It has been a wonderful, crazy and exhausting few months for New York sports fans, and this Saturday could be remembered for generations. The Knicks are playing for a championship a half-century in the making; the first World Cup match in the Meadowlands pits Brazil against Morocco; and, in case anyone forgot, the Yankees and Mets are still in business, too.
It could be a day that people regale their children with, 32 years from now — just like the last time the Knicks were one win from a championship and on their way to Texas for the next game.
It was June 1994, the climax of a wild spring that made New York rightly feel like it was at the center of the sporting universe. But back then, the Knicks were only one part of a singular and bizarre moment in sports history. By the time the craziest day in sports rolled around in mid-June, most fans had already been through a two-month spin cycle of anxiety, joy and pain.
The Knicks were in the N.B.A. finals for the first time in over two decades. The Rangers, after decades of hockey futility, had finally won their first Stanley Cup in more than 50 years, and the city had an energetic, sports-loving new mayor. The Yankees and Mets played almost every day, the Gay Games were in New York that June and it was also the first time the World Cup was held in the United States.
“It was an unbelievable time to be in New York,” said Dave Checketts, the president of the Knicks and the Rangers in the 1990s. “The city was just electric, and the Garden was at the center of it.”
Sound familiar? Actually, there was even more going on in ’94, because jammed awkwardly into the middle of it all was the hunt for O.J. Simpson.
“That was crazy,” Mario Elie, a forward on the Houston Rockets, who grew up on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, said in an interview last week. “My own family was watching it.” In the series against the Knicks, he said many of his childhood friends were rooting against him, and that makes sense.
For weeks, New Yorkers were riveted by the tandem rise of the Knicks and Rangers. From the middle of April until well into June, almost every night one of those teams was embroiled in a tense playoff clash, with half the games at Madison Square Garden, where both teams alternated playing. Night after night, over ice or hardcourt, the building pulsated, and both teams kept winning.
“Each series, I didn’t think it could get any louder,” said Stéphane Matteau, one of the Rangers’ heroes that season. “But each time, it did. It was completely wild.”
For the Knicks to reach the finals, they had to beat the Nets, the Bulls and the Pacers, the latter led by the Knicks archenemy, Reggie Miller. The last two series went to seven games, and the intensity was so raw, Mayor Rudolph Giuliani had to intercede.
Spike Lee, the Knicks superfan sitting courtside, had gotten into a beef with Miller, which seemed only to motivate him. Some fans blamed Lee for the Knicks losing that game, and Giuliani came to his defense. “I think it’s shame he’s being scapegoated,” the mayor said at the time. But the Knicks prevailed in Game 7, while the Rangers did their thing in spectacular fashion.
The impact of the dual playoff runs supercharged the city, with fans packed into bars and vacuuming team merchandise off store shelves. This was the era of dial-up internet, when the main barometer for a New York team’s place in the city’s consciousness was still the back page of the tabloids. Either the Knicks or the Rangers — or both — were on the back page of The New York Post for a whopping 47 days in a row that spring.
Those playoff runs may have even helped save The Post, which was coming off two years of musical-chairs ownership, a nasty strike and sagging readership. But more fans were ready to plunk down 50 cents to follow the Knicks and the Rangers, and it helped to stabilize the tabloid by boosting circulation for the first time in years.
On the 48th day, after all that Knicks and Rangers mania ended, The Post’s back page featured the United States losing to Romania in the World Cup.
“There were no clicks back then,” said Pat Hannigan, The Post’s night sports editor at the time, “but we sold a ton of papers.”
The Rangers conference final against the New Jersey Devils was epic. Facing elimination, Mark Messier, the Rangers captain, guaranteed a win in New Jersey — and then scored three goals to back it up. In Game 7, Matteau scored the winner in double overtime, leading to the sportscaster Howie Rose’s famous scream, “Matteau! Matteau! Matteau!”
On June 14, the Rangers finally won their elusive Stanley Cup at the Garden, and three days later came the mother of all sports days. It started in the morning with the Rangers ticker-tape parade, and the Knicks players took notice.
“It was beautiful what they did,” Charles Oakley, a rugged forward on the Knicks, said last week. “We wanted to do it, too.”
An hour or so after Giuliani handed the Rangers the keys to the city, the World Cup kicked off in Chicago with a slog of a match; Germany, one of the favorites, beat Bolivia, 1-0.
Then came Game 5 between the Knicks and Rockets at the Garden, interrupted by Simpson. For several days, the country had been gripped by the brutal murder of his wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and her friend, Ron Goldman. Simpson, the former Buffalo Bills running back, emerged as the suspect and then briefly disappeared.
When he did reappear, it was smack in the middle of the first half of the game, and the national broadcast switched away from the Knicks to the infamous scenes of Los Angeles police cruisers in low-speed pursuit of Simpson’s white Ford Bronco.
At the Garden, curious fans filtered out to the concourses to watch the chase on monitors as Checketts implored them to return to their seats. Today, aliens would have to land in Central Park to distract Knicks fans from their team, but the O.J. chase felt that way at the time. In the second half, NBC actually split the screen between the two events.
“It was the twilight zone,” Checketts said. “Are you kidding me? This is Game 5. We need you to get back in there. But the whole world was watching it.”
The Knicks won Game 5 and led the series, 3-2. The next day, the focus shifted to the World Cup at the Meadowlands for the Italy-Ireland match. Seven 747s, laden with fans, came over from Ireland, and the stands were filled with the Irish, Italians and their local cousins.
Amid brutal humidity and temperatures that reached 110 degrees on the field, Ireland shocked Italy, 1-0.
A few days later, with the World Cup in full swing, the Knicks lost Game 7 in Houston. Marv Albert, the broadcaster for both the Rangers and Knicks, had announced every Knicks game. A Brooklyn native, he was uniquely positioned to observe a city crackling with the energy of both New York teams, intertwined with the World Cup.
The echoes are uncanny.
“The Garden and the city were jumping then,” he said. “But not as much as we see today, with the watch parties and everything. Thirty-two years ago, it was very big. It’s even bigger now.”
Bigger, but not crazier.
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