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

by Chris Herring

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.”)

After the game, Mason said he regretted throwing a pass at all, and that taking a five-second violation would have been the safer option. But that clarity came only with hindsight. Close to stepping over the line and committing a guaranteed violation, Mason hesitated but eventually passed to Anthony, feeling he had nowhere else to go with the ball. As he let go of it, Anthony still wasn’t standing upright, or in a position to catch the ball. But Miller was—and he swiftly took advantage of the mistake. The Pacers star got away with the shove to Anthony’s back; one he acknowledged during his Hall of Fame speech years later should have been called a foul. After intercepting Mason’s pass on the left wing, Miller then raced to get behind the three-point line, where he squared his shoulders to fire another triple. Anthony was to his feet by then, and tried contesting the shot. But Anthony stood just 6 feet tall, and the 6-foot-7 Miller shot over him with ease. He drained the shot. And now the score was tied at 105. The improbable sequence, which left the Garden stunned, took place in just a twelve-second span.

By the time Walsh made it to a TV, Miller was on the line, sinking free throws to give Indiana a 107–105 advantage. The guard had single-handedly tallied eight points in less than nine seconds of game time.

With five seconds left, and Indiana ahead 97–95, Harper whipped an inbound pass to Ewing at the arc, where he was instantly blanketed by a double team. The big man hesitated, looking for an open teammate, before turning his back to the basket. He then pivoted to his right and pounded a dribble into the hardwood, gaining enough steam not only to get into the lane, but also to split Indiana’s defenders, who’d thought that Ewing would pull up for a jumper. “It was like the seas opened up,” Harper says. Ewing created a clean look at the basket. The only problem was he’d left his feet maybe one dribble too early, leaving him too far away to dunk the ball, but too close to float it in. So with an abundance of momentum, Ewing tried to finger-roll it in. But the attempt was long, and it bounced off the back iron.

“Okay,” Riley said, taking a moment to figure out how to phrase his next critique. “Well, if you want to be a head coach, you probably need to start dressing better.” Beyond that, Riley told him not to be sheepish about the fact he hadn’t been an NBA player. “These guys only care about you having four qualities: that you’re competent, sincere, reliable, and trustworthy,” Riley told him. “If you are those four things, you can accomplish anything in this league.”

“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.”

So reporters had no idea that, early in his career, Ewing paid for each of his teammates to come down to spend a few days with him in his native Jamaica during the offseason. Or that Ewing would regularly tell the younger players to buy whatever they wanted at Friedman’s Shoes during trips to Atlanta, because he’d pay for it. Or that when he learned the wife of Chris Jent—someone he was teammates with for just three months in 1996—developed a brain tumor, he and Van Gundy sent checks the next week to cover the entirety of her chemotherapy and radiation treatments.