Free When the Garden Was Eden by Harvey Araton Page A

answer. “The players were very outspoken about their sentiments among each other but were private in public,” Phil Jackson said. “We did have a few guys serving their country.” The counterculture maverick in Jackson, camped somewhere within the graying boomer who in 2010 would opine that the controversial Arizona immigration policies were not the NBA’s business, couldn’t resist accentuating the word serving .
    Measuring in under the 80-inch disqualification height, Cazzie Russell was one of them. For the first three years of his career, Russell was on a plane many weekends, heading back and forth to the Illinois National Guard. “I would fly to Chicago on a Friday afternoon, attend a Saturday meeting, fly back to New York for a Saturday-night game,” he said. “Then back to Chicago for Sunday duty and rejoin the team for the week.” He cackled at the thought of LeBron James, Nike’s current major general, having to do his duty as a weekend warrior, tweeting his displeasure while his private jet was de-iced for takeoff.
    Russell, an infantryman, saw live action during the summer of 1968 when he was assigned to scan and patrol Chicago rooftops for snipers during the infamous Democratic National Convention that embroiled student demonstrators, protesters, and a massive police presence fortified by the National Guard. The explosion of violence was a reflection of the tensions and frustrations in a country that was reeling from unspeakable tragedy and festering wounds: the assassinations that spring, two and a half months apart, of King and Robert F. Kennedy.
    “They mobilized us because they knew there was going to be trouble,” Russell said. “I saw it all—the protests, the police brutality, the craziness in the streets. It made you sad. It made you think about a lot of things that were a lot more important than basketball.”
    That year, 1968, New York had its own reverberating conflict. In the Brownsville section of Brooklyn—a neighborhood that was of particular interest to me, since I had lived there between the ages of five and ten before moving with my family to Staten Island in 1962—the community was given control of its schools in a decentralization test case. It responded by attempting to rid itself of white teachers. New York’s teachers’ union moved swiftly to defend its members and authorized a citywide strike. The strife between the black community and the union was a window into a city teeming with racial tensions. But it was merely one of many fiscal and social issues that plagued John V. Lindsay from the very first day of his mayoralty, which included a strike by the Transport Workers Union of America that shut down mass transit for twelve crippling days and a nine-day sanitation walkout in 1968 that turned the city into a mountain of reeking, burning garbage.
    That same year, a young Queens attorney who would later become a political force in his own right was amazed by what he saw in his beloved native New York. “It was a crazy, crazy time, but very different from what would come later, the hangover from the seventies, the crack epidemic and HIV and on into the twenty-first century, when the problems would become much, much greater because the world has gotten so much smaller and what happens in Iran is as important as what happens in Chicago,” said Mario Cuomo, the future governor of New York and father of Andrew, who in 2010 would ascend to the same Albany office that Mario had occupied from 1983 through 1994. “In the sixties, Vietnam was driving people crazy and brought all the drugs, and then the political violence and assassinations. But because we were fighting for all kinds of freedoms, it was also a time that you could shape an ideology, an identity.”
    When Cuomo was growing up in the South Jamaica section of Queens in the 1940s, playing baseball (seriously enough to land a minor league deal with Pittsburgh) and throwing elbows in school-yard pickup and church league