It Skipped a Generation

The Knicks won the championship this year, and my kids were delighted for me.

I want you to understand the specific nature of that sentence. Not delighted. Delighted for me. The way you'd react if a coworker's fantasy football team did well. There was perhaps a genuinely sweet "congratulations" which my fifteen-year-old said with real warmth and which landed on me like a hand on the shoulder at a funeral.

First title since 1973. I have waited my entire conscious life for this. And in my own house the emotional register was somewhere between a good report card and a promotion at a job nobody in the family fully understands.

I was with my father instead. We were jumping, scream, crying. That's the correct response. That's what a person does.

Where this actually comes from

My dad made me a Knicks fan, in the way that a parent makes you anything — by not really trying, by just conducting his own life loudly enough in front of you that you absorb it before you know you have a choice.

He didn't sit me down. He didn't explain the rules. He watched games, and I was in the room, and he'd make a noise at the television and I'd look up to see what the noise was about, and after a few hundred of those I had somehow acquired a whole belief system. By the time I was nine I had opinions. By the time I was twelve I had grievances, which is the real marker of a fan.

That's the whole transmission mechanism. It's not teaching. It's proximity plus enthusiasm, over years.

So here's the thing that genuinely gets me: I did all of that. I did the noises at the television. I know my kids heard those, I had all the games on. My children spent their entire childhoods in the ambient radiation of a person who cares enormously about this, and they came out the other side as two people who thinks their mom is ditzy and basketball is fine.

Two for two. A perfect record.

They're good kids, they're not basketball kids

I want to be fair to them, because they've done nothing wrong and they don't deserve to be the punchline of a blog they will absolutely never read.

They're not anti-sports. They're might be sitting there rolling their eyes at me, but if the game's on, they'll engage for a bit. My eighteen-year-old can hold his on and every so often says something so sharp that I get my hopes up for a few hours.

They just have their own things. Real things, that they care about the way I care about this, and I know exactly what it looks like from the inside because I'm watching them do it.

I just thought one of them would get it. Statistically. Out of two.

The disappointment is a bit

Let me be clear that the sulking is entirely for entertainment purposes, mine mostly.

I do the sighing. I do the "no, no, it's fine, watch your youTube." I have a whole routine where I react to the game to an empty room in an increasingly theatrical way until somebody comes in to make me stop, and honestly, that's a win — I got them in the room, and the mechanism doesn't know the difference between interest and pity.

They've caught on, their friends have caught on. They've started doing a bit back, which is that whenever a Knicks highlight comes on the TV they Ohhh and Ahhhh shrill mocking voice. It's not very funny.

And this spring, when it was actually happening — when we were winning, when it kept going, when it went further than it has gone in my lifetime — they watched some of it with me. Not because they cared about the games. Because I did, and I was unbearable, and they really are kind boys.

It's just a different thing than what my dad gave me.

Three generations, two of them paying attention

Here's what I've landed on, thirty-two years into living in a city I moved to for four.

My father handed me something. I couldn't hand it on. It goes: dad, me, and then a polite congratulations from a fifteen-year-old who was already halfway to the kitchen.

But my eighteen-year-old leaves next year, and at some point he is going to be somewhere else, and some team is going to do something, and he's going to think of me — not because he cares about basketball, but because I did, in his hearing, constantly, for eighteen years. That's the same mechanism. It just delivers something else.

I'll take it. I'd have preferred a Knicks fan.

I'm calling my dad again tonight. He'll want to go through the Finals one more time. He's earned it, and so, frankly, have I.