Game Faces

The Knicks, Bernard King, Patrick Ewing, Bad Lieutenant, John Ganz, Barry Lopez, and the ambient gangster noise of 1980's and early 90's New York City.

1.

It's been a festival of old timers in Madison Square Garden. A living history going back to Walt Frazier and Bill Bradley, the last champions, and including Bernard King and Patrick Ewing, John Starks, Stephon Marbury, Carmelo Anthony, Amare Stoudemire, and so on.

At one point they had Patrick and Bernard sitting next to each other. They were teammates very briefly - Bernard missed all of Patrick’s rookie season - and only played in six games together, a blink of an eye in Knicks history.

Was it common, in years past, for the distinguished alumni of a team, in this case the Knicks, to be present at games in such abundance? To be given tickets and a lot of time on camera so as to be, in essence, top of the line supporters cheering on the playoff run, basking in the joy of the moment?

I know about Jack Nicholson¹ and the Lakers; it’s a given that there is a celebrity watch at bigtime sporting events. But this Knicks run has been different in that so many of the greats and sort of greats from recent Knicks history have been assembled. As joyous as it is to see Larry Johnson or Carmelo Anthony or Stephon Marbury or John Starks celebrating, the legacy they evoke is ambiguous². Starks is the most compelling of this group, for me, both as an individual and because of the Knicks teams of the 1990’s he brings to mind.

These Knicks greats appear on camera on their own but more often are seated next to one another, their big and now not so supple bodies pushed into one another as they once were on the bench. Sometimes they are sitting next to former teammates.

When Bernard King and Patrick Ewing were seated side by side, the camera lingered for a few moments as they kibitzed, looked up at the scoreboard, did things that fans watching a game at Madison Square Garden do. Then it cut away. There have been some incredibly joyous Knick moments in the past weeks and months, and those that occurred at the Garden have been accompanied by the sight of these old heads jumping up and down as elated as everyone else.

In comparison, Bernard and Patrick were shown in a subdued state, which is apropos. These most powerful players from Knicks past - both physically and allegorically - are extreme examples of the mask that players wear. Both have effusive, almost magical smiles, Patrick especially. But the dominant expression is one of stoicism and menace.

As the famous rapper T.S. Eliot once wrote, “There will be time, there will be time/To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet.”

But the image of the pair has stayed with me. It has provoked me.

(Knicks Cookie, 2025: Gift of Dorothy Spears and Alexis Rockman.)

2.

I have come to accept the strange circumstance that, just as the 1950’s were once a source of fascination for young people in the 1970’s (Happy Days; Laverne and Shirley), the 1990’s are now an object of fascination in today’s youth culture. Richie Cunningham, C’est moi³. Some of this is a question of style, ambiance, music, mood. But because of our current president, there is a lot of looking back and forth between the New York City of the 1980’s and 1990’s and the America today. The echo is strong on many levels, including the auditory.

I leave it to John Ganz, a New York City kid who has become the top ranked explainer in chief of the connection between New York past and America present, both in his book, When the Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s, and his Substack, Unpopular Front.

Trump’s origins in the mob-infested kleptocratic demimonde of New York business and politics have asserted themselves. During the Trump campaign supporters at his rallies flew banners depicting the Donald as Don Corleone from the Godfather movies. On the trail, he compared himself repeatedly to “the Great Alphonse Capone.” And in power, Trump has attempted to create a kind of patrimonial and clientelist regime that many commentators have likened to a mafia family. And so too has his conduct of foreign policy been compared to mob boss-style intimidation and bullying.

Trump’s own life also provides an almost exact microcosm of the trajectory of the country: first, in the 1980s, the rather tacky, fabulous success made possible by financial chicanery and then the downfall, the ignominious bankruptcies, and near liquidation of his assets. In the early 1990s, his outlook on life, as reflected in his books, became more angry, dour, paranoid. As its title suggests, in 1987’s The Art of the Deal, Trump still believed in positive-sum arrangements: agreements that benefitted both actors. By 1990’s Surviving at the Top, later renamed The Art of Survival, Trump has already adopted a more rancorous tone befitting its Darwinian title: he has endured the 90s real estate crash and a divorce. Just as the 90s recession, which Trump insisted was really a depression, revealed the morbid political phenomena that’s come to fruition in the present day, it also revealed the predatory and vindictive aspects of Trump’s character. By the time The Art of the Comeback comes out in 1997, he has adopted paranoia as a positive condition of being in the world. “I have noticed over the years,” Trump writes, “that people who are guarded or, to put it more coldly, slightly paranoid, end up being the most successful. Let some paranoia reign!”

What Ganz has said about the current moment’s relationship to the 1990’s - “I think people remember it really fondly because they don’t remember it completely,” - applies to the Knicks, too.

3.

At the time of this posting (I wrote most of it earlier) the Knicks are perched at the vertiginous edge of not just the end of their season, but a severe blow to their pride. Having lost the first two games to the Pacers in Madison Square Garden⁴, they now must win in Indianapolis to have any hope in the series. By the time most people will see this, that game and perhaps the whole series will be old news.

The logical thing for your correspondent to do here would be to discuss the details of the 1993 Knicks-Pacers series, which I attended with a press pass during one of the great fiascos of my journalistic career⁵. In 1993 I went to see the Knicks play in Indianapolis. It was one of the most unpleasant experiences of my life (as a sports fan). The sound of revving engines and the sound of revving chainsaws are not that different. To say it was enemy territory is to be subdued about it. And so, I don’t want to write about that now, and hope when I do it is in the context of demons vanquished. One can, still, at this juncture shortly before game 3, hope.

Sporting events are very helpful from a storytelling perspective. The games, and series, and the accompanying obsessions, are very helpful narrative devices. They contain episodes of time. I am thinking, for example, of the Met’s series that provides a narrative frame for the movie Bad Lieutenant, by Abel Ferrara. I am thinking of A Fan’s Notes, by Frederick Exley. Even Fever Pitch by Nick Hornby. I want to use this playoff run, a defining moment in what will surely be known as The Brunson Era, to reflect on that image of Bernard King and Patrick Ewing side by side. What those two players mean and in particular, their faces now and then.

4.

A cold day in late spring. Cloudy. The sun starts to break through in the afternoon, at which point there is a walk in the park with the boy and the dog and the wife, a basketball, and a 15 pound vest. To the basketball court we go. My wife continues for a walk. The dog, tied to the fence, is very well behaved. He's staring in the direction of where my wife walked. Staring at the person who feeds him and loves him most. His gaze is intense. Fifteen minutes of this staring into the distance before he starts looking around and barking at things. Fifteen minutes after that, my wife returns. She takes the dog. A while later, the boy goes home.

I'm left with a ball and the 15 pound vest. The day had been cloudy and blustery, and a few drops of rain had fallen. And so, for a Saturday, the court was remarkably empty. I put the on the vest for the firs time and start taking shots.

I The ball feels light in my hands. My movements aren’t much slowed by the extra weight, almost the opposite. The ball feels light in my hand. I feel strong raising up to shoot. It was as if something in my nervous system had been awoken. Faced with this handicap, I seemed to be able to summon more force.

I practiced moves at the foul line: going right, dribbling through my legs, going left, back through the legs and going right. Going nowhere, in other words, but enjoying myself. My shots were falling. I felt like an old timer, by which I mean I felt like one of those old legends whose jump shots were partly set shots, but the ball goes in.

The heaviness made me feel light.

The sun came out, and it felt like a gift-- it came low and sharp across the Hudson River and hit the buildings at the edge of the park, bathing them in the orange hue of heaven.

I decided to do a suicide. I refer to the drill that had that name back in the prehistoric era when I played high school and college basketball. They now call those drills "the ladder drill.” Maybe it’s just as well.

I jogged it, and I didn't even do the real version-- I just went to the opposite baseline and back.

Then I did a proper suicide: baseline to the first foul line and then back to the baseline; then to half court and back; to three quarters court and back; then full court and back. Both feet across the line and bend down to touch the line with your hand every time you turn back.

My college coach at Vassar, Denis Gallagher, would count down from ten towards the end, when I was the last one desperately trying to cross the finish line before zero. He would usually have us run it ten times, though with an opportunity to stop early if someone hit a free throw. Now, alone, many years later, when I was finished with the first one I thought, “will I do another one?”

“Yes,” I thought.

The sun slanted a bit more and I saw my shadow on the octagonal stones of the park on the other side of the fence. There was no Coach with his whistle. I didn’t do another one. I played division III and wasn’t even that good, and here was the reason why. The ones who become good, never mind great, have other gears, other dimension to the mind games they play on themselves.

5.

Bernard and Patrick made me think of my childhood interest in basketball players, which is different from being interested in basketball. Basketball you play, you read about, you watch on tv or listen to on the radio. Perhaps most of all, you scrutinize the fine print of box scores. There's a kind of religious observance in the scrutinizing of box scores. It applies to all sports. There's a basketball version, football, et al. The close reading of box scores is a ritual that is practiced by many.

I'll never forget my confession to Barry Lopez, famous for his writings about wolves, and the Arctic, and his long solitude know adventures in the world, when I told him that I wasn't able to have dinner with him on his first night in New Orleans because I had to go to the Pelicans Lakers game in which, for the first time, Zion, Williamson and LeBron James would go head to head.

Lopez had come down for a reading at Tulane at my invitation, and I had to send them off with others for his first dinner in town. I made this confession the next day, when we were standing beside the river, way down in Holy Cross in the lower Ninth Ward.

The wind gusted across the river, the sun shone, he took a moment, and then he said, "You were at that game? "

"You're into Basketball? "I said.

Not only was he into basketball, he explained, but he played high school basketball in New York City. He had attended the distinguished Regis High School on 84th Street and Park Avenue. I was still absorbing this shocking fact - shocking considering that Lopez had made his professional life as far away from 84th St. in Park Avenue as a person could without going to the moon- when he added that he had been a pretty good point guard on his high school team and that he still followed the game very closely by reading the box scores.

To explain my shock at this news I will simply quote from the book that made his reputation, Of Wolves and Men.

The wolf is three years old. A male. He is of the subspecies occidentalis, and the trees he is moving among are spruce and subalpine fir on the eastern slope of the Rockies in northern Canada. He is light gray; that is, there are more blond and white hairs mixed with gray in the saddle of fur that covers his shoulders and extends down his spine than there are black and brown. But there are silver and even red hairs mixed in, too.

It is early September, an easy time of year, and he has not seen the other wolves in his pack for three or four days. He has heard no howls, but he knows the others are about, in ones and twos like himself. It is not a time of year for much howling. It is an easy time. The weather is pleasant. Moose are fat. Suddenly the wolf stops in mid-stride. A moment, then his feet slowly come alongside each other. He is staring into the grass. His ears are rammed forward, stiff. His back arches and he rears up and pounces like a cat. A deer mouse is pinned between his forepaws. Eaten. The wolf drifts on. He approaches a trail crossing, an undistinguished crossroads. His movement is now slower and he sniffs the air as though aware of a possibility for scents. He sniffs a scent post, a scrawny blueberry bush in use for years, and goes on.

The wolf weighs ninety-four pounds and stands thirty inches at the shoulder. His feet are enormous, leaving prints in the mud along a creek (where he pauses to hunt crayfish but not with much interest) more than five inches long by ,ust over four wide. He has two fractured ribs, broken by a moose a year before. They are healed now, but a sharp eye would note the irregularity.

I suppose if you think about it for a while, you could find some allegory about survival in the city and in the wilderness. But basketball is not the first thing that comes to mind.

6.

The phrase “lathering up” is what came to mind when I thought about Bernard and Patrick. In both cases, they were stoic, fierce, remote figures dripping in sweat. It wasn't a sweat of fatigue, but it was certainly the sweat of exertion. A man's sweat. I remember thinking to myself that they shouldn't tire themselves out so much before games. They should save their energy.

I should've known better by college. I was on the basketball team. I understood about warming up. But I didn't really understand about lathering up. Years later, I would read that Larry Bird would run 2 miles in the hallways of Boston Garden before every game. I would come to understand that the nervous system when taxed springs awake.

7.

Bernard and Patrick share something important that doesn't get discussed often enough and it's not that they were important figures for the New York Knicks and it's not that neither of them won a championship. What they share is an exterior of menace and ferocity. Bernard called his memoir Game Face. I met him once at the opening of a museum show devoted to basketball in New York City. He chatted politely with me and at some point asked, "Do you still play?"

"Yes,” I said. “I play all the time. "And then I added, gratuitously, but it felt polite, "Do you?"

(Kareem Abdul Jabbar, foreground. Sam Perkins, preparing his speech, background.)

Bernard was dapper in a suit and a bowtie, or maybe it was a regular tie, I didn't think to get a photograph. At that same event, I posed with Kareem Abdul-Jabbar⁶. But I forgot to ask Bernard. He walked with a slight limp. It's my contention that the real athletes, the great players, the serious athletes—they hurt themselves. They wish to be free of the pain. When they're done playing, they're done. It's the amateurs in the underachievers who keep playing into middle-age and beyond.

At any rate, I think Bernard asked me the question so I could ask him and he could dismiss the idea with the regal shake of his head.

Perhaps that is the word I'm looking for, regal. There was something grand in the menace of Bernard's expression and in that of Patrick as well.

Patrick, who just refused to or wasn't capable of lightening things up. Can you imagine him and a teammate doing a podcast like Brunson and Hart?

Ewing had the most glorious smile. He was such a warm guy. But it was as though the very tall, very black, awkward Jamaican kid imported to Boston⁷, that teenager, had acquired a mask to defend against the world, a resting expression that never left his face. In comparison he now he seems quite light hearted. We all go through this—the hardening of the face to meet the people that we meet, and hopefully we learn to let go of it.

The sight of Bernard and Patrick together made me think of all that sweat and my misunderstanding about effort and preparation. The lathering up that took place before the start of the game. It took a long time before I grasped that you need to arrive at a point of maximum effort before you can really start to play. This is true of writing as well as basketball. It's the Raymond Carver/John Lennon lesson: you don't hold things back, you let it all go. You squander it. You spend it while you have it. The love you make is the love you take, and so forth. True of basketball, too.

1. And don’t sleep on Nicholson’s superfan corollary with the Clippers, Billy Crystal. Ben Stiller is filling that role now, for the Knicks. (A reader pointed out, after publication, that this is simply incorrect: The Knicks corollary to Jack Nicholson is Spike Lee.)

2. I have left out the player whose legacy is most important to me, Latrell Sprewell, because I have written about him and what he meant to me and to New York City in some detail already, it’s in the basketball book, and a version of it is here. I don’t even want to get into modern Latrell, and will save that for another piece, maybe.

3. I was not a hapless teenager in the late 1980’s and 1990’s, and for a moment, having felt pleased to have referenced Flaubert and Julian Barnes (Flaubert’s Parrot is a book I kind of love without ever having read it, not all at once, I just look at it once in a long while and think of my old professor Richard Locke, think of how an interesting project of biography, essay, and autobiography Barnes’ book is, maybe read a few pages, and put it back.

But that is not what I wanted to digress about: I wanted to mention Salinger. Because having joked about sitcoms about the 1950’s, I flashed to the thought of the darker realities of that time, and what came to my mind was Salinger. As Louis Menand has pointed out, some of the most well known books associated with America in the 1950’s - On The Road and The Catcher in the Rye, in particular - are in fact products of America in the 1940’s. And although I think those two books are very different, and of much different merit, they both in their own way are straining against the phoniness and shallowness of the official version of American life that the country was presenting to itself.

This all comes to mind because it’s not my childhood that I see reflected in the rosey nostalgia of the 1990’s revival of today. It’s a more complicated, sullied, young adulthood— and even not that young an adulthood.

I recall that when Kurt Cobain killed himself it felt like a definitive end of an era, and that was in 1994. Just a few months before the Knicks suffered a catastrophic loss in the finals—catastrophic because they were so close, they had a window with Jordan out, they had a shot. Catastrophic not just because they missed that shot in 1994 against the Rockets, but because coming up short in the clutch would, it turns out, be the defining musical note for those players and those 1990’s teams, Patrick Ewing and John Starks most of all.

Every sports franchise has an era of bad season and terrible losses; only one team can win the championship each year after all. But this Knicks playoff run is something else. “I don’t know if I can handle these games,” a friend remarked of the Pacers' series. “I watched game one in a bar and after the game there fights, brutal fights between Knicks fans.”

4. I was in the vicinity of the Garden, in front of and around it but not in it, both for the game 5 loss in the Celtics series, when the Garden gave away 8,000 free tickets to fans to which the away game inside, and the game 6 win at MSG. I left before the end of the game on that last win, which I later regretted, because of the spectacular outpouring, the elated crowds jamming 7th Avenue for blocks. The problem was that there were mushroom clouds of pot smoke and some bums on 32nd Street were bent in a fentanyl pose like some modern dance troup, and I was with my son. He was game for it all, to a point, but I could see a rising tension in his shoulders. His eyes kept darting for a place for us to set up and chill, but there was no such place, and he kept walking. Then someone threw up. Actually that is a lie. The throw up happened early, when we were still in the Penn Station. It happened at the start of the adventure not the end. But it set a tone. A beer throw up. Not that near to us, but not that far. After fifteen minutes of all that, we bailed.

Later, I watched the thronging mobs climbing lamp posts, and wished we had stayed.

As the Knicks lost two straight at home, I pondered the meaning of this outpourings. On one hand, it was great to get that win of the Celtics when no one thought we could. (Note the delusional “we.”) It was great to have that release. great to see the sheer number of Knicks nuts out there, flying their freak flag. On the other hand, I thought it set us up for some karmic blowback. And my God they hit hard with that game one loss, the second choke (by which I mean Halliburton echoing Miller), all of it. And then another loss.

5. It occurs to me that these Waterloo-like episode often involve sports. Another example would be my attempt to write about the 2003 Masters Golf Tournament in Augusta, Georgia, which was ten years after Knicks Pacers. Maybe I should just avoid all discussion of sports in years ending with “3.”

6. It was a stipulation of Kareem’s that if he was to attend this event and speak, someone else had to also speak. He didn’t want to be the only speaker. I don’t know if this was a matter of policy, but it seemed to be so. I wondered why. My speculation on the matter is not based on any reporting. But it seemed curious: he would not do it of he was the only speaker. I decided that he wanted this, required it, for purposes of context. If someone else spoke, it would be harder to take some snippet of what he said out of context. Another speaker would make it much easier to establish the situation beyond his own words. Perkins spoke movingly about Kareem, and the financial sponsor - or the representative of whatever bank sponsored the show - also spoke about Kareem and about basketball. He was a tall slender UVA grad who either played on the team or was just an avid fan. He paid for it and of course I have forgotten his name.

7. Tagging along with my wife, who was appearing at the Cape Cod Book Festival, I sat next to the distinguished Harvard professor and author Imani Perry, who has written so insightfully about the South, at a dinner. It came up that I had been to Cambridge for the first time, and played pickup with my son at the Corporal Burns playground there. I was amazed to hear that Perry had spent part of her childhood in an apartment that overlooked this very playground and its courts, and that she would sometimes look out her window and watch Patrick Ewing, then a teenager, play basketball.

I tried to picture Patrick at 14 running up and down, as seen from a window above. It’s a curious thing to picture. He was so gangly by the time we all got a look at him as he approached the start of his Georgetown career, but he was already huge. Patrick as a gangly 14 year old of still normal height, give or take, is an amazing thing to ponder-Patrick just as he was organizing his game face, as one does at around that age.