Though this is the Knicks’ third N.B.A. championship, Thursday’s ticker-tape parade is the first in the team’s 80-year history. The 1970 and 1973 Knicks were not honored with parades, and a former Knick named John Shove “Bud” Palmer had a lot to do with that.
How can that be? Here’s how: Palmer was an original member of the Knicks and led the team in scoring their first year, 1946-47. He is credited with being one of several players who pioneered the jump shot. But in 1966, after stints as an advice columnist, a sportscaster and a children’s show host, he had a new job as commissioner of the city’s Department of Public Events under Mayor John Lindsay.
By Lindsay’s day, ticker-tape parades had become routine and rather rote. In the decade before he took office, there were 82 of them, for everyone from the president of Tunisia to the Shah of Iran to the Little League World Series champions from Staten Island. Palmer, the mayor’s official greeter, had a different vision.
He told Lindsay he wanted to change how the Public Events Department received and honored dignitaries and celebrities. Such duties, he wrote in a letter to Lindsay, “have been singularly burdened with a monotonous similarity and lack of imagination.”
He added, “In the future they will be performed with more consideration and forethought for the best interests of both the mayor and the guests of the city.” Lindsay wrote back, “I like your ideas. Go to it.” (Their correspondence is housed in the archives of the City’s Department of Records.)
One of the first things to go, it seems, was ticker-tape parades. In Lindsay’s first three years in office, there were none.
The Mets did get a parade when they won the 1969 World Series, but by then, the city was starting to have financial problems. Palmer complained to Lindsay that the comptroller’s office had rejected a bill for $372 for name placards placed on the cars that transported the Mets at the parade.
He added bitterly that he had wrangled the cars for free from local Chrysler dealers and that if the city had needed to pay for them, “that bill would have been considerably more than the $372 bill for the signs.”
So when the Knicks — with a legendary squad featuring Willis Reed, Walt Frazier, Bill Bradley and coached by Red Holzman — won the N.B.A. title in 1970, there was no parade. Instead, The Times reported, the team was feted with scotch, salami and Dixieland jazz at Gracie Mansion, the mayor’s residence.
When they won again in 1973, the Knicks got a public ceremony at City Hall Plaza, but it was attended by only 2,000 people, as opposed to the hundreds of thousands who went to parades.
Lindsay presented Reed, the team captain, and Holzman with medallions. But they were not specially minted and inscribed for the event.
They were leftover diamond jubilee souvenirs from a celebration held several weeks earlier for the 75th anniversary of the municipal consolidation that added Brooklyn, Queens and Staten Island to New York City to create the five boroughs.
The post The 1970 and 1973 Knicks Did Not Get Parades. An Ex-Knick Is Partly to Blame. appeared first on New York Times.
