When the Garden Was Eden: Clyde, the Captain, Dollar Bill, and the Glory Days of the New York Knicks [Paperback]

“Brilliant . . . smartly written, featuring tons of interviews with the Knicks of the Phil Jackson-Clyde-Reed era.” — New York Magazine

“Harvey Araton has evocatively rendered the team that New York never stops pining for—the Old Knicks. More than a nostalgic chronicle . . . it’s a portrait of a group of proud, idiosyncratic men and the city that needed them.  — Jonathan Mahler, author of Ladies and Gentleman, the Bronx is Burning

In the tradition ofThe Boys of SummerandThe Bronx Is Burning,New York Timessports columnist Harvey Araton delivers a fascinating look at the 1970s New York Knicks—part autobiography, part sports history, part epic, set against the tumultuous era when Walt Frazier, Willis Reed, and Bill Bradley reigned supreme in the world of basketball.

The late 1960s and early 1970s, in New York City and America at large, were years marked by political tumult, social unrest . . . and the best professional basketball ever played. Paradise, for better or worse, was a hardwood court in midtown Manhattan.

Harvey Araton has followed the Knicks, old and new, for decades—first as a teenage fan, then as a young sports reporter with theNew York Post, and now as a writer and columnist for theNew York Times.When the Garden Was Edenis the definitive account of the New York Knicks in their vintage pomp. With measured prose and shoe-leather reporting, Araton relives their most glorious triumphs and bitter rivalries, and casts light on a team all but forgotten outside of pregame highlight reels and nostalgic reunions at the Garden.

Araton’s revealing story of the Knicks’ heyday is far more than a review of one of basketball’s greatest teams’ inspiring story—ilSf