In the chaotic aftermath of the New York Knicks’ Game Six victory over the Boston Celtics at Madison Square Garden last Friday night, Timothée Chalamet left his courtside seat and was picked up by a car service at the VIP entrance. As the driver tried to navigate through thousands of demented fans dancing in the midtown streets, celebrating their team reaching the Eastern Conference finals, the star of A Complete Unknown felt he was missing out. So, he half climbed out the window of the vehicle and, much to the dismay of his security, started hugging and high-fiving everybody he could reach. Joy unbridled.
Chalamet grew up in Hell’s Kitchen, a 15-minute walk down to the Garden. He knows what getting within a series victory of the NBA finals means around here. As a teenager he used to spend hours loitering outside the players’ entrance trying to cadge autographs and there’s a wonderful shot of him, a callow 14-year-old boy, getting Amar’e Stoudemire to ink his beloved blue and orange jersey. Now closing in on 30, the actor has lived through some of the worst teams in club history but, after last Friday night‘s game, he headed down to Chez Margaux, a private club in the Meatpacking District, to party with the current Knicks. The winning edition. At last.
When the New York Yankees took on their crosstown rival Mets in the Subway Series up in the Bronx last Sunday night, a cameraman spotted Karl Anthony Towns, the Knicks powerhouse centre, and flashed his smiling face up on the Jumbotron screen. At which point, fans of two baseball teams who despise each other united in acclaiming a basketball player. When the Knicks start to look like title contenders, as they do now, it hits different and matters more in these parts.
At its heart, this has always been a basketball town, the street game of filmic lore, a place where hardscrabble courts with chain mail baskets and unforgiving rims never stop thrumming. Day and night. Night and day. The city’s soundtrack is a relentless urban drumbeat of balls hitting backboards, a chorus of “I got next”, the whoop and holler arpeggio of minor asphalt legends and shoot-the-lights-out hoop dreamers.
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Fifty-two years have passed since a starting five of Willis Reed, Clyde Frazier, Bill Bradley, Dave DeBusschere and Earl “The Pearl” Monroe delivered New York its last championship, the second title in four seasons. Names evoking a golden age, washed-out colour footage of Reed hobbling on to the court with a torn thigh muscle to start Game Seven against the Lakers in 1970 retains the power to make old men’s eyes turn rheumy. For subsequent generations, those wins were epic tales, cherished heirlooms handed down by fathers and grandfathers.
Younger fans have long craved yarns of their own to spin because their supporting lives have been grim affairs, hallmarked by failure. Aside from when the Patrick Ewing-led team threatened to win a title in the 1990s, it has been pretty much decades of suffering since. Through all the false dawns, seriously misguided trades and consistently embarrassing antics of man-child owner James Dolan, the Knicks faithful somehow continued to fill the Garden, paying exorbitant sums to endure truly mediocre outfits. In a Manchester-United-right-now kind of way.
Their penance duly served; these supporters have lately glimpsed a burgeoning greatness with Jalen Brunson a force-of-nature point guard conducting a thrilling quintet. The addition of Towns last October brought them a dominant big man regarded by some as maybe the last piece of the jigsaw. After knocking out the reigning champion Celtics, this team has the city believing anything is possible. Of course, in the media capital of the world, hyperbole is the default setting, and the formidable Indiana Pacers could well stop them reaching the finals.
The Knicks have always leant into Manhattan’s glamour, exploiting proximity to the rich and famous with the notorious celebrity row, invite-only courtside seats given to stars of the brightest wattage. A random selection on any night could feature old-school boldface names like Spike Lee, Ben Stiller and John McEnroe, alongside freshly minted luminaries like Cardi B, Bad Bunny, Kylie Jenner and, of course, her boyfriend Chalamet, whose elevation to the most prestigious perches means he’s living every Knicks fan’s dream. Little wonder they see themselves in him.
“Right now, it‘s an incredible time in New York City and the best time ever to be a New Yorker,” said Fat Joe, rapper and staple in the celeb line-up through so many fallow seasons. “When the Knicks are winning and thriving, it‘s like a feeling of euphoria and magic. But from 2001 to 2020, those were some painful memories. The Knicks would be competitive at times, but they would always lose games in the clutch and just break your heart.”
In 2017, McEnroe busted out a guitar during an appearance on The Dan Patrick Show and riffed about yet one more disastrous Knicks campaign. A fan since walking into Madison Square Garden for the first time at eight years old, he began strumming his own mournful version of Green Day’s Good Riddance (Time of your Life), the lyrics changed to reflect his concern about the fresh depths his team had plumbed.
“I still believe or at least I can hope,” he sang, “that the Knicks won’t keep being the butt of everyone’s joke ...’
Time of their lives.
