One last time, Donald Trump and Willis Reed graced the back (lead) sports page of a New York City tabloid.
The former U.S. president stays in the news, racking up billable hours from a myriad of lawyers. Reed, a Black man from Louisiana, has tugged at the collective heart of New Yorkers since Richard Nixon was in office.
Or anyone who remembers basketball at all levels before it became a shooting gallery, when one got on ESPN "SportsCenter" -- then it was the late sports report on one's local channel -- for walking through the air rather than a game of H-O-R-S-E.
Few have played the American game better than the New York Knicks of the early 1970s. When "the magic world of Madison Square Garden" was filled for every home game and the late John Condon, the public address announcer, announced the running score after every made basket. With the Yankees in a dull period before George Steinbrenner signed Reggie Jackson for megabucks in free agency, the Knicks were the biggest show in town -- Tom Seaver and the Mets running a close second.
The Knicks have not filled the big house on Eighth Avenue with an NBA championship since Red Holzman coached Willis, Clyde, Dollar Bill, Earl the Pearl and someone who became famous as a coach, Phil Jackson, to titles in 1970 and 1973.
The latter season featured Reed, the Knicks' captain, the most famous Grambling State athlete to play in the city of Babe Ruth. Joe DiMaggio and Derek Jeter, near the end of the line but still butting heads with L.A. Lakers contemporary Wilt Chamberlain. Both men played on two championship seasons (Wilt with Philadelphia in 1967 and the Lakers, of a record 33 straight victories, in 1972) but one can think of 20,000 other reasons besides basketball for which Wilton Norman Chamberlain is remembered. And being a great teammate is rarely included.
In the spring of 1970, when Nixon ordered U.S. troops to repulse Cambodia -- all in the name of ending the Vietnam War -- and four college students were gunned down on the Kent State campus, the Knicks gave New Yorkers one thrill after another to start a decade that then-President Ford, according to Gotham's tabloids, would command the city to "drop dead."
The month that inspired rocker Neil Young to write of "four dead in Ohio" included four Knicks victories over the Lakers that made New York teams world champions in three sports simultaneously, following Joe Namath's Jets and the Amazin' Mets.
All looked lost when Reed went down with an injury, forcing him to miss Game Six in Los Angeles, which the Lakers won to send it back to the Big Apple for the Friday-night clincher.
It was touch and go all day on May 8 whether Reed would play Game 7 in the biggest sports day in New York until two warriors, Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier, touched gloves inside Madison Square Garden 10 months later.
Chris Schenkel and Jack Twyman were courtside at MSG, above Penn Station, when a noise in the crowd was detected. Twyman, an ex-NBA player whose friendship with fallen teammate Maurice Stokes is an especially ennobling moment in American sports history, then had his signature moment on camera. "I think we see Willis coming out," he exclaimed.
A triple-double by the captain may not have carried the weight of the game's first two baskets, made by Reed. Walt Frazier, by then the team's best player, took it from there and almost every Knick down to trainer Danny Whelan contributed. But it is Reed who planted the flag on the beachhead that night when the Knicks became world champions.
New York loved Reed like it came to appreciate Mickey Mantle and every athletic icon that ever played in that city. No. 19 of the Knicks lived until 80, passing away Tuesday and making the front page of newspapers along with a former president facing possible indictment. Think LeBron James -- much less Kyrie Irving -- can expect that treatment if he lives that long?