WILLIS REED - HE WALKED INTO OUR HEARTS

Taking court in Game 7 cemented Reed’s legacy, but he was so much more

22 Mar 2023 - New York Post

Mike Vaccaro - Mvaccaro@nypost.com

THE MOMENT was captured first on radio, on WHN, 1050 on the AM dial in those days. Marv Albert was behind the microphone, and he was the only conduit to a basketball city sitting on tenterhooks, awaiting Game 7 of the NBA Finals.

The game was blacked out in New York City and its suburbs, so if you weren’t among the 19,500 people inside Madison Square Garden on May 8, 1970, Albert was the only way you would know if Willis Reed would try to play on a hip ruined by a fall inside this building four nights earlier.

Albert’s pitch was higher than normal, because the crowd was already fevered and furious.

“For the Knicks and the Lakers, it comes down to this,” Albert said. “Who will win the final game of the season. And on this one game alone you can almost throw out all previous performance …”

And here is where the crowd nearly drowned Albert’s voice. At this precise second (broadcast in New York on tape delay a few hours later), an ABC broadcaster named Jack Twyman pointed to the floor, alerting his partner, Chris Schenkel of the commotion. The next morning, and for all the days thereafter, the work of Garden photographer George Kalinsky would freeze that exact moment, Reed standing upright, the fans in the background bonkers.

“Now the crowd rising,” Albert said. “Here comes Willis Reed!”

It is among the handful of greatest sporting moments that’ve ever happened within the boundaries of New York — up there with Bobby Thomson taking Ralph Branca deep on Oct. 3, 1951; up there with Cleon Jones squeezing a fly ball on Oct. 16, 1969; up there with Mark Messier shaking the Stanley Cup like an oversized salt shaker on June 14, 1994.

Up there. But probably the greatest of all of them.

“There are times,” Willis Reed told me a few years ago, “when I swear I wake up and I hear the cheers from that night. And here’s what’s funny ...”

Here, he laughed, and if you ever heard Willis Reed laugh you never forgot it.

“We hadn’t even done anything yet.” They would soon enough, of course. Soon enough, courtside observers would spot Wilt Chamberlain aban

doning his pregame rituals, and simply staring at Willis on the layup line (after he’d nervously asked of Kalinsky: “George, is Willis gonna play?). Soon enough, Reed would take a couple of outside jumpers — the only two he made all night — and the Knicks were off to a 38-24 first-quarter lead, a 69-42 halftime lead, and ultimately the first championship in franchise history.

“It was a team that meant a lot to a lot of people,” Reed said.

And the moment Reed walked through the tunnel, elbowed his way past the scorer’s table, grabbed a basketball to begin his abbreviated warm-ups is one that lives to this day. Knicks fans born years — even decades — afterward know it as if they were there to witness it. Whenever that moment is shown on the video board at Madison Square Garden, the cheers are inevitably the loudest of that night.

Reed died Tuesday at age 80, and his passing triggered an outpouring of emotions among sports fans across the gamut. It is important to remember that Reed was a great player long before he was a courageous one. He had already won the MVP for the season and the All-Star Game in 1969-70, and would soon add a third as Finals MVP — he was the first to ever build that troika, and only Michael Jordan and Shaquille O’Neal have joined him.

He wasn’t just the best player on that team, he was its most important one, the captain, a job he assumed when the Knicks were still terrible in 1966 and a designation he took seriously.

“When your teammates think enough of you to name you captain,” Reed said, “you have to honor that every day.”

Said Clyde Frazier on the golden anniversary of that ’70 team: “I don’t ever remember anyone ever telling me Willis was the captain. He just was the captain.”

It was exactly two days into that captaincy when, on Oct. 18, 1966, the seeds of Reed’s legend were officially planted when he essentially took on the entire Lakers team with his fists in a 122-119 Knicks victory. This was a different era, and though Reed was ejected, that was the extent of his punishment.

The ancillary effects? Those would remain until his final game, a two-minute cameo in Game 4 of the 1974 conference finals, a 98-91 Knicks loss to the Celtics. And, really, until his final breath. Every time he was introduced at the Garden, he would be identified as “The

Captain.” Every time one of his old teammates would greet him, it would be the same: “Cap’n!” “Cap!” “Cappy!”

And Knicks fans … well, Reed said this on the night Patrick Ewing’s number was retired.

“Everyone should feel the kind of love I have felt,” he said. “Everyone should know that. The fans always say, ‘Thank you!’ when I shake their hands or take a picture. And they should know: I’m the one who’s eternally grateful.”

He is also the one who gave us an eternal moment just by doing as a captain does: showing up for work, punching a clock, inspiring his coworkers. And it is a bitter irony: New York still suffers from the fact that a wrecking ball was taken to the original Penn Station, a sin so egregious they soon passed a law prohibiting such crimes against local history.

Yet on the same site, five stories above Penn Plaza, someone else decided to do away with the Willis Reed Tunnel when the latest renovation of the Garden was ordered. That tunnel should’ve stood, in some form or fashion, forever. Much as the moment when Willis Reed walked through it on May 8, 1970, has. And does. And always will.