New York’s Forgotten Pioneers: The National Basketball Association’s first all-Black Team

By Adam Criblez

In 1979, the New York Knicks — a storied organization with roots dating to the creation of the National Basketball Association (NBA) decades earlier — became the first franchise to field an all-Black NBA team. And, at least at first, almost no one seemed to notice.

Members of the 1976-77 New York Knicks on the sideline. Larry Berman, photographer. BermanSports.com.

On October 10, the Knicks announced that they had released Glen Gondrezick and John Rudd, both of whom were primarily bench players the previous season. Sam Goldaper covered the story for the New York Times and wrote that the team would open with “five rookies, the greatest number in the team’s history.” [1] Bill Verigan, in the Daily News, also led with the five rookies story, noting in his fourth paragraph that the roster moves left the Knicks “with their first all-black roster in history” before providing a short bio of Gondrezick’s time with the team. [2] Two days later the young Knicks kicked off their season on the road in Atlanta’s Omni Coliseum against the Hawks. With little fanfare the team lost 121—104 and head coach Red Holzman told reporters his team just needed more experience. “They are all young fellows who just come from college,” he said. [3] At the Daily News, Verigan concurred, writing that the team had “a lot of lessons through hard experience lying ahead.” [4]

On the 13th, the Knicks returned to New York City and pulled out a win over the visiting Washington Bullets in overtime, marking the first time an all-Black NBA team had played in Madison Square Garden. Again, crickets. Less than a week later, in Detroit against the Pistons, the Knicks participated in another first—a game in which no white players took the court since the only white player on either team, Detroit’s Steve Malovic, remained on the bench. After the game against the Pistons, reporters asked Holzman about the significance of coaching his all-Black team. Holzman shrugged his shoulders and said, “So?” [5] “What if we had 10 blacks and one white?” he asked in return. “Or nine and two? Is that going to change people’s opinions? What if the 11 best players turned out to be all white? Would the same people then want me to keep a token black or two?” [6]

Publicly, league officials as well as Knicks’ coaches, management, and players claimed color-blindness and seemed hopeful that race would remain largely a non-issue. As Madison Square Garden chairman Sonny Werblin said, “when you’re bad, you worry about getting good players.” “You don’t care whether they’re black, white, green or red. There was no black-white decision to make, none whatsoever.” [7] General Manager Eddie Donovan told reporters that “if we had kept Gondo [Gondrezick] and Rudd just because they were white, we would have lost the respect of our other players.” [8] Even Philadelphia 76ers star Julius Erving, one of the most high-profile Black men in the country at the time, told Jet magazine that “the game transcends color…when the ball drops into the net from 20 feet out, nobody thinks of the color of the man who tossed it. The ball is brown,” Erving continued, “but what fan is conscious of it?” [9] No matter what Erving or Knicks’ officials said out loud, the changing racial demographics of the NBA were impossible to miss—especially in a sport played in tank tops and short shorts. But to avoid alienating white fans, there seemed to be a conscious effort to downplay race.

Team Leaders: 1980-81 New York Knicks Topps basketball card featuring team statistical leaders. 

Despite what was said in public, in private, Knicks officials were having candid conversations about how to improve the team and build the fanbase—and sometimes those discussions involved attempts to add a white star. It wasn’t that skin color trumped playing ability. Fielding an all-Black team was uncharted territory and, with attendance already declining, anything which could potentially turn around the product on the court and at the box office had to be considered. So, in the name of protecting the organization’s economic bottom line, the Knicks explored trades for Seattle SuperSonics center Jack Sikma, nicknamed “Goldilocks” for his long, blonde hair, and Phoenix Suns guard Paul Westphal. Seattle and Phoenix turned them down, and the Knicks kept working the phones.

On October 23, nearly two weeks after becoming the NBA’s first all-Black team, the issue went from nearly forgotten to the hottest topic in basketball after Peter Vecsey, writing for the Post, referred to the team as the “N*****bockers.” [10] Vecsey attributed the phrase as one he had overheard, spoken by “several bigots” who “have no desire to watch only blacks perform.” [11] Whether Vecsey actually heard that phrase, it is not outside the realm of possibility for New York City in the late-seventies. As Jonathan Rieder explains in his study of Canarsie, a neighborhood in southeast Brooklyn, many white, ethnic Americans were experiencing what they considered a “time of danger and dispossession,” as they believed that their lives and livelihoods were threatened by Black people moving into their neighborhoods. [12]

But putting the n-word in print forced players, coaches, and management to address it. “Nobody wanted to be called that,” Knicks’ forward Hollis Copeland said later. “I thought it was in poor taste. But we just kind of let it go. We didn’t want to make a big stink.” [13] Teammate Mike Glenn struck back, asking reporters “do you write stories about how there’s all white guys on the Boston Bruins?” [14]

Vecsey’s column, and the firestorm it created, put an inexperienced team playing in the media center of the country under an even greater microscope. When the young Knicks lost close games and when attendance plummeted to the lowest levels in Madison Square Garden IV history, it provided ammunition to the naysayers and Vecsey’s “several bigots”—see, they could say, no one wanted to watch an all-Black team. Other than Vecsey, few public figures directly connected attendance to the race of the players on the court. And, to be sure, the Knicks were not the only NBA franchise struggling to attract fans. But the Knicks led the league in attendance for years earlier in the decade and played in the most historic arena in the country. Their struggles were amplified and included a racial component not seen anywhere else.

The Knicks finished October 1979 with a 5-5 record and ended the season out of the playoffs with a 39-43 mark. The next year, they fielded another all-Black roster. But that season, powered by the exciting young trio of Micheal Ray Richardson, Bill Cartwright, and Ray Williams, the team finished 50—32 and returned to the playoffs. It was an exciting time to be a Knicks fan. So, of course, it didn’t last. Before the 1981—82 season, the Knicks lost Williams after a contract dispute and added a white guard (ostensibly to provide veteran leadership for the still youngish team). The no-longer-all-Black Knicks plummeted down the standings and, once again, missed the playoffs.

And so, the all-Black Knicks of 1979—81 are easily overlooked in the history of the storied franchise. They followed the “Garden of Eden” Knicks who won NBA titles in 1970 and 1973 with eight Hall of Famers and preceded teams powered by Bernard King, a scoring machine who arrived in 1982, and Patrick Ewing, the first-pick in the 1985 NBA Draft.

Still, during this era, no NBA team better epitomized the struggles of a developing Black culture in the United States than these Knicks. They took the court just as the first strains of rap music emerged from the South Bronx (1979’s “Rapper’s Delight” was the first mainstream hip-hop hit) and during Ronald Reagan’s run to the presidency, which used anti-Affirmative Action language to help propel the former actor to the Oval Office. When Reagan visited the South Bronx in 1980, he told reporters that he “hadn’t seen anything like this since London after the Blitz.”[i] Having an all-Black team also made the Knicks a lightning rod in a racially-tense city. And so, even if there was initially little public reaction to becoming the NBA’s first all-Black team, the 1979-80 Knicks were pioneers in a sport and in a city in transition.

Adam Criblez is a Professor of History at Southeast Missouri State University and the author of Kings of the Garden: The New York Knicks and Their City (Cornell, 2024).

[1] Sam Goldaper, “Knicks Drop Gondrezick, Rudd,” New York Times, Oct 11, 1979.

[2] Bill Verigan, “Knicks Cut Gondo, Rudd; Keep Rookies,” Daily (N.Y.) News, Oct 11, 1979.

[3] Sam Goldaper, “Knicks Inexperience Brings 121—104 Loss,” New York Times, Oct 13, 1979.

[4] Bill Verigan, “Knicks Fall in Opener, 121-104,” Daily (N.Y.) News, Oct 13, 1979.

[5] Harvey Araton, “Garden priority: build a winner,” (N.Y.) Post, October 23, 1979.

[6] Peter Vecsey, “Fan views differ on color scheme,” (N.Y.) Post, October 23, 1979.

[7] Harvey Araton, “Garden priority: build a winner,” (N.Y.) Post, October 23, 1979.

[8] Dave Anderson, “About the All-Black Knicks,” New York Times, October 25, 1979.

[9] “Over All Black N.Y. Knicks,” Jet, December 27, 1979.

[10] Peter Vecsey, “Fan views differ on color scheme,” (N.Y.) Post, October 23, 1979.

[11] Peter Vecsey, “Fan views differ on color scheme,” (N.Y.) Post, October 23, 1979.

[12] Jonathan Rieder, Canarsie: The Jews and Italians of Brooklyn Against Liberalism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), 1.

[13]  Barbara Barker, “Black History Month: Red Holzman’s Knicks were first NBA team to have all-black roster,” Newsday. (www.newsday.com/sports/basketball/knicks/knicks-black-history-month-red-holzman-1.41805719). Accessed April 3, 2020.

[14] Dan Shaughnessy, “Recalling all-black Knicks,” Philadelphia Inquirer, May 3, 1982.

[15] Quoted in Peter L’Official, Urban Legends: The South Bronx in Representation and Ruin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2020), 22.