When the Garden Was Eden
Clyde, the Captain, Dollar Bill, and the Glory Days of the New York Knicks
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- $229.00
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- $229.00
Descripción editorial
“Brilliant . . . smartly written, featuring tons of interviews with the Knicks of the Phil Jackson-Clyde-Reed era.” — New York Magazine
“Harvey Araton has evocatively rendered the team that New York never stops pining for—the Old Knicks. More than a nostalgic chronicle . . . it’s a portrait of a group of proud, idiosyncratic men and the city that needed them." — Jonathan Mahler, author of Ladies and Gentleman, the Bronx is Burning
In the tradition of The Boys of Summer and The Bronx Is Burning, New York Times sports columnist Harvey Araton delivers a fascinating look at the 1970s New York Knicks—part autobiography, part sports history, part epic, set against the tumultuous era when Walt Frazier, Willis Reed, and Bill Bradley reigned supreme in the world of basketball.
The late 1960s and early 1970s, in New York City and America at large, were years marked by political tumult, social unrest . . . and the best professional basketball ever played. Paradise, for better or worse, was a hardwood court in midtown Manhattan.
Harvey Araton has followed the Knicks, old and new, for decades—first as a teenage fan, then as a young sports reporter with the New York Post, and now as a writer and columnist for the New York Times. When the Garden Was Eden is the definitive account of the New York Knicks in their vintage pomp. With measured prose and shoe-leather reporting, Araton relives their most glorious triumphs and bitter rivalries, and casts light on a team all but forgotten outside of pregame highlight reels and nostalgic reunions at the Garden.
Araton’s revealing story of the Knicks’ heyday is far more than a review of one of basketball’s greatest teams’ inspiring story—it is, at heart, a stirring recreation of a time and place when the NBA championships defined the national dream.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Long before he was a sports columnist for the New York Times, native New Yorker Araton grew up loving the Knicks during their championship heyday. Personal significance aside, according to Araton, the teams of the late 1960s and early 1970s "were the city's first true basketball love, consummated in the years before the romance of sport became complicated by money and the constructed divide between athlete and fan." Their share-the-wealth success spurred countless books and created several heroes, such as Walt "Clyde" Frazier, who was smooth on and off the court, and inspirational leader Willis Reed, whose dramatic return from a painful knee injury in game seven of the 1970s NBA finals cemented his legend. Araton profiles the team's construction, its players (some of whom have seen better days since retirement), and the high profile fans ( Woody Allen, Elliot Gould) who may have helped turn pro basketball into a media-savvy, worldwide business. The author's attempts to tie the era's political tumult and his own personal experiences to the larger story feel arbitrary and forced, but this thoroughly reported examination of the "Old Knicks" and their connection to the city is still an essential read for basketball history buffs. 8 pages of b&w photo.
