Vol. 179: About that Knicks celebration

When the thing you were waiting for finally happens

Isn’t it something, the way the New York Knicks brought thousands of otherwise hostile New Yorkers together in common cause this month to celebrate their first National Basketball Association championship in 53 years?

“It is giggling, weeping, spinning, convulsing, mosh-pitting, truck-honking, law-skirting, trumpet-playing, cowbell-ringing, off-key-singing, cigar-lighting, all-night-ing— remembering to remember it all, as if Knicks fans would ever forget,” reported the usually sober New York Times.

“It is hugging strangers so hard they go airborne, fist-bumping cabbies as they crawl through concrete delirium, high-fiving kids on shoulders (and adults on shoulders), climbing stoplights and trees and scaffolding to wave the team flag higher, swiping utility cones and wearing them as hats because they are orange.”

But what most impressed me was the way ancient antagonisms crumbled on that magical night. Blacks and whites, Democrats and Republicans, liberals and conservatives, Trumpers and progressives, feminists and sexual harassers, Jews and neo-Nazis, Catholics and Protestants, Israelis and Palestinians, Hindus and Muslims, Sunnis and Shi’ites, Brits and Irish, Galitzianers and Litvaks, even Episcopalians and Presbyterians, for goodness’ sake— all joined hands in common cause, brought together by nothing more than the thrilling sight of five men running up and down a hardwood floor in their underwear.

Scaling light poles

If you failed to appreciate this moment, that may be because you recall the 1979 celebration in Pittsburgh, when the Pirates won baseball’s World Series for the first time in 19 years. On that occasion, according to reliable reports, the festivities included several female Pirate fans who, in the passionate delirium of the moment, spontaneously performed oral sex on male strangers on the streets of downtown Pittsburgh. New York’s revelry, by contrast, was relatively sedate.

As for Philadelphia, when the Eagles won pro football’s supreme title in February 2018 for the first time in 57 years, the New York Times informed its readers: “In the grand old city with the grand old football tradition, they will scale light poles and drive dune buggies up the steps of the Philadelphia Museum of Art and chant ‘Fly Eagles Fly’ until their voice vanishes. The party will rage for months, because the improbable has happened.”

Well, yes. In this slog otherwise known as human life, everyone needs an occasional sublime moment to sustain us through the miserable toil and struggle to come. Some of us might find sublimity in artistic events, such as the shocking New York Armory Show of 1913 or the opening night of Beckett’s Waiting for Godot in 1953.

When Fieldston hated Barnard

Still, when the clock expired on the Knicks’ victory this month, I found myself recalling a similar celebration that took place in January 1961 when my New York prep school, the Fieldston School, finally defeated its despised basketball rival, the Barnard School for Boys.

These two schools had hated each other since before I was born. During my six years at Fieldston, we played Barnard’s basketball team 12 times and lost all 12 games, usually by lopsided scores. Can you imagine the frustration and anger that gnawed away at loyal Fieldstonites year after year?

Why, exactly, did these two schools hate each other so, and why did their faculties tolerate and even tacitly encourage such hostility? The trite answer is that they hated each other for the same reason Yale hates Harvard, Cambridge hates Oxford, Eagles fans hate Dallas, and France (once) hated Germany: because their parents, not to mention their parents’ parents, hated each other.

But ultimately some genuine pedagogical logic may have justified the Fieldston-Barnard rivalry. At least since the 19th Century, educators have instinctively perceived the critical role played by sports in fostering two vital components of human achievement: competition and cooperation. These pedagogues recognized that such a perception is best conveyed in some practical and dramatic form; that the essence of drama is conflict; and that, short of the ultimate conflict— war— the safest and most effective surrogate might be an age-old traditional rivalry against a contrived enemy school conveniently located just a few city blocks away.

Pandemonium strikes

In the rivalry’s final basketball game of my senior year, Fieldston managed, for the first time in my six years there, to hold Barnard’s margin of victory to fewer than ten points. When that game ended, I melodramatically announced, in my capacity as Fieldston’s co-captain, that no matter where I might be in the future, I would return to New York for every Fieldston-Barnard basketball game until we beat them.

Fortunately for my future plans, Fieldston’s basketball team finally defeated Barnard the following year, when I was a freshman at Penn. And what pandemonium ensued when that game ended! Mobs of Fieldston students— some of whom had been in kindergarten the last time Fieldston won a basketball game against Barnard— stormed the court in a hysterical orgy of screaming, jumping, weeping, hugging, kissing. And then… and then…

After ten or 15 minutes of this mayhem, people started looking at their watches, gathering up their books, checking their homework assignments, and bumming rides home from seniors with cars.

“It was the first time I realized how reality tends to disappoint expectations,” my younger brother Bob, then Fieldston’s basketball manager, recalled years later, when he was a rabbi. “When the thing you were so looking forward to finally happens, how can you possibly express all your pent-up hopes in that moment? I remember thinking: Isn’t there more? Couldn’t there be more? Now we just go back to what we were doing?”

Bednarik’s greatest game

I will give the last word to the late Chuck Bednarik, the mainstay of Philadelphia’s National Football League champion team in 1960. During a radio interview in 1980, Bednarik was asked to choose the greatest game of his college career at the University of Pennsylvania. Without hesitation, he cited the 1948 Penn-Army game at Franklin Field, a seesaw affair witnessed by 78,000 fans, in which Penn held the lead three times against the heavily favored Cadets, only to lose in the final minute on a touchdown pass caught by Army’s Jack Trent.

The interviewer, a Penn student, expressed surprise: How could a heroic All-American figure like Bednarik choose a defeat as his greatest game?

You could almost hear Bednarik shrug over the airwaves. “Well, two years later Jack Trent was killed in Korea,” he explained. “When I heard that, I realized it was foolish to get too concerned over whether we won or lost a football game.”

For that matter, Fieldston’s hated rival, the Barnard School for Boys, closed its doors in 1972. Not much left to hate there.

But here is the good news: You can still spend the day at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, basking in some of the work that once caused riots at that 1913 Armory show. What is truly sublime truly endures.

Enjoy Dan Rottenberg’s newest book, The Price We Paid: An Oral History of Penn’s Struggle to Join the Ivy League, 1950-55. You can also visit his website at www.danrottenberg.com