A Tale of Two Cities

A Lay Sunday Sermon on the Knicks

Congratulations to Knicks fans and all New Yorkers on overcoming a 53-year drought to become NBA champions. I, for one, never thought I’d see the Knicks win a championship: Too many years of futility, too many missed opportunities, too many disappointments. As a historian and something of a nostalgist, I tend to assume that great or notable things belong to the past. As a New Yorker, I think I can be forgiven the feeling, from time to time at least, that this city’s glory days are behind it, that the capital of the 20th century is becoming increasingly bland and unaffordable at the same time. One rather silly romantic conceit I sometimes permit myself is that I’m a member of a fading New York gentry that Edith Wharton chronicled, being replaced by a more commercial and vulgar civilization, or even more absurdly, one of the last of the Mohicans, a native who persists in the old ways despite the world becoming unrecognizable and alien. Or, even better, a Knickerbocker, an old Dutch denizen who refuses to change his trousers with the fashions of the time. I confess snobbery and entitlement even tempered my enjoyment of these Knicks’ historic run: “These transplants don’t know what it’s like to suffer,” I grumbled, or “they are jinxing us with this ‘Knicks in four’ business.” But despite my crankiness and native reactionary streak—when it comes to Manhattan, I’m a NIMBY who thinks they should blow up every new build on Houston street and put the Gaseteria back—I can’t help rejoicing with the whole mass of New Yorkers, without inquiry into their pedigree. That’s what the Knicks can do like no other team: they fuse the whole city into one single spirit. We saw in the spontaneous celebrations that our town still has a spirit, an identity, something greater to which we all want to belong. Last night, the city didn’t seem like a collection of angry little tribes and jostling atoms of self-interest, but one big happy, rejoicing family. People on the streets seemed almost a little timid and tentative at first; they didn’t know what to do with themselves, as young people forced together at a school dance, unsure of how to celebrate together. There was a moment of awkwardness, and then it caught fire. It’s such a particularly great joy to experience when nothing else in the world seems to be going right, and every other big event feels like a gut punch. I will say, as a native who lived through 9/11, Sandy, the blackout, and the desolation that the pandemic brought to the city, it does feel especially sweet and redemptive. It feels that this city, with its young, new mayor and his new type of politics, may be entering a new golden age, although perhaps I’m now a little too old to fully appreciate it.

From the golden age to the dark ages. This brings me to that other city to our south, our so-called capital. They are preparing for another sporting event altogether. It couldn’t be farther in spirit from what New York is experiencing: a bloody, no-holds-barred fight in a cage. What a hamfisted metaphor: a cage on the grounds of the White House, the ultimate symbol of unfreedom. Fighting with bare hands: the ultimate symbol of humanity reduced to the state of nature, to the condition of bestiality. The bitter irony is heightened by this unholy event taking place one month from Bastille Day, which commemorates the glorious dawn of human freedom. They measured and prodded these modern gladiators—slaves, really, whose bodies are sacrificed for other mens’ bloodlust and greed—on the steps of the Lincoln memorial, in sight of Father Abraham’s immortal statue, under his benevolent, but still judging, gaze. What a defilement of our sacred places! It’s sacrilege in the exact Roman sense: a violation of the temple sanctum. Sacrilegus originally meant “one who steals sacred things,” and in Roman law, it combined a sense of a religious taboo with a crime against the state and the entire public good. What could more accurately represent what Trump and his cronies are up to? We ought to feel disgust and horror as old Romans would at an intrusion of the sanctuary of Vesta. That we don’t immediately react in such a way perhaps reflects that we no longer believe, and our empire is truly on the wane.

Despite impiety and profanation in the capital, the flame of democracy still burns bright here in the North. Here, at least, we have not turned infidel. Madison Square Garden is not called the Mecca for nothing: even when the Knicks aren’t good, it’s recognized as the center of the basketball world, where the masses flock to make a pilgrimage to the sport’s holiest place. Basketball is a truly American sport; it represents the balance of team cooperation and individual accomplishment and style. No nation can make a claim to fighting with fists: it is the unfortunate patrimony of all mankind. Basketball might be as commercial and vulgar as anything else in our civilization; it may involve too much money, too much glitz, too much vanity and pomp, but it is undeniably beautiful. No offense to the soccer fans who are now our guests for the World Cup, but it may be the real “beautiful game,” the one where pure human athleticism is best displayed. It’s highly physical, but sheer violence is against the rules (unless, of course, your name is Victor Wembanyama.) It’s a spectacle of strength and power becoming concentrated in a moment of grace and finesse: a basket requires fine dexterity of the fingers and discerning judgment of the right moment to strike as much as pure brawn. And like all the other great American sports, it is democratic, beloved by all races and social conditions. The democratic character of this particular team is heightened by the fact that it includes no gaudy superstar; we don’t have a LeBron, or a Jordan, or a Wemby: Brunson was never considered a franchise player in the same way those players were. He is a modest hero who took a pay cut to build a better team around him. It’s a team of spare parts that somehow came together to form a perfect engine. And while white nationalism is the governing ideology in D.C., the celebration of basketball, whose greatest athletes and whose culture is black, feels defiant. As Washington retreats into parochialism, narrowness, and hate, and falls to grappling and pummeling each other senseless on the ground, New York, not just a metropolis, but the cosmopolis, a city of immigrants and 800 languages, leaps and bounds over it. We embrace our team and each other as we have always embraced the whole world. We remain the true capital of Jefferson’s “Empire of Liberty” and therefore the capital of the universe, a welcoming harbor to whoever still aspires to be free and great. Let’s go Knicks.