The Knicks Will Break Your Heart
"Will it be glory or more purgatory?"
Believe
This spring all five New York City-area NBA and NHL teams are in the playoffs for the first time since 1994. There’s a special sort of suffering reserved for Knicks fans, and I’ve been one my whole life. I lived in New York in the early-to-mid 1990s when I was getting an MFA in Writing at Columbia University. It was a great time to be a Knicks fan and during the playoffs Madison Square Garden felt like the center of the world. I would post up with a group of fellow classmates, usually Mike, Joe, Ed, Ted, Andrew, and Schickler, and commandeer a table at a Morningside Heights tavern or camp out in the apartment of whoever had the biggest TV to watch the games over pitchers of beer and pizza and wings. And if they won we would move on to another bar to celebrate, and if they lost we were deflated and quiet in our mutual misery. During regular seasons there was the refrain, of we’ll get ‘em next time, but during playoffs it was do or die.
Sports Illustrated senior writer Chris Herring’s excellent book, Blood in the Garden: The Flagrant History of the 1990s New York Knicks, captures that era when the NBA was a bit more flagrantly physical and the Knicks were a tough team. I grew up in Central New York, so Georgetown’s Patrick Ewing was always the prime nemesis of the Syracuse Orangemen but I learned to love him when he became a Knick. The cast of players of that era each bring specific memories, from Doc Rivers, John Starks, Greg Anthony, Allan Houston, Larry Johnson, and the enforcers Anthony Mason (RIP) and my favorite player, Charles Oakley. My father tended to lose hope in the Knicks in a very been there/done that way even when there was a minute left in the game (a minute is an eternity in basketball). I gifted him an Oakley’s Car Wash t-shirt in the ‘90s and when we were settling his affairs in 2008 I came across it in one of his dresser drawers and hang on to it as memento (it still smells like his bay rum aftershave).
Sort of related… I’m obsessed with the local John Starks Kia commercial (“Stand tall!”) that has been in heavy rotation during the playoffs. My dad would’ve loved it.
I moved to Seattle in 1999 and while being a post-90s Knicks fan could be depressing I held on to hope. I had seen the Knicks play in the Garden a handful of times but their games were always sell-outs and tickets were expensive and hard to come by.
During my time in Seattle I kept up with the Knicks but starting attending SuperSonics games. I began by buying a solo seat from a scalper out front and soon had “a guy” I could go to for a three-card-Monte style of upgrade, “exchanging” my current nosebleed seat for something in the lower bowl. And over time I started buying tickets through Key Arena, starting with seasonal 4-packs (which included playoff rights) and then increasing the number of games until the end when I had half-season tickets just a few rows behind Sherman Alexie. I had a few years of Gary Payton and was able to attend several playoff games and the sight of lost-looking Patrick Ewing when he played for the Sonics in 2000-2001.
And when the Knicks were in town, my ticket broker would try to bump me up to courtside seats which was pretty cool. And then I experienced a new kind of sports-related misery when the Sonics played their last game at Key Arena on April 13, 2008, before they were relocated to Oklahoma City due to Seattle refusing to build them a new arena and other backroom machinations which still sours me to think about.
But we’re not here to mourn the Sonics, but to celebrate the Knicks making the playoffs. I have to admit I’ve watched Nicholas Heller’s commercial/rally cry celebrating the mood of the city when the Knicks are in the playoffs more than a few times. “The rats don’t run the city. The Knicks do.” (And fun to see my friend Bilena, whose family owns the Italian restaurant and bakery Settepani in Harlem and Brooklyn rock a cameo in her blue and orange.)
Though the Knicks were ousted by the Atlanta Hawks in the first round of the 2021 pandemic-shortened Playoffs I’m still overtaken with the delusional hope that hits me at times like this as last Saturday’s first round match-ups went down. There’s a lot more confidence around the predictions of the fifth-ranked Knicks agains the fourth-ranked Cleveland Cavaliers in the first round of the Eastern Conference playoffs. Before the game I texted Thomas Beller, author of Lost in the Game: A Book About Basketball to gauge his mood and he responded with, “I’m braced for pain but I love the first round of the playoffs.” And in exchanges with my dear friend Gisele, who is a lifelong New Yorker and Knicks, she fan texted back: “Don’t get your hopes up. The Knicks have been breaking our hearts for years.”
Like so many Knicks fans I want to believe and I’m completely swept up in the way the city feels different when the Knicks are in the playoffs. But we’ve all been burned so many times and have had our hope and hearts shattered. That’s the nature of being a fan. But Knicks fans are a special breed. It’s all about appreciating each step, and long for a win play by play, game to game, round by round.
All I know is the Knicks are up 1-0 against Cleveland and I’ll be watching the game later tonight, hopefully from my regular table in the Lombardi Room at Long Island Bar, where Toby will take down the Wisconsin flag hanging on the wall to uncover the oversized TV. And win or lose, the Knicks return to the Garden on Friday promises to be electric. Maybe I’ll need to watch the game at Billymarks or somewhere close to the action. Either way, Let’s Go Knicks!
