A Gift From the Basketball Gods
· The Atlantic
There is, for me, an out-of-time quality to the recent string of crazy, wonderful Knicks playoff games. I find myself lying awake night after night reviewing jump shots made, fouls committed, and shots blocked, always anxious for what lies ahead. Half a century ago, this routine had a certain age-appropriate insanity to it. Now, though, I’m on the distinctly long side of middle age, yet here I am, fitfully trying to sleep and clearing my calendar for each game night as if for a devotional event.
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I’m aware that New York City has fine baseball—I am on a Mets sabbatical until the Knicks run is complete—as well as hockey and soccer. No doubt there are badminton teams of note. But sorry (except not really): Our city game is hoops, and after their prolonged stay in purgatory, the Knicks are back, and playing a beautiful style that long ago seemed our birthright. As the championship series between my Knicks and the San Antonio Spurs commences tonight, I find myself wondering if, maybe, just perhaps, we’ll finally recapture the NBA title. And then I wonder if I’ve committed a karmic crime by even typing such words.
I grew up on the Upper West Side in the 1960s and ’70s, at a time when basketball was practically in the air and water. Walt “Clyde” Frazier and his custom Rolls-Royce spotted slow-riding down Broadway? My friends and I set off running. John Gianelli, a gangly and obscure Knicks backup center, once stopped by the 77th Street courts and took a few jump shots, and we asked him to sign our basketballs. I worked the register at a bohemian bookshop as a teenager, and one winter afternoon, Earl “The Pearl” Monroe, that whirling dervish of a guard, strolled in with the most beautiful woman in the world on his arm. As they turned to leave, I managed to croak out a whisper: “Good luck tonight, Earl.” He turned and gave me a fist salute. I nearly passed out.
[Read: Adam Silver goes to war]
In high school, my friends and I became subway wayfarers, traveling in search of great high-school games. One afternoon, we found ourselves in Queens watching Ernie Grunfeld, who would eventually play for the Knicks, and the next day, in a remote precinct of Brooklyn, watching the sainted Bernard King, a future Knicks star. I played a little basketball at the Bronx High School of Science, and once, in an exhibition game, I found myself, perhaps for five seconds, covering a 6-foot-6-inch forward named Steve Sheppard, who played at DeWitt Clinton High School, a basketball powerhouse in the Bronx. He would play on the gold-medal-winning 1976 Olympic basketball team before having a brief career in the NBA, and he was far bigger, quicker, and better than I was. Otherwise, we matched up quite well. My coach pulled me out at the first whistle.
My Knicks fandom took flight during their 1969–70 championship season. That team featured players who cut, moved, shot, and hit the open man with an egoless ease. Then the Knicks won a second championship in 1973, and my assumption was that this was just how the Knicks rolled. They have not won a championship since. In the 1990s, the great center Patrick Ewing and his band of bruise brothers arrived and doggedly pursued a title. Their misfortune was to play in the same era and conference as Michael Jordan’s Chicago Bulls.
Then came the abyss, two decades of execrable play, a blur of coaches fired more or less annually, sent off to live on the gilded dole of unexpired contracts. The team owner then, and now, was James Dolan, and he is not a particularly pleasant fellow. I was a sports columnist for The New York Times in the late 2010s, and one afternoon, I met a Madison Square Garden insider over a long lunch that my source had arranged with the care of a spy, all but sweeping the room for bugs. The problem with Dolan, this person confided, was that the owner fancied himself knowledgeable about basketball. Only when he was disabused of that notion, the source said, would the team’s fortunes change.
[Nathaniel Frum: Democrats must learn to talk sports]
Apparently two lost decades did the trick. In 2020, Dolan hired the agent Leon Rose as president and gave him the freedom to build a team as he desired. Rose acquired the transcendent point guard Jalen Brunson, our very own Yoda, and then Karl-Anthony Towns, the spectacularly gifted and sometimes frustrating big man; O. G Anunoby, the deadpan defensive maestro; and Josh Hart, the passionate generalist. The tireless Mikal Bridges plays defense and offense with the elegance of a fine jazzman. For several years now, this band has journeyed deeper and deeper into the playoffs, learning to trust and share the ball and to weather heartbreak. And so once again, here we are, playing for a championship in June.
Nothing is guaranteed, of course; my Knicks fandom has long been accompanied by a chaser of disappointment. Will the Knicks’ superb two-month streak hold up against the Spurs and their 7-foot-4-inch starting center, Victor Wembanyama? In his ability and long, lean look, Wembanyama calls to mind another great, otherworldly player (and a product of New York), Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, who stands 7 foot 2 inches. Just as I’ve enjoyed Abdul-Jabbar’s intelligence and interest in politics, art, and more, I confess to grooving on Wembanyama’s intelligence on the court—not to mention that this 22-year-old had the self-possession and curiosity to spend 10 days last summer running, meditating, and honing martial-arts skills at the Shaolin Temple in the mountains of China, or that, when he was in New York earlier this season, he went to Washington Square Park in the rain to match wits with chess players.
But for the next two weeks, I wish Wembanyama and his formidable young teammates nothing but misery on the court. Tonight I will retreat to my basement, where my wife, Evelyn, and I will turn on the TV and watch, sometimes in silence, sometimes with joyful howls, and often in exquisite pain. (We will text more or less constantly during the game with our two sons, ex–New Yorkers and fervent Knicks fans who live in Houston and San Francisco.) Knicks basketball in June is a gift from the sports gods that is not to be taken for granted.