It’s not over yet, but it’s getting close, this first title in New York for one of the four major men’s sports teams since the Giants beat the Patriots in 2012, the longest drought in the history of The Apple. No disrespect to the Liberty and Gotham FC and NYCFC, who have won titles in the WNBA, the NWSL and MLS since then, but this cathartic, somewhat unexpected, and very much needed run…in a late spring when most thought they would be figuring out where to watch a World Cup match while enjoying the Yankees and fretting over the Mets, is just different and has given us another great reminder of how sports is a unifier of people, culture and civic pride.
Now I was not in Boston for the end of the Red Sox run or Chicago for when the Cubs broke their streak, but there were other successes in those cities that gave fans hope, In New York…for the NHL, MLB, NBA and NFL…there has been nothing. 14 years, Mayoral transitions, Pandemic, immigrant challenges, ups and downs of neighborhoods etc etc. without a rallying cry in a city where basketball has lurked in the corners and waited to emerge. St. John’s has given us a little. The Liberty have certainly helped, the Nets…meh. But the Knicks have been the mystical force, always holding attention without parallel ina city where sports loyalties by sport are usually divided…Mets and Yankees, Rangers and Islanders, Jets and Giants.
In New York…in THE CITY (which by the way is what natives call Manhattan, not Brooklyn or Queens or Staten Island or The Bronx)…basketball is king and th Knicks have always had the throne.
Back to why this is different. Think of how we engage vs, in 2012, when Eli Manning hoisted the Lombardi Trophy after beating the Patriots.
Streaming services? Not really.
TikTok didn’t launch until 2016.
AI? Well I asked AI where we were in social media engagement when the Giants went on their run, the last one until this Knicks run. The answers?
Casual “social networking” among friends into a global media and news phenomenon. It was a transformative year defined by massive mobile adoption, the dawn of app-based photo sharing, and the launch of future digital giants
Facebook: Boasting over 750 million users, Facebook introduced the algorithmic News Feed and its iconic Facebook Timeline, transforming profiles into visual life histories. The standalone Facebook Messenger app also launched this year. Google+
Google launched [Google+], featuring unique “Circles” for granular friend grouping, though the platform ultimately failed to gain lasting traction.
Snapchat & Instagram: The mobile-first photo and video landscape exploded. [Instagram] was thriving in its early iOS-only days, while [Snapchat] launched, pioneering disappearing photo messages.
The Myspace Era Ends: Once the ruler of social networking, [Myspace] was sold to Specific Media for just \(\$35\) million.🌍
Social Movements & CultureReal-Time Journalism: Twitter usage doubled as platforms evolved into essential news tools, allowing users to document historical events in real-time. Global Activism: Platforms were heavily utilized in the Arab Spring and the Occupy Movement, cementing social media’s power in organizing grassroots revolutions and protests.
The Early “Influencer”: Users began realizing they could monetize their personal curation, launching the modern influencer lifetsyle.
A life without influencers as we know them now? How can that be?
All in a New York Minute.
Most importantly is the unifying social change the Knicks run has produced in a city that had become deeply divided.
Thursday on my way to the Cynopsis Sports Media Awards at Chelsea Piers I decided to do a little walk. From Columbus Circle to Chelsea, and see what I could find on a day where there was no NBA Finals game. The largest distance I could go without seeing something Knicks…a hat, a rainbow flag, a bag of potato chips,,,two blocks. It wasn’t all commercial, it was very genuine, and not obnoxious at all It was New York. Earlier Thursday I was at the funeral for my Fordham classmate Joe Calvo on Staten Island, and amidst the grief of a life gone too soon, even the priest, found a way to work in hope and levity into his homily, by mentioning the Knicks pointing out that the Sisters who were supporting the #Spurs didn’t really have a prayer to help with divine intervention at this point. It was not the first time during this run that the Knicks found their way to the pulpit, as our New Jersey pastor used the Nova Knicks and how Pope Leo has used sports as a unifier for people in his homily a few weeks ago.
Then there are the fans, generations who knew of a Knicks title who are now grandmothers and grandfathers and fathers and mothers who are enjoying this run on every device possible with the kids, and grandkids and students… generational joy that can be splintered by political divides, global warming, immigrant issues or anything else for this window of time.
Maybe this won’t end well still. Maybe the Spurs wake up or worse yet, the gods decided to break hearts again in Gotham somehow, it’s hard to see that happening but in a business controlled by literal heartbeats, it’s possible. Improbable but that’s why they play the games right.
But if it does sometime in the next two weeks play out, and the explosion of emotion will be felt, and seen like never before because of where we are as social beings in a world that did not exist in 2012.
As New York goes, so goes the world.
For this June, that’s a good thing.
World Cup can wait a few weeks, New York needs this moment. Keep the ride going, and capture and share it however you like. Who knows if it happens again, but it is happening now.
Go NY Go.
Guest Post: Hashtag Sports Learnings…
Leave a Reply