John Riordan: The odd Knicks legacy of Ned Irish
HANGING TOUGH: Julius Randle #30 of the New York Knicks dunks the ball during the second quarter of the game against the Orlando Magic at Madison Square Garden on October 24, 2022 in New York City. Pic: Dustin Satloff/Getty Images
Before The Garden was The Garden, the third of four Madison Square Gardens was situated for just over four decades on the corner of Manhattan’s Eighth Avenue and West 50th Street.
As with any large metropolis, you can always suspect that something iconic which once stood here was demolished because your gaze can barely register the boring brick structures which replaced it, containing chains and bland apartments.
The brand moved south to its fourth and current home on 33rd Street in 1968, just in time for the New York Knicks to butterfly briefly between 1970 and 1973, winning their only two NBA championships before flattering to deceive ever since, at best.
It’s a period of NBA prowess lamented more and more with each passing season of failure in New York. In many ways, it was a false though unforgettable dawn at the new arena for the primary tenants. There have been memorable moments since that time but the Knicks are predominantly a very popular failure.
Everything else has gone swimmingly there. Whether you’re a boxer or a performing artist, if you sell out The Garden, you’re set forever. Even the NBA will cling on to the potential menace it holds over visiting teams but more often than not, the Knicks are so unreliable that they and the NBA are relying on myth over reality.
The seeds of the ‘70 ‘73 success were somewhat accidentally planted a quarter of a century earlier.
On this day, 76 years ago, the New York Knickerbockers played their first ever home game at the previous Garden. A scrappy Upstate New Yorker from Lake George named Ned Irish was almost solely responsible for that new era of professional basketball in the Big Apple.
While the back story is pretty fascinating, let’s get it right out of the way; the one they seemed to name based on some sort of Irish-American caricature was a deeply problematic individual, embodying the worst sort of mid-century racism while also profiteering off of the seismic cultural change in post-World War II America which he so deeply feared.
You won’t find any glowing tributes to his role in spearheading the rapid change of a diversifying league because although he pulled some of the necessary levers that revolutionised the NBA towards its inevitable and necessary opening out to players of colour, he also actively sought to curb the number of Black men that he could fathom being part of the Knicks.
Skip right to his obituary in the during the deepest part of Winter 1982 and you’ll note that no services were planned for his funeral and that his body was simply to be cremated. His one surviving son and his second wife are the only close relatives named.
Almost a decade prior to the move to the Garden and the titles that brought with it, a 1961 Roger Kahn profile of the team and arena owner / tyrant begins brutally and brilliantly: “Edward Simmons Irish, once the prophet of big-time basketball and now president of the worst team in the National Basketball Association, is a man virtually without casual acquaintances. Irish has enemies who suggest, ‘Cut the son of a gun and he won't bleed.’ He has friends who insist, ‘He's the finest buddy a man can have.’ But what is missing from the wide circle about the calculating, headstrong, occasionally brilliant New Yorker are the neutralists. No one is neutral about Ned Irish. No one says simply, ‘He's all right, I guess.’”
The Knicks were at their lowest ebb and success seemed a very distant proposition. It’s difficult to find much else about Irish outside of Harvey Araton’s book which charts the build-up to and the glory of the 1970 and 1973 title-winning Knicks.
Ten years ago, Araton published and tracked the emergence of that famous team back to 1946 when Irish was among the 11 founders of the Basketball Association of America before spearheading the merger with the National Basketball League three years later to produce what we now know as the NBA.
Diedrich Knickerbocker was the pen name of Washington Irving, the author, diplomat and early definition of new world, post revolutionary New Yorker. Irish was a writer of much less renown than Irving, scrapping away as a mid-tier sports reporter at the before finally packing it all in to promote the business side of sports on a full-time basis, founding the Knicks and diving headfirst into the slowly emerging professional version of the game.
It was because he helped make a commercial success out of College Basketball in the 1930s that Irish could muscle professional basketball and the newly formed New York Knicks into the Garden in the mid-40s.
It’s a classically American success story with origins in the darkest days of the Depression, originally inspired by the then New York Mayor Jimmy Walker seeking out some sort of indoor sporting distraction for his citizens while also seeking to raise funds for unemployment relief. The city chief deployed a committee of sportswriters - Irish among them - to promote basketball money-spinners in Madison Square Garden which were soon attracting almost 20,000 people.
Ambitious Irish grabbed the initiative and ran with it. He was also working at the New York Football Giants on their PR side, thus allowing easy access to owner Tim Mara who backed his concept of profiteering off big College Basketball nights at the Garden.
The way Kahn describes it in Sports Illustrated, Irish’s idea was to operate the contests as a concession-style booking; the promoter would guarantee the venue $4,000, which was then the average cost of renting it. He would do all the difficult promotional work and give his hosts a share of the profits.
In late 1934, New York University welcomed in Notre Dame from Indiana and over 16,000 fans clamoured in. The unprecedented financial success of the billing was the making of the future owner.
''I didn't have to put up a cent,'' Irish recalled. ''Don't forget, it was the Depression and the Garden was dark a lot of nights. The only guarantee the Garden wanted was that its percentage of the gate would average the cost of renting the building... If I didn't meet it, my option would not be renewed.''
Twelve years later, when it came time to experiment with the professional game, it helped that the terms by which he had agreed to profit share with the Garden at the dawning of that relationship meant that he was able to set the table on his own terms for the newly formed Knicks, not to mention the prototype for the NBA. The Garden was ahead of its time for indoor sports venues and therefore pretty unique compared with every other venue in a new league whose teams had nothing to offer but ramshackle environs sheltering basic hardwood. So the imposing Knicks president’s early insistence that the home team keep all the gate receipts was a canny and greedy move that did not ingratiate him to his fellow owners.
According to Kahn, Irish would always get his way by threatening to back out of the league. "The way college basketball draws," bloviated Irish, "the Knicks are nothing but a tax write-off anyway."
Just like his obituary, the Kahn profile ends on a whimper. After mostly excoriating him for 90% of the story, Kahn rounds out with three concluding paragraphs that would seem like more of an epilogue if they weren’t the equivalent of an interviewer throwing his hands up in the air.
His subject’s answers “are clipped and uninformative… he seems uncomfortable during interviews, as though he would prefer checking the books or going about his business to discussing what it is that makes his business exciting”.
His is a “sad success story”, summarises Kahn. “After all these years, Ned Irish, who is more feared than admired, more accepted than liked, has become almost a walking advertisement for failure.”
A Knicks fan these days would read those paragraphs with a dark and familiar foreboding over 60 years on. For Ned Irish, read current owner James Dolan, both men ensuring their team is a crumbling edifice of their own ego.
Tonight, the New York Knicks will mark a haphazard anniversary of the night they beat the Chicago Stags in overtime. In reality, it will likely be an inconsequential game against another midwestern city, Detroit, with both teams already accepting of another inconsequential season. The odd legacy of forgotten Ned Irish.
@JohnWRiordan
