Blood in the Garden: The Flagrant History of the 1990s New York Knicks

by Chris Herring

“Don’t ask me to be a traffic cop if I can’t write no tickets.”)

For five minutes, the players watched displays full of carnage. Ones showing brutal car crashes, spliced with clips of PBS programming that illustrated bighorn rams headbutting one another for supremacy.

He was legitimately a tough guy—who came to practice with a hockey helmet and his jaw wired shut the day after shattering his teeth, breaking his chin, and fracturing his mandible at UNLV in 1990—but tried too hard to be a Tough Guy.

“These guys only care about you having four qualities: that you’re competent, sincere, reliable, and trustworthy,”

“You get a lot of guys in this business who have just been spoon-fed,” Oakley said. “But Larry? You can tell somewhere down the line Larry had to learn to eat soup with a fork.”

The 6-foot-11 Brown, taking issue with the nature of Ward’s box-out—“He was going for my knees instead of trying to go for the rebound”—flipped out, and flipped Ward over, suplexing a player who stood nine inches shorter and weighed fifty pounds less. The reaction prompted Ward to jump to his feet and run at Brown, the man he had been praying with just three and a half hours earlier.