Saved By The Bell: Start Spreading the Blues

Red Sox fans, I don’t want to hear about your curse. I have my own.

I spent last Friday evening watching the Toronto Raptors celebrate their playoff win at expense of my New York Knicks. Although it was the Knicks’ first first-round playoff exit in 10 years, it wasn’t surprising. The Knicks were without starter Larry Johnson, and were hardly prohibitive favorites to begin with.

But what bothered me is the way it happened. Year in and year out, the Knicks’ season reads like a David E. Kelley drama. I take the way the Knicks keep losing as a sign that the almighty writer just doesn’t want the Knicks to win in my lifetime.

The Knicks were beset by a number of distractions during the Toronto series, chief among them a bizarre hostage situation involving center Marcus Camby’s family at their Connecticut home. The standoff ended with Camby’s sister a victim of sexual assault, and Camby himself badly shaken.

Camby, the team’s best player this year, did not recover. He was dreadful in a Raptor blowout, and sat out the third game to be with his family. Even when he returned, Camby wasn’t the same.

Events like Camby’s ordeal put sports in perspective. The healing process his family has to endure from this point on transcends the importance of any playoff series, and anyone who faults Camby for his ineffectiveness or his Game 3 absence needs a head examination.

But the thoughts of a Knick fan like myself inevitably drift back to the game, and how fate has done it to us once again.

Every year, fate finds a new way for the Knicks to lose. This year, the combined pressure of Camby’s personal situation and the backlash surrounding recent anti-Semitic comments by point guard Charlie Ward may have proven too much for the Knicks to overcome. That and the offense of ex-Knick Chris Childs, who never played this well in the Garden when he wore the home uniform.

With the Knicks, there’s always something. Last year, Ewing was injured during his final Knick playoff run, and the Indiana Pacers’ frontcourt dominated the glass to advance to the NBA Finals. The year before that, Ewing tore his achilles during the playoffs, but the Knicks miraculously made it to the championship series, anyway. Fans began to talk about how much better the team was without Ewing-until San Antonio Spurs’ tandem of Tim Duncan and David Robinson made them realize that sometimes, even a sullen, aging center is better than none at all.

The amazing thing is that those were relatively boring exits for the Knicks. In the early 1990s, the Knicks contended every year only to be crushed by Michael Jordan and the Bulls. The image the New York faithful took from that era was Charles Smith’s four missed layups at the end of a critical clash with Chicago in 1993.

After Jordan left, I hoped the championships would start rolling in. Instead, the Knicks only found new ways to lose. One year, fan favorite John Starks would inexplicably go 2-for-18 in Game 7 of the Finals, and Pat Riley would refuse to take him out in favor of sharpshooter Hubert Davis. Another year, Reggie Miller would score eight points in 18 seconds to steal an early lead from the Knicks-the series ended when Ewing missed a game-winning layup from two feet away. Another year, the Knicks would go up 3-1 on Miami—only to brawl with the Heat in Game 5 and lose several players to suspensions. The Heat came back to win.

So fate has it in for us. But even if fate were to relent, what would it matter? I’ve read about the championship teams of the early 1970s, the Knicks of Willis Reed, Walt Frazier and Dave DeBusschere. My mom has told me about how all of New York fell in love with them.

Few in New York really fall in love with today’s Knicks. A healthy following does exist, but the draw seems to be a sort of morbid fascination rather than real affection. Some fans are repulsed by the thug image perpetuated by some of the players—Charles Oakley and Anthony Mason four years ago or Latrell Sprewell and Kurt Thomas today. Other fans are only mildly interested by the constant subplot, but never really grow attached to the actual team.

There are other reasons. The NBA isn’t as popular as it used to be. The players are overpaid. Tickets cost too much.

Whatever the reason for New York’s inabilityto embrace the Knicks as warmly as it does its baseball teams, the end result is even more depressing than the consistently bizarre exits.

It’s worse because when that glorious day finally does come, once the Knicks finally do overcome the adversity that constantly plagues them, no one will care.

And that’s a curse even Red Sox fans don’t have to live with.