Up until the end, he still worked the daily puzzles, but he’d stopped buying newspapers, choosing instead to go online each morning and dutifully print them out. Six years ago, my parents sold their house - dining-room table and all - and my father died of a heart attack two years after that. One could say the same thing about those newspapers. Wolf, nearing 80, is still in broadcasting, but nightly recaps such as his have slid into obsolescence. Twenty-five years later, only scraps of that era have survived. It was a little bit of proof that what I had seen was real. I would read about games that I had watched just 10 or 12 hours before, amazed by the fact that someone had written a story about it, often a dramatic one, and that the account now sat before me. I would then spread them out on the dining-room table with my cereal and juice to look at the pictures, scan the scores, and be debriefed on possible trades. As he cast each aside following its puzzle’s completion - he never bothered to read anything beyond the crossword clues - I would scurry forth, raccoon-like, to retrieve their precious sports sections. Burroughs-level crossword-puzzle junkie, each morning heading to the newsstand to return with his daily fix: The Times, the Post, The Star-Ledger, and the New York Daily News. What I had were sports segments on the six o’clock news (I was partial to CBS’s Warner Wolf, whose exclamations of “swish!” during basketball recaps passed for genuine excitement) and sportstalk radio, a still-nascent medium with a decidedly blue-collar feel. The Internet, with its microblogs and highlight gifs, was still a full decade away. My parents weren’t cable subscribers, so there was no ESPN, no groaning Chris Berman puns. If Brian Cashman stays then Aaron Boone stays.As a sports-crazed child of 1980s New Jersey, I had relatively few options to extend my mania beyond the games themselves. Yankee doldrums, Kyrie headaches, and Ted Lasso withdrawl He probably dreamed this for himself, too, the way he dreamed everything else. You would think there would be more New York high school guards who have played their way into prominent roles at the Garden. It is just the way things are.īut as good as it was for Knicks fans to be Knicks fans again, it can only be better now that Kemba Walker has come home. They just will never have the same hold on basketball New York that the Knicks do. The Nets have a right to think they can win it all. And the Knicks, more than the Yankees or the Mets or the Giants or the Jets, will feel like the biggest game in town. Nets a real rivalry, it will be something to see. But the Knicks desperately want to show that the 2020-21 season, the one that brought life and hope and noise back to the Garden when the fans came back, was no fluke, or happy basketball accident. It doesn’t mean they will go toe-to-toe with the Nets, or find a way to be better than the Hawks this time, or even allow themselves to think they could knock off Giannis and the world champ Bucks one of these days. The Knicks try to do it again this season. It was an old jazz man named Dizzy Gillespie who said, and famously, that the professional is the one who can do it again. He could not finish the Celtics-Nets playoff series last spring because of that left knee. There have been surgeries on his left knee. There is a lot of mileage on him, absolutely. He will turn 32 during next year’s NBA playoffs. Kemba Walker, the rare city kid who grew up to get the ball with the Knicks, can be a part of all that. And if they ever do win the team’s first title since 1973, that Knicks team will take its place with the most storied teams the city has ever produced, in anything. If he can help the Knicks become real contenders again, do something more than surprise us the way they did last season before Trae Young and the Hawks got them in the first round, it will become one of the great New York sports stories. Unlike Marbury of Lincoln High, this looks like absolutely the right place for Kemba, absolutely the right time. Coming home with the chance to be a part of something very big if Tom Thibodeau’s Knicks continue going in the right direction. Little big man in the pros the way he was in high school, the way he was in college. He has averaged as many as 25 points in a season. He has averaged 20 points per game for his career in Charlotte and Boston. Kemba Walker, even slowed by injury the past couple of years, comes home as someone who has been as much of a star in the NBA as he was with the UConn Huskies.
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