It’s the third quarter, the Knicks have been trailing all night and the fans are booing the defense and screaming profanities at the refs.
“They need the crowd behind them,” says a tall redhead in section 126. “They need me.”
He punches himself in the chest three times, jumps into the aisle and starts gyrating like a belly dancer on crack.
“Come on! DEFENSE!” he shouts. The crowd is stunned at the sudden explosion. But their shock turns to laughter as the dancing gets more spastic. Now he’s doing the robot; now he’s approximating Michael Jack son in “Thriller”; now he’s leapfrogging down a flight of stairs, crashing into an in nocent passer-by.
“How much did that boy have to drink?” a bewildered fan asks.
They’re ap palled, but they’re also smil ing and clapping along – and hav ing a lot more fun than they were a minute ago.
They think he’s a crazy fan, and he is – crazy like a fox.
He’s Cameron Hughes, profes sional fan. Paid up to $2,000 a night to get the crowds riled up for the New Jer sey Devils, the Atlanta Hawks and the Cleveland Cavaliers, among others.
Hughes, 37, makes about six figures a year for attending 80 games and doing what most do for fun.
“Having Cameron there adds just a little extra energy to the crowd, and it definitely gives the players an extra advantage,” said Amanda Greco, a Cavaliers team official. Other teams, such as the Devils, don’t like to discuss Hughes’ work for them, believing people would be disappointed to learn he isn’t a die-hard fan.
Hughes stumbled drunkenly into his life’s calling when he went nuts at an Ottawa Senators hockey match in 1994.
“I’d had too much to drink and I just started going crazy,” said Hughes. After the game, the team offered him a few hundred bucks to come back. And a star – er, psycho fan – was born.
Nowadays he’s all business. He never drinks during games, and each of his uncoordinated dances is carefully coordinated with the team beforehand.
He teases kids, flirts with women and makes old ladies get up and dance. His signature move is wearing 15 T-shirts and pulling them off one by one, flinging them into the crowd like an overweight stripper.
“I just want people up, clapping, dancing, cheering, whatever,” he says. “I want everyone to have fun at the game.”
Hughes doesn’t work for the Knicks – not yet. But the impromptu audition he performed at last week’s game to try to land a job seemed to work in getting their attention.