The Promised Knicks

Madison Square Garden. 1968. My father was lacing up his chucks in the locker room of the New York Knicks. No, he was not a member of their ’70 or ’73 championship runs. Also no, he was not up for a cup of coffee after being dealt by the Flint Tropics for their washing machine. He was a high school junior about to play a very high school basketball game in the world’s most famous arena. An hour before the Knicks played a very professional one against the Philadelphia 76ers.

But it was 1968. There were no hospitality suites. No James Dolan surveillance cameras. The Flatbush Yeshiva Falcons would get ready for this game in the locker room of the team who’d drench it with champagne two years later. So there he was, lacing them up, when number 19 walked through the door. Willis Reed.

The room fell silent. Reed towered over not just these teenagers but the entire city of New York. He was the captain. Rookie of the year, three years prior. He’d soon go on to win the MVP, two rings, and two finals MVPs along with them. During the first of which, he’d famously hobble out from the tunnel to knock down the first two buckets of game 7 and guard Wilt Chamberlain on one leg.

My father and his teammates waited as Reed stood there, I’m assuming confused as to why there were 13 kids sitting in the Knicks locker room. Had someone told him the Yeshiva boys called first game on court? We’ll never know. Because all Reed told them was simply…good luck out there.

Admittedly, I’ve only seen a few games of Willis Reed. Such as my father’s high school mixtape, I’m assuming most footage was either not televised or destroyed. Yet I’d still hear tall tales of when the Garden was Eden. When giants such as Reed, Bradley, Monroe, and Clyde Frazier ruled the basketball world in a city crazed by it. How years later, such fervor was recaptured by Pat Ewing. How John Starks went from bagging groceries to dunking on Jordan. And how Jordan, then Hakeem, and then Tim Duncan and of course Reggie Miller, in between, would will these Knicks back down to earth.

The importance of a father passing the memories and trauma of sports onto his kids is far too obvious. Yet clichés are clichés for a reason. While many did not meet Reed in the locker room, plenty have recounted a time long ago at the Garden. When the basketball moved with purpose. It’s how I learned to hold my nose whilst rooting for the ball stopping brilliance of Stephon Marbury (sometimes) or Carmelo Anthony (more often). Lament at how they traded away the only fun team I knew (Danilo Gallinari) to acquire Anthony. Understand the significance of those two weeks when Jeremy Lin recaptured the selfless, hard-nosed, and freewheeling spirit of such tall tales. His pick and roll with Tyson Chandler. His telepathic finds for Landry Fields in the air and Steve Novak in the corner. His 38 on Kobe. His buzzer beater in Toronto. Each and every blitzing drive through the lane and poetic finish with contact reminded us of the secret I instinctively knew all along. The Knicks are no Yankees. No 27 rings. But they are no Jets or Mets either. Instead, tortured in a way far more elitist and alluring, with the shared but distant memory of sustained excellence.

But now, I am no longer watching mediocrity interrupted by the occasional flash of brilliance. No brief mimicry of my father’s stories. I am watching what I was promised. The manifest destiny any Knick fan absurdly believes in.

It happened during game one of the Conference Finals. The fourth quarter, obviously. As I witnessed Jalen Brunson suck the soul from James Harden, possession after possession. Bucket after bucket. I was seeing what my dad saw in that locker room. Reed was not yet a champion, but maybe the embodiment of belief. Belief that now this captain, like number 19 himself, is the tip of a spear that is continually sharpened by the roaring Garden - collectively recognizing the suffocating, harmonic, and chaotic brand of basketball played before them.

This recognition must be that of Darwinian instinct. Or at least the product of all the stories. I never witnessed Willis and Frazier. Ewing and Starks. I only saw Allan Houston collect DNPs. But suddenly I know what Knicks basketball was and could be, in the form of a Brunson finish, Hart board, OG putback, and good god…a no looker from Towns at the top of the key. This is the belief I was promised at birth. The promised Knicks of years before. This belief is what I will remember and pass on to my own.

And against Victor Wembanyama, such belief might be all one could ask for.