Basketball is enough

The Knicks and gentrifying fandom

Marcus Camby playing basketball, before a crowd of basketball fans (source)

I. Camby vs. Ferry

Last week I was browsing the web and came across video of a stillborn NBA brawl from 2001. In the clip, New York Knicks center Marcus Camby pleads his case to a referee during a stoppage in play; assistant coach Don Chaney looks on. Suddenly, Camby darts toward the scorer’s table and throws a roundhouse punch in the direction of San Antonio Spurs forward Danny Ferry. The punch misses and Camby collides with Knicks head coach Jeff Van Gundy, who’d rushed in to break up the melee, and would require twelve stitches. Camby was ejected and stationed himself in the Madison Square Garden tunnel, hoping to get another another crack at Ferry as the Spurs boarded their charter bus. Ultimately, Camby was suspended five games and fined $25,000.

The clip was making the rounds on Wednesday, the game’s 24th anniversary, which made my vision blur. I was there! I was ten, it was Martin Luther King Day, we were in the purple seats on the Seventh Avenue side. The next day I wrote a letter to my pen pal Jeff, an old neighbor and fellow Knicks fan who’d moved to Houston. The video itself looks like the dang Zapruder film; I am now, evidently, a senior citizen. My disorientation was exacerbated by a barrage of attendant Knicks content: the podcasts, the fanfic, the memes, the memes, the memes.

“Are the Knicks Becoming Corny?”

Jayson Buford

asked in a post from July, published after the Knicks traded for Mikal Bridges, reuniting him with college teammates Jalen Brunson and Josh Hart. I reject the premise if not the sentiment. I find Brunson and Hart’s media presence exhausting, but I love watching them play basketball. I don’t really get Karl-Anthony Towns’s whole thing — the clothes, the code-switching, the Kardashian girlfriend — but he pulls up from the logo and leads the league in rebounds. The Knicks are stone-cold hoopers.

What’s corny is Knicks fandom, how it’s become synonymous with streetwear espresso martini podcast bros. New York City’s sterilization is concurrent with the upzoning of NBA viewership, inflating one another like accordion bellows. One home game each year is reserved for Kith Night; Trae Young, we are told by grown men in front-facing videos, is Not Valid In Dyckman. Penn Badgley is the new Spike Lee. This shit is happening across the league, across culture, and putative Knicks fans are the worst offenders. Bing bong!

Before I’m charged with Making Up A Guy, allow me to present this New Yorker feature on Cookies Hoops, a popular podcast and media property operated by Ben Detrick and Andrew Kuo, self-identifying ”nightlife guys“ in their late forties:

Kuo and Detrick run a company called Cookies Hoops, which is like a support group for the basketball-obsessed. There’s a podcast, an apparel line, a newsletter, an annual three-on-three tournament, and a new book, called “The Joy of Basketball.” Written by Detrick and illustrated by Kuo, it’s an encyclopedia: part art book, part social commentary, part desk reference. The entries are alphabetical, listing players (“Durant, Kevin”), teams, and miscellaneous themes (“Feral Bigs,” “Ninja Headbands,” “Load Management”). Under “Knicks 4 Life,” there’s one of Kuo’s trademark charts, plotting the emotions of Knicks fans on a color spectrum ranging from “Relying on hope/faith” (very bad) to “Raving under bridges” (kinda good). A full-page illustration depicts the Starks dunk, with the rim made to look like a halo. “The Knicks reflect the self-identity of the New Yorker — past and present,” Detrick writes. “It is basketball funneled through Fran Lebowitz, wearing Lugz boots and shoveling a bacon, egg, and cheese into her maw while smoking a loosie.”

Jesus Christ! There’s so much shit in here, but my takeaway — as someone who will never listen to this godforsaken podcast — is these guys don’t actually like basketball. If they did, they would not be so eager to use it as a metaphor for Fran Lebowitz, or a lens into menswear. They would discuss the Knicks as a fun and cool and good basketball team, instead of this New York Nico-ass fetishization of fading local culture.

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Billionaires holding fans hostage: Good or bad? (source)

II. Liberated Fandom

Back in 2001, when I watched Marcus Camby chase Danny Ferry on the basketball court above Penn Station, there was a local and a national sports media. Both circulated via cable television, AM radio, and newspapers. It was pretty simple. You might hear some stats thrown around, discussion of the executives who assembled rosters with owners’ checkbooks, but focus was on the feats of extraordinary athletes.

ESPN reflected this turn-of-the-century mode, airing highlights and box scores on 24-hour loops, before deciding it was all too stat-heavy. Joe Sixpack didn’t care about Jamal Mashburn’s per-36 figures, but — between swigs of Michelob — he might have opinions on whether Mash had the will to win. The ‘94 baseball strike and ‘98 NBA lockout were fresh in everyone’s mind; better to steer away from the labor stuff.

So we got Pardon the Interruption, and Around the Horn, and Stephen A. Smith yelling at Skip Bayless. These shows were proudly anti-intellectual, middle-aged men barking over one other in fifteen-second increments. Each argument was bound by a countdown clock; the loudest man won. By airing the speculations of blustery boomers in lieu of actual news, ESPN became a parade of the most abhorrent takes imaginable, ranging from “It’s okay to beat your wife” to “Dinosaurs were a hoax” to “Sean Taylor had it coming when he was murdered in a home invasion.”

The counterweight, for those who sought it, was blogs disconnected from the ESPN industrial complex: the irreverent Deadspin, the bookish Classical, the tetchy Awful Announcing and Kissing Suzy Kolber. FreeDarko was a forerunner of basketblogging, a sensitive, thinking-man’s tribute to pro hoops. On any given night in February there were fifteen NBA games, but only two or three mattered; FreeDarko surveyed the forsaken ballgames with a romantic eye. What if these meaningless, small-market contests could tell us something about art, or commerce, or the human condition?

While ESPN crowed about “character issues,” FreeDarko espoused “Liberated Fandom,” that we might appreciate basketball players in their flawed, mercurial brilliance. The project was earnest and overcooked, touchy-feely and woefully Gen X, white guys who’d look you in the eye and tell you basketball is jazz. (Maybe Gerald Wallace was just a guy with braids, and not a mystical folk hero?) It was a niche concern by 2010 standards, but the ethos — basketball as analogy for concerns of self-conscious white dudes — is everywhere now.

Grantland published articles by FreeDarko alumni, bestowing their perspectives with institutional sheen. Zach Lowe (basketball-as-finance) and Kirk Goldsberry (basketball-as-math) were eminences in the field of Approaching Basketball As Anything Other Than Basketball. Thousands of words on court design, team logos and uniform sets, buy-low sell-high prospects, League Pass darlings. Nothing that would make you think, for even one second, that they enjoyed basketball except as a means of modeling fragile, intellectual masculinity. The modern gentleman is too ironic, detached, and sophisticated to take basketball seriously, so instead he is a wise appreciator, statistician-slash-handicapper-slash-fashion critic-slash-memelord. It is basketball funneled through Fran Lebowitz.

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To my downtown crew, uptown crew/True New Yorkers wear orange and blue (source)

III. The Mecca

I’m neither old enough nor smart enough to catalog everything that’s been lost in New York’s affordability crisis, but I suppose I’m privy to Vibe Shifts. Not to keep harping on that game in 2001 — on Martin Luther King Day, no less — but from the outside looking in, New York culture was Black culture. It was Nas and Hov and Rocawear and He Got Game. It was The Tunnel and the 40/40 Club, exported to the hinterlands via Hot 97 and 106 & Park.

I’m not saying rap and hoops are panaceas — just that they were practically monoculture, whereas today New York is more expensive, more exclusive, more segregated than at any other time in my life. The sort of man who ingratiated himself now stakes a claim; if you went to RISD and frequent the L.E.S., pro basketball is your entree into foreign territory. Granted, I am describing a broader phenomenon: Bill Simmons earnestly pondering What If Kobe Were White, overzealous basketbloggers dissecting Terry Rozier’s dribble-penetration in the language of a Pitchfork review.

If, to quote Detrick, “the Knicks reflect the self-identity of the New Yorker,” it’s because New York is a luxury good. Knicks owner James Dolan is the billionaire class’s most beseeching, bumbling tyrant, a sex pest and Trump mega-donor. He blacks out in-market games as arbitrage against cable companies; he deploys facial-recognition surveillance against paying ticketholders, lest he ever face opprobrium. He does not pay taxes on the most valuable arena in the United States.

Getting mad at Dolan is like getting mad at weather; what’s vexing is how Knicks fandom is also shorthand for bygone working-class affectations. “Hating the mayor, complaining about the subway, and getting at least slightly invested in a Knick playoff run are core NYC duties,” GQ’s Matthew Roberson declared last year, “even if you’re like me and hail from the other side of the country.” Californians displacing New Yorkers to inhabit a culture that endures only in their imaginations, and gloating about it besides.

On the internet Hart and OG Anunoby are akin to pro wrestlers or Real Housewives, fodder for memes and reaction gifs. The Post’s screaming headlines, Mike and the Mad Dog’s non-rhotic invective, have been supplanted by bait — more ominous, because the people doing it ostensibly know better. No one cared that Allan Houston and Charlie Ward were evangelical bigots. They were just ballplayers.

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I enjoy watching these basketball players play basketball (source)

IV. Revenge of the Nerds

The best explanation for the Obama-era cultural morass is what I’ll call the “revenge-of-the-nerds” theory: basically, a succession of I.P. arrangements and easily-incited fan communities resulted in the mainstreaming of Comic Con lowbrow. The studios and streaming platforms realized nerds would eat any slop emblazoned with the Marvel seal, so the rest of us have to eat it too. Rent is so high no one can write novels; criticizing Taylor Swift gets you sent to the Hague.

It’s an ambient shittiness . No one’s making you listen to Tortured Poets or watch Doctor Strange 6, but pro basketball suffers a more advanced case. Shams Charania reports the Dallas Mavericks have traded their eleventh man for a draft pick, and NBA fans go apeshit. The trade has no basketball implications; it is checkbook-balancing in deference to an arbitrary budget or deadline. Mark Cuban gets richer and the world keeps turning. Who cares? There’s already a stock market, it’s called the stock market.

The most annoying members of the laptop class have free reign to curate pro basketball in accordance with their worldviews. Nick Thompson proclaims Enes Kanter is a political prisoner; Ben Detrick adoringly likens Paul Millsap to Chuck Schumer. Andrew Yang has thoughts on the Jerome James contract. Mopey dorks are lame, but mopey dorks who can talk ball? Slightly less lame. They are clueless foot-soldiers, over-intellectualizing basketball until it’s dumber than ever.

From what have we been liberated? Stephen A. Smith and Skip Bayless have their own networks. Josh Hart is memestock, Mitch Robinson a $60 million tax write-off. Donovan Mitchell and Shai Gilgeous-Alexander are subject to a literal dick-measuring contest; James Dolan’s cover band opens for the Eagles. I would just like to enjoy some basketball.