“RUNAWAY TRAIN” and “THE MAJOR MATCH RACE”
#836/#835
836. NEW YORK KNICKS VS ATLANTA HAWKS
EASTERN CONFERENCE SEMIFINALS
GAME TWO
MARCH 27, 1971
MADISON SQUARE GARDEN
QUALITY OF PLAY—6.23
DRAMA—5.62
STAR POWER—8.93
CONTEMPORARY IMPORT—7.25
HISTORICAL SIGNIFICANCE—7.44
LOCAL IMPACT—7.93
TOTAL: 43.39
“RUNAWAY TRAIN”
If a poll was taken to find the most popular team in NYC history, the 69-70 Knicks of Clyde Frazier, Dave DeBusschere, Bill Bradley and of course Willis Reed would almost certainly win it. Exemplars of the proper way to play the “City Game,” the beloved old Knicks electrified the town by winning it all in May of 1970.
But there is always a next year, and the 70-71 Knicks weren’t quite as strong. Reed suffered more than usual with his bad knees, the offense didn’t work quite as smoothly, and the team won eight fewer games than it did the year before. Still, they were the class of the east, and few figured the team would have any struggle with their opening playoff opponent, the nondescript Atlanta Hawks.
The southern squires may have been relatively anonymous, but they featured several good players, notably the backcourt of Sweet Lou Hudson and Pistol Pete Maravich (then a rookie) and center Big Walt Bellamy, the former Knick stalwart who had been dealt to Detroit for DeBusschere, and subsequently drifted to Hotlanta. They also had a rugged power forward named Bill “The Train” Bridges. Despite being just 6’6”, 225, the Train more than held his own inside, averaging a dozen rebounds per game over his 16-season career.
In short, the Hawks were no pushovers, as proven in Game One, when they took a lead after three quarters, only to be blitzed by a monster 37-point fourth period that had the Garden throbbing with noise. Up 1-0, the Knicks then hosted Game Two, which attracted the usual 19,500 screaming fans to MSG on a warm Saturday evening, March 27, 1971.
New York controlled the opening stanza, with Frazier and Dick Barnett hitting outside jumpers at will (they would score 29 and 24, respectively). After 12 minutes, the Knicks led by a dozen, and the crowd relaxed. Hudson had just a single bucket in his ledger, although he had forced three fouls on Bill Bradley.
Then Sweet Lou went on a scoring binge of his own to bring the Hawks back in it. Bradley, worried about foul trouble and worn down by being run through countless screens as the Hawks ran its offense through Hudson, couldn’t keep pace. Lou poured in 17 points in the second quarter. The Hawks trimmed the deficit down to seven at halftime; still, there was little sense the Knicks would lose in their castle.
Post-halftime, however, Atlanta began to totally dominate inside. The fabled Ali-Frazier fight (which just might show up on this list…) had taken place in this same arena about three weeks earlier, and the Hawks began to work the Knicks over with Smokin’ Joe-style body shots. Bellamy used his massive frame to lean on Reed, while Bridges was cleaning up seemingly every single carom. Reed was nursing a knee injury, as usual, and was clearly winded while battling Big Bell, who whipped by the usually sturdy Knicks center for three consecutive layups. New York began to crumble from the accumulated blows to its collective liver.
On a couple of occasions, Bridges followed his own misses once, twice, even a third time before scoring, and pretty soon his rebounding totals were through the roof. He would score just 12 points, and miss 13 of his 19 shots, but because he secured so many of those misses, it hardly mattered. DeBusschere, who usually put the ‘power’ in power forward, was overwhelmed. Thanks to Bridges’ yeoman work off the backboards, Atlanta could withstand shooting just 39% as a team, including 7-25 from Maravich. Hudson missed a ton of shots too but made more than his share, on his way to 35 for the game. Incredibly, that was one fewer than Bridges had rebounds—yes, the Train would finish with 36 boards in what was the signal performance of his career.
The Hawks seized control with a 33-23 third quarter, and pulled away from there. Bellamy threw in 19 and 10, Pistol Pete added 17, and the Hawks won going away, 113-104. In all the Hawks outrebounded the Knicks 80-39—in other words, Bridges fell three caroms shy of the entire New York team total.
“Wow, 36 rebounds for Bridges?” Maravich yelped after the game.
“Yeah, the 36 shots you missed,” joked his coach, Richie Guerin.
Only three other players besides the unheralded Bridges have ever recorded 35 or more rebounds in an NBA playoff game—Reed, Wilt Chamberlain, and Bill Russell.
AFTERMATH:
Reed, Frazier and DeBusschere ensured Game Two was just a hiccup, and got the train back on track. The Knicks went south and took both games at the Alexander Coliseum, then returned to the City and ended the series in five. But Baltimore would exact revenge on the ‘Bockers, in a thrilling conference final that will be explored in detail later in the list.
WHAT THEY SAID:
“Now, maybe complacent Knicks fans will believe their heroes are in a life-and-death struggle to get by the Hawks in the opening round.”
—Phil Pepe, New York Daily News
FURTHER READING:
Pistol: The Life of Pete Maravich by Mark Kreigel
VIDEO:
835. MAJOR TAYLOR VS TOM COOPER
ONE MILE SPRINT MATCH RACE
DECEMBER 8, 1900
MADISON SQUARE GARDEN
QUALITY OF PLAY—7.27
DRAMA—8.05
STAR POWER—6.95
CONTEMPORARY IMPORT—8.25
HISTORICAL SIGNIFICANCE—5.12
LOCAL IMPACT—7.77
TOTAL: 43.40
“THE MAJOR MATCH RACE”
The name Major Taylor is dimly recalled today, but he was one of the first great American sporting champions, and achieved worldwide popularity in spite of his race, which was African-American. The son of a Civil War veteran, Taylor grew up in Indianapolis, where his father drove a horse-pulled coach for a wealthy white family. Introduced by this family to bicycling, Taylor immediately proved adept and ultra-fast aboard the two-wheeled conveyance, and began performing tricks on the bike while a teenager (perhaps making him an X-Games pioneer as well). Taylor would wear his father’s old uniform coat while riding, and was billed as “Major” as a result.
Bicycle racing enjoyed an immense popularity in fin de seicle America and Europe, particularly in France. As the new century dawned, huge crowds turned out for the two important disciplines in the sport—sprints, usually consisting of one-mile races around indoor tracks, and long distance races, including the dreaded six-day marathons, which tested endurance and immunity to sleep deprivation. The teenage Taylor won a variety of midwestern races, despite walkouts and threats from white riders (one time Taylor kept his entry in a race secret until the gun went off—after the white competitors had ridden out of sight, he jumped on his bike, pedaled after the peloton, and wound up passing them all to win).
Still just 18, Taylor came east as a celebrated contender, and when he defeated the reigning sprint champion, Eddie Bald, in a race at MSG The Major wound up atop the rankings in races of all lengths, with one caveat—a devout Christian, Taylor refused to ride on Sunday, so unless six-day events were held Monday-Saturday, he would not enter. The “Black Cyclone” was immensely popular despite this devotion as well as his color; one of his most ardent fans was Theodore Roosevelt.
At age 21, Taylor won the World Sprint Championship in 1899, representing the League of American Wheelmen (LAW). For complicated reasons mostly lost to history, a dispute arouse between the LAW and another body, the National Cycling Association (NCA). As a result, a rivalry (and enmity) built between Taylor and the top NCA sprinter, a rider named Tom Cooper. The managers of the two men, Bob Ellingham (Major) and Tom Eck (Cooper) recognized that any great sporting rivalry meant dollar signs, and so set up a match race between the riders, to be held on the opening night before the six-day race scheduled for Madison Square Garden in December, 1900. They agreed it would be a best-of-three sprint series, $500 prize, winner-take-all.
Taylor trained with the French riders set to compete in the six-day team race who were working out at Ambrose Park, a parcel of land at Third Avenue and 37th street in Brooklyn, an area now known as Sunset Park. Taylor allowed the Frenchmen to hang on his wheel for a lap, then “cut it out,” as the New York Tribune put it. “When the ‘Major’ got in one of his lightning bursts they sat up dumfounded (sic), and, dismounting, informed their compatriots that ‘ze black man was one deveeel.’”
The Major was clearly ready for the crucible of the race, and so was the hungry public. So it was that on Saturday night, December 8, 1900, the old Garden at 25th Street between Fifth and Broadway (the actual Madison Square) roared with “tens of thousands of howling enthusiasts [who] packed the boxes, galleries, the oval and aisles of Madison Square Garden, and proved that cycle racing of high degree is as popular as ever with New Yorkers,” according to Cycle Age. Eck talked some late Victorian-era trash to Ellingham as the arena filled up, telling Major’s manager, “Cooper will now proceed to hand your little darkey the most artistic trimming of his young life.”
The Garden velodrome featured incredibly steep banks, ones that caused multiple crashes and spills during most meets; the riders needed to ride powerfully up the banks lest they fall. This resulted in fast times, if the rider could remain in the saddle. Nevertheless, strategy was a large part of the racing, especially in the first match between Cooper and Taylor, which was unpaced, meaning no other rider served as a rabbit to set the pace. Taylor was thought to be best in the all-out affairs, and would fall to the more subtle Cooper, who had learned from the best in Europe. But Taylor stayed steady on Cooper’s wheel until the seventh lap, at which point he exploded out to a ten-length lead. Cooper, stunned, had no answer, and Taylor cruised home first, in 3:06.2.
The two men then went back to the starting line for another mile challenge, this one paced by another top rider, Louis Gimm. The two men rode hard and evenly for seven laps, when Gimm, by arrangement, fell off. The two riders then broke into a synchronized sprint, “almost like a team aligned,” thought the Tribune. The huge crowd screamed as one, urging one rider or the other to gain an edge. Almost the entirety of the final lap was dead even—at last, just fifty feet from the finish, Taylor eked his wheel a few spokes in front, and whizzed over the line to win the second match race, and clinch the best-of-three. His time, 2:08.8, is testament to the far greater speed of the second race.
It was a comprehensive victory for the Major, with no rubber match required. Cooper skulked off without a word of congratulations, or even a handshake. Taylor gratefully took the envelope with $500 inside. “Had the prize been $5,000…it would have been a mere bagatelle compared with my supreme satisfaction I felt over my defeat of Cooper,” Taylor would later write.
AFTERMATH:
Among the gigantic crowd at MSG was the manager of multiple top European racers, Robert Coquille. He immediately began a long courtship of Taylor, promising him all sorts of funds and prizes if he would travel to Europe to compete, and at long last agree to race on Sundays, and thus take part in six-day races that didn’t begin on Monday. Major finally settled for a contract worth more than $7,000 to cross the sea and race the great French champion Edmond Jacquelin in Paris. Taylor defeated the Frenchie, eventually agreed to take part in six-day races, and became a legend on both sides of the Atlantic, despite his color. He retired in 1910 as the greatest American bicycle rider ever—and he arguably still holds that title.
Despite his fame and athletic excellence, Taylor couldn’t overcome the racial barriers of his native land post-retirement. He lost most of his amassed fortune to swindlers and poor investments, not to mention the Depression and divorce. He spent his final years in poverty in Chicago, selling copies of his self-published autobiography from a trunk and living in a YMCA. He died of a heart attack in 1932 at age 53, and was promptly forgotten. Only in recent years has Taylor’s amazing legacy and pioneering spirit been recognized, including an induction into the U.S. Bicycling Hall of Fame and dozens of races, clubs and velodromes named in his honor.
WHAT THEY SAID:
“If ever a race was run for blood this one was. World wide prestige went hand in hand with the victory…I felt that real sportsmanship demanded that an athlete wear his laurels modestly…But many times I have had all I could possibly do to refrain from handing out a bit of the old sarcasm.”
—Major Taylor, writing about the Cooper match race in his autobiography The Fastest Bicycle Rider in the World
FURTHER READING:
The World’s Fastest Man by Michael Kranish
VIDEO: