It was a good night for the newly crowned prince of the city to wander through the winding corridors of his new palace, to take a view and a listen of the building to which he is already wise enough to pay proper homage.
“Madison Square Garden,” Steve Lavin said, “is the Mecca of all basketball.”
Well . . . mostly basketball. In the back rotunda, where Lavin was planning to chat with a few press folk as the NIT semifinals were taking place on the floor, he discovered that a few other Garden sub-letters had already set up a space for themselves, and weren’t inclined to leave. So the circus elephants stayed where they were. Lavin settled for the multi-purpose room.”Life is like coaching,” he said with a laugh. “All about adjustments.”
Just a few hours after signing his name to a contract that will pay him $1.45 million a year for six years to breathe life and energy back into the St. John’s basketball program, Lavin had already started his own series of adjustments: from California cool to New York smooth, from the kid on the make he was at UCLA to the wizened 46-year-old man he’ll be when he coaches his first game next fall.
And from the one-time inheritor of Pauley Pavilion’s ghosts to the future curator, college edition, of the World’s Most Famous Arena. He may have been raised in Northern California and made his basketball bones in SoCal, but he knows the Garden. He’s coached here. He’s worked here as a broadcaster.
Beyond that, his father played here as a collegian at the University of San Francisco, played in the NIT in 1950, a field that also included LIU and St. John’s (which finished third) and CCNY (which won the whole thing, then won the NCAA a couple of weeks later). Cap Lavin has always enjoyed regaling his sons with tales of the Dons’ one-game stay in the tournament.
Especially this one: At halftime of the Dons’ first-round loss to CCNY, Cap Lavin and his teammates were getting ready to go through their lay-up lines when they could hear a few thick New York voices calling out to them from the balcony of the old Garden.
“Hey, kids,” they yelled, “make sure you make your free throws!”
Cap Lavin assumed they weren’t concerned with anyone’s scoring averages. Sixty years later, what used to be a crowded New York basketball buffet table has been reduced to one principal player, St. John’s. And while the mailing address may always say Queens, the basketball heart will forever be Manhattan.
Here’s the thing, too: The Garden needs St. John’s right now every bit as much as St. John’s needs the Garden. The Knicks have suffered through a desultory decade. The Big East tournament still conjures the echoes of the building’s echoing basketball soul, but tomorrow night’s NIT championship game will likely be the last one ever played; the expanding NCAA Tournament is going to kill this version, and Indianapolis is likely to steal the preseason edition.
If Lavin succeeds, this will be the first sign: The Garden will sound like the Garden again. Georgetown and Marquette and West Virginia will feel as if they start every game trailing 8-0 again.
“I know what St. John’s means to this city, and to this building,” Lavin said. “I know how much it matters.”
It is good that Lavin came here when he did, on the next-to-last night in the lifetime of one Garden basketball institution, as he prepares to create another one. It’s all in front of him. It’s all there for him. Right here. This place. This arena. This Mecca.
This Garden.