Singing the Knicks’ Praises, with a Dash of Metal
Shortly before Game One of the Eastern Conference Finals, in which the New York Knicks hosted the Cleveland Cavaliers, Doug Berns, a thirty-eight-year-old musician who operates under the nom de plume DugLust, was popping in and out of crowded bars near Madison Square Garden, slapping backs and taking pics. Since 2024, Berns has been writing and recording musical recaps of every Knicks game—part postmortems, part devotionals, part roasts—and posting them online.
Berns, who was reared on the Upper West Side, has been a Knicks guy since he was five. “I remember watching the ’94 N.B.A. finals with my brother,” he said. “We were supposed to go to bed, but my brother took this little battery-powered radio into our room and we listened to the end. That memory is foundational.” At M.S.G., Berns, who has a flop of chin-length reddish-brown hair, was wearing an Offline Natives shirt featuring the Knicks point guard Jalen Brunson as a red-eyed demon. Berns went to high school (Dalton) and college (Columbia) in the city and never left. Although he plays bass in a handful of groups, including the Big Woozy Band, which does weddings and other events, he did not anticipate getting into the parody-song business, or becoming a mouthpiece for Knicks obsessives. Shit-talking has always been crucial to sports culture; Berns’s version, in which he rewrites the lyrics to beloved pop songs as howling commentary about free throws, is more silly than caustic. “You can be honest about a poor performance without being hurtful,” he said. “I once told a player to use two hands to catch the ball. But he objectively wasn’t. As fans, we have high expectations, we invest a lot, but these are also human beings who work so hard.” He has become an unofficial team mascot—a folk hero in a bespoke jersey and chain. His “Return of the Mack” recap was featured on “The Roommates Show,” a podcast co-hosted by the Knicks guards Josh Hart and Brunson. (Brunson called it “fire.”)
Berns does not stick to a single style; he has used tracks from ZZ Top, Shania Twain, Smashing Pumpkins, and Outkast as the basis of his recaps. His lyrics usually focus on particularly compelling bits of gameplay, but sometimes they take on a fan’s desperation. “Why? Why can’t the Knicks just beat the Lakers?” he sang in March, over the chorus of Michael Jackson’s “Human Nature.” He said that, as a kid, he was “sickeningly obsessed with Iron Maiden.” His original Knicks plan was to write a heavy-metal song about each game. The melodrama inherent to metal lends itself to the agony and ecstasy of fandom, but he realized that spoofing an existing track was both easier and more resonant.
The Knicks have not won an N.B.A. championship since 1973, and inside the Garden the pre-game atmosphere was vaguely tense. (Sports fandom can be rough on the spirit; “shouting unheard advice in a crowd of unheard advisors,” as Hunter S. Thompson once put it.) Berns got a Diet Pepsi and took his seat. He tries to limit his hollering to preserve his voice for the next morning’s recording session.
The first half of the game had its ups and downs. Then it was mostly downs. With less than eight minutes left in the fourth quarter, the Knicks were losing by twenty-two points. A few already heartbroken spectators began to leave. ESPN analytics had Cleveland’s probability of winning at a grim 99.9 per cent. Berns got agitated when people in the stands started chiding a ref, chanting “Fuck Scott Foster!” He grimaced. “They’re fouling,” he said. “You gotta hold your team accountable.” (Earlier, he’d posted a video honoring Foster; it was reposted by Ben Stiller, a courtside regular, who has also appeared in DugLust videos, playing guitar and drums.)
Suddenly, the Knicks turned it around, beginning the second-largest fourth-quarter comeback in the past thirty years, and sent the game into overtime. The energy in the Garden felt seismic, trembly. When the Knicks won, Berns was dazed. “That’s the greatest basketball game I’ve ever seen,” he said. He took a victory strut down Eighth Avenue, stopping to pose for selfies with fans.
Around six-thirty the next morning, he got to work on his song—a spoof of Chad Kroeger’s “Hero,” a bombastic hard-rocker from 2002—at his home studio in Prospect Lefferts Gardens. He’d been up until three, processing the win. “Jalen Brunson’s the hero who saved us / Hell no, we’re not losing this game,” he bellowed. The urgency of the enterprise keeps Berns from getting precious about the particulars, although he did spend some time perfecting the harmonies on the outro. When the track was finished, at around eleven, he started shooting video. His clips often feature multiple DugLusts, seemingly performing in tandem, an effect he achieves with the Draw Mask feature in Final Cut Pro. He climbed out onto his roof, dragging a tripod and two guitars, and carefully closed the screen so his cats wouldn’t escape. He changed jerseys and sunglasses and angles.
He posted the result around 1 P.M., to cascading likes and comments. The success of the entire project had left him emotional. “You can call me an influencer, you can call me a songwriter, you can call me Weird Al—I don’t give a shit,” he said, his eyes wet. “I just want to be creative. That’s all I’ve ever wanted.” ♦