folsomfella
G-League
Just happens to be about the Knicks.
February 24, 2010, 6:16 pm As the Ball Bounces, Bleakly
By MICHAEL POWELL
Rich Pedroncelli/Associated Press Can’t anyone here play this game? Knicks forward Al Harrington in November.
I had a sort of, maybe, what should have been a grand idea.
On Monday night I enlisted Aidan, my 17-year-old son, to take in a game between the New York Knickerbockers and the Milwaukee Bucks at Madison Square Garden. Unfortunately, for aficionados of bad parental decision making, this is akin to admitting that I enlisted Aidan to journey with me to a particularly banal version of purgatory.
This has been the season — no, the decade — of Knick fan discontent. But this night I saw upside: We could catch Tracy McGrady, the latest often-injured former star relied upon to give a giggle to Knicks fans. And we could watch a halftime tribute to the 1969-1970 championship team of my youth.
We found instead a lost team, and an arena where the marketing amounts to nostalgia, dancing grandpas, lots of noise and more nostalgia.
I begin by purchasing two cheap-seat tickets (this being a relative term at $56 for two) and a $9 beer, and we settle into the Garden rafters. By 7:50, the Knicks are 8 points down and fading fast. Shots land randomly, bouncing long, bouncing short, and once bouncing over the backboard. Defense appears largely conceptual. At 8:11, the first fog-horn boo sounds.
How could a basketball team once so hip — Clyde with those mutton chop sideburns and the Rolls and the babes, Willis the Captain, Bradley the Rhodes-Scholar sharpshooter — turn so unbearably dull? The devolution is perversely impressive.
The half-time tribute to the old champions doesn’t help. We watch one graying, former star after another amble stiff-legged onto the court, and the contrast between the memory of their exploits and today’s lot is not encouraging — Gallinari the Stiff-Backed, Lee the Defenseless, Chandler the Clueless.
Even viewed through a nimbus of nostalgia and the memory of smoky old arenas, the replay loop gets old. As Aidan notes, a touch impatiently, the Knicks last won a championship (1973) 20 years before he was born. Billy Hosket and Mike Riordan sound less like energetic bench reserves than an ambulance-chasing law firm.
Then there is the Garden itself, where the management seems to have auditioned by running a minor league franchise in Akron, and that’s probably unfair to Akron. The bill this night features a dancing grandpa — a white-haired gent in a suit who dances/runs in place while he strips off his dress shirt to reveal a Knicks T-shirt — and intense-looking young men in white headbands who roam the upper tiers, handing out blow-up thunder sticks and urging (threatening?) fans to cheer. Hearing no sound in our section — what was happening on the floor was too morbidly intriguing to merit noise — two of these young men frown in disgust and move on to the next section.
By the fourth quarter the Garden sound-system has kicked into decibilic gear in a final attempt to raise the dead: DEE-fense! DEE-fense! At least 14 fans respond. Down on the floor, David Lee plays Ole! as another Bucks forward steams unimpeded to the hoop.
With 2:14 left in the fourth quarter, the only ones left standing in our section are four young finance-sector fellows. After their seventh or eighth beer, they have rediscovered the boyish joy of repeatedly shouting a four-letter word toward the distant court.
The buzzer sounds. The Knicks have lost nearly twice as many games as they’ve won. Down on the court, the old stars have long since vacated their front-row seats.
“Oh man,” Aidan says.
“Right,” I agree.
February 24, 2010, 6:16 pm As the Ball Bounces, Bleakly
By MICHAEL POWELL
I had a sort of, maybe, what should have been a grand idea.
On Monday night I enlisted Aidan, my 17-year-old son, to take in a game between the New York Knickerbockers and the Milwaukee Bucks at Madison Square Garden. Unfortunately, for aficionados of bad parental decision making, this is akin to admitting that I enlisted Aidan to journey with me to a particularly banal version of purgatory.
This has been the season — no, the decade — of Knick fan discontent. But this night I saw upside: We could catch Tracy McGrady, the latest often-injured former star relied upon to give a giggle to Knicks fans. And we could watch a halftime tribute to the 1969-1970 championship team of my youth.
We found instead a lost team, and an arena where the marketing amounts to nostalgia, dancing grandpas, lots of noise and more nostalgia.
I begin by purchasing two cheap-seat tickets (this being a relative term at $56 for two) and a $9 beer, and we settle into the Garden rafters. By 7:50, the Knicks are 8 points down and fading fast. Shots land randomly, bouncing long, bouncing short, and once bouncing over the backboard. Defense appears largely conceptual. At 8:11, the first fog-horn boo sounds.
How could a basketball team once so hip — Clyde with those mutton chop sideburns and the Rolls and the babes, Willis the Captain, Bradley the Rhodes-Scholar sharpshooter — turn so unbearably dull? The devolution is perversely impressive.
The half-time tribute to the old champions doesn’t help. We watch one graying, former star after another amble stiff-legged onto the court, and the contrast between the memory of their exploits and today’s lot is not encouraging — Gallinari the Stiff-Backed, Lee the Defenseless, Chandler the Clueless.
Even viewed through a nimbus of nostalgia and the memory of smoky old arenas, the replay loop gets old. As Aidan notes, a touch impatiently, the Knicks last won a championship (1973) 20 years before he was born. Billy Hosket and Mike Riordan sound less like energetic bench reserves than an ambulance-chasing law firm.
Then there is the Garden itself, where the management seems to have auditioned by running a minor league franchise in Akron, and that’s probably unfair to Akron. The bill this night features a dancing grandpa — a white-haired gent in a suit who dances/runs in place while he strips off his dress shirt to reveal a Knicks T-shirt — and intense-looking young men in white headbands who roam the upper tiers, handing out blow-up thunder sticks and urging (threatening?) fans to cheer. Hearing no sound in our section — what was happening on the floor was too morbidly intriguing to merit noise — two of these young men frown in disgust and move on to the next section.
By the fourth quarter the Garden sound-system has kicked into decibilic gear in a final attempt to raise the dead: DEE-fense! DEE-fense! At least 14 fans respond. Down on the floor, David Lee plays Ole! as another Bucks forward steams unimpeded to the hoop.
With 2:14 left in the fourth quarter, the only ones left standing in our section are four young finance-sector fellows. After their seventh or eighth beer, they have rediscovered the boyish joy of repeatedly shouting a four-letter word toward the distant court.
The buzzer sounds. The Knicks have lost nearly twice as many games as they’ve won. Down on the court, the old stars have long since vacated their front-row seats.
“Oh man,” Aidan says.
“Right,” I agree.
