If you were born and raised in New York City between the 1950s and 1990s -- before gentrification seemed to partition the Big Apple into economic fiefdoms -- there's a good chance basketball was a sport you played with great regularity. It was a game for the rich or poor, for the doctor or drug dealer. It was the place where social structure was replaced by an athletic meritocracy.
There seemed to be a court on every corner, from Washington Heights to West Fourth Street, with asphalt duels deep into the night. You had wooden or metal backboards, bent rims or straight rims, metal nets ringing with every score or the soft swish of twine. Chances are you witnessed a long stream of gifted natives who took their talents to iconic colleges and then the NBA.
Rucker Park is not just a basketball court in Harlem, but also a shrine that hosted Dr. J and Connie Hawkins and Earl Manigault, who was mentored by the legendary Holcombe Rucker. Perhaps no player was more heralded from puberty until retirement than Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, who was raised in Inwood and grew his legend at Power Memorial, right in the middle of Manhattan.
The list of local ballers is a roll call of basketball lore. Tiny Archibald, Pearl Washington, Kenny Anderson, Chris Mullin, Kenny Smith and Lloyd Daniels make just a partial list of Gotham's greatest hoop stars.
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So how do we explain the baleful state of our NBA clubs today? One of the quiet ironies of sports fandom is folks often root for their local team even though the players aren't from there. But still it feels like wholesale betrayal to see the Knicks toil yet again near the bottom of the Eastern Conference. And for a population with such rich, ancestral appreciation for basketball, we seem to tolerate the sad, sprawling state of the Knicks.
Folks think I bang on the Knicks because I've always abhorred them. But the truth is I used to love them. My father moved to Manhattan in the 1960s and raised me on tales of dropping just 10 bucks to sit courtside to see Red Holzman's blessed squad in 1969, which went on to win the team's first NBA title in 1970. I learned the names of Clyde and Bradley and Reed as though they were gods from Greek mythology. Madison Square Garden was a sacred house of hoops, where smart, gifted athletes played selfless ball, turning the team game into another title in 1973.
So my childhood years were filled with the fun, Hubie Brown clubs of Rory Sparrow and Trent Tucker, of Ernie and Bernie and Bill Cartwright and Truck Robinson and Marvin Webster. Maybe the '80s and '90s didn't yield an NBA title, but at least they competed, with Pat Riley's hardscrabble squad reaching Game 7 of the 1994 NBA Finals. Then Riley faxed in his resignation, and that was that. Jeff Van Gundy took the remnants of Riley's guys to one last NBA Finals, and then we entered the Wilderness Years.
The signature team of basketball's signature city has been a punchline, a running joke of failed drafts and fired coaches, of Isaiah Thomas and Starbury and a lawsuit, of Frederic Weis and Michael Sweetney, and of Phil Jackson's laughable return to his NBA roots. They even managed to make Larry Brown, the league's roaming savant, look like a hardwood neophyte.
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Yet Gotham's well-heeled and well-groomed aristocrats squat on MSG's posh seats as if this were Hollywood, as if Magic, Kareem, Kobe and LeBron were Knicks, not Lakers. The radio waves are buzzing with optimism over the team's three-game winning streak, as if these were the 1971 Lakers hacking their way to 33 in a row. We hear how David Fizdale won his revenge game in Memphis, his players making a statement of toughness and dedication to their new coach. Yet even with this streak, the Knicks are 7-14. In fact, if you combine the Knicks and Nets, they have fewer wins (15) than that basketball juggernaut in Toronto (17).
New Yorkers rail against the Jets for their incompetence. We lament the Mets for falling so far since their 2015 World Series appearance. We wince at the Giants' dysfunction since Tom Coughlin was fired. Yet we sit silently while the Knicks butcher our basketball heritage. The Garden is still a destination for movie stars and business moguls, for those who want to see and be seen.
If it feels like I'm omitting the Nets, it's because everyone else has. The only reason we know the Nets exist is because the NBA insists on including them in the standings.The only thing sacred about the Nets is the ground they inhabit -- the former rail yards that were earmarked by Walter O'Malley to build a new ballpark for the Brooklyn Dodgers to replace a crumbling Ebbets Field, until Robert Moses muscled him westward.
Team owners respond to the actions of their patrons. If you refuse to support a failed franchise, the team will aggressively find someone to fix it. But since Knicks games are bubbling over with misguided fans, owner James Dolan has no incentive to change his business model.
Maybe New York City has always been a baseball town at heart, its soul belongs to basketball. With so many basketball legends sprouted by our parks and projects, it feels like blasphemy that the Knicks haven't won an NBA title in 45 years and have been a laughingstock for 20 years. It's just impossible to fathom how we hold baseball and football teams to a respectable standard, but not the Knicks. The best we can do is paint some flirtatious picture on the side of a building begging Kevin Durant to leave the riches of Golden State to the basketball dungeon of the Empire State.
But if no one complains, then it's not a problem, which speaks to the sad state of America's basketball city.
Follow Jason on Twitter at @JasonKeidel.
