Memories

  Christmas Day and the NBA have special meaning for me. Not just the TV games. For I actually attended an NBA game on Christmas Day. 

While I was born in Albany, Georgia as my father was stationed there as part of his Air Force residency after attending the Temple University School of Dentistry, I grew up in the New York Metropolitan Area. Central Jersey was a great place to grow up in, while still maintaining strong family ties to Brooklyn and Manhattan. 

We were strongly influenced by the local New Brunswick media—The Home News and WCTC am radio. That’s how my affinity with Rutgers sports grew. It didn’t hurt that I could bike or even walk to Rutgers Stadium to see the Scarlet Knights take on foes such as Lehigh, Lafayette, Columbia and Colgate. 

From my backyard, raking leaves on an autumn Saturday, I could actually hear when the cannon located inside the stadium went off after RU scored a touchdown. I still have a stainless steel water bucket handed to me by a wild fan after the Knights defeated Colgate in the early 1960’s and the crowd tore down the wooden goal posts. My father gave me hell but he kept the bucket and ladle—they were high quality items. 

My affinity for Rutgers sports grew as I attended more events. Lacrosse was on an open field in Piscataway now energized as a soccer stadium—I saw RU take on powers such as Johns Hopkins and Princeton. 

The baseball field was located nearby the stadium—it had to be relocated to a different place when the football program expanded to big time status. I spent many a day watching RU play or, since it was open, shagging fly balls and practicing my throws back to the infield. 

Then there was basketball. RU became really good in the mid-1960’s. So good that it was hard to get a seat inside the tiny and cramped Rutgers Gym—I went twice while in high school and my high school team actually played a state tournament game on the hallowed hard wood (I would later play pick up basketball there against the likes of some RU players and high school legend John Somogyi, who became the all-time leading scorer in NJ scholastic history—what a gunner!)

What made me the fan that I am today was television. Back in the late 1950’s and into the 1960’s, TV sports was not anything like what we have today. Nobody could have predicted the plethora of cable stations like ESPN, the Big Ten Network, MSG Network and YES, or even the streaming platforms of Netflix and Amazon which gave us Thursday’s NFL games.

Local baseball was the prime attraction. I was just too young to remember the Dodgers and Giants playing in Brooklyn and Manhattan. I recall watching one game on WOR Channel 9, which appeared to be a Dodgers’ away game in Philadelphia. 

Then they up and left for the West Coast, leaving me and my eyes to watch New York Yankees baseball on WPIX Channel 11 (the Giants had been on that station until they abandoned New York). That began a happy marriage for me with the likes of Mel Allen, Phil Rizzuto and all the announcers who followed in their footsteps to the present-day lineup of Michael Kay, Paul O’Neill, Joe Girardi and David Cone, who handle the broadcasts on cable for the Yes Network.

Understand that I do not hate the New York Mets. I became fascinated with the Mets largely from reading the New York papers. Dick Young was an avid National League fan (he was very angry at how the Giants and Dodgers bolted town to what would become richer pastures) and his columns in the New York Daily News brought the fledgling Mets to life. So, too, did WOR, which took over as the Mets broadcaster. I found Lindsay Nelson, Bob Murphy and Ralph Kiner entrancing—even as the Mets soared to record-setting losses in 1962. 

If there wasn’t a Yankees game on, then I watched the Mets. I rooted hard for the Mets in 1969 to a) win the NL East; b) survive the playoffs against the Atlanta Braves; and c) take down the favored Baltimore Orioles in 1969. 

The only time I rooted against the Mets was when they played the Yankees—in the regular season Subway Series contests (I saw one game in person at Yankee Stadium) and of course in the 2000 World Series. Right now I am too addicted to Aaron Judge (like I was to Derek Jeter) so I watch very few Mets games. 

For the record—this baseball-addicted young man delighted in watching out-of-market cable telecasts of Philadelphia Phillies games on WPHL Channel 17 and subsequently seeing the Atlanta Braves play on WTBS—the brainchild of Ted Turner. Baseball heaven indeed. 

When I was growing up, the NFL was too. The Giants were the team. They left the Polo Grounds in 1957 to play in the larger Yankee Stadium, perhaps because the baseball Giants had left and nobody quite knew what would happen to the stadium in Upper Manhattan. 

Except the Giants were not seen on local TV for the home games. The NFL had a blackout rule in effect to promote fan attendance (I had a small, small part in drafting a companion bill to end the local blackouts while I was a Congressional intern in 1971; the bill died then but eventually the NFL dropped its ban on televising home games in the local markets). So what we saw were the away games from places like Pittsburgh’s Forbes Field or Pitt Stadium; Philadelphia’s Franklin Field; and the humongous Cleveland Municipal Stadium, home of the Browns. 

A big event was the annual exhibition game between the Giants and Philadelphia Eagles at Palmer Stadium, the home of the Princeton Tigers. I remember going twice and coming back roasted from the August sun (nobody had lights back then except in the baseball ballparks) but sated. 

Then the American Football League was born. Teams in New York, Boston, Buffalo and Houston formed the East Division; Denver, Dallas, Los Angeles and Oakland comprised the West. If it wasn’t for NBC with Curt Gowdy at the mike for play-by-play with Paul Christman covering the color, the AFL was not going to survive and ultimately challenge the NFL to the point that they forced a merger on the haughty NFL owners. I was reminded of the AFL roots on the Christmas Day broadcast of Denver at Kansas City when Al Michaels alluded to the fact that this was the 113th meeting between the two rivals (Dallas-KC leads by a wide margin even with the Broncos’ win). 

It wasn’t until the New York Titans became the New York Jets under the ownership of David Abraham “Sonny” Werblin, a well-known entertainment and sports impresario who moved the team to a gleaming new Shea Stadium in Queens and then drafted quarterbacks John Huarte from Notre Dame and one Joe Willie Namath out of Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania and the University of Alabama. NYC and I took a liking to the team and the games on TV. 

So, Giants fans, I don’t root against your team—except when they meet. I was happy for the Super Bowl wins—especially over hated New England and Tom Brady. For the record, NYG leads the series-8 to 7. 

Hockey became my sport of choice for Saturday afternoons on CBS and Saturday nights when the New York Rangers invariably traveled to Canada to meet the Montreal Canadiens or Toronto Maple Leafs. I knew everybody who played on the Original Six teams, which also included Boston, Chicago and Detroit. Win Elliot was the first voice I heard on WOR as he called the Rangers games. 

My love of that team led to my 10 year affair with the Rangers as a season ticket holder at Madison Square Garden. I don’t hate the Rangers—I just fell in love with the New Jersey Devils after the franchise relocated to the Meadowlands from Colorado. (My daughter and I are going to Newark after the snowstorm to see the Devils take on Alex Ovechkin and the Washington Capitals on Saturday night).

Plus I was enamored with the expansion team called the New York Islanders. Big losers like the Mets in the formative years, they were still fun to watch. I enjoyed the times I went to see a game at the Nassau Veterans’ Memorial Coliseum in Uniondale. Watching their games on TV was the reason behind my liking the Isles (It didn’t hurt that they were a dynasty in the late 1970’s and early 1980’s with the likes of Denis Potvin, Mike Bossy and Billy Smith in the nets). 

So let’s circle back to pro basketball. I remember watching the Knicks games on WRCA, the forerunner to WNBC, the NBC network flagship station in NYC. Marty Glickman, a legend as a track star from Syracuse in the 1936 Olympics and a Brooklyn native, called the games like he did the football Giants and Knicks games on radio. 

I can recall watching broadcasts from Syracuse, where the Nationals, led by Hal Greer and Larry Costello, played in old War Memorial Arena before becoming the Philadelphia 76’ers; Rochester then became Cincinnati for the Royals with Jack Twyman and Oscar Robertson leading the way (now they are called the Sacramento Kings); Fort Wayne and then Detroit for Pistons’ games with George Yardley and Walter Dukes and a bunch of no names; the Civic Center for Philadelphia Warriors contests involving Wilt Chamberlain, Al Attles and Guy Rodgers; Kiel Auditorium, home of the St. Lous Hawks, where Bob Petit and Cliff Hagan roamed; and the old Boston Garden, home of the Celtics, where Red Auerbach and Bill Russell resided. It was rare that a Knicks home game was televised, although I can visualize a couple of times the Knicks, the lesser tenant at the old Madison Square Garden, had to play at the 69th Regiment Armory on Manhattan’s East Side. 

The Knicks were bad in my childhood. Not until Willis Reed, Walt Frazier, Dave DeBusschere and head coach Red Holtzman showed up did we have anything to cheer about. Titles in 1968-69 and 1972-73 were glorious years, especially listening to a very young Marv Albert call the games on the radio (Marv also did Rangers games). 

Not until the American Basketball Association came together to challenge the NBA like the AFL did to the NFL was thee a second team in the area. The Nets began in New Jersey, then migrated to the Nassau Coliseum. The team even won a title with Roselle Park’s Rick Barry leading the team. They even had one Julius Erving, a local kid from Roosevelt, until owner Roy Boe had financial problems and sold his hot player to the Sixers. 

The rest is history. And the NBA absorbed the franchises from New York, Indiana, Denver and San Antonio. The Nets were lured to New Jersey by the promise of playing in a new arena in the Meadowlands; a stop at a new Rutgers Athletic Center didn’t hurt my rooting for them. Which has lessened now that they play in Brooklyn. 

About that Christmas Day game? It was in 1980. Cold as heck—zero degrees and my friends and I froze on the train platforms in Elizabeth and New York as we made our way to MSG, which still sits atop Penn Station. Christmas Day games on national TV were just coming into vogue (Unlike the 5 games on ABC/ESPN on Thursday: the Knicks won in a close contest; San Antonio downed Oklahoma City for the third time this season—that’s over 50% of the Thunder’s losses; Golden State handled rookie sensation Cooper Flagg and Dallas; Houston romped over an unemotional LA Lakers team; and it took OT for Denver to win against Minnesota).

But for over two hours, we warmed up watching Larry Bird and the Boston Celtics trounce the Knicks whose shooting was as frigid as the weather. It was a great and memorable experience despite the freezing temperatures. The rhapsody of sound reverberating from the multi-colored roof was intoxicating. This was New York coming together as one. For their Knicks. In the spirit of the holiday.

All this nostalgia was borne from my love of New York sports. Which is now augmented by so much sports on TV, cable and streaming services. Maybe too much so. 

I hope you had a great Christmas Day. Watching the Knicks beat Cleveland brought back memories.