The Former Knicks Coach Fuzzy Levane Dies at 92 Few people who have ever worked at Madison Square Garden were as warm and generous as Fuzzy Levane, but it was the pro basketball team occupying the arena to which Levane actually provided his most lasting gift. He gave the Knicks Red Holzman, who coached them to their only championships, in 1970 and 1973. Levane, who died Monday at 92, was the Knicks" coach in 1958 when he hired Holzman as a team scout. It wasn't the first time that Levane threw his close friend a career lifeline. In fact, it can be argued that the genesis of the most beloved Knicks teams was a 1945 steamy shower scene in Rochester, when Les Harrison, owner and coach of the old Royals, couldn't help but peek as a newly signed player lathered up. "I thought you were Jewish," he told the uncircumcised Levane, out of Brooklyn's Madison High School and St. John's University. That's why I signed you. "What are you talking about?" said Levane, whose given name was Andrew. I'm Italian. Harrison was exasperated, wanting a player to attract fans from Rochester's Jewish community. Levane complied, summoning Dutch Garfinkel and his friend Holzman, a tough, defensive-oriented guard from City College. Holzman became an eight-year fixture and a starter on the Rochester team that won an N.B.A. title in 1951 - beating Joe Lapchick's Knicks in seven games. When Holzman was released by Rochester in 1953, Levane brought him to Milwaukee, where he was coaching, and made Holzman his 10th man and unofficial assistant. Levane was fired soon after, and Holzman replaced him. Reminiscing once about how that situation repeated itself in New York under a different timetable and circumstances, Levane said, "I did such a good job that Red wound up as the coach and I wound up scouting for him." He was never envious or bitter that Holzman - whom Levane had become friends with during their college careers - became a coaching star while Levane spent most of the next three decades working the Eastern corridor scouting for the Knicks. It wasn't a bad life, dropping in on his alma mater, St. John's, and combing the basketball bushes, in the process tabbing the well-traveled Anthony Mason as a guy who could help the Knicks along the way. For Levane, it was the gymnasium by night, racetrack by day, with his wife, Kay, and their six children never more than driving distance away. He lit up the Garden when he walked in. As far back as 1958, Jeremiah Tax wrote in Sports Illustrated, "Fuzzy radiates warmth and friendliness like an old-fashioned potbellied stove." About Levane, who spoke in frenzied word bursts, sometime stuttering but always with perfect comic timing, Holzman once said, "You never heard anyone say, "Here comes that jerk, Fuzzy." " Except he said it more colorfully and while Levane, 71 at the time, was recovering from a ruptured aortic aneurysm he suffered after being inducted into the New York City Basketball Hall of Fame in September 1991. It almost killed him, and it would have if he had made it home to bed, and not had his wife with him in the car. Having been born with a congenital heart defect, Levane never thought he would live past 50. He defied the odds to play college and pro ball, then proceeded to outlive not only Kay, who died two years ago, but every dear friend. Of those, it was the loss of Holzman, who died in 1998, that pained him most. When the Knicks won the Eastern Conference title the next spring, Levane cried tears of joy and sadness, telling a reporter that he only wished Holzman had lived to see it. In a telephone interview, Levane's son, Andrew, said of his father: "He was depressed that he'd outlived my mom and his buddies. He just never expected that. Levane had moved in with a daughter in Irmo, S.C., where he watched Knicks games religiously and continued to share memories with callers from New York until his health failed. His daughter Denise was about to serve him a slice of pie when she discovered he had died. "With a smile on his face," Andrew said. A wake is planned in South Carolina for Monday and a funeral on Tuesday.