New York to St. Croix

Oscar Hidalgo for The New York Times - Walt Frazier has owned property in Christiansted on St. Croix since 1979, and spends his days supervising projects there.

It is difficult to pinpoint the exact time that Walt Frazier’s stylish alter ego known as Clyde more or less ceased to exist. But it might have been the September day in 1989 when Hurricane Hugo threatened to do away with both. Mr. Frazier, a Hall of Fame player for the New York Knicks basketball team, was relaxing on the living room sofa with a girlfriend, watching football on television, when the first terrifying winds tore the awnings off his vacation home on St. Croix. The television went dark. The large picture windows blew out. Mr. Frazier and his girlfriend scurried for the bathroom, where they spent the next 12 hours, cowering and praying.


Slide Show

From renowned hedonist to home-building horticulturist, he described the personal gain as priceless. “I remember Dave DeBusschere and the other guys on the team used to say that I would have the toughest transition to make going into retirement because of being Clyde and coming down from all that,” Mr. Frazier said, recalling the days when his wide-brim hats and flashy suits inspired comparisons to the Warren Beatty character in the 1967 film “Bonnie and Clyde.”

“It didn’t happen right away, and it wasn’t easy,” he added. “But I was fed up with New York and that scene, the nightclubs and the cars. I didn’t want to vegetate as Clyde. I was searching for something. I didn’t know what it was until I came here.”

Even Clyde got tired of New York; something to think about. Old #10. How I remember that team.

Oscar Hidalgo for The New York Times - Entrance room to the Main House, his residence
Playmaker’s Paradise

“I began to sense there was something for me to do here, and then I realized doing all this work was what was going to keep me young,” said Mr. Frazier, who will celebrate his 65th birthday next month and remains fit and youthful looking, despite thinning hair. “I look back now and I can see that I was going through a metamorphosis, a change for the better.”


As part of his repudiation of the nightclubbing Clyde, he changed his lifestyle. The lifelong city dweller became a nature lover. He learned to sail, bought a boat and became a licensed captain. And he found the garden calling to him many mornings at sunrise.



Patricia James, who is his girlfriend and helps him manage the property and rental business, said the style fits all occasions. “We’ll be going out to dinner, I’ll have a dress on and I’ll say to him, ‘You’re not going to change?’ ” Ms. James said. A self-described perfectionist, he is not easy to work for, she said, and Mr. Frazier agreed, noting that he once fired his son, whom he had hired to manage the property during his absences.

 Fired his own son? Now, that's a tough taskmaster.

From Queens to the NBA

He was before my time. I do remember his name, and remember his brother, Al, as a coach (college? Marquette, I believe.).

February 6, 2010
From a Home Court in Queens to the N.B.A.
By COREY KILGANNON

They called it the Rockaway Game, basketball the way it was played in the 1940s on blacktop courts along the Atlantic Ocean in Rockaway Beach, Queens.

The games were tight, half-court affairs fueled by hustle and heart and marked with selfless teamwork as preached by the stern coaches in the local St. Francis de Sales Catholic Youth Organization leagues, where the catechism was the give-and-go, the pick-and-roll, moving without the ball, finding the open man, amen.


This was before slam-dunk contests and chest-thumping displays of hubris. Games were won with precision passing and aggressive defense. Flashy play and ball-hogging left you on the sidelines. Outside shooting was discouraged because of the ocean breeze, and fouls were called the Irish-Catholic way: on oneself.

The master of the Rockaway Game was Dick McGuire, whose basketball fortunes rose during his adolescence when his family moved in the late 1930s from the Bronx to a bustling area in Rockaway known as Irish Town. The family bought Rohr’s restaurant on Beach 108th Street, renaming it McGuire’s bar. It was a block from the blacktop that would propel Dick and his brother Al to legendary careers with the New York Knicks.

Mr. McGuire, who died on Wednesday at 84 of an aortic aneurysm, was inducted into the Basketball Hall of Fame, where he joined his brother.

The family slept above McGuire’s bar during the winter but moved into the basement each May and rented out the upstairs to boarders spending summers among the cluster of bars and bungalows from Beach 116th Street to Rockaways’ Playland. The area was known as the Irish Riviera, a summer refuge for Irish New Yorkers seeking escape from hot tenements.

“It was all churches and bars,” John McGuire, the eldest of the three McGuire brothers, recalled by phone on Thursday. “When the band stopped, you went to another bar. If you had a fight, it was with your fists.”

There is still a bar at the McGuire’s former location: Gallagher’s Snug Harbour, owned since 1971 by Frank Gallagher, who on Thursday sat looking out the window at what was no longer Irish Town. Many locals still call his place McGuire’s, and on Thursday, it felt like McGuire’s again, with the phone on the bar ringing off the hook.

“They all want to know about the wake, the funeral arrangements,” Mr. Gallagher said.

The McGuire boys were fascinated by the Rockaway basketball scene, dominated by the likes of Dutch Dehnert and Joe (Poison) Brennan, said a local, Kevin Boyle, 51, who does some coaching at St. Francis and still has a phone number for Ed Baccales, an old-timer from the 108th Street court.

Reached by telephone, Mr. Baccales described the genesis of the half-court games on “the McGuire playground,” a blacktop pitch next to the ocean boardwalk, with netless rims mounted on metal backboards.

“Dick and I used to shovel snow off the court so we could shoot baskets in the winter,” Mr. Baccales said.

The games were always three on three, and if you scored, you regained possession of the ball — “winners out.” Games were played to 7: losers sat; winners stayed on. Al and Dick McGuire both dominated, but it was Dick who became known as Tricky Dick for his ball-handling, his passing and finesse, his peripheral vision, his seeing-eye bounce passes and his intuitive sense of the court, skills that would help make him an N.B.A. All-Star several times over. He could cut and feint, even fresh from Sunday Mass, in suit and shoes.

Because of the ocean breeze, Dick preferred to pass or drive to the basket rather than to shoot. He developed a condition known as Rockawayitis, a chronic reluctance to shoot the ball, for which he was teased throughout his career, despite starring at La Salle Academy in Manhattan and then at St. John’s University.

“It was so hard to shoot down here, he let someone else do it,” Mr. Boyle said. “You would develop trick moves to get to the basket.”

Mr. Baccales, however, gained fame for being able to adjust his set shot to the prevailing wind.

“I had a great set shot, but Dick was a great passer,” Mr. Baccales said.

John McGuire recalled, “We never had any players over 6-3, and if you got hacked hard, you called the foul.”

Throughout the 1950s, the level of play attracted top high school, college and professional players from New York City and even Long Island and New Jersey. Sunday afternoon games would draw Queens players like Bob Cousy, from nearby St. Albans, and Ray Lumpp from Forest Hills. Dolph Schayes would come from the Bronx, as well as Ray Felix from Manhattan and Tommy Heinsohn from New Jersey.

The popular Fitzgerald’s bar faced the court, and crowds would gather to watch the games on Sundays when the young men played for kegs of beer.

“This is where the top competition was at that time, and the best ballplayers from New York and beyond would come down,” Mr. McGuire said.

The Rockaway Game was imported by such players into the N.B.A., where it helped foster a winning formula. When Dick McGuire and Mr. Cousy teamed up in the backcourt for the Eastern Division in the 1954 N.B.A. All-Star Game at Madison Square Garden, the crowd cheered their magical playmaking chemistry.

Dick McGuire was drafted by the Knicks in 1949 and guided them to three straight NBA finals, from 1951 to 1953. But even during those years, the Beach 108th Street blacktop remained his home court in the summer, recalled his widow, Teri, 76, who met Dick on Rockaway Beach in the summer of 1955. The couple lived in a bungalow near the bar until Mr. McGuire was traded to the Detroit Pistons in 1957, she said.

“Every morning, he would walk from the bar to the court and play all day,” she said. “I’d spend the day on the beach while he played.”

Who fights?

In July, Tim James was deployed to Iraq.

Who are the soldiers who fight this nation's fights?










Every day, the 5-year-old son and namesake of the basketball player Tim James, a former first-round draft pick in the N.B.A., asks when his daddy is coming home. Betty James, who is looking after her grandson while James is gone, has a stock answer: “Soon, baby. Soon.”

Last week, Tim Jr. returned home from kindergarten and broadsided Betty with a new question. “Is my daddy in a tank that shoots up people?” he said.

Betty described the moment as “very heartbreaking.” Until then, she had consoled herself with the thought that Tim Jr. did not understand how this trip was different from all the basketball tours of duty that took his father far from home.

After three seasons in the N.B.A. and a few more overseas, in Turkey, Japan and Israel, James enlisted in the Army last September. He was three months away from his 32nd birthday. In July, he was deployed to Iraq, following the example if not the exact path of the Arizona Cardinals’ Pat Tillman, who gave up his N.F.L. career after the 2001 season to become an Army Ranger. Tillman was killed in 2004 by friendly fire in Afghanistan.

“I feel good when I wake up every morning,” James said. “I feel like I’m doing something important.”

James’s N.B.A. career ended after a fruitless tryout with the Knicks in the fall of 2002. He later played in Turkey, Japan and Israel.



The transition has not been as smooth as a fast break. James initially had a hard time sleeping on the base. “I’d hear loud machine-gun fire going off in the middle of the night,” he said, “and I was just tempted to reach for my weapon.” He added, “At first it was quite nerve-racking, until I realized it’s like a normal situation.”

In Liberty City, the section of Miami where James grew up, he fell asleep many nights to the sound of gunfire, he said. It was there, at 13, that he saw his first dead body close up. Until he entered the Army, James said, he had never carried a gun.




Tim James’s unit, in T-shirts sent by the Miami Heat. James stood in the back, right of center, towering over his comrades.





His is the quintessential American success story: the kid from Miami going to college, graduating and embarking on a career that made him a millionaire. The opportunities James received filled him with gratitude and infused him with a desire to give back.

Playing overseas, James experienced a renewed appreciation for the freedoms of life in the United States. In Israel, he said, he lived near enough to the Gaza Strip to gaze at it daily and wonder, as he put it, “what’s going on across the line.”

With his basketball career winding down, James considered teaching and coaching before deciding the Army was where he could do the most good.

He sold Dr. J

Roy Boe in 1975.


What could possibly be the worst sports move I ever witnessed. Boe sold Dr. J for the money he needed to pay the NBA. Still, he put together two great teams.

How'd he do that?

Kobe Bryant had 35 points and 10 assists as the Lakers stormed past the Nuggets and Chris Andersen in Game 6.

The tattoos, the hair.

The Wall Street Journal can't bring itself to be kind to President Obama in any respect; to me, that means Obama is doing great. In a survey the website asked voters to rate the president's job thus far: 70% of 11,000 voters gave him an F. An F!


One hundred days into President Obama's administration, there is little mystery about where the president's extracurricular interests lie.

Oval Office, Round Balls
Richard Nixon, seen bowling in 1969.
After his inauguration, the president hosted a Super Bowl party, correctly picked North Carolina to win the NCAA men's basketball tournament and sat courtside for a Bulls-Wizards NBA game. He works out nearly every day, sports a Chicago White Sox cap and plays pick-up basketball with his buddies. This week he played P-I-G against the champion University of Connecticut women's hoops team.

The president is also jumping into the fray on a host of controversial sports issues. A Democrat who believes in the power of government to force change, Mr. Obama is using his bully pulpit in a manner that could ultimately give him the most expansive sports résumé for any president since Theodore Roosevelt.

Obama: The First 100 Days
Photos: From Day 1 to Day 100

WSJ.com/100Days: Analysis, photos, more

Could It Really Be Him? Yeah, Probably

GO BULLS! President Obama’s team lost; it may not have bothered 5-year-old Nick Aiello.












Michelle Obama with Jill Biden, center, and Michelle Fenty












THEIR NEW HOMETOWN President Obama at a casual D.C. spot.








During the Bush years, Washington got used to a homebody president who preferred bringing friends into the Executive Mansion to venturing outside it. But these days, President Obama and his wife, Michelle, are popping up all over this city.

The Obamas have gone to parent-teacher conferences, school sporting events and visited working-class and gentrifying communities that have rarely served as stomping grounds for American presidents and first ladies — speaking to students at a charter school in a predominantly Hispanic neighborhood, and worshiping in a black church, among other activities. (The president and friends also tossed a basketball around at a city-run recreation center.)

Political observers are still debating whether this out-and-about style simply reflects the personal inclinations of the Obamas or some political calculus (or both). But one thing is clear: No other modern president has reached out so widely to so many corners of the city, says Doris Kearns Goodwin, a presidential historian.

That is no surprise to friends of the first family. The Obamas, after all, are city people, former community organizers who have long felt at home in the urban landscape. Mr. Obama is the first president since Richard M. Nixon to be elected while living in a city neighborhood, in his case, Chicago’s racially and economically diverse Hyde Park. And the Obamas are now eager to explore the city beyond the White House walls.

Of course, the social schedule of the president and first lady is also a powerful political tool, a way to nurture political alliances and to cultivate political narratives. The Obamas can enjoy their time out on the town while, at the same time, reaping potential dividends by reinforcing their promise to bring change to Washington and honing an image of openness and accessibility, some Washington watchers say.

Some warn, however, that such a schedule can also carry political risks, particularly if it undermines the mystique of the presidency, the image of power and command that a president needs to enact an ambitious agenda. Americans love the idea of the common man in a position of political power. (Think Jimmy Stewart in “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.”) But they can also lose some respect if a politician seems too familiar. (Think Jimmy Carter in his cardigan.)

The Obamas know that it’s different. As the first African-American couple in the White House, they want to reach beyond the prosperous, predominantly white corridors of Washington.

“We were taught you have to get to know the community you’re in, and you have to be a part of that community,” Mrs. Obama said during a visit to Mary’s Center, a health clinic that serves a predominantly Hispanic neighborhood. “D.C. is our community now, and it’s our home.”

For ordinary people, the unexpected encounters with the new president and first lady are astonishing. Joe Clark, a corporate lawyer who sat near the president at the basketball game, described the experience as “surreal.”

“I couldn’t believe that he was so accessible that I could literally shake his hand and heckle him about needing to suit up because his team was losing,” Mr. Clark said.

That is not to say that the Obamas can live anything close to a normal life here.

Mrs. Obama and her staff also visited Miriam’s Kitchen, a soup kitchen, where the first lady bumped into Bill Richardson, a 46-year-old homeless man. Mr. Richardson was so stunned that he could barely stammer thank you as Mrs. Obama scooped a helping of mushroom risotto onto his plate this month. “I was expecting some lunch, but this is the president’s wife; this is her right here,” said Mr. Richardson, who said he planned to get to a phone as soon as he could. “I’m going to be like, ‘Mom, you’re never going to guess who I’ve seen.’ ”

Howard Komives

The Trade that made the Knicks champions.

Howard Komives, a sharpshooting guard who played for 10 seasons in the National Basketball Association but who was perhaps best remembered for the trade that sent him to the Detroit Pistons from the Knicks for the future Hall of Famer Dave DeBusschere, died Sunday in Toledo, Ohio. He was 67.

I remember Komives. Yes, Butch Komives. I remember the trade, very well.

The Knicks traded Komives and center Walt Bellamy to the Pistons on Dec. 19, 1968, for DeBusschere, an outstanding defender and rebounder at forward as well as a formidable scorer. The deal enabled the Knicks to move Willis Reed to center, his natural position, and they went on to win N.B.A. championships in 1970 and 1973.

What a great team that was.

Norm Van Lier, Three-Time N.B.A. All-Star

The Bulls’ Norm Van Lier in a 1973 game against the Knicks


Get a look at those shoes; no fancy duds. And the shorts.













February 27, 2009
Norm Van Lier, Three-Time N.B.A. All-Star, Is Dead at 61
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

CHICAGO (AP) — Norm Van Lier, an All-Star guard and standout defensive player for the Chicago Bulls in the 1970s and later a sports broadcaster in the city, was found dead on Thursday in his home in Chicago. He was 61.

Firefighters went to his home, just blocks from United Center, the Bulls’ arena, in response to a request for a well-being check. They found him unresponsive and pronounced him dead shortly before 1 p.m., a Chicago Fire Department spokesman said. The Cook County medical examiner’s office confirmed his death. No cause was given.

Van Lier, who grew up in Midland, Pa., was drafted by the Bulls in 1969 out of St. Francis College in Pennsylvania but was immediately traded to the Cincinnati Royals. In 1971 he led the league in assists.

After three years with Cincinnati, he joined the Bulls and spent more than six seasons with them, becoming a fan favorite and gaining the nickname Stormin’ Norman for his fiery, tenacious play alongside teammates like Jerry Sloan and Chet Walker. A memorable moment came Jan. 19, 1977, when he made a full-court shot against the San Antonio Spurs.

A three-time All-Star, Van Lier played on five playoff teams and was named to eight National Basketball Association all-defensive teams in his 10-year career. He finished his career with Milwaukee in 1979, retiring with career totals of 8,770 points and 5,217 assists. Among Bulls, he ranks third only to Michael Jordan and Scottie Pippen in career assists and steals, the team said.

After retiring, he covered the Bulls as a television and radio analyst in the Chicago area and had a supporting role in the 2002 movie “Barbershop,” playing a customer. Information on survivors was not available, but an oral history project in 2003 referred to his having a wife, Susan, and two daughters at the time.

Navarro = Memphis

In La Vanguardia of Barcelona, the headline Los Grizzlies de Navarro derrotan a unos Lakers desnortados sin Gasol appeared over a story of the basketball game between the Los Angeles Lakers and the Memphis Grizzlies. (Grizzlies in Memphis?)

History Beginning in 1995 as the Vancouver Grizzlies through today’s Memphis Grizzlies franchise.