Quote of the Day (P. J. O'Rourke, on How America Remembers and Teaches History)

“We cannot, as a nation, know where we're going unless we know where we've been, even if I'm not exactly sure what I mean by that statement. Should we barrel down the highway to the future with our eyes glued to the rearview mirror? Should we keep in mind that if we forget history, we’ll end up repeating it, per that famous quote of Santayana? Yet consider the way history is taught these days: A survey of history students probably would show that they admire Santayana's genius but hope his next CD won't be just a remake of Supernatural with different vocalists.”— American humorist P. J. O'Rourke (1947-2022), “I Sing of Fizzy Fluid Retention,” The Atlantic, November 2007

Spiritual Quote of the Day (John Donne, on the Psalms as ‘The Manna of the Church’)

“The Psalms are the manna of the church. As manna tasted to every man like that he liked best, so do the Psalms minister instruction, and satisfaction, to every man, in every emergency and occasion.”—English poet and Church of England cleric John Donne (1572-1631), Sermon 66 (Preached at St. Paul’s, Jan. 29, 1625), in The Works of John Donne, Volume 3

The image accompanying this post of John Donne was created by English portrait miniature painter Isaac Oliver 9ca. 1565-1617).

Flashback, May 1973: Knicks Reach Peak of Greatness—and Start a Half-Century of Frustration

Fifty years ago this week, the New York Knicks defeated the Los Angeles Lakers 102-93, taking their NBA championship series four games to one—their second title in four years.

I wrote about the squad in a prior post from a decade ago. But I find that with the passage of time, additional poignancy accrues to this achievement, and more can be written about the larger meaning of it.

The victory secured the Hall of Fame credentials of coach Red Holzman, as well as several starters from that squad: Walt Frazier, Bill Bradley, Earl Monroe, Dave DeBusschere, Willis Reed, and Jerry Lucas.

Ecstatic fans like me couldn’t imagine at the time that this was a summit the team would not reach again for 50 years and counting, as I write this.

We were reminded of it, brutally, this week, as the Knicks were beaten in the second round of the playoffs by the Miami Heat. (One consolation: thank God it didn’t happen at Madison Square Garden, on Wednesday, the 50^th anniversary of that earlier victory, with Frazier himself in the stands, doing his best to cast whatever residual magic he had left on Jalen Brunson, Julius Randle and Co.)

Particularly over the last two decades, the teams have been so woebegone that longtime fans were just grateful for the team to be competitive, let alone that it would have a championship run.

It was all so different back in the early Seventies.

For the Knicks players, their success in ’73 meant that their title in 1970 was no fluke; that they had avenged their loss to the Lakers in the 1972 Championship Series; and that they deserved to be considered not just among the best of their time, but eminently worthy of emulation through their team-oriented style.

For Holzman, it meant the vindication of his trade the prior year for Earl Monroe, who, many observers wondered would be able to blend his style with backcourt partner Frazier, as well as sweet revenge in the Conference Finals against nemesis Red Auerbach, the Boston Celtics president and GM given to off-court gamesmanship to rattle foes (like changing the Knicks locker room when they were visiting for games in the Boston Garden). Holzman savored the fact that the Knicks became the first team to win an elimination game in the Celtics’ home court.

For New York fans, the Knicks’ triumph was something far greater, analogous to what Pittsburgh Steelers championships were about to accomplish: boosting the spirits of a Rust Belt metropolis badly in need of it.

In the early Seventies, New York City often seemed nothing like the “Fun City” that Mayor John Lindsay proclaimed it, with crime, population lost to the suburbs, graffiti-strewn subways, and strained finances that would plunge the city toward financial crisis in the middle of the decade. And that was on top of other strains that New Yorkers experienced like other Americans in those years: the Vietnam War and Watergate.

In contrast, the Knicks gave New Yorkers something that not only distracted them from the outside world, but that even united them in pride for a team that sacrificed individual goals for the good of the whole. Fans paid attention not just to the more celebrated ones, like the Rhodes scholar Bradley, the indomitable Reed, and the too-cool-for-school Frazier, but even role players.

(Several weeks ago, I astounded a close relative when I mentioned one of these from the 1973 squad, Harthorne Wingo. My relative insisted that I must be making the name up. Nope!)

Back then, it really was like the title of a book and documentary about the team from several years ago: “When the Garden Was Eden.”

They’d never won a championship before hiring Holzman as head coach. They haven’t won one since he left the sidelines, either.

In reading about the aftermath of the Knicks’ second title, I couldn’t help but wonder if I were seeing something similar this week in the case of the squad that, perhaps more than any other over the last decade, reminds me of them on their emphasis on defense and hitting the open man: the Golden State Warriors.

With the Warriors’ loss to the Los Angeles Lakers only a few hours after the Miami Heat ushered this year’s Knicks squad out of the playoffs, the resemblance to Holzman’s team suddenly hitting its twilight years seems hard to miss.

Just as Holzman had to deal with the sudden departures of injured and aging veterans Reed, DeBusschere, and Lucas after the ’73-’74 season, Warriors coach Steve Kerr must now contend with 38-year-old Draymond Green, 35-year-old Steph Curry, and 33-year-old and injury-plagued Klay Thompson in the last stretch of their career.

And, just as Holzman found in the late ‘70s that highly touted young players like Ray Williams and Micheal Ray Richardson couldn’t really take the place of his former Knick core, Kerr must be wondering after his team’s second-round exit when Jordan Poole, Moses Moody, and Jonathan Kuminga are ready to take the baton from Curry, Thompson, and Green.

I could not conclude this post without words of praise for Red Holzman. The numbers of six of his players, now retired, hang from the rafters of MSG. So does a number associated with their coach: 613, the number of wins he notched in leading the team.

The Knicks coach was glad to see the success of one of his former players, Phil Jackson, as head coach of the Chicago Bulls. But Jackson’s self-created “Zen Master” image was nothing like the modest style of Holzman.

Holzman started by effecting an attitudinal shift when he took over the Knicks. As Frazier put it four decades later: “He cut out all the shenanigans.”

A typical quote of his, in Mort Zachter’s 2019 biography, Red Holzman: The Life and Legacy of a Hall of Fame Basketball Coach, is, “A good team doesn't have any superstars. They fit together, make sacrifices and do things necessary to win."

According to Holzman, there were five essential factors for winning: emotional maturity, the will to win, good fellowship, leadership and alertness.

Ultimately, he focused the team’s attention on fundamentals: Ball movement, teamwork, and spontaneity, culminating in the two “D’s”: Discipline and defense.

Indeed, it’s not so much an image from those years that comes to mind but a sound, a mighty roar from the Garden faithful that came through loud and clear as I listened to games on the radio: “DEEE-fense, DEEE-fense!”

Quote of the Day (Isaac Bashevis Singer, on the Writer as ‘An Entertainer of the Spirit’)

“The storyteller and poet of our time, as in any other time, must be an entertainer of the spirit in the full sense of the word, not just a preacher of social or political ideals. There is no paradise for bored readers and no excuse for tedious literature that does not intrigue the reader, uplift him, give him the joy and the escape that true art always grants.”—Polish-American fiction writer and Nobel Literature laureate Isaac Bashevis Singer (1904-1991), “Nobel Lecture,” delivered Dec. 8, 1978

TV Quote of the Day (‘The Andy Griffith Show,’ On Whether Opie Wrote Graffiti on a Bank Wall)

Sheriff Andy Taylor [played by Andy Griffith]: “Uh, Opie, Barney says there was a poem written on the wall of the bank and that you was standin' along beside of it with a piece of chalk in your hand.”

Opie Taylor [played by Ron Howard]: “Yeah, but I didn't do it, Pa. Honest.”

Andy: “I believe you.”

Deputy Barney Fife [played by Don Knotts]: [angrily] “Are you pittin' your crime detectin' judgement against mine?”

Andy: “Well, Barney, I have to, because, for one thing, Opie wouldn't lie to me.”

Barney: “You call that evidence?”

Andy: “And for another, he ain't learned how to write yet.”— The Andy Griffith Show, Season 1, Episode 7, “Andy the Matchmaker,” original air date Nov 14, 1960, teleplay by Arthur Stander, directed by Don Weis 

Quote of the Day (Willa Cather, on When a Writer ‘Begins to Work With His Own Material’)

“When a writer once begins to work with his own material he realizes that, no matter what his literary excursions may have been, he has been working with it from the beginning—by living it. He has less and less power of choice about the moulding of it. It seems to be there of itself, already moulded. In working with this material, he finds that he need have little to do with literary devices; he comes to depend more and more on something else—the thing by which our feet find the road home on a dark night, accounting of themselves for roots and stones which we had never noticed by day. This guide is not always with him, of course, he loses it and wanders, but when it is with him corresponds to what…is called the wisdom of intuition, as opposed to that of intellect.”— American novelist Willa Cather (1873-1947), Preface to “Alexander’s Bridge,” in Stories, Poems, and Other Writings (Library of America, 1992) 

Quote of the Day (George Washington, on ‘Virtue and Happiness’)

“[T]here is no truth more thoroughly established, than that there exists in the economy and course of nature, an indissoluble union between virtue and happiness, between duty and advantage, between the genuine maxims of an honest and magnanimous policy, and the solid rewards of public prosperity and felicity: Since we ought to be no less persuaded that the propitious smiles of Heaven, can never be expected on a nation that disregards the eternal rules of order and right, which Heaven itself has ordained: And since the preservation of the sacred fire of liberty, and the destiny of the Republican model of Government, are justly considered as deeply, perhaps as finally staked, on the experiment entrusted to the hands of the American people.” —President George Washington (1732-1799), “First Inaugural Address,” April 30, 1789

In New York City nearly 235 years ago, George Washington demonstrated the qualities Americans hoped for in their President.

In a New York City courtroom yesterday, a former and still-aspiring occupant of his office was found to be notably wanting in virtue and sense of duty.

It was frustrating to watch this latter individual fill that job with neither a sense of decorum nor of honesty. But maybe now, the “eternal rules of order and right” that Washington hailed will at long last begin to be vindicated.