At Last

The Knicks just did their part to try to redeem The Time of Bastards

Golf is the President’s game. He owns courses all over the world, and seems happiest lording it over his cronies and CEOs on the green. Tennis is the sport of the suburbs and the country club crowd. But basketball, as the writer Pete Axthelm put it, is the city game. Every neighborhood, no matter how run-down, has a rusty hoop and a patch of asphalt. You don’t even need a net. If you can heave a ball through the ring even just once, you can delude yourself into thinking you could be LeBron James or Steph Curry.

It’s easy to lose forget that when an endorsement can net a billion dollars and the courtside seats at Madison Square Garden look like the modern aristocracy and cost as much as tuition at Harvard. But the New York Knicks just reminded us it doesn’t have to be that way. I was on the subway right after the team’s miracle comeback in Game 4 of the NBA Finals, and I saw people high-fiving and shaking hands across class lines, race lines, and gender lines in a way that that I haven’t witnessed since 9/11.

“It was like a happy blackout,” my friend Denis Hamill said.

Now they’ve done something I’d given up hope of seeing: they’ve brought back the NBA championship to the city after 53 years. And they’ve done it by representing the best of us. Every sports team has a character. The 1927 Yankees had Murderer’s Row, including the Olympians Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig. The Dallas Cowboys of the 1970s had a brutal, Tom Landry efficiency. The Showtime Lakers, led by Magic Johnson and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, had speed, flash, and dominance.

But the current Knicks line-up has a kind of flawed humanity that reflects the city that surrounds Madison Square Garden.

The superstar Jalen Brunson had nights during the NBA Finals when it seemed he could barely throw the ball in the ocean, but came back like the city in the fiscal crisis when it mattered. Karl Anthony Towns began the season as a stultifying clog on the offense, like he was going to be a selfish finance bro hogging the ball and stopping the momentum. Instead he turned into a sharp-eyed playmaker, spotting open men across courts as crowded as subway platforms. OG Anunoby, the injury-prone Londoner, rallied from a hamstring pull and gave us the best New York sports moment since Willis Reed limped from the tunnels in 1970. Raw-nerved Jose “Grand Theft” Alvarado, a child of NYCHA housing and the only native New Yorker in the pack, picked his spots and somehow got in Wemby’s face despite being a foot and a half shorter than the French Goliath. And Josh Hart was Josh Hart. Brilliant and bold sometimes, and utterly confounding at others.

They were us. Or at least we could see ourselves in these men who struggled against the odds and the shit-talking, and somehow became so much more than they were supposed to be. A lot’s been said about how this team made up for all the decades of Knick disappointment, ranging through the Trent Tucker years to the Patrick Ewing era, as well as the times of Carmelo Anthony, Linsanity, and Amar’e Stoudmire.

But when you see the joy that’s exploded around the city – in some cases with awful consequences – you know this was about more than basketball. People have been yearning for something that redeems this bastard us-against-them time. Our leaders have been pushing us to give up hope, to submit, to give our money and souls over to the crypto-market, the predictive market, the cold, harsh reality that the underdogs can never win.

Not this time, baby.

We needed this one and our guys gave it to us.