What I talk about when I talk about the Knicks
Or, zen and the art of persistence
People have forgotten how bad New York City got in the 1970s.
By 1975, the city had run up fourteen billion in debt and lost its credit line. Cops were laid off and hot trash piled on the sidewalk. The subway shut down, became an inert canvas for graffiti. We were one paperwork error away from bankruptcy. Eight hundred thousand people gave up and left.
City officials asked the feds for a bailout, but President Ford wasn’t having it. He gave a speech at the National Press Club blaming the crisis on those officials and vowed to veto any aid for New York. The Daily News ran the headline “FORD TO CITY: DROP DEAD.”
And one night in 1977, the power went out and the city looted itself in the dark. “New York” became a synonym for bedlam. A failed state.
For many Americans, New York hasn’t changed. The city is still the punching bag of conservative media. A dogwhistle for hatred towards certain kinds of people. Stoked by fear of imaginary gangs of roving murderers, rapists, and pizza rats.
Once, a distant family member of mine visited from Texas. It was Christmastime. He wanted to see Times Square, the tree in Rockefeller Center, the tourists ice skating. After, we headed to the East Village, ate amazing food, and barhopped. At the end of the night, he said New York was “cleaner” than he thought it would be. “Much less of a shithole.”
It makes a guy sensitive.
Plenty has been written about New York and its singular aura. I could go on about how the most languages on Earth are spoken in Queens. It’s the financial capital of the world. The art capital of the world. The culture capital of the world. Every musician, every author, every anybody dreams of performing in New York.
And yet New York is also the first place to get blasted by aliens and leveled by Godzilla. It’s the perennial target, not because it fulfills some obscene desire to destroy the greatest city on Earth. No. The reason monsters beat up on New York and not Topeka is because there are no stakes to anything happening in Topeka.
The Knicks are the perfect team for New York because no matter how many times they recover, rise back, and rebound, no matter what remarkable heights they reach, they are a punching bag.
Forget how many clutch baskets Jalen Brunson has made, how many hours he’s drilled, the chips he won in the NCAA. 2x All-NBA. 2x All-Star.
Too little, too short.
It doesn’t matter that Karl-Anthony Towns has the highest plus-minus in the postseason of any player ever. Or that Jalen Brunson is fourth on that list, ahead of peak Kobe, or that Mikal Bridges and Josh Hart are also in the top twenty (the only Spur near the top is Wemby at number nine).
No one wants to believe. But New York believes.
Wemby may cosplay as a Zen master, but pay attention to how the Knicks spoke after Game 4.
After OG Anunoby made the most important play in New York basketball history, the tip-in to score the final points of the game, he had this to say: “It feels cool. Everyone’s pretty excited.” Then he paused for a beat. “I’m excited too.”
Jalen Brunson said, “One word that captures that all is just believe.” He said the goal was “chipping away at [the Spurs’ lead] one possession at a time.”
No gloat, no ego, no exuberance.
After the game, Coach Mike Brown said, “You have to have a little luck in life. You’ve got to have a little luck in sports. But you can also make your luck too.”
One of the harder lessons I’ve had to learn is that if I’m trying to achieve something difficult, I cannot merely steel myself and charge towards success. Nor can I expect results to materialize instantly. I have to create the conditions that allow me to succeed. Where you live, who you surround yourself with, even what you do with your free time—all these compound into who you are, what you can do.
At one point, when the Knicks were still down by fifteen points, Rick Brunson just said, “We’re winning this game.” To which Jalen replied, “All right.”
All right? All right. The conditions were there.
New York didn’t recover overnight.
The city first had a deficit in 1961. A bailout came in 1975, but it still took six years for the city to finally balance the budget.
The subway got back on schedule but it was still a mess. The city made a plan to overhaul it, one train car at a time. Seventeen hundred cars were cleaned up by spring of 1985, thirty-four hundred by ‘86, forty-seven hundred by ‘87.
They fixed up Bryant Park, hauled the trash, and hired guards. After seven years of redevelopment, the crime rate dropped by more than ninety percent. Visitors doubled. Thousands of people started having their lunch in a park where dealers used to sling.
Business improvement districts were established, which taxed themselves to fund cleaning and upkeep. Grand Central received one in 1988, which covered seventy-five blocks around the terminal. Times Square got one in 1992. One by one, the city created thirty more.
All the while, the beautiful people of New York kept at it.
Clive Campbell set up two turntables in a rec room on Sedgwick Avenue, and looped the drum break so it never stopped. When the lights failed in ‘77 and the looters hit the electronics stores, they carried home sound systems and became the new wave of DJs and emcees. A couple of friends from Queens, John Cummings and Thomas Erdelyi, started playing gigs at a failed country bar on the Bowery. A new wave band, fronted by a wacky dude named David, opened for them. A kid dubbed SAMO (aka same old) tagged buildings uptown. Another kid from Kutztown, Pennsylvania started drawing on subway station walls that the city was working hard to scrub.
The city keeps moving.
Zen is not a golden latte, a wellness app, or a venture-subsidized yoga class. It’s not a ten day spiritual retreat where you sneak out to eat meat and tell your friends “I’m pretty sure I’m Buddhist now” after.
It’s building a wall, brick by brick. Listening to your heart beating. A quiet breath held before the ball drops into the basket.
After the Knicks won Game 4, the first thing I did was yell. Then I hugged my brother and cried. The third thing I did was shout, “I love this city so fucking much.”
I don’t know what’s gonna happen next. But I love New York. I love the New York Knicks.