The day before the New York Knicks took over Lower Manhattan to celebrate their historic NBA championship, a Business Insider staffer stumbled upon a heartwarmingly desperate Facebook post.
A son was begging for a spot high above the predicted crowd of millions to watch the parade with his 88-year-old father, who was recovering from surgery, and his 10-year-old son.
“This is a long shot. Then again, so was Jalen Brunson’s three in Game 4. I’m looking for my OG,” the post read.
Business Insider already had planned an employee watch party in our newsroom above the parade route — and who wouldn’t want to feel like newly minted New York City sports legend OG Anunoby? We reached out and invited the trio to join us.
After enthusiastically taking us up on the offer, 58-year-old Winston Bao Lord and I hopped on the phone to plan the logistics of his visit.
Imagine the slight shock I felt when we found out exactly who we were talking to
Bao Lord shares a name with his father, Winston Lord, a close advisor to Henry Kissinger and a crucial part in restoring US-China relations in the 1970s. He’s also a die-hard Knicks fan, a trait he passed down to his son, who spoke about his father’s accolades and Jalen Brunson’s team leadership in the same reverent tone.
Though we weren’t aware of Lord’s vast, storied career when we initially reached out, the discovery reminded us that at the end of the day, everyone —no matter if you’re a retired diplomat or a student who skipped school — can feel the magic and camaraderie of being a Knicks fan right now.
“The thing that’s unique about the Knicks, of course, it unites the city.”
It’s been 53 years since their last championship, but Lord said his wait for this moment was longer. He’s been a fan since he was his grandson Levi’s age, and he’d been loving the team for two decades before he saw their first championship win in 1970.
“The thing that’s unique about the Knicks, of course, it unites the city,” Lord said. “This is the one team everyone can sort of get behind.”
His son and grandson took the train from Baltimore into the city last night to meet him, and soon enough, the small group was in a cab on their way from his uptown apartment to Business Insider’s offices at 7:30 a.m. this morning — around the same time I was frantically elbowing my way through the massive orange-and-blue crowds downtown trying to beat them there.
They arrived through the mayhem around 9:30 a.m. after a cab ride and a half-mile walk. The route their cab took, they said, was a team effort between them, their cab driver, and AI — they fed the official parade route into both Claude and Gemini to ask for real-time road closure updates.
I couldn’t believe they made it on time, especially with the 88-year-old Lord’s walker in tow. But once they did, their excitement was palpable.
“The energy, it’s incredible. If you look around walking to One Liberty Plaza, you’re seeing all these feet hanging from the second floor because it’s trying to get a vantage point.”Bao Lord said about their commute.
Once they were in and we were waiting for the parade to start, we talked about their favorite Knicks memories.
Lord was born in 1937, and told me about growing up in New York, secretly listening to Knicks games on the radio as a kid, and watching for footsteps outside his door so he could quickly turn the volume down before his parents caught him staying up late.
He also told me he didn’t get much of a chance to watch the team’s last Finals run 53 years ago as intensely.
“I was working for the government in 1970, 1973, when we won our two championships,” Lord said. “That’s the good news. The bad news is, I was working for a guy named Henry Kissinger, who, if you left the office before midnight, you got fired. So, I didn’t see that much of the actual games when we won our championship.”
He couldn’t catch most games then, but with the free time retirement has given him, his primary hobby has been keeping up with his favorite teams. If he wasn’t watching the Knicks parade today, he told me he’d be at home watching the World Cup.
“But in terms of enjoying it with my family, this is certainly one of the highlights.”
As I spoke with Lord and Bao Lord about their love for the team and New York, Levi, the 10-year-old, was sitting off to the side, his excitement seeming to wane a bit as he waited for the parade to start. Just as I began to wonder whether he was as big a fan as his dad and grandfather had hyped him up to be, the parade kicked off — and he jumped up in front of the window, the diehard Knicks fandom in his blood on full display.
I couldn’t hear the office TV announce which bus each player was on, but Levi, with his face pressed up against the glass, told me every single one. He was squinting to read the signs on the sides of the buses, confidently naming every player on them, becoming more animated as he rattled them off.
His grandfather and father were proudly watching him when they could pull their eyes away from the window. The only other time I saw the elder two Lords look away was when they would get up during a lull in our direct line of sight to check the TV for who was coming next.
In that moment, I caught a small glimpse of what it must have looked like when the three of them went to their first game all together at Madison Square Garden for the first time last year.
I asked Lord where the parade ranked on the scale of most interesting or exciting days in his life; he called it apples and oranges.
“Compared to opening China or forging a peace agreement with Vietnam or going to Middle East shuttles, going to a Moscow summit, I’m not going to put it in that class,” he said. “But in terms of enjoying it with my family, this is certainly one of the highlights.”
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