Team!
Teams change. They have to. Players get injured, age out, or stop fitting. Other players come and go for various reasons. The big one lately is salary caps. Oddly, a “good salary” underpays a valuable player. And the draft brings in rookies every year. Some work out, some don’t. Some only work out when they get replanted with another team.
But there are times when teams are teams, and just work. I think that’s the Knicks right now, even though they’ve lost five of their last six games. One does learn by losing as well as winning. I’m sure that’s happening now.
What I’m saying there is Don’t make any trades. Keep the team together. If you do, and everyone stays healthy, they’ll win the East, and maybe the championship as well.
Sports polygamies
I grew up in a town in New Jersey that is closer to Manhattan than much of Brooklyn and Queens. The city skyline combed the horizon east of my bedroom window. As a kid in the ’50s, my main teams were the Brooklyn Dodgers and the New York Knicks. When the Dodgers divorced Brooklyn and married Los Angeles—and the Giants did the same when they ran off with San Francisco—I was lost along with millions of other local National League (aka Anyone But the Yankees) fans until we were all adopted by the New York Mets. That happened in ’62, when I was 15. I loved those Mets immediately and still do.
But I also move around. In 1965, at age 18, I went to college in North Carolina, where I fell in love with college basketball. (My school, Guilford College, was at the top of the NAIA, and won the championship in ’74. Bob Kauffman was the big star during my first three years there.) I also started playing pickup and intramural basketball then, and fell in love with that too. (All I was good at was shooting if nobody defended me. I had no other skills and had the leaping ability of a parking lot. But shooting got me chosen other than last for pick-up games, and if I got the first shot in a game of HORSE, there was a fair chance that I’d win. Now old and arthritic, I shoot about 3% from out there. Or anywhere. (Caution: the best line ever uttered by New Jersey senator Cory Booker was in response to a question about his skills as a high school football player: “The older I get, the better I was.” Same goes for me and pickup basketball.)
When I went back to New Jersey for a stretch between 1969 and 1974, I fell in love with the New York Knicks. I had liked them before I went to North Carolina, but not the way I liked the Mets. But between the Mets’ World Series win in 1969, the National League Pennant in ’73, and the Knicks’ NBA championships in ’70 and ’73, I was in sports heaven.
But then I moved back to North Carolina, where I became fully invested in college basketball, which is almost a religion there. The family fave (I have many kin in NC) was, and remains, the Wake Forest Demon Deacons. But I couldn’t help digging all of ACC basketball, especially the North Carolina Tar Heels, because I lived mostly in and around Chapel Hill. Starting in the Fall of ’77, I started going to all the Duke games I talk about in my Whoosiers post, which made me a Duke fan.
Then, in 1985, I joined David Hodskins in Palo Alto, to set up our business there. College basketball in the Bay Area was small stuff at the time (still is, mostly), so we got season tickets to the Golden State Warriors, to which I stayed a loyal fan until I moved to Santa Barbara in 2001. During that time, I also enjoyed following the San Francisco Giants and 49ers, and the Oakland A’s (though not the Raiders). I never stopped loving the Nets and the Knicks, though I didn’t follow them closely.
Though the Southern California teams—Dodgers, Lakers, Angels, Clippers, Chargers—enjoyed some loyalty among locals in Santa Barbara, I had rooted against all of them too much over the years to develop any new loyalties. Though now I’m ready to dig the A’s, because my favorite Met, Jeff McNeil, was just traded there. Though I’ve never met Jeff, his mom is our bookkeeper in Santa Barbara, and I’ve followed his career a bit through her.
Anyway, in 2007, we moved to Boston, just in time for the Celtics, Red Sox, and Patriots all to have great seasons (the first two won championships in ’08, while the Pats were undefeated in the regular season, but lost in the Super Bowl, inviting the third-best second-best Onion headline of all time*). Our son was 10 years old when we arrived, and he and I got totally involved in the local sports scene. If you told me when I was growing up that I would become a fan of any Boston sports team, I’d have thought you nuts, but that’s what happened: I had an affair with all three teams. Still do, though I continue to love the Mets and the Knicks. (I was never crazy about the New York football Giants and Jets, though I did like them.)
I think my loyalties are kind of like those of a coach. You love the one you’re with. And when you’re away from all your sports loves (as I am now from New York, North Carolina, California, and New England), you kind of root for all of them in some ways.
But the blood runs deepest. I’m a son of New York, and will be until I’m gone.
* The second best was Skip navigation Sony Releases Stupid Piece Of Shit That Doesn’t Fucking Work. The best was Anti-Spam Legislation Opposed By Powerful Penis-Enlargement Lobby.
Look over there
I just made what I had here into its own post: Whoosiers!
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