Reed a sports hero to be proud of
The Madison Square Garden court was a blur of activity, the 1994 NBA Finals having moved from Houston to New York. Swarms of media filled the floor, including a small busload from the Chronicle there to cover the final steps toward what would be the first major team sports championship in Houston.
There were interviews to be done, an assignment to complete. But I was, much to my amazement, on the Garden floor. I had something I had to do.
I had one chance. I stationed myself at the left elbow, free-throw line slightly extended. I took a pass and put in an awkward lefthanded jumper.
I could never be my childhood sports hero. That was obvious, even to me, by the time I was 10 years old and first saw Willis Reed play in person. But I was where he stood in the first exhilarating minutes of Game 7 — that Game 7 — when he authored one of the most iconic moments in sports history. And in tribute, I took the shot that he did.
Hardly anyone noticed mine. His will never be forgotten.
When Reed passed at 80 on Tuesday, there were tributes around the NBA citing his excellence as a player and, of course, his legendary arrival for Game 7 of the 1970 NBA Finals, when he got off the training table and limped his way through the old midcourt tunnel and onto the floor to join his Knicks teammates as the Lakers, a team full of basketball icons, stopped their warmups to watch.
Reed made the game’s first two shots, the only ones he took. Walt Frazier produced one of the greatest games ever played. The Knicks won the championship.
We’ve heard Marv Albert’s “Here comes Willis” radio call so often that I can’t tell if I remember it from the many years since seeing that moment or from listening on the radio in the family kitchen.
Athletes who play through injuries are said to “pull a Willis Reed.” The game is called “the Willis Reed game.” When the Garden was reconfigured, fans lamented the loss of the admittedly anachronistic “Willis tunnel.”
That night was understandably considered definitive, but not to me.
Willis Reed was my favorite player at an age when declaring a favorite player was important. He was my guy before he crashed to the floor in Game 5, a game the Knicks somehow won, but with their championship hopes seemingly broken with no way to stop Wilt Chamberlain again without Reed.
He was my guy even before the first game I ever attended, on Christmas Day 1969, when Reed put in the game-winner off an inbounds lob from Frazier at the buzzer, a memory so cherished in my family that my brother sent me an account of the game this past Sunday, two days before Reed passed.
Reed was my first — and really, only — sports hero because he personified the way heroes are supposed to be. He was, as 76ers coach Doc Rivers (who played for Reed in Atlanta when Reed was a Hawks assistant) tweeted, “Simply a great person, A man!!! A leader!!! A Winner!!!”
The Knicks were basketball poetry, teamwork above everything. They were a team with a Rhodes Scholar who would become a United States senator, Bill Bradley; the future commissioner of the ABA, Dave DeBusschere; and the best player in franchise history, Frazier.
Yet Reed was the captain, not just as a title given to him, but as a description of the sort of player and person he was.
NBA commissioner Adam Silver has had to put out too many statements in recent seasons following the passing of some of the greats of the game. This one seemed personal, or at least it was to me.
“Willis Reed was the ultimate team player and consummate leader. My earliest and fondest memories of NBA basketball are of watching Willis, who embodied the winning spirit that defined the New York Knicks’ championship teams in the early 1970s,” Silver said. “He played the game with remarkable passion and determination, and his inspiring comeback in Game 7 of the 1970 NBA Finals remains one of the most iconic moments in all of sports.”
Over the years, I’ve come to be proud that I chose a favorite player so well. In the past few days, as with people taking solace from the stories shared at a memorial, I’ve gotten to appreciate the descriptions not of his remarkable strength or soft shooting touch, but of the sort of guy he was.
“I knew him as an adversary of my dad’s growing up, the Knicks vs. Celtics battles back when I was super young,” Rockets coach Stephen Silas said. “Then he became the coach at Creighton University, where my dad went. I remember having conversations. And when my dad worked for the New Jersey Nets, (Reed) was the GM, and I used to see him all the time because I was a ball boy.
“Just a nice, nice man. Had an edge to him. You could tell that he was an enforcer and not the nicest guy on the court but someone that would talk to me, someone who would spend time and knew my name and asked, ‘How’s school?’ When I went to college, ‘I know you are at Brown. How is that?’ ”
When Silas worked for the Retired Players Association and Reed attended an event in Boston, Silas had no ticket, but Reed saw him and said, “Just come in with me,” knowing no one would say a word about Reed’s bringing a guest. Silas spent that evening with Willis and Gale Reed.
“He was so nice and gracious,” Silas said. “Something about those guys from that era — they all have a toughness about them on the court, and you can see it simmering when you were around them, but just so nice and thoughtful and proud to be part of the NBA.”
I finally met Reed, too. When I was in my first weeks covering the NBA for the Dallas Times Herald, I called him in his office long before cellphones. The first thing he said was, “How did you get this number?”
That would seem to be a letdown, but it wasn’t, because moments later, he could not have been more conversational or helpful to a reporter who had no idea what he was doing.
We met a few times since, once chatting at the old Nets practice facility in New Jersey, once at the Hall of Fame. I told him what he and the Knicks meant to me, and he said he appreciated it but talked instead about the Nets. On the next occasion, he wanted to talk about Hakeem Olajuwon to make sure I understood the greatness of the player I was in Springfield to write about.
I probably never really explained to him what his career and example meant to me, but on some level, I think he knew.
As Howard Cosell put it to him that May night in 1970, “You offered, I think, the best of the human spirit.”
Rest in peace, Captain, and thank you.