Keidel: MSG Is Nothing More Than A Building Filled With Lies
By Jason Keidel
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I apologize to Jets fans for branding them the worst fans in the five boroughs and beyond. It was myopic, inappropriate, and inaccurate. The jaded Jets devotee is impossible to engage at times, but you are salvageable.
The true, blind Fan Guy indeed dwells in Gotham, but he's not swathed in Gang Green.
He's spending two grand for courtside seats, for just one game, wrapped in orange in blue. He's toiling in incessant pain, watching the world's most unheralded team near Herald Square, in the sports mausoleum called MSG.
Just three months ago we were lost in an echo chamber of optimism. Not only had the Knicks turned the proverbial page from the wretched Isiah Thomas torture chamber, but we had seen his inverse. The true messiah had landed on 7th Avenue, lording over the basketball world from his corner office inside 2 Penn Plaza.
Phil Jackson swung open the saloon doors and blasted all the bad guys. He had not only brought his swagger, pedigree, endless string of titles, but he was the Native Son come home, the cycle of basketball life complete. His final act in his bejeweled basketball life would be to bring life to a flatlined franchise, his franchise, where he learned the game at the altar of Red Holzman, a journey that began in Montana, the son of a minister, spawned by true holy rollers, the basketball iteration of "A River Runs Through It."
One of my first articles for WFAN.com, nearly five years ago, was called "No Garden Party." It was a tortured treatise on the carcass we call Madison Square Garden. And, sadly, nothing has changed since. The biggest problem isn't location, vocation, or a dearth of decent talent.
The biggest problem facing MSG is honesty. It's a building full of lies.
It's a lie to say it's the world's most famous arena. It's a lie to say it's the Mecca of Basketball. In fact, that assertion is a joke. The Knicks haven't won a title in 42 years. St. John's hasn't threatened for NCAA supremacy since the Big East was the beast of college basketball in the 1980s. It's a lie to price the proletarian out of the building, to charge Porsche prices for a Prius. In any other industry, a sagging product has a commensurate price. Except at MSG, where greed still bleeds your paycheck dry.
A New Yorker, a true New Yorker, not the Oberlin grad who moved here at 25 for the hot yoga and skinny jeans, knows that the Garden was built way more on boxing than NBA basketball. And long before the Knicks mattered, hockey and college basketball trumped the Knicks on the MSG marquee.
Going back to its days on 49th Street -- and built by boxing promoter Tex Rickard -- the Garden was the main nerve of pugilism, pregnant with luminaries like Joe Louis, Sugar Ray Robinson, Rocky Marciano, and some kid named Cassius Clay, who later blessed the new building as Muhammad Ali.
Just last summer I sat ringside as the Garden blossomed with boxing, booming with ethnic pride. Thousands of Puerto Rican fans cheered Miguel Cotto while he pummeled Sergio Martinez. And if Cotto signs to fight Canelo Alvarez at MSG around Cinco de Mayo, the building will explode with flags and flavor and fervor.
The Knicks don't have a fraction of that traction. Even if the team still sells tickets, you must wonder who's buying them. Is it the old-school fan or the new-world hipster? Why would anyone blow their budget on this product unless they just want to be seen with Spike Lee or Seinfeld or Taylor Swift or whatever star is sparkling from the sideline?
And the spin has all of us dizzy. Before the season started, it was common to hear the local Pollyanna predict 40 or so wins and winds at the back of their beloved Knickerbockers. You could feel the mojo and new karma that comes with the Zen Master.
Now, at 5-33, with the longest losing streak in team history in tow, we're hearing how Jackson has yet again saved the franchise by dumping the salaries of Iman Shumpert and J.R. Smith, getting copious cap space in return, giving the franchise a fresh start and open wallet for the next crop of free agents.
What happened to this season? The Knicks never admit what they are, and hence they can't cure their recycled maladies. And don't ask the warped, Smith Snuggie-wearing Knicks fan what he thinks, because he will tell you Tyson Chandler would have made all the difference.
We've been hearing about new beginnings, in some form, for a decade. Since the 2004-05 season, the Knicks have finished under .500 seven times. They have won fewer than 35 games six times and more than 50 games one time. (They will be lucky to win 20 this year.) Yet we dismiss every season before it's over in the name of rebuilding. It's like that galling "Xanadu" project in New Jersey, next to MetLife Stadium, a haunted, half-built edifice that hangs in ominous relief against the Meadowlands swamp.
The Knicks have lost 23 of their last 24 games. They have now usurped the 76ers as the worst team in the NBA. Is this the production you expect from Midtown Manhattan? Is there any business in the neighborhood that accepts those results?
If we want results, we have to look toward the rear of sports, to the Rangers, who, at least, made it to the Stanley Cup Final last year. Maybe hockey is a second-tier sport and the Rangers have won just one title since 1940, but at least we're honest about them, and not embarrassed by them.
If we're honest and earnest about the Knicks, we have to be embarrassed by the Knicks, the world's worst team in the world's most overrated arena.
Follow Jason on Twitter at @JasonKeidel
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