willis Reed stepped onto the court, it gave us a 10-foot lift just to have him," recalled Bill Bradley.

Another Knick starter who pointed to the presence of Reed as the deciding factor in Game 7 was Walt Frazier. He was already the coolest cat in town with his fashion flair, but now the Knick guard had the game of his life, with 36 points and 19 assists.

Two other figures, neither of whom donned a uniform in the series—and one of whom had left the team that winter— should be mentioned in connection with the Knicks’ first championship. 

The man no longer with the organization was general manager Eddie Donovan, who, in order to be closer to his family, had left the team just a few months before to take on a similar role with the expansion Buffalo Braves. But, in his six years as Knicks GM, Donovan had surely assembled a championship-caliber squad through drafts (Reed, Frazier, Bradley, reserve Phil Jackson) and trades (Dick Barnett and, most significant, power forward Dave DeBusschere, whose presence enabled Reed to move back to his natural position: center).

The other significant figure was coach Red Holzman. It was he who stressed the necessity of moving without the ball, of “hitting the open man,” and, above all else, of the word that would be chanted by the crowd in critical moments: “DE-FENSE!” Holzman emphasized that playing cohesively as a unit would bring success to the Knicks as individuals. Forty years later, after Holzman’s election to the Basketball Hall of Fame, his retirement and death,  he remains a standard-bearer for a particular style of coaching, as evidenced by this Huffington Post article on “5 Tips for Building a High Performance Work Team.”

This Day in Sports History (Howard Cosell, Broadcast-Booth Mouth, Dies)

Apr. 23, 1995— Howard Cosell, perhaps the best known—and certainly most controversial—sportscaster of his time, died at age 77 of a heart embolism at the Hospital for Joint Diseases in New York City. Even as the strength in his body had faded in the last few years under the assault of multiple diseases, the memory of him had faded from a public that once tuned in to hear his outrageous utterances (or, as he put it, “telling it like it is”) on TV prizefights or with partners Frank Gifford and Don Meredith in the early years of “Monday Night Football.”

Cosell might have initially thought of himself as a sports journalist, but as he grew more famous, his fame extended far beyond those confines—a fact he abetted and reminded everyone about, on every conceivable occasion. 

In the early 1970s, Woody Allen spun comic gold from him in not in one but two films. In Bananas, Cosell made a cameo, giving a play-by-play narrative of the honeymoon night of Allen’s character, Fielding Mellish. In Sleeper, the humor was more pointed. A historian shows a tape of Cosell to Miles Monroe, Allen’s cryogenically frozen visitor from a century before: “At first we didn't know exactly what this was, but we've developed a theory. We feel that when citizens in your society were guilty of a crime against the state, they were forced to watch this.”

“Humble Howard,” they nicknamed him at the height of his fame, with irony as obvious as the toupee he wore on TV. He not only admitted to his egotism, he owned it. “Arrogant, pompous, obnoxious, vain, cruel, verbose, a showoff,” he once said. “I have been called all of these. Of course, I am.”

Sportscaster Jimmy Cannon put it far more hilariously and, of course, concisely: “If Howard Cosell were a sport, he’d be roller derby.”

In the mid-1970s, a relative of mine bought the live LP, Sinatra—The Main Event, in which Cosell introduced the Chairman of the Board. From a generation that worshipped The Beatles and Bob Dylan, I was aghast at the thought of purchasing anything by Ol’ Blue Eyes. But anything with Cosell constituted double grounds for temporary insanity.

“Not just Sinatra, but Cosell,” I asked my relative, staring at the LP. “What did you do?”

“It was a BIG mistake,” my relative allowed.

It’s hard to explain to anyone below the age of, say, 35, who came of age after Cosell receded from the limelight, what he had been like. I can say that when I was a kid, some of my friends took to mocking him. “THIS is How-ard CO-sell,” they would say, clutching an imaginary microphone, “speaking of sports.”

I might have thought better of Cosell if I thought he might be a bit bothered by the impromptu parodies of him by me and my friends. After all, it might be said that he got into sportscasting partly because of his advocacy for children.

Into his mid-30s, Cosell had been a sports attorney, with enough famous clients (including the young Willie Mays) to have become at least moderately successful. But at one point, while helping a client form a Little League with the novel idea of young ballplayers interviewing major leaguers, Cosell decided it would be even more fun—and, more important, lucrative—if he did so.

By 1956, Cosell was doing so well with sportscasting and commentary for ABC Radio that he was able to quit the legal profession.

The title of Cosell’s 1985 autobiography, I Never Played the Game, was a double-entendre. The meaning he wanted readers to get was that, unlike the “jockocracy” he endlessly railed against, he wasn’t a dimwitted cheerleader for a sport. But the other, literal meaning of the title was also true, albeit in ways he didn’t like to think about: He had never participated in the games he announced, as player or coach, and, therefore, brought no special insight into what to watch on the field or court, or in the ring.

The stands that Cosell took were less noble than he gave himself credit for. It wasn’t Cosell who was taking himself away from his livelihood in his prime, but Curt Flood when he battled baseball’s reserve clause all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. And it wasn’t Cosell who lost the greatest honor in his sport by following the precepts of a dimly understood religion by refusing to go to war in Vietnam, but Muhammad Ali (the former Cassius Clay).

After leaving "Monday Night Football" in 1984, Cosell gradually scaled back his activity, retiring for good in 1994. By the time Robert Lipsyte got around to writing in The New York Times about a visit to him for his 75^th birthday, I had practically forgotten he was even still around.

Lipsyte’s piece, written two years before Cosell’s demise, shocked me—and, I suspect, a number of other readers—in its unsparing depiction of a man who—outside of the limelight he once courted, beset by cancer, heart disease, kidney disease, diabetes, mild strokes, still absolutely bereft by the death of his beloved wife Emmy—seemed to be awaiting death impatiently:

“He does not get out of the apartment much. His daughters, Jill and Hillary, are concerned that physical activity, crowds, pressure of any kind could exacerbate his various ailments. The many medications he takes tend to leave him dopey and smiley. And with few real interests since his wife died three years ago -- he watches little TV and does not read much anymore -- the need to keep his eyes open diminishes.”

This Day in Sports History (Rice Immortalizes Notre Dame ‘4 Horsemen’)

Oct. 18, 1924—In the fading afternoon twilight in the press box at New York’s Polo Grounds, New York Herald Tribune columnist Grantland Rice pondered how to convey the excitement of the University of Notre Dame’s 14-7 win over Army that day, in a way that would distinguish his piece from that of talented friends on rival papers. 

Suddenly, a chance conversation from the year before and an anecdote he’d heard that week about the moviegoing habits of the Fighting Irish inspired the courtly Southerner to compare the winner’s swift backfield to a whirlwind force and to the “Four Horsemen” of the Apocalypse, in perhaps the most famous lead in the history of American sports journalism.

Rice’s dramatic opening and the importance of the game itself (a major clash of collegiate football powers) led the sportswriter’s editors to splash the piece on the front page, above the fold, of the Sunday paper. The column proved a public-relations bonanza for Notre Dame, providing one of the legendary moments in an athletic history filled with them.

In his heavily distributed column “Sportlight,” Rice was not above alluding to the Greek and Roman literature he had studied at Vanderbilt University. This afternoon, however, he referred to a piece of literature better known to religious-minded Americans, including the winning team—the Book of Revelation:

"Outlined against a blue-gray October sky, the Four Horsemen rode again. In dramatic lore they are known as Famine, Pestilence, Destruction and Death. These are only aliases. Their real names are Stuhldreher, Miller, Crowley and Layden. They formed the crest of the South Bend cyclone before which another fighting Army football team was swept over the precipice at the Polo Grounds yesterday afternoon as 55,000 spectators peered down on the bewildering panorama spread on the green plain below.”

There was some poetic license involved with this—not a surprise, really, since, liberally sprinkled among the 67 million words produced throughout his five-decade career, Rice tossed in his own verses for the sake of variety. Purists noted, for instance, that there was no way that the Army team could be “swept over the precipice at the Polo Grounds,” because the field sprawled out below the precipice under Coogan’s Bluff. Moreover, for subsequent generations of English majors raised on the prose of Ernest Hemingway, much of this is sounded like purple prose.

But Rice had his share of friends and admirers, even among those who wrote in ways that differed dramatically from his. Stanley Woodward, who acted as mentor to a generation of famous sportswriters as sports editor at the Herald Tribune, observed that among Rice’s legacies to subsequent practitioners of the craft was “rhythm and euphony.” Roger Kahn, author of the masterful elegy for the Brooklyn Dodgers, The Boys of Summer, noted simply that the “Four Horsemen” passage was “the most remarkable lead ever written on a football game”—one that, like the cyclone that functioned as the article’s central metaphor, “swept away all before it.”

As Rice recalled the creative process that led to this in his autobiography nearly 30 years later, The Tumult and the Shouting (excerpted in a fine football anthology just published by the Library of America, Football: Great Writing About the National Sport), after being nearly run over by three of the players in the Notre Dame backfield as he was standing on the sideline, he told a friend, “They’re like a wild horse stampede.”

But when he remembered this, Rice was in his early 70s, ailing, and, likely, forgetful about a more immediate influence on his thinking. Back in October 1924, George Strickler, then coach Knute Rockne's student publicity aide and later sports editor of the Chicago Tribune, told Rice and other reporters during halftime who were marveling over the exploits of quarterback Harry Stuhldreher, left halfback Jim Crowley, right halfback Don Miller, and fullback Elmer Layden that they were “just like the Four Horsemen,” a reference to the movie the team had seen the Wednesday before they traveled east for the game: The Four Horseman of the Apocalypse, starring an exotic new newcomer to Hollywood named Rudolph Valentino.

Reporting that day was as talented a group of sportswriters as may ever have watched a single game: Damon Runyon, Paul Gallico, Gene Fowler, Westbrook Pegler, Jack Kofoed, Davis Walsh, and Frank Wallace. Significantly, though, it is only Rice’s account that is still remembered.

The hyperbolic nature of his prose and the prominence given his story by The Herald Tribune accounted for much, but not all, of the reasons for this. Once Notre Dame made it home to South Bend, Strickler quickly got Stuhldreher, Miller, Crowley and Layden, all dressed in their uniforms, to mount horses from a local livery stable, and made sure that the wire services received the resulting image. The photo became indelibly associated with a team that went on to win the Rose Bowl and compile an undefeated record. The power of Rice’s words, then, was multiplied by a single image.

If the 1920s represented the Golden Age of Sport, then Rice was its bard. What he did with this passage illustrated what contemporaries regarded as his greatest gift, and what many today see as his greatest failing: transforming a transitory athletic moment, place, and people into mythological status.

A couple of years ago, Tommy Craggs posted a devastating critique of Rice’s literary failings (“Why Grantland Rice Sucked”) on the sports Website Deadspin. The notion of a sportswriter comparing a minor-league baseball game to Gettysburg, Bull Run or Waterloo is, indeed, laughable.  

But at least some of this is unfair to Rice. As a onetime college athlete himself, he knew intimately the competitive instincts and stresses of those who played sports, and he was part of a writing fraternity that was not interested in exposing the peccadilloes of players. It would take a full two generations after the appearance of the “Four Horsemen” column before that laissez-faire attitude changed.

What had altered, too, was the nature of the media covering these events. For No Cheering in the Press Box, a 1974 oral history of sportswriting edited by Jerome Holtzman, Strickler mused that by then, it would have been impossible for Rice and his brethren to practice the craft the way they had before:

“Your stories today are shorter because of the economics of getting out a newspaper. Your columns are narrower. Your type is larger. And when you start to trim a Grantland Rice or a Davis Walsh, you get down to the straight Associated Press story. You trim out the little touches, the man's nuances. You trim out the man himself. So how are they going to build up another Red Grange?”

(The reference to Grange is apropos here. While Notre Dame was crushing Army, Grange was leading the University of Illinois to victory over Michigan with an electrifying, five-touchdown performance, leading Rice, in a typical bit of versification, to term him the "gray ghost.") 

The other basic change was what boosted this particular column by Rice to begin with: the image. With the rise of television—and especially the multiple cameras and instant replay that were increasingly used—viewers could now see for themselves, in real time—and repeatedly thereafter—any plays. They didn’t need the likes of Rice to talk about the action. The emphasis, then, switched to the individuals associated with the game.  

More has disappeared, however, than the romantic style of sportswriting epitomized by Rice (who, incidentally, in perhaps his best-known bit of verse, wrote: "For when the One Great Scorer comes/To write against your name,/He marks--not that you won or lost/But how you played the game"). The Polo Grounds, scene of countless legendary baseball and football contests, was demolished in 1964. 

Even the types of backs hailed by Rice could no longer exist today. The biggest of the Four Horsemen, Layden, weighed only 164 pounds. In contrast, on this year's much-ballyhood Fighting Irish roster, quarterback Everett Golson and running backs Cam McDaniel, Tarean Folston, and Greg Bryant average 200 pounds.

This Day in Sports History (Roller-Derby Queen Weston Dies)

May 10, 1997—Former roller-derby star Joanie Weston, whose immense athleticism was overshadowed by contests that stressed fan-pleasing fistfights and hair-pulling, died at age 62 at her Hayward, Calif., home of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, a rare brain disorder.

In the early 1970s, as I grew weary of the increasing demands of the upper grades in my elementary school (heavier homework loads, more advanced math), I looked forward to watching our TV on Saturday mornings. I had moved beyond the still-standard cartoon fare of that time of week. 

But I had inexplicably found a show that, like school, called for more attention (mine) and a higher skill set (someone else’s) than, say, Bugs Bunny, but which, in contrast with my academic pursuits, was decidedly entertaining.

Roller derby had attained a zenith from which it would fall precipitously. It was not only reaching 120 cities through syndication but it was being mentioned in publications such as Sports Illustrated (e.g., this classic 1969 overview of the sport by the great Frank Deford), songs by Jim Croce, and even a film, Kansas City Bomber (whose reason for being perhaps had less to do with the sport’s inherent skills than with the anatomical charms of star Raquel Welch).

Leo Seltzer had conceived roller derby as a continuation of the transcontinental roller-rink “marathons” common during the Depression—then picked up on rules suggested by the great sportswriter-fiction writer Damon Runyon to bring about the modern sport. Seltzer’s son Jerry raised the sport's profile in the Fifties and Sixties by arranging widespread television coverage. 

There seemed no reason why, like football in the same decades, this rough-and-tumble pastime might not become far, far bigger very soon.

The sport to which roller derby was compared was wrestling, mostly because of its inevitable brawls.

But while I could care less about guys with rolls of muscle alternating with fat thumping each other on the mat, I was fascinated by roller derby. It was, like ice hockey, all a matter of speed and movement, and like ice hockey in those years it also had its share of fights (hello, Derek Sanderson?).

But I loved how the two teams in their helmets and shorts circled the banked tracks in whip-fast phalanxes, as so-called “jammers” probed for an opening as they tried to “lap” the opposition. Charlie O’Connell, lean, strong and disdainful (think of the New York Mets’ Dave Kingman on skates), ruled the men’s side of the sport. Joanie Weston, as “pivot” (the controller of the action) of the San Francisco Bay Bombers, was queen of the women’s side.

Only a year or two after I had started watching it, roller derby had largely disappeared from the airwaves, a victim of financial troubles. I had gone on to other things—high school and adolescence—and hadn’t noticed its passing. 

It wasn’t until I picked up Deford’s appreciation of the life of Weston in the New York Times Magazine 14 years ago that I thought again about the sport, and its great female star.

Away from arenas, Deford revealed, Weston was a sweet, nun-educated, pretty young woman who, while traveling the exhibition circuit, loved to cuddle at night in one of those lonely Holiday Inns with a mixed-breed canine named Malia. 

But once she strapped on her skates and helmets, preparing for no-holds-barred action in which she might block one minute and sprint as the jammer in another, she was something else entirely:

“[O]n the banked track, she was transformed. Hear it now: No. 38 in your program, No. 1 in your hearts. The Blond Bomber --- 5 foot 10, 165 pounds, strong and agile, as superb a female athlete as ever there was. She kept her hair strawberry blond and a scarf knotted around her neck to make her as stylishly feminine as her (wonderfully) tacky orange and black attire permitted. Never mind. Swirling, pounding, commanding, she looked the best part of a Viking queen, sallying forth.”

Weston’s prime occurred before Title IX was passed 40 years ago. Who knows how many remunerative athletic doors it might have opened for her?

One sport other than roller derby in which she was undisputedly dominant was softball. The story goes that, in one game, Weston hit eight home runs for St. Mary’s College in Los Angeles—and was ready to try for another when she was told by the nuns running her school that if she hit it, she would be excommunicated!

Nowadays, if you want to see a blond Valkyrie wage uninhibited combat against all comers, you have to catch Laura Ingraham subbing for Bill O’Reilly on Fax News. What the spectacle gains in decibels, it loses in dynamic images—a sorry tradeoff, if you ask me.

I understand that roller derby has undergone something of a revival this past decade, only this time playing down the wrestling-like antics. I think Weston would have approved.

This Day in Sports History (Tonya Harding Wins Tainted Figure-Skating Championship)

January 8, 1994—Two days after rival Nancy Kerrigan had been eliminated from the U.S. Figure Skating Championships through a sudden attack on the kneecap through mysterious assailants, Tonya Harding won the contest.

Now, you would think that the Olympics—which had already seen a massacre by terrorists, a trip-up between two female runners, and such extensive steroid use that one East German female athlete required a sex-change operation afterward—had seen enough violence, cat-fighting and skullduggery to last a lifetime. 

But the Kerrigan-Harding saga proved to be something new, right up there with the Texas mom who tried to rub out a rival for her daughter on the cheerleading squad.

Kerrigan’s assailants had not done their job thoroughly enough. Therefore, even though the swollen knee forced the skater to withdraw from the U.S. competition, she still had six weeks to rehabilitate the injured body part and prepare for the Olympics—and, using an obscure rule, the figure skating association committee decided to place her and Harding among America’s Olympic hopefuls.

A video of the attack led to unsettling questions for Harding on possible associations with the thugs.

The intense speculation—not to mention gathering legal storm—unsettled the Pacific Northwest skater so much that she faltered at the Olympic games in Lillehammer. While Kerrigan came away with a silver medal, Harding finished out of the running in eighth place.

It turned out that Harding had good reason to fear the long arm of the law. It was Harding’s no-good ex-hubby, Jeff Gillooly (with whom she still lived), had hired goons to whack Kerrigan, and eventually she was forced to cop to knowing about the “Battle of Wounded Knee II” and hindering prosecution. She was lucky to escape with three years probation and payment of $160,000 in fines and contributions.

The U.S. Figure Skating Association, however, was in a considerably less forgiving mood than the law.

Harding had initially threatened to go to court after the attack to ensure that she would have the opportunity to go to the Olympics. The aggrieved association, surely remembering this, not only stripped her of her title but banned her for life.

To be sure, there were elements of stereotyping in how the media played up the Kerrigan-Harding rivalry. 

I remember early accounts of Kerrigan comparing her looks to those of a young Katharine Hepburn, bringing to mind a cool patrician elegance that must have seemed odd to this daughter of a middle-class Irish-American welder. 

And, to be sure, all the talk about Harding and her “poor-white-trash” background inspired a countervailing bitter academic critique.

All of this talk about class missed the point. There is nothing wrong with being poor—nor, come to think of it, anything in and of itself that makes it particularly noble.

Harding’s problem in the end was not a poverty-stricken background, but a poverty of values that led her to cut corners to win success—and, in the years afterward, to watch her life continue to careen, without the grace she found, fleetingly, on the ice.