53 Pick-Up

This week’s new story is non-fiction for a change. A love letter to my New York Knicks and their long suffering fans. Including the author. Especially the author.

53 Pick-Up

Waiting 53 years for a championship ring is cruel. That can not be denied. Just ask the hockey Rangers, pre-1994.

But do you know what is even worse for a fan than a five-decade dry spell? I’ll tell you. A half a century schneid where you come to hoops consciousness in the year AFTER their last crown. Like I did. Missing the bubbly by ONE year.

It’s hard to believe but true. In May of 1973, when the NY Knicks last rang the NBA victory bell, I was almost but not quite ten years old. I was a sports nut. Already.

I can recall vividly the Super Bowl and World Series of that year, and the year before. Same with the Yankees’ lineups. And while I am now familiar of course with all the Knick lore of ‘73 I have no actual recall of that team. That title. Besting Wilt the Stilt and Jerry West, the Logo. No real memories of the Captain, Willis Reed, certainly not as a force. Same for Fall Back Baby Barnett.

How to explain this deferred fandom? Missing the boat? Up ‘til then we were a baseball family, I guess. My dad pitched in college. Coached us in little league. We just had not caught roundball fever. Yet.

Of course, ironically, hoops eventually became “my sport”, to the extent reality could be stretched to say I had one, and my father did end up coaching my brother and me in an 11- and 12-year-old Police Boys Club basketball league a couple short years later.

The hoop would go up on a pole in our driveway, and we spent hours playing HORSE or around the world, honing our pre-three-point stripe “jumpers” to the sounds of American Top 40 from a transistor radio perched in the open garage.

But not in ’73.

Here is the killer.

What makes the pain especially piquant.

I have very vivid memories of watching the Knicks religiously the very next year. Immediately after their last title. Right up through a playoff series win against an oft-renamed D.C. club called, for that year only, the Capital Bullets. (I don’t really remember the following series, a season ending loss to the already hated Celtics.)

It was a very different squad from the two-time World Champions. Reed and Dick Barnett were there but made little impression. They limped through cameos and then disappeared. It was the last stand for Lucas and DeBusschere who, accordingly, register with me, but faintly.

But I was hooked.

How the switch flipped for me exactly then? A hair too late? Just bad luck, I suppose.

By the season after that, ’74 –’75, I followed doggedly and remember it all distinctly. The depleted roster that complemented the surviving Million-Dollar Backcourt of Frazier and Monroe with the likes of Dennis Bell. Mel “Killer” Davis. The “G-Man” John Gianelli. The unforgettable Hawthorne Wingo. The mid- season acquisition of Jim “Crazy Horse” Barnett.

I truly suffered through and remember well their first-round playoff loss to a nondescript Houston team. Think Rudy T. before his face was reconfigured, long before he coached Hakeem to break our hearts.

By this time, I was fully engaged.

As was the franchise collapse.

Lots of Knick fans had a lifetime drought. I get it. Basically, anyone born after the Kennedy assassination. But nobody can have a longer hex than I did. The full 53.

Yes, Woody and Spike and others have shared my 53-year journey. But unlike me, they had seen the mountain top.

I suffered the entirety of the streak.

And knew nothing but.

That is why this old Knick fan shed a tear or two that late Saturday night earlier this month when the torment finally ended.

And I will make another confession.

As the waterworks flowed, I tried my best to be in the moment. Enjoy the present tense. The immediate past. The clincher. Another Groundhog Day affair of sleeping through the alarm followed by an eventual, inevitable, inexorable choking out of the victim like a python at breakfast. The historic game 4 a mere three days removed. The sublime OG swatting then swooping from the rafters to save our bacon. The tsuris of Larry David who collapsed like a pyramid scheme when Hart missed a bunny. The postgame elation of his sidekick, Seinfeld, my hometown’s most famous alum.

But as someone in his seventh decade, whose road has more blacktop behind than before me, I looked back.

To the distant past.

Dancing in my head were thoughts of nights long ago watching on a black and white portable TV in my shared bedroom. WOR channel 9. On the mic the workmanlike Bob Wolff and the estimable Cal Ramsey, the NYU standout and momentary Knickerbocker. Marv had not yet matriculated from radio.

I would inhale contests against the day’s angular sharpshooters, like Bob McAdoo and his Braves of Buffalo. Trying to stay awake for West coast battles against silky-smooth Slick Watts and his SuperSonics, like the Braves also extinct, or at least evicted.

There I would sit in the flickering darkness yawning through the endless commercials for White Owl cigars and Eastern airlines. Dinosaurs now themselves. The reward for my devotion?

Being subjected to the antics of skeletal Phil Jackson, pre-genius phase, whose main use seemed to be coming in late in the game to do jumping jacks in front of the inbound passer.

Clyde and the Pearl remained of course a backcourt nonpareil. Thrill a minute. But by this time Dollar Bill Bradley, scrawny and running in cement, seemed in need of a B12 shot. As beloved Knick Micheal Ray Richardson would observe, poetically, of a later version of the team similarly afflicted, “The ship be sinkin’”.

20 years later I was there in person, a city taxpayer, for ’94. The close call. The indefatigable Starks’ famous Two for Eighteen. The whole exciting era. Jousting with Jordan. Mase and Oak rearranging spines like an osteopath with an unpaid bill. The majestic Ewing. For years I told Patrick’s naysayers we would miss him dearly when he was gone. Boy, was I right about that.

The surprise trip to the Finals in ‘99 was fool’s gold and never moved the needle for me.

Then, 25 years in the wilderness.

Until this exquisite, hand-picked band of brothers ended the curse.

I lived through an iteration of Knick guards in the late ‘80s who could not shoot straight. Somehow optimistically dubbed themselves the Bomb Squad, perhaps for their willingness to let fly despite the carnage that followed. I guess it had a better ring to it than the Bricklayers. Well, for this year’s model the name finally fits. This group has the guts and cool of a real bomb squad. The ones who defuse explosives.

This current Knick team has seemed to recognize a simple fact that somehow eluded more than one of their playoff opponents: the counting of the final score, the only one that matters, is done only after the full 48 minutes.

So what is on my mind, now that Sisyphus has picked up the rock, sprinted up the hill, and thrown it down with two hands?

Just this.

I know the Knicks and their followers, from Charles Smith to young Chalamet, have waited a long time for this. Paid their dues. God bless them.

But I also know this.

So have I.