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

by Chris Herring

According to McDaniel’s teammates in Seattle, he often walked around the Sonics’ locker room fully erect after games, hanging towels on his hardened member.

“So, we’re not gonna practice today. Instead, we’ll watch a movie that just came out. It’s about Tim McCormick. It’s called White Men Can’t Jump

Oakley took a similar approach toward practices. In one scrimmage, he dove for a ball that was headed out of bounds, but knocked it into the crotch of assistant Jeff Nix by accident, leaving Nix in so much pain that he made arrangements to see a urologist. The ordeal was a blessing in disguise: during the visit, the doctor found, and removed, an unrelated growth Nix hadn’t been aware of. “It’s always made me grateful that Oak hustled the way he did,” Nix says. “He may have saved my life.”

The 25-year-old Anthony was full of contradictions. 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. He was someone who mistakenly left a loaded gun in the Knicks’ weight room after practice, but often became gun-shy when confronted about his shortcomings.

“I was so mad—I just wanted to take my fist and put it through his face,” Starks said of the sequence. It would hardly be the only time Starks boiled over about Miller. (After a particularly intense regular-season game with Indiana in 1995, Starks bizarrely told a beat reporter, “I’m gonna cut [Miller’s] dick off and make him eat it.”) And the Game 3 headbutt obviously wasn’t a fist to Miller’s face.

After a few seconds of thinking Jackson’s request over, a member of the small group responded to the coach. “Fuck you!” he shouted down to Jackson, as the men kept sledgehammering during the walk-through. The moment—hard hats, defiant swagger, competitiveness—summed up New York City’s grunge beauty in one fell swoop.

Antoine got past his father with a crossover dribble and raced in for a layup that would have tied the score. But just before he could finish the play, the elder Mason—at least seven inches taller and 80 pounds heavier than Antoine—flew into the frame and clotheslined his adolescent son in the throat. “As I’m laying on the ground, holding my throat and coughing, he grabs the ball, lays it in, and says, ‘Game.’ And then walks in the house,” he says.

Sometimes he pushed the players a bit more than they liked. During a practice that first year under Riley, Van Gundy repeatedly shouted at Charles Oakley, telling him he was playing soft. After the third such remark, Oakley fired the ball at Van Gundy’s crotch, leaving the coach doubled over.

Two days later, when the Knicks hosted another high schooler, Tapscott rolled out the same spiel. He used the same icebreaker, asking whether the youngster had attended his school prom one month earlier. Seemingly confused, Kobe Bryant raised his eyebrows. “Yeah—I took Brandy to my prom,” Bryant said, referring to the teenage, platinum-selling R&B singer.

“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.”

And even if the story didn’t have a happy ending, it’s one nearly all the players—and their millions of fans, who’ve longed for a team like that ever since—would gladly relive.