Free When the Garden Was Eden by Harvey Araton

medal from the Summer Olympics… And to my right, the young man who was the recipient of that medal… Bill Hosket.”
    Then the question dropped.
    What did Hosket have to say about the African American 200-meter medalists, Tommie Smith (gold) and John Carlos (bronze), raising a Black Power salute from the podium? Not much. Something quickly manufactured about how Hosket and his teammates were focused on what they had to do, nothing more or less.
    When the interview concluded, Hosket stared at Cosell in total disbelief. Cosell ignored him, exulting in his ability to make another member of the jockocracy—an institution he both promoted and railed against—squirm. He looked over at Blauschild and chuckled in that macabre Cosellian way.
    “Threw the farmer a hanging curve and he singled up the middle,” he said.
    Hosket wasn’t too insulted. At least he had mustered some response. He recounted the story to me as he no doubt had to friends and associates in the years since he had returned to Ohio and gone into the insurance business—with an enduring appreciation for what he called “the fun part of being in New York.” But there had been a larger lesson in Cosell’s presumptuous query, a new paradigm for reporter-athlete protocol, based on the politics and social upheaval that were crashing through the once heavily fortified boundaries of sport.
    “It was a tumultuous time and the first time that it seemed the outside world had invaded ballparks and arenas,” said Larry Merchant, who at the time wrote a critically acclaimed sports column for the New York Post , a destination read during my teenage years the minute my father walked through the door before dinner, the afternoon paper rolled up in his back pants pocket. With a literate, acerbic touch and an eye for the offbeat, the column was called Fun ’n Games. But now, all of a sudden, the questions being asked and the answers given were not always fun and were about much more than games.
    “It wasn’t just the [Vietnam] war; it was the social upheaval, the civil rights, women’s rights, who stood up and who didn’t,” Merchant said. “So many issues that were controversial, to the extent where a number of the athletes decided they could not avoid it. What had always been a sanctuary began to reflect the outside world.”
    Wilmer (Bill) Hosket Jr. was the Knicks’ first-round draft pick in 1968, a 6'8" forward/center out of Ohio State, the tenth player chosen overall. In Mexico City, his Olympic teammates had included some famous names (Jo Jo White, Charlie Scott, Spencer Heywood) and others (Calvin Fowler, Don Dee, John Clawson) already retreating into obscurity. Hosket would fall somewhere in between as he embarked on a short four-year NBA career, two with a rising Knicks team.
    That first visit of his to New York, though, came four years after the Civil Rights Act of 1964, after Martin Luther King Jr. had electrified the nation with his “I Have a Dream” speech in Washington, D.C., and three years after black players in the upstart American Football League’s All-Star game were turned away by New Orleans hotels and businesses, leading to a boycott that forced the game to be moved elsewhere. Sixteen months had lapsed since Muhammad Ali refused to join the Army, famously explaining, “I ain’t got no quarrel with them Viet Cong.” The unsavory tensions of the real world had intruded resolutely upon athletics. Smith and Carlos had used the international Olympic stage to condemn the ongoing oppression of their people, Carlos unzipping his track jacket in a show of solidarity with American blue-collar workers because, he said, it wasn’t just African Americans who were being held down by the rich American establishment.
    The country was choosing sides, and many sportswriters were beginning to ask the players they covered, “For or against?” In the Knicks’ locker room, many of the players with serious points of view were initially reticent to