Steve Lavin. (CSM /Landov)
The Knicks regulate the basketball heartbeat in New York City. They control the city’s hardwood mood swings. When things are good — and lately, they have been as good as they have been since the Clinton Administration — the town feels like an overgrown version of Hickory, Ind., one big, sprawling gymnasium. It is the city game, after all.
But the Knicks aren’t the game’s only civic curators, and that’s made the past few years especially difficult for local gym rats. It’s been four years since one of “our” teams has been in the NCAA Tournament (not counting liberal March adoption policies when it’s OK to annex a UConn here, a Siena there, when we can pretend Syracuse is the outer-est of the outer boroughs).
And even then, the reps were Iona, from Westchester County, and Seton Hall, from over in Jersey. The last time a school from one of the boroughs qualified was Manhattan two years before that. None of this is news, of course, to those who care most about rectifying this arid, acrid stretch.
“Nothing gets the pulse of the city racing quicker than when basketball is important,” Tom Pecora said.
“Everyone knows how important the game is to the city and vice versa,” Steve Lavin said. “You can’t work here and not feel it every day.”
Tonight, inside a splendid little bandbox on Fordham’s Rose Hill campus, Pecora’s Rams will play host to Lavin’s Red Storm. It’s an inter-borough skirmish pitting one team that always will hoist the area’s most prominent banner and one from an ascendant conference that always has thought of itself as a sleeping giant but has spent more time lately slumbering than growing.
Both programs have been through hell across the past decade, sent there because of the misdeeds and indifference of one set of coaches (Mike Jarvis, Bob Hill), kept there thanks to the earnest if lacking performance of two others (Norm Roberts, Dereck Whittenberg). But when St. John’s hired Lavin last spring, it signaled the Johnnies were done dipping cautious toes in the waters of modern big-time basketball, and Fordham’s luring of Pecora from Hofstra coincided with an infusion of support in a program that had been scraping the bottom of the Atlantic 10.
Both men have had immediate impacts. Every few days this fall, it seemed, Lavin was securing another platinum-plated name on the recruiting trail, and the senior-heavy Johnnies hit the season running by capturing the Great Alaska Shootout. And Fordham already has four wins this year, one less than the total accrued over the last two years combined.
“It’s a cyclical sport,” Lavin said. “I remember a stretch in Southern California in the early and mid-80s, UCLA and USC were down and it allowed schools like Arizona to step in, but then it came back around again for both the L.A.-area schools. I can see something like that happening for both us and Fordham.”
Pecora, raised and reared on city ball, would love to see nothing more than a permanent renaissance here, for everyone.
“When St. John’s is good, it’s good for everyone else in the city,” he said. “And I think us being competitive would be a good thing for St. John’s,
too. It’s good to have teams pulling each other up.”
At a time when the Garden plays host to doubleheaders featuring national programs, when the Izod Center gets Duke-Butler, Pecora envisions a time when the Garden can do its part in the revitalization of the city game. An ambitious wish for two doubleheaders, afternoon and evening, eight area schools, capped by the St. John’s-Fordham game as the main event.
“Who wouldn’t like that?” Pecora asks.
This is a first step there, a noisy night when Queens will get after The Bronx, when the Big East tries to big-foot the A-10, when the city’s flagship program, NCAA-free since 2002, wanders into the den of a prime adversary, which has waited 10 years longer. And why not? The Knicks are off life-support. The city hums for the city game again. Why shouldn’t the colleges re-join the fray, and join in the fun?
michael.vaccaro
@nypost.com