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newspapers are going to be lining somebody’s birdcage tomorrow?”
    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.”
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    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