It was standing room only today as nearly a thousand people packed St. Joseph's Roman Catholic Church on Fifth Street this gentle spring morning. They had come to honor and bid farewell to, as Father Peter Colapietro said in his homily, "the simple saloonkeeper's son, who always looked for the other guy" and who became "the New York giant who was a shooting star."

It was standing room only the way it was in the glory days at Madison Square Garden, in the late 1960's and early 1970's, when Dave DeBusschere and that wonderful, perfect mixture of intelligent, talented ? selfless may not be overstating it ? athletes made up the Knicks' championship teams. Some of those men, including Willis Reed, Walt Frazier, Earl Monroe and Bill Bradley, were now grim and moist-eyed pallbearers who carried DeBusschere's coffin into the high-vaulted church.

Those Knick teams, as Bradley said shortly after in his remarks at the funeral, possessed the "magic of life." He recalled the roaring crowds at the Garden and the precision of execution of the players and the "chills of winning a championship."