THE TIDES OF MARCH
College hoops reclaims center stage in the city, at least for the month
THE PEOPLE walk past and they don’t know, because they can’t know, because New York City flies past all of us in a blur — the years and the decades speeding by. The 778-foot tall building at 350 W. 50th St. is a fine ole structure but hardly stops people in their tracks, not in a city that houses 241 skyscrapers.
This is One Worldwide Plaza. Once upon a time it was a massive parking lot. Once upon a time it was the fictional site of the Peterman building on “Seinfeld.”
Once upon a time, it was Madison Square Garden.
“You’re too young,” Lou Carnesecca told me once. “There’s no way you could have ever seen a game at the Old Garden, right?”
“I was 1 when they tore it down,” I told him. He cupped one of his ears. “I can still hear it,” the old St. John’s coach said. “I can still hear it.”
The third incarnation of Madi- son Square Garden was the first one built nowhere near Madison Square, settling here, on Eighth Avenue between 49th and 50th streets, right on the eastern edge of Hell’s Kitchen. It ruled Manhattan from 1925-68, hosted so many important prize fights, hosted the old eight-day bicycle races, hosted the circus, hosted the Rangers and the Knicks.
And — once upon a time — it was responsible for New York City becoming the de facto capital of the entire sport of college basketball. Kids would hone their games elsewhere — Midwestern gyms, urban playgrounds, from Seattle to Santa Fe to Salem, Mass. — with one common goal:
Make it to New York. Make it to the Garden. Make it to the Mecca. It is a different time now, a different city, its glorious stretch mostly contained to the memories of old men and newspaper morgues. This is a pro town now, its sporting rhythms ruled by the Yankees and the Giants, the Mets and the Knicks.
This month, though, comes a splendid renaissance of roundball, the college kind, just when we need it most. New York’s prime basketball tenants, the Knicks and Nets, are embroiled in an endless shift of misery, and both will be roommates in basketball purgatory for years to come. The City Game mostly lies in repose at the Garden (the new one, 17 blocks south of here) and Barclays Center.
So we will open our arena doors and devote our attention spans to the kids these next few weeks in a way that will feel like 1950 all over again. This week the Big East and the Atlantic Coast Conference hold their postseason showcases in New York City, the Big East taking its regular turn at the Garden, the ACC invading Barclays Center. In two weeks the NCAA will decide one of its regional champions at the Garden. And, yes, for the old-timers and the hardliners, the NIT will crown its 80th champion on the next-tolast day of the month. College hoops will be king. And college hoops hasn’t been king in decades. There have been the occasional spasms of revival. The Big East used to command attention every year, especially when New York’s primary team, St. John’s, was a national program with big ambitions in the ’80s.
Back in 1970, Al McGuire thumbed his nose at the NCAA Tournament for regularly misplacing his Marquette Warriors in the wrong regional, so he actually refused an NCAA bid in favor of the NIT, won the NIT (beating St. John’s in the finals), reveled in the attention of New York, he crowed, “If you slap me, I’m going to punch you.”
But even by 1970, the college game had become a decided second citizen at the Garden, exactly 20 years after it had reached its pinnacle — CCNY capturing both the NCAA and NIT, both of them played at the Garden, both highlighting the Beavers’ quintessential New York style of movemove-move and pass-pass-pass.
That double triumph capped a brilliant 17-year run under the watchful eye of Ned Irish, who as a sports writer for the WorldTelegram newspaper studied the enthusiastic crowd that had gathered one winter night in 1931 when six New York colleges had played a triple-header at the Garden, all the proceeds going to Mayor Jimmy Walker’s Unemployment Relief Fund.
So it was that on Dec. 29, 1934, Irish — by then working for the Garden — scheduled a doubleheader using two local teams — St. John’s and NYU — as the bait, inviting Westminster and Notre Dame to serve as foils, and he sold every single seat — 16,138. The first player on the floor that night, leading St. John’s pregame layups, was a kid from Xavier High named Frank McGuire, who would become one of the city’s great basketball ambassadors — first with the Redmen, later with North Carolina and South Carolina.
“It was the game the kids all over the country underlined in red pencil on their schedules,”
McGuire said shortly before his death in 1994. “The Garden was the place to play.”
St. John’s lost that first showcase event to Westminster, 37-33, but NYU dispatched the Fighting Irish, 25-18, and across the next 17 years teams from literally every corner of the country begged for a coveted slot on the Garden’s famous marquee, where the Garden hawked its doubleheaders loudest. In 1938 the NIT was born.
But even as the college game was taking over the city, the darker charms of the sport — and the venue — began to appear. There are two things those old enough to have attended those games always remember: the thick plumes of cigarette smoke that used to turn the Garden’s halftime lobbies into foggy, smoggy wonderlands; and the gamblers who made little attempt to hide themselves or their intentions.
By 1951, not even New York City could provide safe harbor to the corruption, and the dam burst. The gamblers were exposed, and so were the players who shaved points — and sometimes threw games outright. And one of the principles of that unraveling was CCNY. It was a devastating blow.
“After the scandal,” Carnesecca says, “it was never the same. It was still great a lot of the time. But it wasn’t the same.”
The NIT is a consolation bracket now. The Holiday Festival, which even as late as the 1990s was a fine way to spend two Christmas week nights at the Garden, exists now in name only as an early-season doubleheader. This year’s event started at 11 o’clock in the morning. Both New York teams — St. John’s and Fordham — were blown out. Attendance was 8,200.
The Big East Tournament, of course, has long been the sport’s salvation in New York, and it will continue to be this week. The ACC at Barclays means a return to New York off the swarm of Syracuse (and Boston College) students and alums who used to keep the Garden hopping in the old days of the Big East. And when the NCAA came back to the Garden two years ago it provided two days and three games worth of endless fun. There is little doubt that will happen again.
Up here, on the corner of 49th and Eighth, the ghosts who linger from their old home surely approve. The old capital of college basketball breathes once more, even if it only is for a month.
But what a month.