A Part of It

After my parents divorced, my dad started his own advertising agency in Manhattan and determined that his efforts to woo clients would be immeasurably enhanced by having Knicks season tickets at his disposal. But since he only had so many clients to woo and was also eager to demonstrate just how little he was taking me for granted post-divorce, he ended up bringing me to lots of games in the late 1980s and early 1990s. “Bring” may be the wrong word, since one of the best parts of the whole arrangement was that he somehow persuaded my mom to put me on a commuter train to Grand Central and let me make my own way, a thirteen-year-old kid from the suburbs, to his office in midtown. My mom signaled her disapproval of this plan by giving me a can of mace to put in my pocket, which I avidly fingered as I strode alone and awestruck between skyscrapers up Park Avenue. Upon arriving at his office, I’d nestle into a corner of the forest-green carpet, read a Stephen King novel, snack on the endless supply of mini-Snickers in his fridge, take shots on the standup nerf hoop, or knock golf balls at the putting machine, all while waiting for my dad to finish work and take me to the game. (An office stocked with abundant signs that its chief executive is going through an acute midlife crisis, it turns out, is a great place for a teenager to kill time.)

Sometimes I got to bring friends, one of whom, a soft-spoken vegetarian, would smile good-humoredly while we ribbed him for ordering a salad at the steakhouse that my dad invariably brought us to for dinner. The seats in the Garden were great: court-level, maybe fourteen rows back behind and a little to the right of one of the baskets. And the Knicks were, in those years, though not great, very good. Patrick Ewing, Charles Oakley and Mark Jackson were in their prime. On a lucky day, they could beat the best teams in the league. We were at the MLK Day game when the Knicks stunned Michael Jordan’s Bulls with a not-quite-buzzer beater, which led the NBA to adopt the “Trent Tucker Rule”: you can’t catch and shoot an inbound pass with 0.3 seconds or less on the clock. During games, as a friend recently reminded me, my dad would turn our entire section into something like his local bar, making friends, debating the merits of the team, leading cheers, trading jokes, and sometimes getting into altercations with anyone who stood in front of us for too long. “Sit the f*#& down!” he’d shout. Though in such moments I’d stare at the floor and hope it wouldn’t come to actual blows, I didn’t mind too much. This, after all, was what it meant to be a part of it, New York, New York.

By the time the Knicks were consistently reaching the Eastern Conference finals with the chance of going all the way, my dad’s business had gone bankrupt, a casualty of the Bush I recession and probably also his overly zealous approach to entertaining clients. Thus, we watched those classic games on TV, my dad doggedly chain-smoking next to me on the couch. To this day, if I ever find myself in a small room filled with cigarette smoke, I can hear the nineties NBA theme song (recently revived by NBC) in my head. I remember my dad being less cheerful on these occasions. If he started getting really angry near the end of regulation, I’d realize he’d placed an ill-advised bet. But more often he was just morose. When the Knicks were losing, he had a habit of mentally rewinding the game in order to lament where things stood. “If only they hadn’t turned the ball over back when they were on a run, the score would be practically tied right now,” he’d say. “If only Starks had passed to Ewing instead of trying a three-pointer, they’d still have the lead.” Some mistakes, as the Knicks periodically reminded us, are hard to come back from.

My dad had moved to New York City from the Midwest in the late 1960s and become a fan just before the Knicks won two championships, but, like many in his generation, he didn’t live to see them win another. He and I watched a few games together, when I wasn’t with friends, during their doomed 1994 run to the finals, and he pretended to be excited, but I don’t think his heart was in it anymore. Things weren’t the same. And they wouldn’t ever be again. After he lost his business, my dad stumbled between jobs he hated and long stretches of unemployment, stubbornly ignored the urgings of doctors to stop smoking, quit drinking, exercise more and eat healthier foods, before dying young in 2002.

I stopped paying attention to the Knicks around that time. Apparently, there wasn’t much to see. I missed Linsanity because I was a new parent. Then, a couple of years ago, I started watching again, not with high hopes so much as because it was something to do with my wife and kid. This season in particular, we’ve tuned in for innumerable games, crammed together on our queen-sized bed, eating vegetarian meals in bowls in our laps, nudging each other whenever one of us sits or leans in a way that blocks the other’s view. I try not to get upset when my son, normally one of the kindest people I know, yells profanities at the opposing team’s players. After all, unlike me, he’s a true New Yorker. And my dad, I tell myself, would have loved watching games with him.

I did not see what’s happened in the past month coming. My wholly unanalytical sense is that when the Knicks are winning, they are really winning, but when they are losing, they are really losing. You can see it in their body language. Mikal Bridges will practically dance his way from a made three-pointer to the other side to steal, with his Plastic Man arms, the ball out of his opponent’s hands so he can go back and make another one. Or he won’t. His face will suddenly turn dejected, his arms limp at his sides, his shots clanking off the rim again and again. Karl-Anthony Towns either loves everyone and everything or hates himself, his winning smile curdling into self-recrimination. Even stoical Jalen Brunson seems to churn inside when things go wrong, and his ball-handling heroics become desperate antics, a frenzy of frustration. Watching them makes me believe in the occult power of mind over matter or at least recognize the truth of Wittgenstein’s dictum, “The world of the happy man is a different one from that of the unhappy man.” When the Knicks are joyful, rims widen, impossibly narrow avenues open up on the court, the ball veers of its own volition into the right hands; when they are sad, invisible doors shut in their faces everywhere they turn. During the regular season, I’d seen them sad too often to have serious hopes for the playoffs.

Watching them repeatedly get psyched out during games they should have won, I could entirely relate. Not just relate: fully participate in their pain. Fandom is a funny thing. After a loss, I would of course ask myself: Why do I care? Why does it matter? Why does the whole world suddenly seem like a dismal, ugly, inhospitable place? I don’t even know these guys. Twice during the playoffs (Game One against the Cavaliers and Game Four against the Spurs), I got so depressed by how they were playing that I almost stopped watching. In the bathroom, pondering my options, I reminded myself that my family was still in front of the TV and that the whole point of being a Knicks fan was getting to hang out with them. Moreover, my ninth-grader son, perpetually busy with homework and friends, doesn’t really have much time for me anymore and will be off to college way sooner than I’m ready to accept. Remembering this, I returned to watching the game, and in both cases discovered the karmic reward for holding true to what matters: miraculous, utterly unexpected last-minute victories. Proof, I guess—though proof is clearly not the primary basis for any of these thoughts and feelings—that you can maybe sometimes come back from things you thought had spelled your doom. That bonkers buzzer-beater putback by OG Anunoby to finish off what had been a 29-point third-quarter deficit in Game Four of the finals? I wish my dad could have seen it.

I enjoy watching games with my family so much that I sometimes get depressed even after a win. I feel suddenly adrift, my adrenaline dissipating as I return to my dull life. What is there now, I wonder, to be excited about? In fact, this realization has supplied a good rationale for what I frequently think of as my utterly inexplicable emotional investment in the Knicks’ playoff fortunes. In the early rounds, I came to the conclusion that the fundamental reason I cared so much was that I wanted the Knicks’ run to keep going. Loving a team, I know from experience, is not forever. I wanted to have more time watching the games with my family, more time with my son leaning up against me in our bed, like he used to back when he was little. But if I’m correct about my motives, this creates a new, unlikely conundrum. The Knicks, as I write these sentences, are, remarkably enough, up three to one against the Spurs, one win away from a championship. Who should I root for at this point? What outcome should I hope for in the next game? I just don’t want it to end.

Photo credit: Jean-Baptiste Bellet, Wikimedia Commons (CC BY)