I always come back to the Game I played at no level of expertise, but that doesn’t matter. The body remembers, even now, years after I’ve touched a ball. Muscle memory extends itself into emotional memory and when those memories are entangled with countless hours on courts with others but often alone with one’s imagination, a ball, a hoop, the dying light of winter afternoons, the infinite beauty of the body in motion no matter how clumsy — all that, contradictions included, are one version of love.
Thus, watching the Knicks in their playoff run, especially in the championship round against the Spurs, I came back to it, as I always do.
It was Brunson’s heroics on repeat, it was OG’s tip, it was Hart’s relentless hustle, it was the Villanova connection and boyhood memories of the Big 5. It was the comebacks, it was the New York energy, it was the joy, or as Roger Angell once wrote “the business of caring — caring deeply and passionately, really caring,” in a way that defied race and class and background. It was the fan’s optimism, that great opposition to despair, and their amazement when their optimism came true.
Deeper than all that was the beauty of the game itself, of basketball played well as a team, that mix of leaping and body control and fakery and power and elegance and physics and unselfishness that lives on in the utopian dreams of the old who once played. It was the beautiful line of a perfect pass, the footwork that allowed a drive to reach the basket, the incomparable arc of a jump shot that hits.
For a few weeks, the New York Knicks and New York itself offered an alternative to corruption and tribal division. Here was beauty, here was sacrifice, here was joy.
