The problem with sports is that sports either: 1) functions as an allegorical enclosure inside which everything else (world, self) can be glimpsed and potentially even briefly made to reveal itself, or 2) is delightful precisely because it excludes everything else and offers a brief zone of perfect respite from the crushing truths of our petty sufferations.
The problem with writing about sports, then, is that you either: 1) embrace the first premise and guarantee sounding like some kind of idiot of projection, idealization, and Pathetic Fallacy, or 2) fall silent, as one might while beholding an eclipse or the Rothko Chapel or a livestream of a mother owl caring for its owlets. That’s to say, if sports is one of those transcendent things meant to humble and unite us in breathless regard for what can happen entirely outside ourselves, why deface it with the graffiti of individual response? (The great exception proving this rule is Annie Dillard’s essay about seeing an eclipse, “Total Eclipse.”) For this reason, I think, I’ve (mostly) sworn never to write about sports.1
But wait, I’m already committing romantic nonsense to the page. The difference between a championship run and a total eclipse or the Rothko Chapel is that the eclipse and the Chapel aren’t accompanied by twenty-nine embarrassingly failed eclipses or Chapels. (There are thirty teams in the NBA, and for one of them to win the rest all have, eventually, to lose.) Nor are they accompanied by years, even decades, of failed eclipses or Chapels, all of them shrouded in excuses, recriminations, and equivocating statements like “We gave it our best” or “Nobody expected us even to get this far.” Sports is a vast sinkhole of failure, of abjection, of human error and inconstancy, all of which is only survived by those who produce it and those who devote themselves to it through gigantic engines of denial.
What’s more, it isn’t really possible to protect sports from an “outside” world of money, corruption, commercialization, gambling, politics, and celebrity worship; the beauties of sports are hedged at all sides by the sporting world’s propensity to generate these things from within its boundary. The moments we cherish are like splendid flowers sprouting atop a mountain of shit. It’s best not to place one’s nose right up against the flowers. Sometimes they are flecked with the shit, or reek from their symbiotic relationship with the mountain. Your childhood hero may not have been Pete Rose, or Wayne Gretzky, or Tiger Woods. You may have gotten luckier than that. Still, best not press in too closely.
Anyway, sports is constituted not of silence, but of language—of chatter, trash talk, statistics, listicles, broadcasts, post- and pre-game pressers, pleading calls to bookies, fickle avowals and disavowals of loyalty, bogus authoritativeness, fansplaining. The talk vastly outweighs the playing. So why not add a little more? I’ve agreed to blog the NBA Finals—destination, this year, of the possibly transcendent New York Knicks, who’ll face the San Antonio Spurs. A rare destination for the Knicks; they’ve not gone since 1999, and not since 1973 have they gone and won. It is this which has united the city in distraction, adoration, anticipation, and—of course—the unspeakable dread of having to tuck in at the meal of disappointment that is a true sports fan’s regular banquet.
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Of course, the idea of “uniting the city” is another falsehood. Sports, an ostensibly welcoming and egalitarian institution, routinely alienates those who don’t care for it. At moments like this vast numbers of people whom a nonfan might safely assume to share their indifference (the pod-people dress like humans, most days, most years) abruptly flaunt the orange-and-blue hats or jerseys, or begin forwarding the orange-and-blue memes, or reminiscing about how they loved Latrell Sprewell. Sports is worst for its dissidents at such moments, with the suggestion that everyone had always been caring so much all along.
No. I’m here as a witness for the middle case: the fair-weather fan. I’ll suggest that we are the majority in this cresting wave—neither at the top of the curl, nor reluctantly swept from the bottom layers of seawater and sediment, the zone of those wishing they could ignore the whole thing, except the dinner party they’d been looking forward to has been canceled in favor of gathering at a bar with a television. Here, in the middle, many of us are playing catch-up. We haven’t paid close-enough, recent-enough attention to the Bad Knicks, those failed confabulations of borrowed stars and injured role players, to fully earn our ecstatic embrace of these Good Knicks. Our facts are hurriedly cribbed.
Here are all the Knicks my tired brain can retrieve without cheating: Willis Reed, Walt “Clyde” Frazier, Dave DeBusschere, Bill Bradley, Phil Jackson, Earl “The Pearl” Monroe, the Knicks who won championships in 1970 and 1973, both against the Los Angeles Lakers; the Knicks cited in Woody Allen movies, some of which are now discredited; the Knicks whose delicious names were pronounced by Howard Cosell and likely mentioned also by Oscar Madison, sportswriter (I’m not checking this fact, nor will I permit it to be checked); the Knicks who brought total joy in the wide-lapel era of New York sports around the same time as did Joe Namath and Tom Seaver; the Knicks who wrote books and had books written about them. I was barely old enough for these Knicks but my brain seems to hold their names and visages in the same way I can sing along to nearly all the Top Forty songs from 1970 to 1973 without any difficulty.
Then: Bernard King, lonely scoring champion. Then: Patrick Ewing, the seven-footer, the great hope, the draft pick the team won in a possibly rigged lottery. Ewing, who led a brave failed run to the Finals in 1994, where the team lost to the Houston Rockets, who had their own seven-footer, the iconic Hakeem Olajuwon. Ewing’s comrades: Charles Oakley, John Starks, Anthony Mason. Then: Latrell Sprewell, who I got to know in Oakland as a Warrior (more on this later), he who led another doomed campaign to the Finals in 1999, to lose to the Spurs, while Ewing was injured. Sprewell’s companions: Allan Houston, Charlie Ward, Kurt Thomas (men much blurrier to me than the Seventies roster). Then, in intervening years: Carmelo Anthony, Tracy McGrady, Kristaps Porziņģis (okay, I had to use Google to spellcheck that name), Stephon Marbury, and Jeremy “Linsanity” Lin—basically, as I understand it, all ultimately painful names to recall, painful for the hopes that collected around them and then floated off in the cold light of better-constructed opponent rosters and merciless tabloid or talk-radio disdain.
That’s it.
Don’t quiz me on the names of the far end of the bench of this current group. It’s a bad sign, probably, if I know them all by the time I finish watching this series. In any case, I won’t retain them.
Why am I a weak Knicks fan? There are many reasons. As an outerborough New York City kid, I forged my one catastrophic bond to a baseball team called the Mets. It was all I could afford, and I mean that literally—my friends and I could ride the 7 train to Shea and get in for a buck-fifty, even to a double-header. By the seventh inning of an invariably losing game we’d have made our way down to the empty field-level box seats. The ushers didn’t care enough to stop us. (I could also go with my grandmother from Queens, though she’d insist we sit proudly in the upper deck to the end—“up with God,” she joked). The Knicks seemed bound up in Manhattan privilege and tradition, as did the Yankees and Rangers (hockey) and Giants (football). I opted for the expansion-team and rhyme-scheme logic of being, at least theoretically, a Jets and Nets fan, and a fan of the New York Islanders in hockey, though it always irritated me that they hadn’t done the obvious thing and named themselves the “Long Islanders” (wouldn’t that be cool?).
Really, I was weak in my knowledge or attention to any game that wasn’t baseball. I was destined to get semi-serious about basketball, though I’ve still never lurked in basketball chatrooms or involuntarily memorized basketball statistics or formed theories around basketball the way I do by second nature as a Mets fan. But these were my two sports because these were the two games I played. “Baseball” consisted of stickball in the street, or sometimes a softball game in what used to be called a sandlot but was in my childhood called a vacant lot. “Basketball” took place in schoolyards, on concrete, half-court games of two-on-two or three-on-three. (Later, when invited into gymnasiums to play full-court games with ten players, I found myself bewildered by turning around to face the opposite rim, and by the proliferation of bodies, and played terribly.) I wasn’t gifted at either sport, but scrapped my way to adequacy. Before leaving for college I was better identified with baseball. For one thing, while playing I could narrate it, even my own errors—“Easy double-play ball, but oh, he muffs it”—whereas in basketball I utilized grim silence to tough out being the worst player on nearly any court. Then, when I moved to college in rural Vermont, or afterward, to other cities, I embodied “New York playground ball.” It wasn’t that I was any better, but my city style seemed to convey an authority it hadn’t had while actually in Brooklyn. Of course, this encoded a racial discomfort.
“The National Basketball Association…is a photo negative of American race relations: strong young black men have some of the power, much of the money, and all of the fun. The NBA is a place where, without acknowledging it—and because it’s never acknowledged, it’s that much more potent and telling—white fans and black players enact and quietly explode virtually every racial issue and tension in the culture at large.” So wrote David Shields in Black Planet: Facing Race During an NBA Season, published in 1999, the year of the previous New York–San Antonio Finals. Despite two black head coaches in the present showdown, despite eight years of Obama, Black Lives Matter, and, of course, the nightmarish backlash against both, and despite the twenty-first-century internationalization of the NBA (Victor Wembanyama, the Spurs’ twenty-two-year-old star, is of French-Congolese ancestry; no US-born player has won the league’s MVP award since 2018), we’re still on Shields’s planet, as I was on Brooklyn playgrounds in 1978.
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I’ve never been to a game at Madison Square Garden, though I have seen a couple of Bob Dylan shows there. I became a real basketball fan in my twenties, while living in Oakland, where I fell for the Golden State Warriors of the Tim Hardaway–Chris Mullin–Mitch Richmond years, a team forever in search of a proper tall man at center, and which never won anything, but whose underdog charm was easy bait for a Mets fan. This bet of allegiance accidentally paid off, as I was able to relish the spectacular recent Steph Curry-led championships—four of them in eight years—not as a Johnny-come-lately but as a diehard who’d paid my dues riding BART to sit in half-empty arenas decades earlier. That I was an “authentic” Warriors fan gave my offspring the relief of seeing me shed happy tears for a winner, a hedge against the Mets-pity they were forced to offer me all through their childhoods.
(I also continued to play, well into my forties, both before and after an on-court injury requiring surgery—a full rupture of my right Achilles tendon, the rehabbing of which took over a year. I’ve never damaged my body so violently at baseball or by any other method. The scar rising along the back of my calf, out of my gym socks, made basketball fully “mine” at last, and allowed me to claim I’d lost a vertical leap which in fact I’d never possessed. At my brief best I was a three-point shot specialist, though it only counts for two in most schoolyards. What ended my participation was not a dramatic injury but the permanently sore knees that cause most anyone who plays to sit down by their fifties.)
The question is, what entitles me to the present Knicks? Nothing. But as Saul Bellow wrote in a letter encouraging a friend to help himself to other people’s facts in his writing, the thing about claiming fannish love of a team is that it requires only “the strength to pick them up”—which New Yorkers are doing right now in droves. My motives in this writing are mixed, too. I hope to excavate the romantic nonsense, in service of a contradictory impulse to relish and to dispel it in one gesture. If the present Knicks seem consonant with Mamdani’s New York in their non-zero-sum, pothole-filling approach (they set a record in their last playoff game by accumulating 130 points without a single player scoring more than 20), if folk-hero point guard Jalen Brunson gave up $113 million to enable the organization to sign the players around him, we might also feel free to speculate that in some alternate reality Brunson could have accepted that crazy sum and handed it over to the fight against hunger or cancer; to note that he and the other Knicks play for the team’s owner, James Dolan, a Nixonian creep with an enemies list and a panopticon of surveillance devices in his buildings; to understand that though obsessing on these games for the next two weeks makes a sublime diversion from an outside world of nightmares, the nightmares are destined, always, to penetrate the defense and score, score, score.
English (US) · 