Fair warning, dear reader: The NCAA has occupied Madison Square Garden. So you can be excused if, when you take a look at the court, you have to remind yourself you’re still in Manhattan (New York, not Kansas) because you just as easily could be looking at Raleigh or Reno or Redondo Beach.
It means when you walk along the corridors you are all but swaddled in blue, the official color of the NCAA, and as you wander you may well have to remind yourself that you are not in Anaheim or Atlanta or Austin, Seattle or St. Louis or San Antonio.
They have done their best to sanitize the Garden, to wring the New York out of it, and if they haven’t yet put a huge NCAA logo up to cover the signature pinwheel ceiling … well, that’s only because they haven’t thought of that yet. That’s what the NCAA wants, what it craves, what it’s gotten.
But there’s one problem:
The players who will compete in the NCAA East Region this weekend? They know where they are. They know who came before them. They know the basketball history housed in the building, and the city, and it’s really kind of amazing: By the time these kids hit college, they already have played thousands of games in hundreds of venues in dozens of cities.
And still the Garden — and the City — matters to them. No amount of NCAA Lysol can scrub that away.
“As a basketball fan, just growing up, Madison Square Garden has always been the arena where you see big-time players come in here, go off for huge games, all the history and tradition that this arena has,” Virginia’s Joe Harris said before making the Garden’s ghosts no doubt beam by adding this: “It’s the world’s most famous arena.”
But is it? Still? Even for kids hardened by AAU circuits that bring them to Vegas and L.A., even for teams, like Michigan State, which has played games on an aircraft carrier in San Diego and an Air Force base in Germany? Tom Izzo, the Spartans coach who has crafted those exotic itineraries, understands why that would be a question.
And also has a pretty good answer.
“You know, the Garden is like a building version of our guy Magic,” he said, as in Johnson, as in the greatest Spartan of them all. “I can talk to [our guys], and a lot of players I talk about, these guys weren’t even born. But Magic, I can talk about him all the time. Everybody knows him, everybody knows who he is, what he’s all about, no matter when you were born.
Izzo grinned.
“And I think Madison Square Garden is something like that.”
It has been 53 years since the Garden last played host to an NCAA game. That was a Tuesday night, March 15, 1961, and the old gym on 50th Street and Eighth Avenue was jammed to capacity for a triple-header beginning at 6 p.m. sharp. That night 18,327 people watched Princeton top George Washington, St. Bonaventure beat Rhode Island and Wake Forest surprise St. John’s.
The NCAA left the Garden, and the city, near midnight that night and never came back. It was probably no coincidence that 1961 was also the year of the last massive gambling scandal to hit college basketball, with New Yorker Jack Molinas serving as Vinnie “The Chin” Gigante’s wingman in an operation that made the scandals of ’51 look like a 50-cent craps game.
As it turns out, that might have been a Garden that really did need a full supply of cleaning products. But a funny thing happened over the past half century or so: The portion of the Garden’s history that tends to be remembered is the good stuff. Especially by those too young to really remember much of anything.
“They go out there and see the banners,” Iowa State’s Fred Hoiberg said. “They see the jerseys up there — DeBusschere and Ewing and Frazier and all the great players that played here. They watched the old Big East Tournament out here, and that was a pretty special event.”
Said Virginia’s Tony Bennett: “I’m actually fascinated to see the floor because I played the Knicks in the Eastern Conference semifinals [with Charlotte] in ’93, so I can’t wait to see this.”
Well … the floor won’t look like that floor. It will look exactly like the floor in Memphis and Indianapolis and Anaheim. The NCAA is in New York. But it won’t ever be of New York. We’ll just have to live with that. And, for the weekend, each other.