Sports and the City: A Quarter Century of Misery (and Company) for New York Fans
Across the past 25 years, it has rarely mattered how uniquely New York sports stories have been told or how sweetly they have unfolded. They’ve mostly all ended the same way.Sports and the City: A Quarter Century of Misery (and Company) for New York Fans
Across the past 25 years, it has rarely mattered how uniquely New York sports stories have been told or how sweetly they have unfolded. They’ve mostly all ended the same way.
I was 27 years old when I blew the mind of my inner child by getting a press credential to write about the New York Knicks. This was late February of 2011, and ESPN was still a few months away from launching Grantland, the sports and culture website where I’d been hired as a contributor. But I had my first assignment: to go hang around Madison Square Garden in the weeks following the splashy, costly trade for Carmelo Anthony and ponder what my favorite franchise had become.
The Knicks of my youth had been celebrated for their win-ugly panache, their distinctive coaches, and their absolute stranglehold on tri-state area drive-time talk radio. Sure, the Rangers had won the Stanley Cup in 1994, but the Knicks had John Starks, the hoops embodiment of someone jangling a set of keys in front of a baby’s face. (It was me, I was baby.) By 2011, though, all that near glory was ancient history.
The Knicks had missed the playoffs only eight times between 1967 and 2001—but they matched that total between 2002 and 2011. I noted in my eventual story that the longest-tenured Knick at the time, Toney Douglas, was a second-year player who had suited up alongside 33 different teammates over the course of two seasons. I summed up the state of Knicks basketball since the dawn of the 21st century as this: “A prolonged scorched-earth campaign marked by mammoth contracts, personal vendettas, botched drafts, illegal operations, and outright hostility.” (Man, to think that was all written years before the Phil Jackson era.)
By the time the piece ran that May, the Melo, Amar’e Stoudemire, and Mike D’Antoni Knicks had brought the team back to the playoffs for the first time since the Knicks got swept by the New Jersey Nets in 2004. Their reward? Being swept by the Boston Celtics in the first round.
More than eight years later, in a December 2019 New York Times article titled “The Lost Decade of New York Sports,” columnist Dan Barry gazed back over the 2010s and deemed the Knicks “the most extreme example of New York City’s consistent sports futility.” But he also stressed that they were far from the only local team that had been struggling. (And struggling, and struggling …)
Ever since the Yankees beat the Mets to win the World/Subway Series in 2000, this quarter century has offered slim pickings for New York’s two handfuls’ worth of major professional sports teams. There have been a few notable exceptions—the Giants’ two Super Bowl wins over the Patriots after the 2007 and 2011 seasons, the Yankees’ 2009 World Series, the Liberty’s WNBA title last year. But New York has been a largely bannerless town for 25 years.
From MetLife Stadium to Citi Field, from Madison Square Garden to Yankee Stadium, new chapters of New York sports history are constantly being written. Some, like the Knicks’ 2022 free agent signing of Jalen Brunson, are inspired. Others are pretty dismal: Rewatching the Giants do their worst on last year’s Hard Knocks is not for the faint of heart. And many are just absurdist, like the Jets’ iconic mononucleosis graphic or that time last fall when a lucky pumpkin and the Mickey D’s character Grimace joined forces to fuel a Mets playoff run.
But for the past 25 years, it has rarely seemed to matter how uniquely New York sports stories have been told or how sweetly they have unfolded. Ultimately, most wind up with the same bitter ending, one that reads: better luck next year.
Sports franchises are built like cities, which is to say that they’re built like the Ship of Theseus: with ongoing turnover, incremental fixes, and various points of failure that are swapped out one by one until what remains is a roster so revamped that it sparks existential arguments about the meaning of the phrase “same old Mets.” New York City may never sleep, but it does labor in shifts: At any given time, someone is rising, and someone is fading, and someone’s window of opportunity is about to slam shut.
It’s tricky to capture so many moving parts in one snapshot, just as it’s daunting to try to describe 25 years’ worth of false starts, tough breaks, bad trades, annoying personalities, close calls, and yooge, yooge plays—multiplied by, like, 10 (give or take) different New York franchises. But if I survey the landscape like I’m looking out from a skyscraper over the vast grid of Manhattan, a few memorable landmarks emerge, little living histories of big (and, often, bad) moments in the wide world of sports.
Like, see where that guy is, next to the subway stop over there? That’s where I exchanged legal tender for the New York Post day after day and was occasionally rewarded with vital Jets headlines like 2010’s “Tormented Rex Bares ‘Sole’ Over Kinky Feet Vids.” That building way out in the distance? That’s the barbershop in Queens that used to do Anthony Mason’s hair, and where I watched the last-place Knicks lose a draft lottery sweepstakes. Seinfeld called the intersection of First Street and First Avenue the “nexus of the universe,” but to me it’s the cursed location where I watched Carlos Beltran go down looking in Game 7 of the 2006 National League Championship Series and was powerless to stop it.
Those twinkling lights in Tribeca? That’s … Henrik Lundqvist’s bar, which—sorry, I’m so sorry, I just get emotional when I think about how the Rangers’ consistently anemic offense deprived the best goalie of a generation of the Cup he deserved. He’s like if David Wright met Patrick Ewing, you know? [Blows nose.] Anyway, so yeah, over near that church steeple in Brooklyn is my friend’s old Carroll Gardens apartment where I abandoned my Jeremy Shockey jersey after the Miracle at the New Meadowlan—hey, wait, where are you going?
That’s just a tiny sample of my mental map. And across the city and the suburbs, millions of New York sports fans—whether their NYers-Briggs Type Indicator is Mets-Jets-Isles-Nets or Yankees-Giants-Rangers-Knicks or some other cursed combination—have their own personal hot spots. Maybe it’s the couch where some poor Jets fan first saw Aaron Rodgers’s busted Achilles, Brett Favre’s [redacted], or Adam Gase’s gaze. Maybe it’s the hinterlands surrounding Nassau Coliseum, which will always feel like home to those who understand. Or the Nike HQ where Liberty mascot Ellie the Elephant once freaked out Adam Silver. Or that lipstick-shaped office building where Bernie Madoff’s machinations put the Mets payroll at risk. Or wherever the Nets brain trust was when they agreed to the trade that revitalized the Celtics.
Plotted in the aggregate, this all makes for a bustling streetscape, with people crossing paths at the sites of their biggest disappointments and, occasionally, their unlikeliest delights. Somewhere, there’s a Knicks fan who can’t help pointing out, every damn time, the storefront where Isiah Thomas’s haute popcorn shoppe used to be. And there’s that fire escape where a Giants fan got fresh air and pinched themself, over and over, just to make sure all of it—the Helmet Catch, the MVP, all those yellow cabs honking in shared merriment down on the streets below—was real life. But there I go again, sharing my own personal coordinates when nobody asked.
My next reporting assignment for Grantland in the spring of 2011 involved shipping up to Boston to cover the Stanley Cup Final between the Bruins and Canucks, a cross-continental showdown so dirty that it would have made even Pat Riley blush. The Bruins lost the first two games of the series but came back to outlast Vancouver. And a few days after Game 7, during the victory parade in Boston, some kid went viral for the sheer nerve of his homemade sign, which was festooned with Boston sports insignias (three Red Sox, three Patriots, one Celtics, and one Bruins) and read:
11 YEARS OLD
8 PARADES
To that I can say only thank heavens for Eli Manning, because if it hadn’t been for his heroics in early 2008, I would not have been able to self-soothe with a silent comeback: “You can’t write that sign without 18-1, bitch!!!” Such imperviousness, such confidence, such hostility toward a child—this must be what winning feels like. But I also understand that having that comeback at all means I’m one of the lucky ones, that there are Jets fans reading this right now and sneering: must be nice.
In 2002, Bill Simmons wrote that there are distinct “Levels of Losing,” and it stands to reason that there are different levels of losing teams, too. No one whose team hasn’t won the big one this century feels sorry for Giants or Yankees fans, for obvious reasons, even if their championships were more than a decade ago and have been mixed in among some really rough things along the way. (You know, like Plaxico Burress shooting himself in the leg, Jason Pierre-Paul blowing up his hand, or the 21st-century Yankees coming up short thrice in the World Series and losing six times, including that time, in the American League Championship Series.)
Similarly, now that the Mets employ Juan Soto thanks to the largesse of owner Steve Cohen, they’re no longer quite the same lovable losers they were when they were hamstrung by the cash-strapped Wilpons.
It’s easiest to feel for Jets fans, who last experienced a title in 1968 and who genuinely thought they had something there with Rodgers. And Zach Wilson. And Sam Darnold. And the Sanchize, and so on. The Nets, meanwhile, much like the Islanders, haven’t only been going through it—they’ve been going through it while being routinely overshadowed and undermined by the louder and complainier Knicks and Rangers.
The Knicks we’ve talked about here, but the Rangers have an interesting recent history. In many ways, they are to early 21st-century hockey what the Knicks were to late 20th-century basketball: a contender every fall, gone too soon every spring. (Which reminds me: The recent death of the one-of-one New York and national broadcaster Al Trautwig marked an irretrievable loss.) This season, the team is packed with talent but is also sitting at fifth in its division and third in the current wild-card standings and is in real danger of missing the playoffs.
Who would have considered, back when the Rangers won their most recent championship in 1994 and their play-by-play guy Sam Rosen exclaimed, “This one will last a lifetime!,” that his words might wind up being a curse, not a blessing?
A few weeks after the NHL playoffs ended in 2011, I up and moved to California. (As far away as possible from that Boston parade route, you know?) My New York teams kept me broadly tethered to my memories of emotionally fraught street corners and sports bars around my former city, but before long, new influences took root on the western homefront.
I watched from an old pal’s place in the Marina as the Giants won another Super Bowl in early 2012, and later that year, I went to AT&T Park to see the baseball Giants on a title path of their own. (I also went downtown and saw a bunch of naked people at the parade.) I felt some of the absolute worst FOMO of my entire life throughout the duration of Linsanity, in a way that still upsets me to remember. And flying back and forth between my former coast and my new one for the 2014 Stanley Cup Final, I convinced myself that the Rangers were going to beat the Kings. I was wrong!
In the fall of 2015, I was eight months pregnant with my first kid when ESPN pulled the plug on Grantland and Terry Collins decided not to pull the plug on Matt Harvey in Game 5 of the World Series. In both cases, I cried because it was over, even as I knew I should be smiling because it happened. I’ve forgotten many things about childbirth, but one memory that’s crystal clear, for whatever reason, is that when I went into labor that first time, I was wearing a Tomas Hertl shirsey I’d purchased at a Rangers-Sharks game. Hertl, then a rookie, had scored four goals that game and ended Marty Biron’s career—an anecdote I almost certainly shared with a nurse at some point in between contractions.
My sons are 9 (!) and 7 now, and in their lifetimes, none of my New York teams have won a championship. Not like they care, anyway: As far as I can tell (because they’re glad to tell me), they typically like to root against their boring old mama’s favorite franchises. The vibe’s more fun that way! Across these little clowns’ whole lives, the San Francisco 49ers have been the designated contender that always breaks its fans’ hearts, the Vegas Golden Knights might as well be an Original Six franchise, and the Golden State Warriors dynasty isn’t some cool modern miracle that we all watched unfold—it’s just the natural order of the universe.
If I asked my kids to name the world’s most famous arena, I’m confident that they would pick the only NBA venue they’ve ever been to: Golden 1 Center, home of your! Sacramento! Kings! When the boys ask me things, meanwhile, they use phrases like “the 1900s” to refer to the ’90s, and I can feel my eyesight deteriorating and my lower back pain flaring up.
Every now and again, I feel ever so slightly regretful that I haven’t done a better job of passing along one of my most important values—a love of mostly disappointing New York sports teams—to my offspring. But really, the ball was never in my court. The thing about 9- and 7-year-old children is that they’re extremely skilled at jumping on bandwagons. There’s one simple trick to winning them over: just win. I said simple, not easy.
Why is it so difficult for New York–area pro sports teams to succeed? Is it the weather? The water? The tabloids? Is there some kind of pressure put on the athletes that is found only in New York, kids, only in New York? My prevailing theory has always been that the astronomical ticket prices for playoff games result in a skittish crowd that saps the energy from an arena right when the players need it most, although (a) this might be hyper-specific to the New York Rangers and (b) I don’t see why those same forces wouldn’t exist in other major cities like Los Angeles. (Or, hey, maybe they do! That last Lakers title was in the bubble …) Maybe the problem is the binary connotation of success in this case: You either had a victory parade or you didn’t, and nothing else counts.
New York’s Finest
Over the years, I’ve seen a lot of zeros in the championship column. But I’d like to think that I’ve gotten better at assigning (some of) them a positive value, of squeezing a few decimals’ worth of joy out of nothing. Sometimes it’s just that classic “We’ll get ’em next year” optimism that comes with a fun, young roster. Sometimes it’s learning how to decouple the memory of how I felt when Chris Kreider scored that hat trick last spring from the bummer of how everything ended a couple of weeks later.
Usually, though, what I appreciate most, even from thousands of miles away, is the sense of community that gets forged in the crucible of the bad times—one that can be activated by code phrases like “Endy Chávez” or “triangle offense” or “Joba Chamberlain swarmed by bugs” or “the Tampa Bay Lightning.” It sucks to suck, obviously, but it sure feels amazing to blow off steam. And it feels even better when, every so often, the clouds part and the shots go in and the bats connect and the team moves on to the next round and the text messages stop being about the petites agonies of defeat and instead just say, like, BING BONG!
Back in 2010, after LeBron made the Decision, I walked home through the streets of New York and could vividly imagine how alive the scene would have been if only King James had deigned, unwisely, to take his talents to Manhattan. Last season, when the Knicks lost to the Pacers in seven in the second round, I felt similarly bereft, but also oddly … excited? The Knicks haven’t made an Eastern Conference final since 2000, when I was 16. It’s been so long that I don’t think people quite understand how gloriously feral New York City will become if ever the Knicks are really, truly back. If that day ever comes, I’ll book a flight back from California, even if I can’t get into the Garden. It will be more than enough just to wander the streets.
The other night, with the Knicks on the West Coast to play the Lakers, I got a glimpse of what life might look like, here at home, if the team that first made me a sports fan could ever become relevant again. Every possession crackled with importance. All the stars were on the floor. At one point, I heard my sons spontaneously discussing Brunson between themselves and had to gnaw on my forearm to avoid some dopey mom outburst that would kill the organic moment.
Steady now, I told myself as one of them ran to get the Brunson basketball card they know I keep on my office bookshelf. One false move, and they may never be this Knicks-curious again.
That was as good as things got. Eventually, Josh Hart couldn’t get the game-winning shot off before the buzzer. And then, in overtime, Brunson went down with a rolled ankle that I was initially terrified was an Achilles tear. (He’ll supposedly be back in a couple of weeks, although I’ll believe it when I see it.) My children looked stricken by the injury, but maybe also a tiny bit riveted by the intrigue of what will come next. I began to wonder whether maybe they’d take after their mother after all, the poor dears.
Last summer, when the Celtics won the Larry O’Brien Trophy (thanks in part to that trade they did with the Nets), that kid with the 11 YEARS OLD, 8 PARADES sign from the Boston Bruins parade refreshed his figures:
22 YEARS OLD
13 PARADES
Hey, look on the bright side—at least Boston’s parade rate per year has been slipping.
In an interview, the guy was asked which of all the wins was his favorite. “I’d say my favorite one is going to be the next one,” that lucky twerp quipped in response. I fumed at his blithe Bostonian winners-win attitude, the kind that comes only from having attended double-digit parades in one’s lifetime, until I realized that I, too—a certified fan of losers!—could parrot this sentiment.
I’m 41 years old these days, which means that if you were to ask me right now to name my favorite Knicks championship of my lifetime? I’d have no choice but to respond with that exact same line: the next one. And it would be nothing but the truth.
