Keidel: Before A Hardwood Hell, MSG Was The Center Of The Sports Universe
By Jason Keidel
» More Columns
They say you don't want MSG in your food. You certainly don't want it in your hoops.
The Knicks' robust two-game wining streak aside, they are 12-46 and have had four losing streaks of at least seven games this season. In a world of acronyms ... smh.
With the Knicks throwing a bevy of Hall of Fame coaches and executives at the problem to no tangible growth, it makes you wonder if the building itself were forever haunted.
But Madison Square Garden wasn't always a hardwood graveyard. Remember when it was the axis of sports, of culture, of Gotham?
A building couldn't be better placed in a city, or in our soul. A most heralded building near Herald Square opened in 1968, and the Knicks, of course, blessed the court with two titles in six years. Then nothing for the next 42 years.
College basketball and amateur boxing dangled on the sporting vine for a while, but now we're left to replays and recollections.The Rangers are fairly regal these days, but have won just one Stanley Cup since 1940. So it's up to us to take selective strolls down history.
Most of us are too young to remember the original Garden, about 15 blocks north, up 8th Avenue. But the history before 1968 is at least as celebrated as the decades since.
People think of the Garden as a basketball venue, but hardwood was the secondary surface, if not tertiary. The Rangers were founded in 1926, while the Knicks didn't start playing at MSG until 1946. Even then, college basketball dominated NYC and MSG long before the Knicks gained any traction.
And the unquestioned king of MSG was boxing. For those who still think the Knicks are the face of the five boroughs, the sweet science was the main nerve of Manhattan. And the recent announcement that Floyd Mayweather and Manny Pacquiao will square off taps into a New Yorker's nostalgia.
Joe Louis, Ray Robinson, and Rocky Marciano bogarted the bold ink decades before the NBA resonated, before street ball consumed the blacktops and playgrounds of the city.
Not only was MSG made for boxing -- physically and metaphysically -- it was even inspired, bought, and built by a boxing promoter, Tex Rickard. From 1925 until 1968, boxing was the main event, a square slab of canvas, flanked by men in fedoras pounding typewriters ringside, a halo of cigar smoke crowning the ring.
And then the "new" building hosted the fight of the century. Which was easily the night of the century. This Sunday, March 8, will be exactly 44 years since Muhammad Ali fought Joe Frazier. Not only a fight, Ali-Frazier was a referendum on race, class, and war. For one night, MSG was the vortex of sports, the kind of crossover culture that only boxing, MSG and NYC could deliver.
What was your favorite MSG moment? Was it the grainy days of Red Holzman and Clyde Frazier? Was it Pat Riley, Patrick Ewing, and the dearly-departed Anthony Mason? Was it St. John's in the mid-'80s? Was it the Golden Gloves?
My first Garden moment was gawking at Roberto Duran while he fought Carlos Palomino in 1979, the year I turned 10. I saw a Virginia Slims tennis match between Bjorn Borg and Ivan Lendl. I also adored the Hubie Brown Knicks of Bernard King, Ken Bannister, and Truck Robinson. Perhaps one of the most morbid basketball chasms was the gap between King's salad days and Ewing's prime. King's knee surgeries curtailed what could have been an epic duet.
The final enchanted moment I planned to experience was a fight between Felix Trinidad and Bernard Hopkins, but the bout was postponed two weeks because Satan chartered two planes and crashed them into two buildings. Instead of Sept. 15, the bell rang on Sept. 29, 2001. And while the fight had endless gravitas, it was hard to focus on boxing while the embers still churned a few miles south.
We now can pay lip service to boxing, hockey, and college hoops, but the Knicks, for whatever reason, have commandeered the Big Apple, leaving other sports and the Brooklyn Nets to scour the city for scraps. You can decide why a team with 12 wins since October has us so spellbound.
Of course, there's been more conventional entertainment, from rock and rap events to Eddie Murphy, who filmed his iconic stand-up act, "Raw." Before he became the Nutty Professor and the voice of an iconic, animated animal, Murphy may have been the funniest man to grip a microphone.
Now the main act is comedic, but accidentally so. The Knicks are tragically funny. Or are they a funny tragedy? Either way, we'd like to get our laughs somewhere else. If only the Knicks took us seriously.
Follow Jason on Twitter at @JasonKeidel
