From 50 Years of Frustration to Jubilation: One Knicks Fan’s Personal History
This season, I was a believer in the Knicks. But I had a lot of scar tissue to overcome.
By Frederic J. Frommer
Growing up in Queens, I was steeped in stories of the Knicks’ championship teams of the early 1970s. But, alas, I was too young to remember any of them.
I experienced those tales only through my parents’ memories and a tattered Knicks poster in my bedroom. Instead, my fanhood was marked by constant disappointment, starting with a 1978 playoff sweep by the Philadelphia 76ers and their superstar, Julius Erving, aka Dr. J.
So when the Knicks snapped a 53-year drought with an NBA title last weekend, I finally knew what it was like to be a Red Sox fan in 2004 or a Cubs fan in 2016. Is it any wonder that New York City Council Speaker Julie Menin said Thursday that New York’s new slogan is “Knicks in Five,” following the Knicks five-game stunner over the favored San Antonio Spurs?
Besides rooting for the Knicks for nearly a half-century, I come from a family with a personal connection to the franchise. My late father, Harvey Frommer, collaborated with legendary Knicks coach Red Holzman on his autobiography Red on Red. Holzman led the team to their only other NBA titles, in 1970 and 1973, dazzling my young parents, which was no easy feat.
My dad, a noted sports historian who played the game on the playgrounds of Williamsburg, Brooklyn, as a boy in the 1940s and ’50s, was a demanding fan. But my late mom, Myrna Frommer, a noted writer in her own right, was even tougher to please; she had no interest in sports at all. Given the chance, she’d choose ballet over basketball any night.
But she and my dad would often attend Knicks games at the Garden during their heyday, and she marveled at the players’ artistry, including Walt “Clyde” Frazier and Bill Bradley. It’s the only memory I have of her expressing admiration of any sports feat.
The New York Times would later describe Holzman as the “maestro” of those teams, whose selfless basketball won over a city — just as this year’s Knicks did with their own brand of teamwork. Frazier himself recently observed: “Actually, I’m living vicariously through them. They remind me of my team.”
He reiterated that at Thursday’s ticker-tape parade in Manhattan, giving a shout-out to Holzman and several of his teammates.
Over the past 50 or so years, the Knicks have had their share of awful teams. But the great teams are the ones that sting the most, especially when their seasons end in postseason heartache. In the 1993 Eastern Conference Finals, for example, power forward Charles Smith missed four consecutive layup attempts, costing the Knicks a pivotal Game 5 against the Chicago Bulls. I can still hear Marv Albert’s famous call: “Smith, Smith, stripped, Smith stopped, Smith stopped again!” The Knicks won an Eastern Conference-best 60 games that year under coach Pat Riley, tying a franchise record, but lost the series in six games. Chicago, led by Michael Jordan, went on to win its third straight NBA title.
The next year, with Jordan taking the season off in a quixotic quest to make it as a professional baseball player, the Knicks made it to the NBA Finals — only to lose Game 7 to the Houston Rockets as New York guard John Starks shot an abysmal 2-for-18.
And, of course, who can forget Reggie Miller’s eight points in nine seconds to cap the Indiana Pacers’ stunning comeback in the opening game of the 1995 Eastern Conference semifinals? The Pacers took the series in seven games.
This season, I was a believer in the Knicks. Honest, I was. But I still had a lot of that scar tissue to overcome.
So last week, as I watched Game 4 in a Manhattan bar, I must admit that doubts started to creep in when they fell behind by 29 points in the second half. And I wasn’t alone.
Everyone there had that awful feeling of déjà vu as it appeared the Knicks would lose their second straight home game and could be headed to yet another postseason collapse. People started yelling at individual players — “Bridges, how can you miss that shot?!” an exasperated fan shouted at Mikal Bridges, who went 3-for-9 that night.
Then slowly, a bar filled with bored and depressed fans gradually came to life. The library atmosphere gave way to a rollicking, nervous energy. When OG Anunoby tipped in the go-ahead basket with 1.2 seconds left, the place exploded. Strangers hugged each other and jumped up and down in celebration.
Soon the streets were filled with ecstatic fans who reacted as if the team had already wrapped up the title, jumping on top of anything they could scale, yelling “Let’s go Knicks!” and “Knicks in Five!” True, the Spurs, down three games to one, technically still had a shot at winning the series. But as snakebitten as we Knicks fans were, we also know a team of destiny when we see it.
At Thursday’s parade, it was great to see so many ex-Knicks on hand, starting with Frazier. There was Spencer Haywood, a power forward who played for the team in the mid- to late ’70s. Starks and Patrick Ewing, of those great 1990s teams, were soaking it in. So was Allan Houston, Latrell Sprewell and Larry Johnson, who made their Knicks marks in the 1990s and early 2000s; and more recent stars such as Amar’e Stoudemire and Carmelo Anthony.
When it comes to exorcising demons, it helps to do it definitively. This team turned into a machine in the postseason, winning 13 in a row at one point on their way to a 16-3 playoff record — an .842 winning percentage against the best teams in the sport.
Jalen Brunson, the team’s undersized star guard who seemed to channel the city’s lunchpail work ethic, never had any doubt.
“Damn, we did it, dawg,” he said at a City Hall ceremony that capped Thursday’s parade. “Somehow, some way, I knew we were going to find a way to get this done.”
Frederic J. Frommer, a sports and politics historian who has written for the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Atlantic and other national publications, is working on a book on ‘70s baseball.