ATLANTA — They are forever now. It’s official. It’s for real. Two basketball lifers, two New Yorkers, two Knicks, two men who owned two different incarnations of Madison Square Garden. Richie Guerin. Bernard King. One from The Bronx. One from Brooklyn.
Both, forever, of Springfield, Mass., now.
“This is the pinnacle,” said King, whose election was revealed officially yesterday, though The Post reported it on Friday. “There’s nothing higher than the Hall of Fame. You don’t go anywhere beyond that.”
Guerin has known since February, since the All-Star Game, when the Veterans Committee selected him, but he was just as moved, just as delighted when the Class of 2013 was officially announced yesterday on the morning of the NCAA National Championship Game.
“It’s a very happy moment for me,” Guerin said. “It means an awful lot to me. It’s something I’ve looked forward to my whole life, basically. I didn’t know if this would happen. This is a moment I’ll never forget.”
In their own unique ways King and Guerin share a kinship with Knicks fans and with each other. The Knicks who have enjoyed the most prosperity are the glory bunch of 1969-73, and the near-miss heartbreakers of 1993-2000, and even the Joe Lapchick teams of the early ’50s, the teams that assembled both franchise championships and all eight trips to the NBA Finals.
Guerin and King were different. For almost all of their tenures with the Knicks, they were often the only reason for folks to make the trek to the Garden. For Guerin, his office was the old Garden on 50th Street and Eighth Avenue, the one with the famous marquee out front and the layers of smoke that all but blacked out the upper grandstands.
For King it was the present Garden, on top of Penn Station, a room he would often fill with roars whose ferocity rivaled the trains grumbling underground, and his own famous visage when it morphed into something a generation of Knicks fans knew as Bernard’s Game Face.
“I would describe it as intense … focused … with a want to win.”
No one ever doubted the want to win of either of them, but part of the reason they seemed destined to be overlooked was because neither of them ever did much actual winning in a Knicks uniform, which is why Patrick Ewing’s No. 33 hangs in the Garden rafters alongside Dick McGuire’s 15 and six jerseys representing both championship teams.
Guerin played on some truly horrible teams in the late ’50s and early ’60s and appeared in a grand total of two playoff games, a couple of losses to the Syracuse Nationals following the 1958-59 season. He set the Knicks’ single-season scoring mark for pouring in 29.5 points per game during the 1961-62 season in which the Knicks finished 29-51.
King tried to push the Knicks out of the circle of mediocrity into which they had fallen after the ’73 title. He guided them to a sweep of the Nets in the ’83 playoffs, to an unforgettable five-game win over Isiah Thomas’ Pistons in ’84, and pushed the eventual-champ Celtics to Game 7 the round after that. But while he won the NBA scoring title the next year at 32.9 points per game, the Knicks were already 24-46 by the time he suffered his calamitous knee injury and well on the way to that spring’s fateful lottery.
The holes on the resume stung both men for years, because not only did both have to wait for induction to Springfield, neither Guerin’s No. 9 nor King’s No. 30 hangs in honor in the Garden’s rafters.
A few years ago, walking on the future site of Barclays Center, King said: “If that ever happened … I don’t know if I’d ever be able to sleep again, knowing my jersey hung with the men who are up there.”
Guerin has been far less diplomatic, telling the Post’s Marc Berman in 2006: “You can’t fault someone who played in an era where the supporting cast wasn’t good enough to win championships. If you perform to standards, they should be recognized.”
Who knows if those numbers will ever hang from the pinwheel ceiling. But their names belong forever in the roster of immortals in Springfield. For now, that’ll have to do.