On Being a Knicks Fan and the Meaning of Everything

I watched the greatest comeback in NBA history on my phone in a parking lot in Corte Madera, California. This was not my plan, of course, but the Knicks were closing the cavernous gap with me in that parking lot; I knew that my role, my responsibility, my tiny part of this monumental endeavor on behalf of New York City was to stay put. And drink mini bottles of vodka (more on that later).

The Knicks coming back from 29 points down has not been my experience of fandom, even if Knicks fans have learned that there is something different about this particular team and its players. But I want to share something about what this means beyond the celebrities and viral videos and even the games. For me, and so many others, this Knicks run is also a story about identity, community, and connection to something bigger than yourself. It’s a story about New York City, and as with all things New York, that means it’s a story about everything.

Identity

The first thing I remember writing was a short story about my sneakers in the fourth grade. They were named Gerald and Mark after the Knicks starting back court: Gerald Wilkins and Mark Jackson. My teacher was impressed by this imaginative leap but there was nothing unusual about it to me: giving my sneakers the names and personalities of my favorite players was a way to spend more time with them in between games – even as the team finished with a losing record.

I came of age with the 90s Knicks – a gritty, grind-it-out, and always good team that never made it to the top. These were tough guys who weren’t blessed with the talent of their rivals, most prominently Michael Jordan. They won with defense, rebounding, relentless effort, and a bruising physicality that seemed to mirror the city before Manhattan’s makeover under Rudy Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg. Even our one star, Patrick Ewing, seemed like he had to fight a little harder to get points: sweat-drenched, he’d put his shoulder down and lumber straight into the defense, carrying the weight of millions of people on his back before flinging a shot in the direction of the basket. My favorite Knicks were the ones who came out of nowhere: undrafted John Starks and third-rounder Anthony Mason, journeymen who found a way to become All Star role players in New York.

I was lucky enough to have a dad who bought into a share of season tickets. In my teenage years, when talking to adults became confounding, there were always games at the Garden to share, the unspoken language of trying to will the Knicks to victory with chants of De-Fense. From those seats, we saw Starks dunk over Jordan to seal a playoff win; we also saw Charles Smith helplessly miss five layups to lose a pivotal Game 5 against the Bulls. Losing only seemed to intensify my connection to the team. When we finally reached the Finals in 1994 (with Jordan taking a break to play baseball), I watched Starks shoot 2-18 in Game 7 (0-11 from 3). The rational thing to do would have been to lament this irrational shooting which likely cost us a championship; instead, I was proud of his effort. I remember wandering barefoot onto Manhattan streets after the game, the phrase “keep shooting, John” mysteriously in my head.

And so it went. We lost Pat Riley to Miami and brawled our way through successive playoff matchups with the Heat – with coach Jeff Van Gundy, dressed like a disheveled and coke-addled trader, clinging to Alonzo Mourning’s leg. We traded playoff wins and losses with Reggie Miller, finally reaching another Finals by beating the Pacers in 1999 after Ewing tore his Achilles – assuring we would lose to a Spurs team graced by two big men, David Robinson and Tim Duncan. We descended into decades of tragicomical mediocrity under a Bond-villain owner and a procession of declining coaches, aging stars, freak injuries, and off-court soap operas. Somehow, this only heightened the loyalty of fans who could become irrationally excited about the flickering promise of one ill-considered draft pick after another.

To identify as a Knicks fan through all those years was a strange and stubborn thing to do, like Starks shooting eighteen times in Game 7. But isn’t the belief in something unseen the very essence of faith?

Community

The Knicks are a singular religion in New York.

Baseball loyalties have always been divided – between Yankees, Dodgers and Giants, and then Yankees and Mets. Football is similarly split between Giants and Jets, both of whom play in New Jersey. Hockey has its die-hard Rangers fans but, with apologies to some of my friends, the sport has always been niche. New York is a basketball town, littered with outdoor courts that require no fee or equipment to play other than courage, where everyone feels a stake in the Knicks – as the Nets discovered after they moved from Jersey to Brooklyn.

It helps that the Knicks play in Madison Square Garden, the literal heart of the city, right on top of Penn Station. This is a place you also go to see other things: I saw the Big Apple Circus there as a kid and attended my first rock concert as a teenager (Dire Straits) after which I got buzzed for the first time (in the upstairs dining area of Sbarro). But despite all the other events, and that bond-villain who owns MSG, the building has always belonged to the Knicks. As everyone is seeing once more, there’s no sound, no energy, no feeling like MSG during a basketball game.

For all the focus on the resale prices at these Finals, my memory of MSG was of a place where people from all over the city came after work to be together. And if you couldn’t make it or afford the price, there was always a television or radio somewhere where you could catch the game or strike up a conversation about what the team was doing right or – more often – wrong.

This, more than anything else, is what fuses my love of the team and place. New York, perhaps more than any city on Earth, encompasses sprawling diversity: of race, religion, and ethnicity; of income and circumstance; of natives and newcomers; of highs and lows, heartbreak and hope. The Knicks are a thing that everyone can share – the great leveler. I’ve had conversations about the Knicks with homeless people and billionaires, doormen who’ve been on the job for decades and little kids who probably name their sneakers after players born decades after me. The team connects New Yorkers to one another and to the city’s past and future.

Like so much in America, the 21^st century has been a time of painful transformations in New York. In many ways, the century – and so many wars that have marred it – began with 9/11. The Bloomberg years saw the construction of high-end public spaces and the rise of Billionaire’s Row south of Central Park, colorless monuments to wealth and ego and oligarchy – be in American, Russian or Chinese. Financial capitalism supplanted some of the city’s working and striving-class ethos. A New Yorker, Donald Trump, was rejected by his hometown and seems intent on taking it out on the rest of the world (including Knicks fans, who knew intuitively that he would wreck their karmic winning streak in Game 3). The city is harder to afford than ever before as evidenced by the price of getting into the Garden.

Perhaps it’s no coincidence that the Knicks have struggled throughout most of this century, as if the team was mirroring the convulsions happening outside of MSG. That is until a second-round draft pick named Jalen Brunson came to town and then reunited with a group of friends to form the team’s core. And for all the snapshots of celebrity-row, the genuine images of this playoff run are of people of every kind celebrating in bars and parks and subways and streets. It’s a cathartic coming together, an assertion of community that has far-too-often been lost in America, as if the city is exorcising not just the demons of sports but of a world gone wrong.

My personal favorite was the video of a group of Knicks revelers chanting U-P-S! at a delivery truck on the Upper West Side after Game 4’s comeback win. It’s the kind of delirious gesture that was immediately familiar to me, something that made innate sense. Because the Knicks won. Because O.G. won it with that tip-in. Because it’s fun to chant with strangers. Because we’re all probably a little drunk. Because we want to forget whatever pain there is until morning. Because we’ve seen a million of those trucks blocking traffic while double-parked at rush-hour. Because of course we assume, we know, that driver is a Knicks fan too. And we love him for it.

Exile

I moved away from New York not long after 9/11. I reoriented my entire existence: for better and worse, away from a life of outer-borough writing and into an unlikely career tied up with American national security. If I’m honest, my motivation wasn’t so much patriotism. I had witnessed my city, the place I love more than any other, the place that made me who I was, attacked. When I packed up my Astoria apartment, I assumed that I’d be back in a few years. But life usually has more in store for you than you can imagine as a 24-year-old.

Of course, I go back constantly. From D.C., weekends on the Accella or the Turnpike, barreling back into the city. From L.A., weeks over the summer and holidays where I can feel like myself again walking the endless streets. My parents still live in the apartment where I was born, the one where my room was plastered with Knicks posters – Gerald Wilkins and Mark Jackson dressed as fighter pilots (“The Bomb Squad”) or John Starks improbably rising over Michael Jordan (“The Dunk”). Some people relax when they step into nature; I always exhale a little differently when I enter the din of Penn Station or emerge from the Lincoln Tunnel.

But most of the time, when I’m away, nothing connects me to the city like sports. The one non-negotiable aspect of my daughter’s lives is that they are Knicks and Mets fans, even if they mainly humor my obsessions. One of the few blessings of technology is that I can watch every Knicks game with the same announcers who were there on local cable television when I left, Mike Breen and Clyde Frazier. Those broadcasts are like rituals transporting me back to the city, back to that energy, back to childhood. Every game is accompanied by a group text that keeps me in touch with my high school friends as if we were still sixteen.

As luck would have it, four of us were able to watch the second half of Game 1 together in my friend’s Manhattan apartment. I showed up just after halftime from my book event at the 92^nd Street Y. Stressed out from missing part of the game and the Spurs third quarter lead, I poured a vodka on the rocks. Then Brunson started scoring and the Knicks clawed their way into the lead. Surely the vodka played a part (this superstition will be familiar to any fan). I refilled and sipped nervously. When Brunson hit an insane dagger fade-away with 38 seconds to go, the cheering from every corner of the city – from bars and watch parties and other apartments – washed in through the 8^th floor window like we were all together. Because we were.

The Parking Lot

Game 4 also conflicted with a book event, this time at the wonderful Book Passage in Corte Madeira. I noticed one guy in the audience wearing a Knicks jersey, number 20 (Alan Houston, I nodded with respect). As I spoke about American history and identity, I stole occasional glimpses at the score. Spurs up 10. Spurs up 20. Spurs up 29. I didn’t rush through the book-signing line like I intended. I had faith in the Knicks, but clearly not quite enough.

By the time I walked out into the parking lot I noticed that the Knicks had it under 20. I jumped on the group text. “Ben the vodka.” Pulling the game up on Hulu, I dutifully walked into a Total Wine which was (by the grace of a higher power?) next door. I grabbed a few mini-Belvederes, made my way back into the parking lot, and called an Uber. When the Knicks cut it to 15, I cancelled the Uber. The parking lot was working. I paced my way over to a curb and sat down.

If the anonymous suburban sprawl of that parking lot accentuated my distance from New York, the image of the Garden and the sound of Mike Breen’s voice was like the tether that holds an astronaut from drifting off into space. Shot by shot, stop by stop, the Knicks were clawing their way back. It wasn’t the prettiest comeback, which seemed fitting. Without ice, a sip of vodka was more something to be endured than enjoyed. When Josh Hart blew a layup that would have sent the arena into delirium, I immediately forgave him.

When I was 8 years-old, I attended Game 6 of the 1986 World Series, the game when the Mets came back from two runs down with two outs and the bases empty to beat the Red Sox. Walking to the subway, I still remember my father warning me not to get used to this kind of thing because sports rarely offers up those endings. He was right. 1986 is the last year that a team I rooted for one the championship.

As O.G. Anunoby prepared to inbound the ball with the Knicks down by 1, it all felt like too much. “I believe” one friend texted on the group thread. “I believe” I wrote back. I paced the parking lot as Brunson hoisted a three pointer and barely saw what happened on my small screen when O.G. flew from nowhere to tap it in, the kind of thing that only seemed to happen for other teams from other places. I closed my eyes and could feel, from all that distance, the city explode: so many years of mediocrity, so much endured, so many individual journeys converging into a moment that bound us all together. The kind of thing that only sports can offer; the kind of noise that only New York can make, the kind I could hear and feel over 2000 miles away.

There are still identities that can connect you to a larger whole. There are still places that we can call home, wherever we are. There are still reasons for hope, no matter how far you fall behind. I believe.