The Knicks Take the Series—Seize the Joy!
“Tarry, delight, so seldom met. . . . The games have ended, the heroes are dispersed . . .” So begins Roger Angell’s “Agincourt and After,” his astonishing account of the 1975 World Series. Angell opens with a nod to A. E. Housman’s poem on the fleeting nature of joy. (“So sure to perish, tarry still; forbear to cease or languish yet.”)
Housman knew little of ball, but he had it a hundred per cent on the money, joy-wise. Joy is here and gone, but we Knicks fans feel it now, we’re embracing it now, from Gun Hill Road, in the Bronx, to Hylan Boulevard, on Staten Island, from Times Square to Grand Army Plaza; from the watch parties in Bryant Park and outside the Garden (buzz off, James Dolan!) and on countless city corners; we’re feeling it in all the filled-to-bursting bars in Elmhurst, Williamsburg, Astoria, the West Village, and Harlem; on all the buzzing chat groups (“Did you see THAT!” “The refs are murdering us!” “WTF!” “Yes! We did it!”); in suburban living rooms, in hospital waiting rooms, in the backs of cabs, in all the far-flung corners where the Knicks are beloved—joy everywhere. At the wedding I’m attending upstate, a clutch of guests suddenly burst out cheering. Inappropriately. (They’d been furtively watching the game on their phones when the Knicks took the lead down the stretch. Sorry, Coop and Olivia!) From all over the city came reports of stranger-on-stranger hugging; of people crying ecstatically; of subway delays and honking, honking, honking everywhere. “Thank you, Jesus!” said Spike Lee down in San Antonio. “Thank you, Jalen!” said New Yorkers everywhere. Joy! Fleeting, perhaps, but the Knicks are champions without doubt, and it’s been an intense pleasure to watch a team of such flash and fortitude, bravado and humility, prevail after more than half a century of waiting. It is a precious thing. “Tarry, delight, so seldom met . . .”
Until now, I had thought that my happiest sports moment would always be sitting in the left-field stands of the now-gone Shea Stadium with the very same Roger Angell, then a lad of eighty, but still the reigning bard of baseball, its greatest chronicler. This was the 2000 World Series, Yankees-Mets, a Subway Series. (I am pro-Yankees. Roger somehow managed to be a fan of the Yanks, the Mets, and the Red Sox. Only he could manage this polyamory without shame.)
It was a crisp October night. Throughout the game, Roger told stories of his long baseball past. As a kid, he had followed Babe Ruth’s home runs and hot-dog heroics. I kept my ear cocked to Roger’s tales but my eyes were fixed on the vast lawn spread out before us. The game was deadlocked until the top of the ninth when Luis Sojo (O, unlikely hero!) hit a two-out, two-run single to seal things for the Yanks. After Mike Piazza’s towering fly ball settled into the web of Bernie Williams’s mitt to finish off yet another save for Mariano Rivera, Roger, needing only his twinkly eminence as a press pass, led the way to the champagne shower in the Yankees locker room. His tweeds drenched with bubbly, he worked efficiently, scooping up player quotes for his story. His notebook filled, we piled into his boxy old Volvo, and Roger, driving at a brisk eighty miles per hour on the Grand Central, dumped me off on a random corner on the East Side. I found my way west across Central Park and home, still buzzing with happiness.
But as much as I miss Roger, who died at a hundred and one, and relish that night at Shea, this Knicks victory, sparked by OG Anunoby’s “right hand of God” tip-in to win Game Four and Jalen Brunson’s magical forty-five point performance in Game Five, is the topper. Nothing like it. Not in my lifetime, anyway. Game after game, the Knicks fell behind at the start. And game after game, they fought back. On Saturday night, with Karl-Anthony Towns and OG nagged by foul trouble and the bench players struggling, Brunson refused to give in. Almost single-handedly, he mastered the young and exquisitely talented Spurs team. He’d had enough. “I woke up this morning just not wanting to go home to play another game,” Brunson said afterward.
Nearly every time he came down the court with the ball, Brunson forced the action, jab-stepping to rock his defender off balance, then whirling like Baryshnikov toward the basket. He launched shots at cockeyed angles, challenging everyone, Wemby included, always without fear. In the end, he would not be denied. The Knicks won the game 94–90 and took their first N.B.A. title in fifty-three years. Cue the parade.
As a fan, I am a catastrophist. What can go wrong will go wrong. This is how I am constructed. In the wake of OG’s miracle shot, what would follow was so obvious. On the brink of elimination, the Spurs would learn from their self-immolation and grow a strategic brain to match their undeniable skills. They would play smarter. They would surely win Game Five at home, pick up some momentum, defy the odds back at the Garden, and then, riding high, take the whole damn series and the trophy. Of course that would happen.
It had happened before. Warriors fans will not soon forget that, in 2016, with a team led by the Splash Brothers, Steph Curry and Klay Thompson, they were up three to one and on the brink of a parade, too. And then it all came crashing down, thanks to a certain LeBron James. The Cavs took the series, leaving behind an indelible image: LeBron sprinting down the court and swatting from behind a shot by Andre Iguodala. (The musically oriented will recall the Nicki Minaj-DJ Khaled version of the moment: “Any baller tryna score, check them shot clocks / But I hit ’em with them ’Bron-Iguodala blocks.”)
So, yes. For the Knicks, it could all go very bad in a hurry. The truth is, the Spurs could have taken all four of those first games. Every one of them. And so, in the run-up to Game Five, I started having nightmares of Wemby, with his velociraptor arms, whacking away Knicks’ shots, receiving lobbed passes from his guards and dunking the ball as easily as most men dunk a donut. Or maybe, just to make me even more miserable, he’d go on standing thirty feet out, draining threes. In the end, he’d take the stand and accept the series M.V.P. trophy on his home court.
It was all too much to bear and foresee. Clearly, as a fan, I needed some diversion.
And so on Friday night, I turned on the MSG Network, the cable station that carries Knicks games through the regular season. They were showing just what any anxious fan with a bad case of the butterflies required—a replay of the last time the Knicks won the title.
May 10, 1973. The Knicks were up three games to one against an aging, but still daunting, Los Angeles Lakers team. The original video of that game had been damaged and lost for some time, but then, after many years, it was retrieved and painstakingly restored—incompletely, but just enough to get the gist, as with the Dead Sea Scrolls or the Gnostic gospels. Despite the occasional blurriness and missing bits, it was fully suggestive of the great historical event.
I was fourteen then. But like everyone else in the New York area at the time, I was unable to watch it in real time. The game, which was played in the afternoon at the “Fabulous Forum,” in L.A., was not broadcast live to New Yorkers. The N.B.A. wasn’t very popular in those days, and the network was loath to cancel its regular programming. Instead, we listened on the radio and then, at least at my house, we watched the telecast, late at night, on tape-delay, and—at least in my house—in glorious black and white. (My father, wary of new technologies and unneeded expenditures, did not pony up for a color TV until the Reagan years.) Now, in 2026, the great event was available in “living” color: the Knicks in their familiar blue and orange, the Lakers in gold and purple, the announcers, Keith Jackson and Bill Russell, sporting the egg-yolk yellow blazers of the ABC network.
In recent days, young Knicks fans have been made to digest from their dreary Boomer elders heavy doses of old-timey hoops lore, but mainly about the 1970 title series, featuring Willis Reed’s limping, yet noble appearance in Game Seven, his injured leg shot up with painkillers. They have heard endlessly about the gaudy thirty-six-point performance by Walt Frazier, a ball-handler and defender so cool, so divinely slick and mutton-chopped, that he seemed to step out of a Curtis Mayfield record. (It’s now standard fare for players to double as fashion plates—many have stylists—but in those days basketballers dressed like accountants. They drove a Buick or a Chevy, maybe a Cadillac. Frazier was another thing. He wore “midi” fur coats, rode around town in a Rolls, and posed for photographers at home on his mink bedspread. He had champagne moves and champagne tastes. We loved him.)
The Knicks returned to the Finals in 1973, having added two crucial players to their lineup: Jerry Lucas, a deep-shooting big man who also had the talent of memorizing the names and numbers in the first fifty pages (minimum!) of the Manhattan phone book, and Earl (the Pearl) Monroe, who had been a hot-shit solo artist for the Baltimore Bullets and now found a way to adjust his ambitions to a team known for its unselfish ensemble style of play.
The Lakers had aged. Wilt Chamberlain and Jerry West were still in the lineup and effective, but Elgin Baylor, a high-wire precursor to the likes of Connie Hawkins, Julius Erving, and Michael Jordan, had retired. After dropping the first game of the series, the Knicks were on a run and the Lakers seemed worn down.
Watching Game Five of the 1973 series on MSG, while thinking about this year’s Knicks team, I was struck yet again by how much pro basketball has changed. And not just in its popularity, which has exploded and gone global. The athletes then were swift and skilled, but generally unmuscled, Wilt excepted. Average players did not spend the off-season “working on their bodies.” They spent the off-season working a second job. The game itself is now radically more wide open, the players more versatile in their skills. The three-point shot, instituted in the 1979–80 season and later perfected as a weapon by Steph Curry’s Warriors, among others, in the twenty-tens, spread the game out, turned the crosscourt pass into a weapon rather than a sin; it shifted coaching strategies. Big men like Chamberlain generally parked themselves in the low post and called for the ball. The idea that Wilt could, or should, shoot from twenty-five or thirty feet out, à la Wemby or KAT, was preposterous.
Baylor and West, to say nothing of Oscar Robertson and Bill Russell and many others, would still be premier players in the contemporary game, but they would find the action on the floor . . . altered, accelerated, and even more aggressive. In the old days, players known to deploy a sharp elbow to the kidney or the jaw were known as “crafty,” or, if things got more out of hand, as “enforcers.” Such tactics were hardly limited to the routinely inelegant. Bill Bradley (late of Princeton and Oxford) had the speed of a slug, the vertical leap of a hippo, and so, to keep up with his man on defense, he sneakily grabbed his opponent’s shorts and hung on for dear life. But that’s nothing compared to the Wemby-KAT wrestling matches! Having grown up watching such players, and even covering them as a young N.B.A. reporter in the mid-eighties, I have been struck by just how much more brutal the game is now. In the playoffs especially, it is a full contact sport. How many times did we hear the announcers talk about “physicality” during these playoff games? The rough stuff is a constant. The San Antonio defenders were practically draped on Brunson, steering him to the sidelines and away from the paint. They basically beat the daylights out of Brunson on every possession and hoped the whistle would not blow. It very rarely did.
But, as I watched the ’73 Finals and thought about this latest sublime series, what did seem similar across time was the harmony and unselfishness of the two Knicks teams. Both teams were harmonious units and blessed by character as well as skill. As Bill Bradley put it about his era, “There was nobody who was a misfit, there was nobody who was selfish.” The same goes for Brunson & Co.
The Spurs will likely win championships in the coming years. Wemby and super-young players like Stephon Castle and Dylan Harper, who performed on Saturday night with the energy of a gazelle and the court vision of an eagle, are just too good to come up short for long. Wemby will get stronger, the team wiser. “This is the biggest lesson of my life, the biggest learning moment,” Wemby said mournfully in the post-game interview. “This has been a hell of a year in terms of experience.”
But in this series, the Knicks showed greater maturity and tenacity. They never failed to display the well of composure that is vital to every comeback. When the Spurs locked down Brunson, or tried, the ball went elsewhere, zinging around the court, from player to player, as if in a berserk video game. Everyone, it seemed, had his moment. Deep into the bench, they played as a complete unit. Sometimes, a duo on the level of Michael Jordan and Scottie Pippen, Kobe Bryant and Shaquille O’Neal, can carry a lesser cast to a title. This was not the case with the Knicks, not in the seventies and not now. The ethos of then carried over to the ethos of now. Savor the joy, New York. Soon enough, we’ll wake up to ordinary cares and the trials of daily life; the same dreadful leader (who managed to soil Game Three at the Garden with his sneery arrogance and snoozy indifference) will still be in office, for a while at least. But set such things aside for a moment. Savor the joy, so sure to perish, tarry still. ♦