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The late 1960s and early 1970s, in New York City and America at large, were years marked by political tumult, social unrestâ€"and the best professional basketball ever played. Paradise, for better or worse, was a hardwood court in Midtown Manhattan.
When the Garden Was Eden is the definitive account of how the New York Knickerbockers won their first and only championships, and in the process provided the nation no small escape from the Vietnam War, the tragedy at Kent State, and the last vestiges of Jim Crow. The Knicks were more than a team; they were a symbol of harmony, the sublimation of individual personalities for the greater collective good.
No one is better suited t! o revive the old chants of “Dee-fense!†that rocked Madison Square Garden or the joy that radiated courtside than Harvey Araton, who has followed the Knicks, old and new, for decadesâ€"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. Araton has traveled to the Louisiana home of the Captain, Willis Reed (after writing a column years earlier that led to his abrupt firing as the Knicks’ short-lived coach); he has strolled the lush gardens of Walt “Clyde†Frazier’s St. Croix oasis; discussed the politics of that turbulent era with Senator Bill Bradley; toured Baltimore’s church basement basketball leagues with Black Jesus himself, Earl “the Pearl†Monroe; played memory games with Jerry “the Brain†Lucas; explored the Tao of basketball with Phil “Action†Jackson; and sat through eulogies for Dave DeBusschere, the lunch-bucket, 23-year-old player-coach ! lured from Detroit, and Red Holzman, the scrappy Jewish guard ! who beca me a coaching legend.
In When the Garden Was Eden, Araton not only traces the history of New York’s beloved franchiseâ€"from Ned Irish to Spike Lee to Carmelo Anthonyâ€"but profiles the lives and careers of one of sports’ all-time great teams, the Old Knicks. With measured prose and shoe-leather reporting, Araton relives their most glorious triumphs and bitter rivalries, and casts light on a time all but forgotten outside of pregame highlight reels and nostalgic reunionsâ€"a time when the Garden, Madison Square, was its own sort of Eden.
Think you know how the game of baseball began? Think again.
Forget Abner Doubleday and Cooperstown. Forget Alexander Joy Cartwright and the New York Knickerbockers. Instead, meet Daniel Lucius Adams, William Rufus Wheaton, and Louis Fenn Wadsworth, each of whom has a stronger claim to baseball paternity than Doubleday or Cartwright.
But did baseball even have a fatherâ€"or did it just evolve from other bat-and-b! all games? John Thorn, baseball’s preeminent historian, examines the creation story of the game and finds it all to be a gigantic lie, not only the Doubleday legend, so long recognized with a wink and a nudge. From its earliest days baseball was a vehicle for gambling (much like cricket, a far more popular game in early America), a proxy form of class warfare, infused with racism as was the larger society, invigorated if ultimately corrupted by gamblers, hustlers, and shady entrepreneurs. Thorn traces the rise of the New York version of the game over other variations popular in Massachusetts and Philadelphia. He shows how the sport’s increasing popularity in the early decades of the nineteenth century mirrored the migration of young men from farms and small towns to cities, especially New York. And he charts the rise of secret professionalism and the origin of the notorious “reserve clause,†essential innovations for gamblers and capitalists. No matter how much you ! know about the history of baseball, you will find something ne! w in eve ry chapter. Thorn also introduces us to a host of early baseball stars who helped to drive the tremendous popularity and growth of the game in the postâ€"Civil War era: Jim Creighton, perhaps the first true professional player; Candy Cummings, the pitcher who claimed to have invented the curveball; Albert Spalding, the ballplayer who would grow rich from the game and shape its creation myth; Hall of Fame brothers George and Harry Wright; Cap Anson, the first man to record three thousand hits and a virulent racist; and many others. Add bluff, bluster, and bravado, and toss in an illicit romance, an unknown son, a lost ball club, an epidemic scare, and you have a baseball detective story like none ever written.
Thorn shows how a small religious cult became instrumental in the commission that was established to determine the origins of the game and why the selection of Abner Doubleday as baseball’s father was as strangely logical as it was patently absurd. Entertaining fro! m the first page to the last, Baseball in the Garden of Eden is a tale of good and evil, and the snake proves the most interesting character. It is full of heroes, scoundrels, and dupes; it contains more scandal by far than the 1919 Black Sox World Series fix. More than a history of the game, Baseball in the Garden of Eden tells the story of nineteenth-century America, a land of opportunity and limitation, of glory and greedâ€"all present in the wondrous alloy that is our nation and its pastime.A sensational bestseller when it appeared in 1986, The Garden of Eden is the last uncompleted novel of Ernest Hemingway, which he worked on intermittently from 1946 until his death in 1961. Set on the Côte d'Azur in the 1920s, it is the story of a young American writer, David Bourne, his glamorous wife, Catherine, and the dangerous, erotic game they play when they fall in love with the same woman. "A lean, sensuous narrative...taut, chic, and strangely contempor! ary," The Garden of Eden represents vintage Hemingway, ! the mast er "doing what nobody did better" (R. Z. Sheppard, Time).
