The Knicks’ first title in 53 years brought the whole city together. A first-person report from the Canyon of Heroes.
OG Anunoby is at the free-throw line. He misses the first. My entire body tenses. The second shot falls. The Knicks are up by 4. The Spurs inbound the ball. The clock reads 7.7. San Antonio has no timeouts and less than eight seconds to bring the ball up the floor and somehow score 4 points. Any rational basketball fan would say that the game is all but over. Although, if you’re a Knicks fan, it’s that “but” that keeps your lungs from filling completely. In a game that was essentially over, I felt exactly like Quint from Jaws describing his rescue from the wreckage of the Indianapolis, “You know that was the time I was most frightened? Waitin’ for my turn.” Letting yourself believe would be tempting the fate of God. No matter how intellectually certain victory seemed, there was always that nagging doubt, a voice screaming this doesn’t happen for Knicks fans. But, like Quint, our turn finally came. The Knicks are NBA champions once again, 53 years after the years of Clyde Frazier and Willis Reed. Those 53 years were the 1,100 men that went in the water, and we all know only “three hundred and sixteen men come out, the sharks took the rest.” Sharks with names like Michael Jordan, Hakeem Olajuwon, Tim Duncan, Reggie Miller, and Tyrese Haliburton.
The jubilation of New York City over the past month reached its pinnacle today when, at long last, New York City had a parade to celebrate their very own New York Knickerbockers entering the Canyon of Heroes and the books of history. The New York Post is reporting today’s parade as the largest ticker-tape parade in Big Apple history. Knicks fans flooded lower Manhattan, hoping to catch a glimpse of the team that brought the Larry O’Brien Trophy back to Madison Square Garden. Knicks fans were so desperate to figure out ways into the celebrations that I heard from two different attendees (who asked not to be named) about the ways they skirted around the law. One man claimed he walked the parade route at 3 a.m., trying to find hidden access routes past the barricades. He said he had found the perfect spot and even buried a set of bolt cutters there, but his access was blown when some less-than-careful teenagers stumbled upon his entry and their babbling alerted the cops. Another attendee showed me his homemade “all-access” badge, which, along with his confidence, succeeded in granting him access to the closed-off ceremony plaza. Knicks fans are devoted.
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Fittingly, Mike Breen, the voice of the Knicks, was the emcee of the ceremony at City Hall, in which Mayor Zohran Mamdani presented everyone in the Knicks organization with a key to the city. The oppressive heat and humidity muted the crowd response slightly, so the Knicks City Kids didn’t get the response they were probably expecting, but once the champions came out, a crowd of fans, celebrities, and former players (John Starks was in the crowd chomping on a rather large cigar) “paid homage to their heroes” in the parlance of Walt “Clyde” Frazier.
The entirety of City Hall Park was closed off with several moats of barricades, so even with a press pass (real or homemade) it took some doing to get through. I made it through security at 6:30 a.m. and found a spot directly across from the dais, nestled between a cable news video village and one of five confetti cannons that, when fired, covered City Hall Park so completely in orange and blue confetti that I almost lost some of my own video equipment. From the moment I landed in my spot to the final speech, there was a consistent roar from the crowd behind me on Broadway. Every 20 minutes or so we would hear a large swell of noise before it diminuendoed back to its steady ambient. Inside the park, the audience ran deep with Knicks devotees, such as superfans John Turturro and Ben Stiller, and members of the extended Knicks media universe like 7PM in Brooklyn podcast co-host The Kid Mero and Roommates Podcast co-host Matt Hillman. Josh Safdie had what looked like an Arri camera on a shoulder rig filming the speeches, no doubt for the upcoming A24 documentary he and Stiller are making on the Knicks.
Sports still seem like the most socially acceptable reason for grown men to cry. Parade attendee Peter Abbadessa admits to getting a little emotional when the final second ticked off the clock. Abbadessa said, “It means everything to me as a fan and as a New Yorker. My family, we’ve been in New York here since 1896. It’s everything to bring this city together. It’s a dream come true.” And it’s true: the Knicks are unique among New York sports teams in that they don’t split the city — they unite it. Yankees or Mets. Giants or Jets. Rangers or Islanders. All the other New York fan bases are split, but in New York there’s only one NBA team that matters, and for too long was a source of nothing but heartache and disappointment. Photographer Chris Bacarella said this championship “felt like watching the ’07 Giants on steroids.”
The joy this Knicks run has sparked has been nothing short of magical, and it extended beyond the confines of New York, as the Knicks fans travel, so does the jubilee. Los Angeles writer and comedian Colby Smith needed to do nothing more than leave his apartment in a Staten Island Ferry T-shirt: “And a guy pointed at me and goes ‘we did it bro.'” After each game of this Knicks’ final run, New Yorkers spilled into the streets across the five boroughs, hugging and high-fiving strangers, chanting together, crying together, feeling together. I’ve never felt a coming together like this before in this city. There’s a reason why comedian Desus Nice called this the “reverse 9/11.” Parade attendee Nick B. said, “I think my biggest concern about winning was that it’d be this momentary burst, like after all these years actually winning would ultimately be a letdown. It’s almost been the opposite — it’s been sustained joy over days.”
The post-championship Knicks have already given us a plethora of perfect moments, most of them coming from OG Anunoby, starting when directly after winning a title OG went live from the Knicks locker room for 18 seconds, during almost all of which he spent asking his celebrating teammates how to turn it off. Jeremy Sochan hasn’t seemed to have worn a shirt since Game 5. Mikal Bridges similarly went on Instagram Live completely faded and demanded a “big-headed” statue for Jalen Brunson. The starting five has appeared hungover on daytime talk shows and hungover on late-night talk shows, and there’s something very beautiful about their celebrations paralleling the good-hearted debauchery occurring throughout the city. This title has become a great coming together. All walks of life are joining their celebrations. Even non-Knicks fans are feeling the energy. Even the amount of ire toward the hated “bandwagon fans” was kept surprisingly at a minimum. Comedian Alise Morales watched Game 5 from the Del Close Marathon, a 24-hour improv comedy festival hosted by UCB. She said, “It was definitely a mix of huge lifelong Knicks fans, new fans, and out-of-towners who were just excited to be experiencing New York at such a high point … It was honestly one of my favorite moments in my 15 years in NYC. People were just so hyped to be together and be celebrating.” The relief of winning was so great that the die-hard Knicks fans opened their arms and embraced the love, no matter where it came from.
The city is alive. New York Forever.
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