The Difference Between the Knicks and the White House Cage Fight
There are moments when a phrase, or a current of thought, that had seemed condemned to archival history is suddenly all anyone talks about. So it is right now with the chewy subject of breads, circuses, and cities. New York is alight with the joy of the Knickerbockers’ doggedly pursued N.B.A. championship title with, in this summer of celebrating our gloriously hybrid Americanness, the pleasing anomaly that a team of mostly Black and brown Americans bears the name of the town’s oldest, once most élite, and now obscure Dutch element. But the subject of bread and circuses arises out of the ancient observation—from the grouchy poet and satirist Juvenal, who witnessed it in first-century Rome—that, if people are supplied with food and entertainment by their oligarchs, they won’t care or even notice if the government they live under is changing from some sort of a democracy to a dictatorship right before their eyes.
The Knicks won a week ago Saturday, and New York affirmed that victory on Thursday, with a parade and a ceremony at which Mayor Zohran Mamdani presented the team with newly redesigned keys to the city, though what, exactly, the keys unlock these days is unclear. In between those civic thrills, an openly gladiatorial spectacle was staged on the White House South Lawn: a U.F.C. cage-fighting event overseen by Dana White, the combat-sports impresario and longtime friend of President Donald Trump. Meanwhile, athletes and supporters from many nations passed through our now suspicious borders to fight for the World Cup of what the rest of the world calls football. Inevitably, the question arises of whether we are each, in our way, being distracted from our own crisis by our own oligarchs, and by the circuses that they encourage. Indeed, some of our oligarchs actually own the circuses. It was James Dolan who invited his pal Trump to visit the Garden for the Knicks’ Game Three, and it is Dolan, not New York, who owns the team, just as it was FIFA’s president, Gianni Infantino, who showered praise and a faked-up peace prize on Trump ahead of the World Cup.
Violence, of course, hovers at the edges of even our favorite games, and we are not always aware of the risks that our heroes take on behalf of our entertainment. It has been pointed out that the N.B.A. final series was rougher—what is euphemistically called “more physical”—than the game used to be. A few years ago, there was a flurry of concern about the rise of concussions in the N.F.L., but that has largely subsided, as the league continues to bring in record-breaking revenues—more than twenty-five billion dollars are projected for next year. This month, as the Carolina Hurricanes won the Stanley Cup Finals, we saw sadly that the N.H.L. has become more physical, too—with a cruder version of the game, which some Canadians think was intended to be more easily accepted by the never-seen-a-winter Sunbelt cities that the league wants to thrive in. More sadly, the former player Claude Lemieux, a paladin of both the Montreal Canadiens and the New Jersey Devils, died by suicide just weeks ago, shortly after receiving the highest honor in Montreal hockey: carrying the team torch onto the ice before the opening face-off. His family, significantly, has donated his brain to Boston University for study.
Some historian will doubtless make a case that Trump’s cage fight was a Jacksonian gesture, pleasing to the people, and that only the snobbery of an élite would disdain it. But one had merely to watch the fight, and to see the fighters paraded out of the White House to the arena, to know that on the South Lawn we have moved beyond populism and entered Caligula country, where the emperor delights in vulgar cruelty for its own sake. There is a real distinction between a city unified by five fine starting players in a game that originally involved throwing a ball into a peach basket and that, however improbably, became the city game, and the bloody display in the nation’s capital. One is about civic commonality, the other about authoritarian cynicism; one is about a city pulling together around a common pleasure, the other about desecrating the decorum of democracy.
Given how easily sports can be turned sour, why do they continue to move us and unify us? One looks to the story of the Haitian World Cup team, appearing in the tournament for the first time in fifty years, which has gathered expatriate players from the Haitian diaspora to play for that beautiful and utterly despoiled country, where many of them have never lived. Coming from elsewhere, they managed to make a Haitian essence in the absence of a functional Haiti to play for. “For a few hours, geography will matter less than identity,” one writer noted. Surely it is, rather, that for a few hours the players will reveal that identity depends less on geography than on self-perception, less on where you were born or even raised and more on how you choose to feel.
Identity politics, so-called, are often condemned for making what you are more important than what you do, but the other side of them is that they make what you want to be as important as what you’re supposed to be, allowing people to choose the identity they desire even in the face of the identity they were told they ought to have. In the country’s two-hundred-and-fiftieth year, OG Anunoby, a British-born Knicks forward, tips in a shot, with 1.2 seconds remaining, to win Game Four. Jalen Brunson, of New Brunswick, New Jersey, is now as much a necessary New Yorker as Joe DiMaggio, who was of North Beach, in San Francisco, before and after his Bronx sojourn. For that matter, a very, very tall Frenchman is now an essential Texan.
Pastimes and people are oddly matched. Some pastimes are distractions, some are distortions, and some few are true distillations—refining a city or a place or a community to its essence, deliciously sipped by all. In reminding us about the artifactual nature of teams, sports remind us that all identities are largely fictive—things we choose to embrace because we like them, and they like us. We pick a team and make it ours. Juvenal’s satire about the narcotizing effect of all that bread, all those circuses, also contains his equally classic counsel: to pray for both a healthy body and a healthy mind and for a spirit that counts long life among nature’s smaller gifts, making the brutal domination of others less important than the serenity of the self. Whether we’re watching or playing, it’s still sound advice. ♦