Tag: Basketball

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Lessons from Lisbon, Madrid and Madison Square Garden

What Makes a Civilization Great?

What the Knicks and the Iberian Peninsula Teach About Greatness

As I watched the New York Knicks march toward a championship, I found myself thinking less about basketball and more about history.
Championships are often explained through the mythology of the superstar. We celebrate the dominant scorer, the transcendent athlete, the singular genius who carries everyone else to glory.
Yet the Knicks offered a different lesson.
Jalen Brunson was unquestionably their leader, but this was not a one-man team. Their success depended on relationships forged years earlier at Villanova. These were players who trusted one another instinctively, who understood where teammates would be before they arrived, and who were willing to sacrifice statistics, shots, and even money for a larger goal.
Brunson famously left substantial money on the table to help the organization assemble a deeper roster. In a professional sports world often defined by maximizing individual gain, he chose collective success.
The result was not merely a winning team. It was a cooperative enterprise. And history suggests that great civilizations are built the exact same way.

The Chemistry of Convivencia

During our recent trip through Spain and Portugal, I was struck by how often the story of Iberian greatness was actually a story of collaboration among very different peoples.
Long before the Inquisition, the Iberian Peninsula became the world’s vibrant center of learning. This didn’t happen because one culture triumphed over another, but because multiple cultures interacted in a unique ecosystem of coexistence, or Convivencia.

  • Romans contributed law, infrastructure, and language.
  • Muslim scholars brought radical advances in mathematics, navigation, and agriculture while preserving Greek philosophy.
  • Christian kingdoms eventually provided the political framework that inherited this vast reservoir of knowledge.
    But it was the region’s Jewish scholars and statesmen who often served as the vital connective tissue—the ultimate “glue guys” of the Mediterranean world—functioning as the translators, diplomats, scientists, and financial administrators who made the system run.

Hasdai ibn Shaprut (c. 915–970): The Ultimate Catalyst In the Golden Age of Córdoba, Ibn Shaprut served as a physician, translator, and foreign minister to the Caliph. He utilized his multi-linguistic mastery to translate the famous medical texts of Dioscorides into Arabic, establishing Iberia as Europe’s medical capital. As a diplomat, he negotiated complex alliances between Muslim rulers and Christian monarchs, proving that intellectual and political synthesis was the true engine of Iberian prosperity.

The Knowledge Enablers

When we look closer at the Golden Age of Spain and Portugal, the intellectual peaks were achieved not through isolation, but through an intentional exchange of ideas.
Consider Moses Maimonides (1138–1204), born in Córdoba. While globally revered as a towering rabbi and philosopher, Maimonides was also a brilliant physician who wrote extensively on hygiene, pharmacology, and psychology. His philosophical masterpiece, The Guide for the Perplexed, sought to harmonize Aristotelian science with divine revelation. His works were eagerly read not just by Jews, but by Christian thinkers like Thomas Aquinas and Muslim scholars alike, fueling the intellectual fire of the entire continent.
This collaboration yielded practical, world-changing technology. The famous translation schools of Toledo transformed Europe by turning ancient Greek and Arabic texts into Latin. Suddenly, Aristotle, Galen, and Ptolemy were available to a continent hungry for knowledge.
When it came to the Age of Exploration, Portugal’s maritime empire was literally guided by Jewish science:

[Jewish & Islamic Astronomical Data] 
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   [The Perpetual Almanac] (Abraham Zacuto)
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[Advanced Cartography & Astrolabes]
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  [Global Maritime Exploration]

The legendary astronomer and mathematician Abraham Zacuto (1452–1515) revolutionized navigation. His life’s work, The Perpetual Almanac, alongside his improvements to the copper astrolabe, allowed sailors to determine their latitude at sea using the sun rather than the stars.
Without Zacuto’s calculations and personal consultations, there might have been no Vasco da Gama reaching India, no Pedro Álvares Cabral reaching Brazil, and no Portuguese trading empire stretching from Africa to Asia.
The remarkable achievements of Spain and Portugal were not products of isolation. They were products of connection.

The Cost of Exclusion

Yet history also reveals how fragile such success can be. Beginning in the late fifteenth century, Spain and Portugal gradually abandoned the very conditions that had fueled their rise.
The expulsion of the Jews in 1492 systematically removed the most educated, skilled, and commercially connected citizens from the peninsula. Abraham Zacuto himself was forced to flee to Lisbon, and later Tunis, taking his brilliant mind away from the Iberian sphere.
This purge of human capital soon stretched from the cities to the fields. In the 1520s, the Spanish Crown banned Islam entirely, forcing the remaining Moorish population to convert or flee. These Morisco communities comprised the foundational backbone of Spain’s agricultural sector. For generations, they had engineered and maintained highly sophisticated, intricate systems of irrigation, terracing, and water management that kept the arid landscapes of Valencia and Andalusia incredibly fertile.
When this specialized expertise was systematically uprooted and driven out, the consequences were immediate and devastating. The complex canal networks fell into disrepair, agricultural productivity plummeted, and once-abundant yields dropped dramatically. Spain quickly found that you cannot exile your primary food producers without paying a severe price; as the agricultural infrastructure collapsed, localized famines began to creep across the countryside.

[Forced Conversion/Exile of Moorish Peasantry (1520s)]
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      [Collapse of Sophisticated Irrigation Networks]
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           [Severe Drop in Agricultural Yields]
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             [Creeping Famine and Depopulation]

At the exact same time, enormous quantities of silver were flowing into Spain and Portugal from the Americas. Instead of stimulating innovation, this easy wealth reduced incentives to develop domestic industry or rebuild the shattered farming sector. The broad lesson remains: easy wealth can quickly become a substitute for creativity.
Meanwhile, nations such as the Netherlands and Great Britain adopted the exact playbook that had once made Iberia successful. They welcomed displaced Jewish merchants and skilled laborers, encouraged innovation, expanded scientific inquiry, and developed institutions that rewarded enterprise.
Leadership shifted. The world’s center of gravity moved northward.

The Contemporary Question

History does not repeat itself exactly, but it often rhymes.
Today, the United States remains the most innovative nation on earth. Our universities attract talented students from every continent. Our laboratories lead scientific discovery. Our entrepreneurs continue to create technologies that reshape the world.
But these strengths depend on openness.
Scientific progress thrives on collaboration. Medical breakthroughs emerge from international networks of researchers. Innovation accelerates when people with different experiences, perspectives, and skills work together toward common goals.
When nations become fearful of outsiders, suspicious of rigorous inquiry, or hostile to global intellectual exchange, they risk weakening the very forces that created their success.
The lesson of the Knicks is surprisingly similar to the lesson of pre-Inquisition Iberia. Greatness is rarely the product of a single star, or a single insular culture.
Whether in basketball, science, business, or civilization itself, success emerges from cooperation. The most successful teams are not always the ones with the highest raw talent; they are the ones that best combine talent, trust, shared purpose, and a willingness to sacrifice individual advantage for collective achievement.
Civilizations are no different.
The question facing every great nation is whether it will continue attracting talent, embracing knowledge, and building institutions that encourage cooperation—or whether it will retreat into exclusion and self-congratulation.
The Knicks answered that question on the basketball court. History answered it centuries ago.
The question now is whether we are paying attention.

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Miracles on 34th Street


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.

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Ode to Kobe and Basketball

Kobe and the NBA Finals
Entering Staples Center Lakers v. Magic 2009

A few weeks ago I was in Palm Springs participating in the lugubrious task of looking for an assisted living facility for a relative when I received a phone call from my son. “Kobe Bryant just died in a helicopter crash,” he uttered in disbelief. After a short period of “it can’t be,” a wave of sadness and tears enveloped me. Crying does not come easily to this sexagenarian, especially for the demise of such a public figure. 

Why was I so profoundly affected? Of course, the tragedy of losing his young daughter and the others who were in the prime of life was obvious. But, after a few days of reflection, I realized that basketball had been a refuge of joy for my children and I, and that the sanctity of entertainment that it had provided was breached by this terrible event. 

Those of us born in New York City were introduced to the game at an early age. There were hoops in every indoor and outdoor gym. Living a few doors down from us was the City College of New York center who had won the NCAA and NIT tournament in one year, a feat never since duplicated. Phil Jackson, then a reserve player for the New York Knicks, lived in Queens and played pick-up at my elementary school. Everyone  in public school had to play and I did. And I stunk, though fleeting accomplishments are burnished into my memory: my 6th grade teacher, Mr. Axelrod, giving me a thumbs up after sinking two foul shots for my only points of the year; sinking the winning layup in overtime to lift the intramural Bayside High School Newspaper team over the Chess Club (OK so they were not physically gifted but they did think two passes ahead). And through family lore: my 70 year old 4 foot 8 inch aunt recounting her brush with basketball greatness: “Lawrence,  I got out of the car and was looking at his belt-buckle. I looked up and saw him and almost fell over.” She was describing meeting Wilt Chamberlain, then a bellhop at Kutscher’s Hotel in the Catskills, NY where he played summer ball in between semesters at University of Kansas. But it was fandom for the NBA that refined my love of the game. It was the rise of the NY Knicks in the late 60’s after decades of futility that energized me and the city. My high school buddies going to Madison Square Garden on December, 31, 1968 and watching the likes of Willis Reed and Walt Frazier dismantle the Baltimore Bullets; listening to the Knicks win their first championship on radio in 1970 (not televised in the NYC area back then). Going out west and living in Los Angeles and later San Diego, I came under the Laker spell. A lifelong friend had gone to Michigan State grad school and first informed me of a freshman sensation, Earvin Johnson. As a junior gastroenterologist in a large multispecialty group in LA County, I found a coterie of docs who worshipped the Lakers. One, who had season tickets since the team came from Minneapolis, was especially passionate. “Anytime you need a partner, I’m ready to go,” I pleaded with him as I informed him of his patient’s polyp burden. After a year, I got the call and accompanied him to Showtime in the Forum in Inglewood. We were center court, one row behind Karem Abdul Jabbar’s dad. And then there were 48 minutes of watching Magic Johnson’s craft with no look passes, Jabbar skyhooks and basketball magic that pushed Newtonian physics to its extreme. The day I interviewed for hospital privileges at Whittier Presbyterian hospital was the day the Lakers signed Shaquille O’Neal. I don’t remember any of the interview questions I was asked that day, but I do remember the excitement of an all-star center coming to LA. What followed was joyful hours of watching the Kobe-Shaq and later the Kobe-Gasol Lakers on TV and at Staples Center. Kobe picked up the mantle  of Laker greatness and pushed the athletic limits of great basketball. We were treated to over two decades of multiple winning seasons.

 Kobe’s greatness extended beyond the court. My son was the recipient of a Kobe “high five” after seeing him leave U.C. Irvine Basketball Practice Facility one summer day 10 years ago. And following in the erudite tradition of great former NBA players, Kobe thought outside the box and was able to deconstruct greatness for the average fan, allowing us mortals a glimpse of a higher level of performance. And so, with a bit of satisfaction, I watched my younger son embrace the Washington Wizards when he went to Georgetown and my older son participate in the well being and fandom of the Miami Heat. Basketball is a team game and mirrors the collective nature of human kind but also rewards individual great talents. We can only imagine what insights were lost with the passing of Kobe Bryant. What my family and I  have is the joy and memories of watching the Mamba play the game in such a way that it sketched us a blueprint for life.