It’s Patrick Ewing week at perkisabeast
This morning a friend of mine who works at a certain newspaper that shall remain nameless — Here’s a hint. — sent me this amazing picture of Patrick Ewing from 1981. That was Ewing’s senior year in high school, when he was destroying every six-foot-four inch center all over Massachusetts.
The picture sparked something in me so I’m dedicating this whole week to Patrick Ewing.
Maybe it’s because his kid is playing in the Final Four (that really makes me feel old), or that he seems to have come out of his self imposed exile by showing up at Knicks games, or the fact that ESPN is playing the 1982 game as I write this , but I found myself thinking about the big man and my complicated relationship with him.
Truth be told, I am now a huge Patrick Ewing fan. However, it didn’t start out that way.
First, let me say that it is really hard to like anyone who played for the New York Knicks. I hate the Knicks with a passion. A passion. Generally accepted Bostonian code will say that the Knicks are not nearly as loathsome as say the New York Yankees — mostly because the championship teams of the early 70’s were stacked with righteous dudes like Bill Bradley and Clyde Frazier. But me, I hate the Knicks much more than I ever hated the Yankees.
To me, the Knicks are to the Celtics what a New York person must think of the Red Sox, an inadequate wanna be, like when you see someone who looks just like you except they are much fatter than you are and deep inside you feel smug and superior. Growing up in the 1980’s I thumbed my nose at them with the same contempt a man scrapes dog doo off his shoe.
And then Patrick Ewing happened.
Like the rest of the world, I first saw Ewing his freshman year of college. Immediately and without much thought (I was 7-years-old) I didn’t like him. He was mean, brash and cocky, clearly he knew he was the best player on the court.
He was also sort of funny looking with his ultra long arms, enormous shoulders, and broad nostrils. We used to laugh about the size of his nostrils, a fact I feel bad about today because poor Ewing was repeatedly taunted as a youngster for looking “like a gorilla.” In fact fans used to hang a stuffed gorilla in effigy to Ewing at BC games. Like the busing riots in Southie, there are shameful parts of this city’s history that we just need to live with.
I had other reasons to hate him, Ewing played for Georgetown (I was a BC guy, sadly,) he wore a t-shirt under his uniform and he would block shots into the next century even if it was clearly a goaltending violation. I suppose I knew he was amazing, I certainly feared him. But still, there was something about those early Georgetown teams that I didn’t like, which is funny because Ewing is a Boston kid, and John Thompson was freaking Celtic. But still it was like no one in Boston spoke of these guys with any reverence, which is a shame for Ewing because he clearly deserved to be hailed as a local hero. I think he still harbors resentment for the area because of this even though I personally think about him every time I pass Cambridge Rindge and Latin High School on my way home from work.
Nevertheless, I rooted against Ewing all the way through college. I scoffed at his one national championship, and dismissed his inability to win the other two as proof that he was more of a media creation than a true basketball great. Remember this was the era of Larry Bird so my standards were impossibly high.
Then he went to the Knicks and it was like, “well forget it now, this guys a total dickwad.” And for the rest of the 1980’s and into the 90’s I rooted against Patrick Ewing.
To me Ewing signified everything I didn’t like about that era’s basketball. He was slow, he would dribble the ball in the post too long, his go to move was a boring fade away jump shot. It was in my mind the kind of physical, grind it out basketball that killed the free flowing ball movement of the Celtics and Lakers dynasty. Even though in truth age and injury killed that era and those two teams.
Further, NBC stuffed the Knicks down our throats on the east coast. Every Sunday as my beloved Celtics disappeared into obscurity, I’d be stuck watching another goddamn Knicks game. I also hated Michael Jordan at the time and Isiah Thomas so basketball was painful for me then. To me they were all Madison Avenue flash and no substance.
I rooted so hard for the Knicks to lose the 1994 championship series and delighted when they went down in game 7 when John Starks shot them out of it. I also thought that those Miami-NY games were about as far away from a good rivalry as you can get, but that’s another story.
For the next few years as the Celtics fell deeper into a black hole I sort of wrote off basketball altogether, even rooting for the Bulls for a while (ouch).
And then it happened. In 1999, I had an epiphany about the big man. I started to sort of love those enormous knee pads that made him look like his body was held together with rubber bands and chewing gum, the high fade hair cut, the fact that he clearly seemed to be trying to will his team to win despite the fact that his body was broken and that his team could never get him a decent player to co-exist with.
By the time the Knicks made their run to the Finals I was a bona fide Ewing fan, I think probably because I myself was getting a little older and understood the amount of torture Ewing went through on a nightly basis just to get his body ready.
I also enjoyed the fact that he seemed to cherish playing in the NBA, I remember watching him when he was injured goofing around and pointing out pretty girls in the stands of the Fleetcenter one game. His co-hort was a Knicks equipment manager who looked like a child standing next to the dapper giant.
Another factor was watching the poor guy get roasted by the New York media, who seemed intent on running the guy out of town, which I think doomed the Knicks to their current run of futility.
By the time the Knicks traded him away in one of the all time bone head moves, I had come around full circle to the big man, counting him as one of my favorites. It’s still painful for me to think of him wallowing in a Orlando Magic uniform to end his career, there’s something so not right about it.
But then again, maybe Ewing was never meant to garner any sympathy, he was sort of like a modern day Wilt Chamberlain, the man who once so eloquently said, “Nobody ever roots for Golliath.”
So as we watch Oden, probably the closest thing to Patrick Ewing to come around let’s raise a glass to old Patrick who deserved better both from his hometown of Boston and his adopted town of New York.
