New York City has endured its share of sporting futility, but basketball failure feels particularly unnatural.
It wasn’t supposed to be this way.
The game was invented by James Naismith only a few states away. From the late nineteenth century onward, New York blanketed its boroughs with playgrounds, blacktops, school gyms, and settlement houses where basketball became part of the city’s DNA. College basketball once revolved around New York. Madison Square Garden was its cathedral. In 1950, CCNY accomplished something that will never be repeated: winning both the NIT and NCAA championships in the same season.
Then something happened.
The point-shaving scandals of the early 1950s cast a long shadow over New York basketball. One of the CCNY players caught up in the scandal later became my neighbor in Queens. Growing up, I would occasionally see him and knew little of his history. Only years later did I understand that he had been part of a team that represented the pinnacle of New York basketball and the scandal that helped bring that era to an abrupt end.
New York basketball has spent much of the ensuing seventy-five years trying to recapture what was lost. The city’s college dominance evaporated. The original Pennsylvania Station, perhaps the most magnificent railroad terminal America ever built, was demolished and Madison Square Garden rose over its ashes.
The Garden would become “The World’s Most Famous Arena,” but not because of basketball. A few stories below the court, travelers could catch a train out of town. The building hosted political conventions, rallies, concerts, and iconic boxing matches. For basketball, its enduring image remains Willis Reed limping from the tunnel before Game 7 of the 1970 NBA Finals.
The Knicks’ history has largely been a study in longing.
They lost to the Rochester Royals before I was old enough to understand disappointment. They spent decades staring up at the Celtics. Patrick Ewing’s finger roll rolled off the rim. John Starks misfired fifteen times in a decisive Finals game. The years that followed brought a parade of bad decisions, overpaid rosters, lottery disappointments, and steadily rising ticket prices to watch increasingly mediocre basketball.
Yet basketball runs deep in native New Yorkers.
We played before school, during recess, after dinner, and until the streetlights came on. Every neighborhood had a court and every court had legends. I remember hearing about a kid in seventh grade who stood only five-foot-nine and could dunk a basketball. Endless debates followed: what would you rather accomplish, dunking a basketball or winning a Nobel Prize?
The answer was always dunking.
So when the Knicks fell behind by twenty-nine points in the second half yesterday, the familiar feeling returned. Futility was back in town.
I shut off the television in disgust and went to bed.
Around 11:40 p.m., I could hear noise drifting up Third Avenue from the direction of the Garden. I ignored it. A text arrived from an old colleague in California. I didn’t open it. I assumed it was another taunt.
The Knicks had broken my heart too many times to earn the benefit of the doubt.
The next morning I glanced at the score.
Knicks 107.
Spurs 106.
I looked again.
Surely I was reading the wrong game.
But there it was. A one-point victory. A comeback from twenty-nine down. One of the greatest playoff rallies in franchise history. Miracles, it turns out, still happen on 34th Street.
Walking through Manhattan later that morning, I noticed Knicks jerseys everywhere. Construction workers patching potholes on Lexington Avenue were talking basketball. Strangers exchanged thumbs-up. The city seemed lighter.
For one morning at least, New York wasn’t carrying fifty-three years of basketball disappointment.
Could this finally be the end of the wandering?
The rational side of me remains cautious. Knicks fans have learned caution the hard way. Decades of disappointment create a futility blockade in the mind that even the most spectacular victory struggles to penetrate.
But perhaps something is changing.
Perhaps this team is writing a different ending.
And if they are, I will be there in spirit with Clyde Frazier, Earl Monroe, Willis Reed, Bill Bradley, and Dave DeBusschere, standing at the gates of deliverance, waiting to see whether the long exile is finally coming to an end.