1970 Somethin'

In honor of the end of the Knicks 2013 season, I watched Game 7 of the 1970 NBA Finals aka "The Willis Reed Game." I'd heard about it but never really appreciated its significance, until my Dad (shoutout Dad!) put me on to the game's historic, cultural, and heroic import. Here's the backdrop:

-the NBA finals are gonna be decided by one game, and "the #1 question is can the Feds can get us," no, actually, it's will Willis Reed play. Whachutalkinbout Willis was the Knicks big man and the only answer to the Lakers' Wilt Chamberlain. For those who don't know bout Wilt the Stilt, he is famous for two things: 1. scoring 100 points in a game (insane), and 2. claiming to have slept with like a million women or something ridiculous like that. Only the first is relevant here.

-Keep in mind that that Lakers team had three of the top 50greatest players of ALL TIME (I'ma let u finish): Wilt, Jerry West, and Elgin Baylor.

-Willis had gotten injured and no one knew if he was gonna play. Not even the other Knicks knew. Suddenly, as both teams are on the Court getting ready to start the game, Willis limps out of the locker room. At this point I'll turn the narration over to an eye-witness at the time, albeit as a youngin, Dad Esq. aka SuperDad:

"Although the run-up is discussed in the interviews, none of the clips really capture the emotion of watching Reed hobble on to join the team--an indescribable bit of drama. When is the last time you saw a pre-game analysis interrupted in mid-sentence to watch a single player limp on the court to a standing ovation that grows with every practice shot taken?"

What follows is one of the greatest basketball performances of all time. Willis incredibly hits his first two shots, sends the crowd into pandemonium, and then helps orchestrate one of the greatest displays of team basketball ever. This gets to the socio-cultural stuff. Again, Dad: "In an era of racial turmoil, the 70' Knicks were the first truly integrated (in every sense of that word) "dream team.""

The team really was diverse: Willis was from the segregated south (Louisiana) and went to an HBCU (Grambling), Bill Bradely was a Rhodes Scholar, future U.S. Senator, and Princetonian,  Dave DeBusschere was a white dude from Detroit, and Walt "Clyde" Frazier was "who everyone wanted to be" (footnote: Dad). 

I've heard about some of the "racial turmoil," too. Pops told me that when he was a teenager these dudes stormed the basketball court with sticks and bats and just started takin muahfckrs out, but when they came to him his Black friends he played ball with were like, "nah, he's cool, leave him alone." I'm sure that made him even more aware of the way basketball, a team, can unite people, a city.

When you hear Willis talk about it years later you can see the incredible selflessness of a man who took the floor when he could barely walk. This decent recap concludes with this from the Big Man (paraphrased): "people ask me how I explain to my son that the greatest game I ever played I only scored 4 points. I tell him it wasn't the best game I ever played, but it was the most important." #early Father's day