Former Knick Coach Holzman Has Leukemia

Red Holzman is 77 and has been ill lately and finally ended up in the hospital, which is never good at his age. It was in the newspapers on Thursday morning. So as soon as the hour was right, a call was placed to Long Island Jewish, in New Hyde Park, maybe 25 minutes from his home in Cedarhurst. The voice sounded tired. But it was him. “Call me back in a couple of days,” he said.

Then, for a brief moment, there was a smile in his voice, sunlight through the clouds.

“Whatsa matter, kid?” he said. “You hard up for a story?”

It’s what he always used to say, somehow more than 20 years ago now, when he was still coaching the Knicks and I was covering them and he would pick up the phone on his day off and hear that it was me.

“Now remember,” he would joke back then. “write something nice about me.”

You could never do it enough. This is a get-well card for the coach today, who can’t get back to his seat at the Garden, across from the visitor’s bench, soon enough. The place is never quite right without him.

He is a treasure of sports in the city, has been for such a long time. He once coached a basketball team at the Garden that was like Basie’s band. Holzman won his second NBA title with the Knicks a quarter-century ago, and it is still discussed as if it all happened last week. The stature of that team only grows with time, as does William (Red) Holzman’s.

It has been such a graceful basketball life, all the way back to the Rochester Royals in the ‘40s and ‘50s.

“I wasn’t exactly the greatest attraction,” he said once. “I’d start dribbling out the clock and pretty soon I’d look up and the joint would be empty.”

He went from there to a full house at the Garden, to a sound that came to be known as the Monster of Madison Square Garden, to a team for the ages. Now his name is in the rafters, way above where he sits with his wife, Selma.

At a time in sports when everybody seems to leave sooner or later, Red Holzman never went anywhere. When he left the Knicks’ bench, he just moved across the court to Court 25, Row D, Seats 1 through-4.

I met him my first month in New York, a year out of college and suddenly covering the Knicks. My second game, very first week, the Knicks lost to the Jazz in New Orleans and he made some move at the end with Spencer Haywood and then had the thrill of being second-guessed by me, and big, in the Saturday papers.

The Knicks came home from New Orleans, won the next night at the Garden. When we were finally assembled in his cramped little office afterward, he was asked the first question about the victory.

Holzman started to answer, and then grinned.

“Why don’t you handle that one, Mike,” he said. “You’ve been around this game a long time.”

There were a million other ways to put me in my place. He did it with a laugh. A big guy giving a lesson in style. Sometimes a get-well card can say thank you as well.

After that, I sat next to him every night, and it was like being allowed to have a seat next to genius, even though he didn’t have much of a team that year. Still, it was like taking some sort of grad course in the NBA. Watching him work his bench, the clock, his timeouts, the other coach. The Knicks were outplayed plenty, never outcoached.

Holzman also had a smart mouth for the refs, don’t worry. One night in Seattle, Don Murphy was killing the Knicks. Holzman had been giving it to him all night, begging for a technical foul. But refs always gave him extra room. Finally, Holzman got off the bench in that distinctive crouch of his, waved his rolled-up program, called timeout.

The Knicks sat down. Holzman was staring at Murphy, who was staring right back at him.

“You like it here, Murph?” Red said.

No response.

“You plan on opening a bar here after you retire?” Red said.

Now he got his technical.

There was another night against the Cavaliers. The Cavs were a contender that season, and by the third quarter the Knicks were down by 30 points. Holzman stayed with it, though. Used his timeouts. Made his substitutions. Switched some things on defense. Earl Monroe got hot. The Knicks scrapped back into the game and finally lost by about 10. The Knicks never had a chance the whole way, and it was still one of the best coaching jobs I’ve ever seen.

In the locker room afterward, I said that to Holzman, smoking a cigar by then.

“Where was I gonna go?” he said.

He puffed on the cigar and said, “My contract says I gotta stay around until the end of the game. I figure I better keep coaching.”

He made a gesture at the locker room, or maybe at his basketball life, and said, “It’s where I belong.”

He seemed to disappear for a while at the end of the ‘80s, but one of the first things Dave Checketts did when he became president of the team was treat Holzman with the respect he deserves, get him back in the program, even traveling with the team again during the playoffs.

And always, you could look across the Garden and see Holzman in Court 25, Row D. So much has changed at the Garden. Not him. He is the enduring class of the place, of sports in his time in New York. If everything goes right, we will see him back in Row D, next to Selma, at the All-Star Game. Where he belongs.

(c) 1998, New York Daily News. Dist. by Los Angeles Times Syndicate