The “Cage” and the Knicks

Knick’s winning the improbable championship, and an artist’s journey

We ran into each other on a hot summer afternoon at Bucknell University, under dampled rays in muggy Lewisburg shining through the canopy of old trees that screech owls hid, as I’ve heard their trilling calls at sundown coming back to my dorm.

“Hey Mako!” Jay said in his iconic charm, drawing me in. He was my first year dorm mate but I did not know him that well. But he recognized me, and pronounced my name perfectly. “What are you doing here in summer?”  I paused and thought twice before I told him. What I was about to say was a statement I had just came to realize myself, and a reason that I was starting at Bucknell in the empty campus to do an independent study to spend time painting in their art barn.

“I am here to work on my art…  I came to realize that I need to try to make it as an artist”.

I expected Jay, a model jock that can turn heads on any street, let alone a quiet campus in rural Pennsylvania, to simply dismiss me. “Art?”  “That’s nice…good luck with that!”

But Jay turned to me and looked at me in the eye (a kind of look that the world will come to know) and said “I know what you mean Mako…”. He had a pensive look, as if I was in tapping something in him, too.

“I am here for a basketball camp…,” then he said something of a vow. “I am not a very good player…but I think I can be a great coach.”

“…I can be a great coach”. That was a statement made by a first year student at Bucknell whose name is Jay Wright

“…I can be a great coach”. That was a statement made by a first year student at Bucknell whose name is Jay Wright.

When he won the second national championship as a legendary coach at Villanova, a run that included current Knick’s three starting players (therefore affectionately called “NovaKnicks”), I saw Jay standing as if he was all alone on the sidelines. As the clock turned zero, he was still going through all the permutations of possible outcomes at .5 second left. He seemed stunned that the won.

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I kept on looking at the score. I could not see the game on our midnight flight to LA. So I kept on looking at the score on my microfeed. “81 Spurs - 52 Knicks”. Even I knew the Knicks were gritty team, there is no way they can come back, especially against the French 22 year old wunderkind Victor Wembanyama (or “Wemby”) whose Gumby like 7.3 nimble frame makes any comeback, or any thought of scoring any basket impossible.

Then I looked again a few minutes later and did a double take, “97 - 88”. I thought it was an error. Knicks were on a run and cut their deficit from 29 points to 9 in matter of minutes.

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There is a court on West 4th Street in Greenwich Village where basketball becomes something else entirely.

I used to walk past it in the early years of what would become my work with Culture Care — we were helping plant a church nearby, one of those tentative, hopeful, rented -room-and-folding-chairs experiments in community — and I would stop, sometimes for longer than I planned, watching the game on that cage court. It is a famous court, the Cage, walled in chain-link, surrounded by onlookers pressed against the fence. But what I remember most is not the fame of the place. It is the quality of attention in a smaller than regulation court. The players moved with a furious joy and seriousness, a language spoken by bodies that had practiced so long the moves were no longer moves — they were rhythm and syntax of rappers, somatic street knowledge. There was a ferocity and rawness. And in those moments I thought: this is what culture care actually looks like at street level. Not elitism curated, or over explained and analyzed - just given as a spontaneous gift made in a smaller than regulation court. When I later saw the footages of Knicks making their impossible comeback(s), it felt like they made the regulation court a bit smaller to fit their outsized grit.

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Of course, the Knicks won the championship. It was as if there was no other outcome that Jalen Brunson’s heart and the tenacious teammates would allow. The story was written a long time ago with all of the team and their coach dismissed in the press, a tale told so many times that they were not capable of winning a championship.

One thing about these micro feeds is that they kept on showing the probability of win upfront. The number sat in the 95% level for the Spurs to win for majority of the game. They were, on paper, a much better team, and they were “dominating”.

Artists know that reality of “low % of win”well. We are given no chance from the start, told many time that our projects are impossible, and we should do something more practical. We have been told, along with liberal arts education, that such notion of creating or studying about beauty is not what we need to survive. What if the Knicks showed us the true gritty art of a generative life? Championships are won every year. But what endures will be the Knicks’s come backs, time and time again. Apparently, Brunson turned down the $113 million more to choose to be the number one guard of the Knicks, and that allowed them to recruit other complementary players. Actually, they were all under-regarded players. When, in the fifth game, the Brunson, the shortest player on the court drove a layup around Wemby, the tallest, supposed to be the most gifted player, we knew how this story must end. Then after the clock ran down to zero, just like his college coach Jay after their NCAA championship, Jalen, before celebrating, coolly went over to the other bench to congratulate their coach.

Of course, the little engine that could would not be a story without that “that could” part. But there is always more to the result than the result. We are not human doings but human beings with a heartbeat. At the end, trophies and individual accolades will mean very little. On our deathbeds, we will be dreaming of that impossible arc of a shot made with improbable possibilities. Because that is what life is made of. Life is an impossible art, a masterpiece gifted to us by a great coach.