Lance Mannion: A sense of where they were

Sunday morning, February 17, 2019.

While back, I was watching a Knicks game and during a break a promotional ad for the team came on. It was one of a series MSG runs regularly. Knick fans who are interesting, accomplished, and talented people in their own small ponds are filmed talking about their love of the Knicks while they go about their work in which they’ve found ways to incorporate expressions of that love. In this particular ad, a barber shaves the number 33 into the scalp of a customer, another diehard Knicks fan. The barber, who looked to be in his late 50s, and the customer, who looked to be no more than twenty, which means they represented a span of at least three generations of fandom---the barber having come of age as fan when the Knicks were led by the likes of Willis Reed and Walt Frazier.Missing from the ad was a fortysomething fan whose formative years as a Knick fan would have been dominated by number 33---and the customer having grown up cheering on Carmelo Anthony, agreed. Number 33 was the greatest Knick player of all time.

Number 33 being Patrick Ewing.

My first thought when I heard them was “Of course he was,” as if there was somebody foolish enough in the room with me to doubt this. “Nobody even close.”

Then I thought, “Well, there has to be someone close. Ewing was great but the Knicks have had plenty of other great players over the years. Who’s closest?”

I had to start thinking hard. I’ve never been a committed Knick fan. The Celtics are my team and have been since I was a kid. I was a Patrick Ewing fan. I started rooting for him in his college days when he played for Georgetown. I always root for the Catholic teams in the NCAA playoffs and back then Georgetown seemed to me the Catholics’ Catholic basketball school the way Notre Dame was the Catholics’ Catholic football school. Ewing was the Hoyas’ star and my fan’s heart followed him into the NBA and onto the Knicks where I cheered him on for the whole course of his career.

"Patrick Ewing led Georgetown to a national title in 1984." (Ray Stubblebine/AP via the Washington Post)

It helped that those were dismal years for the Celts. The only decade of their existence since the 1950s when they didn’t hang a championship banner from the Garden rafters. (Although they’re on the brink of doing it again---they hung their last banner in 2008.) So I couldn’t think of who might be Ewing’s nearest competition. That’s when I thought of grabbing the phone and calling the staunchest Knick fan I know.

Knew.

Pop Mannion was a Knick fan.

I think I’ve mentioned here and on Twitter and Facebook, that I haven’t been grieving for Pop in the six months he’s been gone. I don’t feel that he’s gone. I even forget that he’s gone. So what happens is that I keep getting hit with reminders and it actually surprises me. Those reminders usually come when something occurs to me on a subject I would have talked over with him. Sports and politics and books mainly. Those are the moments when I’m overcome with missing him. The other night when that ad came on was one of those moments.

Pop would certainly agree Patrick was the best Knick of all time. No argument there. But I’m not sure who he’d say was the second best. Probably Walt Frazier. Clyde the Glide. But he might have said Willis Reed. I don’t know for certain, however, and now, of course, I never will.

I do know who his favorite Knick was.

I even know---or I’m pretty sure I do---his second favorite. Earl Monroe. Earl the Pearl. I think that might have been partly due to his liking to say Earl the Pearl. IPop liked poetry when it rhymed. But I think it was also due to Monroe’s being a little guy by pro basketball measures. A shrimpy six-three. Pop identified with that. Pop was a little guy by just about any measures. Any merely physical measures. Five-six.

Keep that in mind when I get to the kicker of this post.

Five-six.

Like I said, I’m not sure Monroe was his all-time second favorite. But I am sure of his favorite.

The most highly educated one. The Princeton grad. The Rhodes scholar. The one who went into politics when his playing days were over. The three-term Democratic senator from New Jersey. The one who ran for president in 2000.

This guy.

Bill Bradley, in case you didn’t recognize him.

Picture was probably taken in 2000 at a local campaign event. Don’t you love the looks on their faces as they’re sizing each other up? Pop “introduced” me to Bradley when I was a little kid first watching the Knicks on TV with him. When I was in college, he re-introduced me when he introduced me to the writing of John McPhee. His favorite book by McPhee at the time?

Yep.

“A Sense of Where You Are”.

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On the NBA's YouTube channel: "Patrick Ewing's Top 10 Career Plays".

From the Washington Post: "Looking back at the first time Patrick Ewing committed to Georgetown".

And Bleacher Reports ranks the "Top 25 Players in NY Knicks History".

April 2021