Bury Me A Knick?

Spike Lee, da god, at Madison Square Garden

Last night I rewatched Good Will Hunting just to try and remind myself why exactly I root for Boston-area sports teams. It’s been a trying time — not necessarily for Boston-area sports teams, who are all in some state of rebuild. (Even a somewhat over-performing Red Sox team got within a whisker of this year’s World Series …) But, you know, things aren’t quite going according to plan, and the most peculiar of my neuroses (every few years) is the one that causes me to question whether my sports loyalties have any real influence on my life choices, and therefore the state of my existence. I am nearing the end of a season, it feels like, as a man and as a writer, and therefore wondering if it’s time to request a trade.

Tottenham Hotspur, under the genuinely well-meaning Nuno Espirito Santo, look exactly like a team whose star player tried very hard to bugger off in the summer but ultimately had to make do with his old locker. The early promise of beating an always competent Manchester City side, with Heung Min-Son on talismanic duties to boot, has evaporated in the stasis of unimaginative passing, inconsistent stamina, and a corps of young men who will allow themselves, any given Saturday, to be shoved around by effing Brighton.

I’ve never seen anything like it. It’s been two managers, three if you count Ryan Mason, since these players downed tools on the highly huggable Mauricio Pochettino; and yet no period of the classic ‘new manager bounce’ has translated into a sustained change of soccer philosophy. I repeat: I’m not sure I’ve ever seen anything like it, and I’ve been pretending to know a thing or two about football since I was six.

But perhaps I have.

I got into Boston teams, I repeat, reading Jonathan Franzen send up the Red Sox in Strong Motion and listening to Bill Simmons send up everybody on his podcast. If you’d like to dig a little deeper, there’re more than enough cinematic endeavours to lend the New England collection of States a literary and even scholastic gravitas they shall always enjoy. But … something irreparable happened to my Patriots fandom when Tom Brady bandied about with a MAGA hat by his locker, and as both he and Coach Belichick passed up multiple opportunities to disown then Presidential Candidate Trump and his (at best) dislikable march to the White House.

I still call myself a Patriots fan, despite a) stepping away from the entire NFL for about two solid years, and b) having only secondary recall of that amazing Super Bowl win over the Atlanta Falcons in 2017, which I boycotted in very silent protest. There’s much to enjoy — and, at present, relate to — in the stingy, curmudgeonly lifelessness of a Bill Belichick press conference, and in the future of a team that has Damien Harris willing to run through walls and Mac Jones at quarterback making perfect read after perfect read.

But maybe my heart’s not that into it anymore, like a marriage without salsa lessons and date nights and Thai food on weekends. Increasingly I get the sense, particularly when I watch the Boston Celtics surrender inexplicably to inferior ball teams, that I’m just tuning in because I’m supposed to. Because I like the feeling that at least two of my loyalties are tied to the same city, and I could build a routine around that if I ever sell that novel, and maybe even a family. But what if I never do, is where I’m at right now. What if I never sell that novel and what if I never start a family? Will I die simply ceding my modest dollars to League Pass, and precious time to YouTube, in the name of mere obligation? Will I keep yelling “Tottenham ‘Til I Die” just cause I enjoy the spiritual association of it all with Guy Ritchie’s stronger gangster flicks, and grime music, and ideas of London I first devised (again) at age six?

If I can’t be with a woman I love, maybe I should be with the, ahhh … teams … I … love?

***

The plan has always been fairly simple, and you’ll find it littered across this website: publish a book, make season ticket money, and go live right next to basketball’s New York Knicks. At that point, united with the city whose literature, whose cinema, has always made perfect spiritual sense to me, I imagine I would give up the rest of the gun too — surrender myself whole to the mediocrity of football’s New York Jets (UGHHHH!!!) and then (DOUBLE UGHHHHH!!!) the glorious inconsistency of the modern New York Yankees, and the consistency of the game announcer that yells, “Seeeeeeeeeeeee ya!” whenever Aaron Judge and co. launch a home-run.

Every time I tune into a Knicks game, even for the highlights alone, I can feel the energy in the Garden (albeit televised, albeit streamed, albeit edited into ten wholesome minutes) rattle my bones. I’m not sure when last a Celtics game made me feel that way, and that breaks my already second-hand heart. Every time I catch a Yankees highlight, I’m able to talk myself into wanting the best in life for Aaron Judge, for that Bronx kid Andrew Velazquez, and for All-Round Nice Guy Anthony Rizzo, who the Yanks traded for mid-season. I am able to wish that clubhouse well, even though the Yankees remain amongst baseball’s premier assholes; even though St. Louis, when my heart last fluttered in the name of real-life romance, went on a winning streak that I foolishly mistook for cosmic juju.

It’s less about what’s fading than what pulsates me at the moment, if at all (sigh) anything does. My favorite creature in all sports, here and now, is Los Angeles Chargers’ QB Justin Herbert for the gazelle-like fashion in which he navigates the pocket — for the precise measurements he applies to throwing a football downfield — and to the highway robberies he coordinates in other people’s end-zones. The kid is beautiful, and so is that Charger gold-and-blue. Herbert reminds me of what it was like to believe you had a new favourite rock band, to place your blind faith in the idea that they would never go mainstream, and that they’d drop at least one record you could sneak onto a mix CD for a girl. I want that feeling back before I turn 40, before I die. I want my sports stars to act like every game is the last game they’re ever going to play, my teams to conduct themselves like the entire season’s on the line in August, and sports generally to make me feel like my old man did whenever we stayed up for the Masters, made tea for Newcastle United at Liverpool: like I was going to be a little boy forever, at least in the way that I approached new places, new experiences, new people. I want to be infatuated, or something like it, all season long.

The Chargers face the Patriots Sunday night, in a winner-takes-all-my-affections bowl. The Knicks know I’m coming, whether or not New York does. But I’m never wearing a Yankee hat in public, and (ah, shit) Tottenham Til I Die I Guess.