After eight years in the N.B.A. wilderness, the New York Knicks are back, if not quite thriving, in the playoffs. And, following a year of empty stands—evacuated because of the coronavirus pandemic—full-looking crowds have come back to pro-basketball arenas around the country. A week or so ago, it was tempting to assume that those dual returns would be characterized almost exclusively by happiness. When the Knicks, my bane and my obsession, clinched the fourth seed in the league’s Eastern Conference, in mid-May, I kidded myself and my friends with a lot of Dayenu-ish self-delusion about how it would be more than enough satisfaction to taste a slice of the post-season, no matter how the team did in its first-round series against the Atlanta Hawks. Communal life in New York City has been stuttering back into action with the same optimistic sheen. I’ve been to the theatre and to art galleries, as eager simply to overhear other people as to experience the work of artists. People seem happy, if slightly stunned. Aside from the specifics of vaccination—“Which one?” “First or second?” “How did it feel?”—the most common conversation is an effusion of sheer disoriented relief. On the grand staircase at the Met, I watched a woman stop mid-flight, lift her arms, look at her companion, and say, “Can you believe it?”
But, in the N.B.A., angst has made its own return, arm in arm with the supposed normalcy of league-wide live spectatorship. The Knicks lost Game One, the Sunday before last, when Atlanta’s backcourt prodigy, Trae Young, hit a floater in the waning seconds, quieting a Madison Square Garden crowd that had given him hell all game. For sports fans, the flip side of a favorite team’s renewed relevance is the inevitable accrual of resentment toward opposing players who happen to be good. Young likes to boast and make faces and do little routines when his shots go down—he shivers and holds his arms, a nod to his nickname, Ice Trae—and something in the cut of his jib makes him equally irritating and fun to root against. “It got real quiet at the end,” he said in an interview after the game, acknowledging and courting his new status as New York’s chief antagonist, at least for as long as the series lasts.
When I showed up to Garden for Game Two, last Wednesday night, the fans streaming in were already egging one another on in anger directed at Young. The crowd I’d seen on TV for Game One was exuberant and hopeful, glad and giddy and somewhat nervous to be there in support of its team. The Game Two crowd was hardened by a tough loss; there was a palpably despairing edge in the building, only streaked through with joy. The crowd, I noticed, was more packed with young men, maybe college-age, than I remember usually seeing at the Garden. Families and groups of old-timers were hard to spot. Whenever a Hawk appeared on court to get up practice shots, a round of boos came down, and a chant that would punctuate the night began: “Fuck Trae Young!” Cheers accompanied any sign of a Knicks player, and when Spike Lee entered the arena, in his customary bright blue and orange—he’s a fan in technicolor, symbolic, in his operatic moods, of the entire sporting city—he was hailed with applause.
Then the game began, and the Knicks quickly fell behind. Julius Randle, the Knicks’ star forward, had recently won the N.B.A.’s Most Improved Player award, which he richly deserved. But the Hawks were sending double-teams at him every time he got the ball, paying special attention to his dominant left hand. His signature move—a hard dribble toward the baseline and a weird, oblong, floating jumper—was all but eradicated, and, without the ball, he walked around in a daze. By halftime, the Hawks were up by thirteen, and the Garden crowd was in a funk. “Randle just sucks out there,” a guy behind me in a concessions line said, during the break. I kept hearing Randle’s name uttered mournfully in the halls.
The great skill of the Garden crowd is its capacity for unison. A chant starts up in the heights of the arena and, seemingly in seconds, spreads around the place, until the voices are one livid voice, expressing approval or dripping bile. The multitude becomes its own organism. Now its mood was heterogeneously sour, and souring. At one point, the New York guard Elfrid Payton was at the free-throw line, and the Garden shook with epithets against Young—who, with his fleet, young-pony drives, was putting together another masterpiece—effectively distracting our own player. I was sitting just across from a group of guys in their twenties, who had been sloshing beers around, frequently shouting the second-most popular chant that night, “Trae is balding!” (Young, who, in every other particular, looks like a teen-ager on perpetual spring break, has a weirdly wispy nest of hair, staticked to attention as if run through constantly by a freshly inflated birthday balloon.) But even these guys got annoyed when the crowd chanted through the Knicks’ turns at the foul line. “Shut up!” one kid yelled, as if with a single plaintive cry he could address each of his thousands of comrades all at once.
So it felt all the more surreal when the Knicks surged back in the second half. They were led by the veteran guard Derrick Rose, a phenom of yesteryear, who had provided consistent offense off the bench all season and assumed the leading role left vacant by Randle. He made lilting three-pointers and direct, intelligent drives to the hoop. When the veteran wing Reggie Bullock hit a three to tie the game at seventy-two, the crowd got so loud that the noise felt like a strong gust of wind. Lee, who had largely sat stoic to that juncture, was finally standing up and slapping fives at courtside. Stadium officials had ushered in some fifteen thousand fans, five thousand fewer people than the Garden’s true capacity, but, outside of a designated section for unvaccinated people, I couldn’t see any real gaps in the crowd. I felt a pang of something like regret at how much money the Garden’s contemptibly inept owner, James Dolan, must have made that night on tickets alone. (In recent years, the cursings-out at the Garden have largely been directed at Dolan; the ire at Young must have been, for him, like a surprise vacation.)
Young inexplicably sat for a long time at the beginning of the fourth quarter, and his teammates went cold. The ex-Knick Danilo Gallinari, sporting an awkward, Travis-Bickle-ish mohawk, was open from three all night but rarely connected. The Knicks won, miracle of miracles.
Ecstatically crowded as it gets, the Garden empties out fast. After the Rose-fuelled victory, the crowd roared so loudly and protractedly that I could feel the floor under my feet tremble and slightly sway. But, only a minute or two later, there was a flood of bodies toward the exits, and, soon, the weird, waiting glow of empty seats and aisles. A few kids hung back, drunk on victory, still shouting the names of favorite players. Otherwise, the place was so quiet that it started to give me the creeps.
On the escalator down from the arena to the street, there was a woman, possibly drunk, saying loudly to a friend, “I knew it! I saw it! I saw it in a dream!” No Knicks’ name was mentioned much by the exiting revellers—not Randle or RJ Barrett, not Rose or Taj Gibson. The great fixation, still, was Trae Young. “Fuck Trae Young!” a group of kids was shouting on the corner of Thirty-fourth Street and Eighth Avenue. Now the epithet was a celebration, but there was still, even in exultation, a bit more menace in its repetition than made real sense in the moment.
Groups of young men in threes and fours walked up and down Eighth Avenue aimlessly, less looking for the train, or a car home, than hanging around and waiting for a fresh chance to defame the slight point guard from Atlanta. “Fuck Trae Young,” one group would call. “Fuck Trae Young,” came the answer from another. On Thirty-second Street, at a side entrance from which players sometimes exit, a throng had assembled on the sidewalk, spilling out into the street. The kids slapped hands with passing motorists, who honked their horns in affirmation. “Fuck that Trae Young shit,” one driver offered. When the smell of weed wafted strongly through the crowd, one kid yelled, “Smoking that Trae Young pack!” The crowd was there, I guessed, to watch the players leave. Some kids—I assumed that they were the smokers by the reddened whites of their eyes—kept asking, “Did Trae Young come out yet?”
Fanhood, at its fundament, is controlled enmity. Jubilation pays its price in senseless antagonism. Even those of us who abhor friend-enemy distinctions in politics become little Schmittians when watching sports. This is not necessarily a problem for most of us, but it starts to feel troubling in a society whose pro-social anchors are rapidly crumbling. Even having developed, with unnerving speed, my own healthy dislike for Trae Young, the obsession with him both inside and outside the Garden began to seem disconcerting. I found myself hoping that he’d somehow already left Midtown surreptitiously—one of those getaway scenes where the hunted individual lies flat on the back seat, under a blanket or a tarp.
Part of the wildness, I knew, had to do with the simple fact of being back in the stands, out of the house, alive. It has been easy, perhaps too easy, to become nostalgic in advance for the summer to come: how lovely it will feel to be back together in public. Surely, though, the time alone and afraid has had some deranging effects that will stick around for a while and delay easy coexistence—which wasn’t entirely commonplace, anyway, even before. Murders are up, in New York and elsewhere; airlines are reporting unprecedented belligerence from travellers, and even violence. Sometimes I thought I could sense the name Trae Young becoming a symbol not only for the possibility of a first-round exit for the Knicks but for everything that has lately ailed us: rolling lockdowns, clashes over mask-wearing, the coronavirus itself. The guy’s carrying more symbolic weight than his skinny shoulders can handle.
After Game Two at the Garden, it was reported that a Knicks fan had spit on Young, earning an indefinite ban from the arena. Later, a fan in Philadelphia dumped a bag of popcorn on Russell Westbrook’s head as he walked through a tunnel to the locker room to tend to an injury. A fan in Boston threw a full water bottle at Kyrie Irving, missing his head by what looked like a few inches. A fan in Washington ran onto the court in the middle of play. The crowds have come back, and with them have come all of their perversities, now, possibly, made worse.
For Knicks fans, Game Two may prove to be the summit of a short playoff run: New York lost Games Three and Four, in Atlanta, and Randle has looked no less at sea. Wednesday’s Game Five, back at the Garden, could easily be a protracted, and very loud, farewell. Last Wednesday, Seventh Avenue, just outside the Garden’s iconic, gradually gradient steps, was mayhem after the game. The whole street was full of bodies—jumping, moshing, shouting, out of control. Clouds of smoke floated upward. The Knicks had won a single playoff game, and the scene looked like a reenactment of V-J Day. If the Knicks ever manage to win the title, it might be an apocalypse for Midtown as we know it. As I turned the corner onto the Avenue, a mob had surrounded a city bus, denying it passage until it endured a sloppy chant or five.
A dark-skinned man in a black shirt stood atop a concrete barrier smiling and waving his hands. He looked upward, presumably at God, and shouted, “Thank you for being a Knicks fan!” A line of cops stood waiting by a van, big guns slung over their arms. One of them, a wide-set Black guy, looked like he wanted to join the fun. He tried to telegraph his fellow-feeling with a loose, open smile. I didn’t see anybody return it.
The street was a mess—a riotous and menacing one, if I’m honest; after soaking it in, undiminished, for an hour or so, I longed for home. As I headed that way, I thought about the last thing I had seen before exiting the Garden, which was, conversely, a moment of anomalous stillness: two young players, the rookie Obi Toppin and the third-year forward Kevin Knox, looking like fair-skinned twins, stripped down to black tank tops and shorts, taking practice shots, already preparing for the next game.
