Extra! Extra! Knicks in Five!

Jonathan Lethem on the champs

Well, they did it. After a fifty-three-year drought and a five-game series, the New York Knickerbockers—led by a seemingly unstoppable Jalen Brunson—are the National Basketball Association champions. What else is there to say? As Jonathan Lethem, blogging the NBA finals for the NYR Online, writes in his final post: “Therein lies the difficulty with making this final report: once it was over, all seemed utterly fated.” Or as the Knicks’ Karl-Anthony Towns, jubilant in Madison Square Garden, put it to the TNT interviewer Ernie Johnson: “It is written. This was written for New York.”

Alone in the Gym

Jonathan Lethem

In order to defy the odds, to prove themselves masters of the impossible, the Knicks very gently rebuked my maxim, by letting the Spurs beat them by two points in the third quarter. Yet the game was somehow already in the bag, in a “we have them right where we want them” sense. Or so it felt, in retrospect. Therein lies the difficulty with making this final report: once it was over, all seemed utterly fated. It was already being processed into a simulacrum on the platform hurriedly erected at center court for the presentation of the championship trophy, and also the most valuable player award—which went, indisputably in the end, to Jalen Brunson.

First the hateful owner, James Dolan, had his turn in the sun. He bellowed promises to New York City. Then Brunson and Karl-Anthony Towns and the other jubilant players took their turns gratifying and frustrating the network interviewer Ernie Johnson’s request that they convert their accomplishment into language. Having beckoned Jalen Brunson’s father, the former journeyman Knick and now assistant coach, onto the stage, Johnson led the witnesses atrociously, saying: “For anybody who’s a fan of father-son moments, it doesn’t get much better than this” and “What does it feel like to stand next to him holding that trophy?” I can feel stirred by father and son moments as much as the next guy who has been both of those things, but prefer them a bit less forced. So, it seemed, did Brunson, who withheld any mention of his father in his generic answer: “It’s everything we dreamed of. It’s why I came to New York.”

Speaking with Towns, a few minutes later, Johnson quite literally used the phrase, “Can you put that into words for me?” Towns’s reply included the enigmatic suggestion that it had already been made of words, long beforehand: “It is written. This was written for New York.”

In fact, Game 5 took a shape that had become familiar—dare I say even a little predictable? The Spurs brought a youthful fury to the opening quarter and as always opened up a double-digit lead. The Knicks looked stymied by a smothering defensive, and turned over the ball too much. They appealed bitterly to referees they felt were biased against them. And then they came back, re-seized the lead only in the latter half of the fourth quarter, and won. The fact that this was a sixteen-point comeback got little attention, after last game’s improbabilities. But the dynamic was similar, except that this time Towns and the Knicks’ bench contributed very little in the way of scoring, so that Brunson had to carry them even more. He scored forty-five points, almost half of his team’s ninety-four. His flurry began in the second quarter, really, and never relented, and the Spurs took on the air of a doomed squad. They’d showed their stuff and it was good stuff and then the Knicks’ alchemy was unveiled and the Spurs had their accomplishments stolen from them. They were, for this year, the backdrop. So young, so talented, they’ll likely be considered favorites next year. In the manner of other miracle teams over the years, in New York and elsewhere, this group of Knicks may not be.

Of course, what happened on the court was really just a thing that happened, a game that was played, and thrilling at the finish. Contra Towns, it wasn’t actually “written.” It will be written now, though not much more by me. My own language had already begun to fall away during Wednesday’s game, the comeback too enthralling for me to bother taking notes. Tonight I watched with the offspring again, to let my fair-weather fandom be rewarded, and also to feel it melted into the collective mystery. I shouted along with my kids. Merely because I had promised to do some typing afterward didn’t actually place me in any special relation to the occurrence on the screen. Figuring out what it means to me is either too private or too insignificant to need excavation. Probably it is both. I happened to speak yesterday with a friend who grew up in New England, a friend barely interested in sports, but he offered this observation: “The whole Red Sox thing was never the same once they won. They just went back to being a normal team.” The championship season evaporates and leaves one to wonder why it seemed so essential, so transformative, in the making.

A few moments before he mounted the stage to join his teammates, immediately after clenching his father, mother, and wife in a series of deep hugs, Jalen Brunson was pulled into a one-on-one interview with the reporter Lisa Salters, who caught him in a relatively unguarded moment. “Holy shit,” he began, then stopped. “I got no words.” But then he found a few. “I don’t know what I’m feeling, I’m in awe, I don’t know.” When Salters asked about his willful confidence in carrying his team to the finish line, Brunson stumbled his way to this declaration: “Whenever I had the ball I’m just thinking about me alone in the gym.”

Read blog posts for the rest of the series here.

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