“Well, let’s start with this. They are kids, and there will come a time when you’re standing in the crowd, and it’s going to be hot, and they’re going to be complaining about one thing or another, and you’re going to say, ‘Why the fuck did I drag them to this?’ But at the end of the day, you’re building a family together, and the hope at least is they’ll partially remember they were there with you for this momentous, historical event.” It’s a Wednesday afternoon in Brooklyn and I’m talking to my dad upstate over the phone, asking for some advice and a pep talk before taking my kids to the Knicks ticker-tape parade Mayor Mamdani has predicted will be the largest in the 360ish-year history of the city.
I feel compelled to take my kids, and particularly my son, to the parade because after years of expressing disinterest — if not outright disdain for both playing and watching sports — for the first time in his nearly dozen years, he partially paid attention to the Knicks’ improbable championship run through this spring and summer. When I look back on his sports apathy, I put some of the blame on myself, and some of it on our socioeconomic circumstances in an entertainment industry that has become borderline inaccessible for all but the wealthiest fans in America, but I think mostly it’s just who he is, and how life turned out for both of us.
One of my earliest memories was around the age of five, when I was anti-sports and cycling through the calendar with my mom, desperately trying to find a gap in the Yankees, Jets, and Knicks schedules, when my dad wouldn’t be rabidly tracking one of his teams. When I got to the end of each team’s start and end dates, and realized American sports was an endless loop, I started crying. My mom reasoned, “Maybe you could try getting into it?” So I did.
But it wasn’t always a smooth ride. We split a Yankees season ticket package when I was growing up with a few other families, and another formative memory is demanding we leave a game in the seventh inning, as we did sometimes to beat the traffic the 90 minutes north we lived from the stadium, while a Yankees pitcher with one hand named Jim Abbot threw a no-hitter. My dad was beside himself, screaming at my sister and I that we were witnessing an unbelievable triumph of the human body and spirit, and I was probably complaining it was hot and I wanted to listen to Hot 97 in the car and get home to watch some bullshit on TV. I’m now glad he stood his ground, and spent years taking me with him to games I probably wasn’t always the most willing participant in attending. I share that to say from my personal experience, passing down sports fandom is not linear, and not easy for many of us.
My son has organically developed interests that are diametrically opposed to mine, which is pretty incredible because neither of us are very well-rounded people, primarily interested in shit we can watch, read, or listen to. He is a self-identified gamer (I am not and haven’t been able to force myself to try for his sake for sustained stretches, which is on me), and his primary interest revolves around an online game called Roblox. For most of his life, if he could choose to watch anything, it wouldn’t be a TV show or a movie (and has gone through periods of militant resistance to sitting through either), it would be videos of people making strange comments and noises as they play Roblox on YouTube. He exclusively listens to a type of music that I *think* is called digicore. I swore to myself when I grew up I wouldn’t shit on whatever music my kid was into, as my dad did with rap, and parents have with their kids since the beginning of time, but briefly click on this link and try to wade through a few minutes of what I’d describe as a blend of 8-bit house, white middle school spoken word, and show tunes, and tell me how long you think you could listen to it while trying to operate a moving vehicle. I’ve more or less made my peace with this state of affairs, accepting my son and our differences on his own terms and as my failings as a selfish, shitty parent, but throughout the last few years I’ve had friends who will introduce me to their precocious five years old sons who took readily to sports and watch every game together and can rattle off Knicks lineups (“Obi Toppin, Taj Gibson, Alec Burks, Elfrid Payton, Nerlens Noel….”) and I’ll experience a pang of something it would be hard for me to articulate precisely.
For Father’s Day last year, one of my editors wrote pretty persuasively on the subject of why you should not infect your kid with your tastes and interests. I agree with most if not all of it, but struggle with adhering to some elements of it. This is because I think attention spans and human curiosity are under attack. Bites of entertainment are getting progressively shorter, training our brains to focus for briefer periods before demanding the next hit of dopamine. In addition, the shit we’re seeing and consuming is being served to us by an algorithm building a profile of taste off the history of shit it has already served us, concentrating and consecrating this narrow sliver of taste and leaving no room for growth or surprise. When I was a kid, I learned a lot about my taste by having it confounded via channel surfing. Streaming has robbed us of this process of discovery, and it seems fairly apparent that a byproduct of this shift is the interest or even ability to follow a season of live sports is going away for kids like mine and his friends and classmates, because while I don’t have a large enough sample size to diagnose something as broad as a generational shift, my son is far from alone in his antipathy.
When I was a few months older than my son is now, the Yankees won the World Series. It was a religious experience for me, because after the Knicks lost to the Bulls in the Charles Smith series in 1993, and then to the Rockets in the Finals in 1994, and then the Yankees lost to the Mariners in the playoffs in tragic, heartbreaking fashion, ending Don Mattingly’s career in 1995, I was convinced I was cursed and New York City was cursed and no team I rooted for would ever win anything of substance. It was also life-changing because I was there, sitting next to my dad for Game 6 in our middle mezzanine seats at the old stadium up the first base line when the Yankees pulled off the incredible feat of losing the first two games of the World Series decisively, at home to the Braves, then reeled off four straight wins, culminating with the one TBD game we managed to secure tickets for before the series started. If I had any even mild ambivalence to sports before that, it was gone.
Most of my childhood sports memories are tied to in-person experiences. This is because when I was a kid, even through my young adulthood, it was relatively affordable to regularly attend in-person sporting events in New York, and I was privileged to attend a decent number of them. This is no longer the case. My family had to give up our season ticket share shortly after the Yankees became a dynasty. These days, getting my family together to go to a casual Summer evening Yankees game, a staple ritual of my early life, is hewing closer to the price of a modest vacation.
This incredible year of Knicks basketball, I didn’t attend MSG once because the price of a nosebleed ticket for an inconsequential midseason game has risen to several hundred dollars, which my wife and I simply don’t have to frivolously spend. I wonder what an entire working and middle-class generation of kids are being deprived of, particularly harder sells like my son, who has attended a single Knicks game as a toddler he doesn’t remember. Without the in-person experience allowing them to lock into the screenless rhythms and joys of a basketball game, I fear he’ll never get the chance to be swept up in the magic I found in sports in my childhood. Though recently, I had sudden cause to believe perhaps that might change.
“Dad, is New York really going to burn to the ground if the Knicks win?” My son’s question as he got off the bus one afternoon in mid-May caught me off guard, because I was surprised to discover he and his classmates were aware of what was going on and talking about it at school. “Yeah, probably.” I responded. As the Knicks marched towards destiny, I noticed he had begun picking out the jerseys and blue and orange shirts I’d bought for him over the years with the hope it might make a dent via brand affiliation and skin contact, clothing that mostly sat at the bottom of his drawers in favor of Nintendo merch, until now.
I’m part of what once was a small, dedicated community of Knicks fans in Brooklyn who spent our nights passionately arguing over the long-term prospects of Frank Ntilikina and Kevin Knox in the 2010s, and I was reluctant to abandon them and the communal joy of stunning, suddenly annual 2020s Knicks postseasons this year throughout the playoffs, which I had some guilt about. But with the Knicks’ playoff winning streak snapped after a frustrating Game 3 Finals loss to the Spurs on the night of President Trump’s hostile takeover of Madison Square Garden, I decided I owed it to my kids to stay home and watch Game 4 together. My daughter passed out promptly at 9 p.m., but my son stayed up for the duration, losing his mind alongside my wife and I as Jalen Brunson and OG Anunoby’s right hand pulled off the greatest comeback in NBA Finals history. He took my phone and filmed the final seconds of the game and recounted the highlights to my wife and I in disbelief, excited about a team in a way I’d never seen before. I thought, maybe this could be his religious experience.
“Ok, everyone get all of your pee out now. This is your last chance. You’re not going to get another one for six hours.” I’m coaching my kids as we rush to get our shit together and get out the door while the sun rises over Brooklyn. When the Knicks won the championship, my family finally had an opportunity to revel in a free in-person event for New Yorkers to celebrate the team. My wife took off work and we kept our kids out of school, waking up at 5 a.m. and beelining to the Canyon of Heroes to hopefully get a spot on the parade route where I’d celebrated a Yankees championship 17 years earlier, and my daughter and I recently celebrated the Liberty chip in 2024. We packed light because we had to, adhering to NYPD commissioner Jessica Tisch’s draconian regulations concerning what would be permitted into the controlled pens on Broadway (I had three bottles of water and one bottle of water filled with an ensemble mezcal) and prayed for good luck.
When we emerged from the 4 train into a crammed tunnel, it was clear we would have none. The scene, as we made our way slowly through a massive crowd kettled between Nassau and John on Fulton, was directly out of the eighth episode of the second season of Andor. What we learned afterwards was getting into the parade was a matter of luck and chance if you picked the right access point, but official communication to the crowd was non-existent, and the NYPD elected to present a calm and orderly parade route to the television cameras rather than accommodate as many fans as possible. As a result, tens if not hundreds of thousands of tired, angry, frustrated, drunk people were held out a block or two away from the festivities, where my family was caught for several hours. I thought about the passion of all these people who in some cases had flown or driven hours to New York for this, who like us, hadn’t been privileged enough to enjoy any of this playoff run in person, and now were even being denied this ostensibly egalitarian ancient ritual, and it pissed me off.
“Look, we’re down 29 at halftime right now, we’re coming back, we’re getting in there.” A lanky white teenager with his father got a good laugh from the frustrated crowd with that one, though he was proven wrong when none of us made it in. My kids were far from the only kids in attendance, but the majority of the crowd was passionate, sarcastic, dickhead New Yorkers in their late teens and early 20s smoking weed, talking shit, hitting Fireball nips in the mist falling at 6:30 AM. It was loving and communal, it was aggro and contentious, it was frequently funny, it was frequently frustrating, the epitome of what life is like in this endlessly strange, dense and diverse city. The kids were mostly troopers, but when the crowd was informed we weren’t getting in, and got aggressive and insistent with lines of people pushing through the crowd in both directions at the same time creating choke points and crush, they got understandably freaked out, and we decided to watch the parade at home. This required a Carpenteresque odyssey, walking several miles through FiDi, followed by a ferry back to Brooklyn. I like to think even in our failure, the occasion imprinted on my kids, but who knows.
My son has become fixated on movie trailers and release dates over the course of the last year or two, with the rise of the video game film. I surprised him a few months ago with a midnight showing of The Super Mario Galaxy Movie on opening night. He asked me to take him to a 10:30 a.m. screening of a shockingly emo CGI Netflix show a few weeks ago that was somehow released into theaters as a special event. He’s become the youngest person on Earth eager to watch live broadcasts of Saturday Night Live with me, suddenly a comedy dork thanks to The Minecraft Movie and his discovery of Jack Black. I have introduced him to a rage rapper named 2hollis, who makes music that is relatively close to the digicore shit he likes but I actually enjoy, and serves as a mostly tenable compromise for us in the car.
From my experience, for whatever it may be worth, if you are neurotic dad reading this, down on yourself for whatever reason because you are having trouble connecting to one of your young kids, hold out hope. My life experience suggests that in spite of yourself, somehow, through the sheer force of exposure and being there every day, you and your kid may eventually find common ground and a way back to each other.
My son may never become a committed Knicks fan, which is fine. Being vaguely aware of what’s going on with the team when they’re worth paying attention to and sitting through the occasional game with me is more than I ever could’ve hoped for. And I’d like to tell you there’s a happy ending to this story, that the Game 4 miracle and the parade won him over, not just as a fan, but as a kid who finally trusts his dad’s taste, but I can’t.
The day after the Knicks won the championship, I was buying tickets for a hungover screening of Disclosure Day and attempted to talk him into coming with me. He said “No thanks,” flatly, so I suggested he could very well like it. After all, he hadn’t thought he would enjoy that Knicks game, and look how that turned out.
“Dad, you know that’s totally different.”
“I don’t think anyone is going to remember Disclosure Day for the rest of their lives.”
