We should remember the Knicks have tried the heart-string tug before, have tried reaching back to 1970 and 1973 and tried to sprinkle whatever pixie dust might be left in the attic bins at the Garden.
Then, it was 1982, and the road back to the Canyon of Heroes seemed just as crowded with impediments as it does now, with a LeBron and a KG and a Paul George and a Chris Paul and a Tim Duncan scattered seemingly everywhere.
Larry Bird and Magic Johnson were 26 and 23, not even close to the secular gods they would become. Michael Jordan was coming off his freshman year at North Carolina, Isiah Thomas his rookie year in Detroit. Over the next 17 years, those four players would have a hand in 14 titles and 22 trips to the Finals.
Maybe if he had known that, Dave DeBusschere might have given Sonny Werblin a different answer in May 1982 when he agreed to take over the Knicks, was given (allegedly) free reign and was asked to use the magic powers of the ’70s Knicks to end the drought infecting the Garden.
Back when the drought was nine whole years long.
“It won’t take us that long,” DeBusschere said on the day he was introduced alongside Hubie Brown, “to get this where everyone wants it to be.”
OK, DeBusschere had one small disadvantage if you’re going to compare the résumé Gulf + Western read 32 years ago and the one from Jackson that set Jim Dolan’s heart aflutter. Actually, 11 small disadvantages. And if that’s the first thing you think about at this point in the conversation — good.
The Knicks will surely and rightly reach back to the Nixon Era today, there will be famous George Kalinsky pictures like the one of Jackson playing volleyball on the beach during the ’70 Finals, or the one of Jackson (sans a front tooth) joining Jerry Lucas, Willis Reed, Walt Frazier and Bill Bradley flashing “We’re No. 1” index fingers in the visitors’ locker room at the Forum after Game 5 in ’73.
Good. Celebrate. Rejoice. Reminisce. If you aren’t going to do that on the day you bring one of your old heroes home, you shouldn’t ever do it.
And after today, the Knicks shouldn’t ever do it again.
Unless they’ve booked an early-morning trip down lower Broadway sometime in the next five years.
For now, Jackson’s time as a Knick becomes an official footnote, a trifle of trivia. It is far more useful to compare what Jackson did in the employ of two of the Knicks historic tormentors — the Bulls and the Lakers — than what he ever did as a player dubbed “coat hanger” — partly for his extra-wide shoulders, partly because, occasionally, he’d hang on the other side of halfcourt when he could sense a steal by someone else and a breakaway for him.
Those are the things that will be of most interest today when the Knicks introduce Jackson, and when Jackson undergoes his first public grilling, a task he has shown little difficulty with in the past and one that should pose no hindrance now. Maybe someday he can spin us a few yarns about the old days, but for now the lines on Jackson’s dossier covering 1967-78 shouldn’t matter less even if they read “Fort Wayne” and not “New York.”
“In the end, they may love you for yesterday,” DeBusschere said not long before he died, which was years after the Knicks fired him in 1986, “but they boo you for right now. And that’s how it should be.”
Of course it should. If history was all that mattered, the Yankees would’ve hired Don Mattingly and not Joe Girardi and probably been one title poorer — or hired Babe Ruth instead of Joe McCarthy and maybe been six short.
Yesterday can be a splendid thing.
Starting Tuesday, “Yesterday” is a song that was already an oldie the last time the Knicks won a championship, replaced for the here and now by another from the Beatles’ canon: Tomorrow Never Knows.