I’m a fan of the New York Knicks. I don’t mean, “I like the New York Knicks,” I mean, “I’m a fan of the New York Knicks.” That means I can identify the difference between Mardy Collins and Anthony Carter, even though they’re both bald 6-foot-1-ish point guards with no shooting ability that wore the No. 25 for the Knicks whose last names start with the letter “C” and are about seven letters long.. That means I have played NBA Street Vol. 2 with Kurt Thomas, whose basketball talents of “intense rebounding” and “pick-and-pop 18-footers” make him the least street NBA player since Slava Medvedenko.
It means I spent the last seven years of my life devoting large amounts of time to watching a basketball team with no hopes of making the playoffs, looking forward to a day when they would.
So last week’s 4-0 series sweep by the Boston Celtics featuring two last-minute losses turned me into an emotional wreck. My hopes were up after seven years of no playoffs, then in cruel, quick, abominable fashion, those hopes were smashed, like so many Jared Jeffries jump shots into so many rims.
“Someday, ” I repeated to myself, as I often have. Someday, things will work out in such a manner that sports will make me happy.
As a Northwestern fan, “someday” is a word we hear a lot. Bowl wins. NCAA Tournament appearances. Made extra points. All of it hypothetical, but all of it guaranteed by our sports notion of “karma won’t let this continue forever.”
Weeks like this week, after the brutality of the orange-and-blue shutout, I wonder whether this is an unhealthy way to live life: living on sports credit. Imagining that there is some higher power, some Sports Jesus ensuring that someday, the meek get blessed and inherit the sports earth (i.e. the first round of the NCAA Tournament).
Luckily for me, my Knicks might. After years of basketball bleakness, Amare Stoudemire came to New York because he wanted to play in New York, the world’s greatest, most beautiful and most conceited city that is way better than your city. Then, Carmelo Anthony willed his way to an NY uni, and immediately, people hollered about the potential of Chris Paul joining them a few years later. It happens because it’s New York. In a year, pro sports rendered a permanent cellar-dweller relevant because it’s pro sports. The Knicks had greatness thrust upon them, and someday, maybe they’ll win a single playoff game.
But for us, we purple, unhappy few, I worry that there isn’t. What seismic shift could so quickly uproot the Big Ten’s power structure? Will Ohio State ever stop being Ohio State? Sadly, it seems the only thing that can make NU more appealing to recruits is sports success, and to have sports success, the school has to become more appealing.
That’s not to say NU is permanently doomed to reside in the valley of the crappy. But it’s dangerous to assume that sports karma will one day grant us sports joy because that just leads to us investing our sports emotion in something that might never pan out. Someday, NU will have to go out and grasp greatness, but unlike with my Knicks, it’s not just going to come because it can.
Sports editor Rodger Sherman is a Medill junior. He can be reached at rodgersherman2007@u.
