FRANK McALLISTER had waited his son’s whole life for this night. The financial planner from North Jersey has heard all the stories about the way fathers and sons are entwined with baseball. For him, though, it was always something else.
“It was always basketball for my father and me, always the Knicks,” McAllister said yesterday afternoon. “Nov. 22, 1975. That was my first game. I still remember the score: Cavaliers 95, Knicks 94. It was a loss. But it was glorious.”
When the time arrived to pay that 32-year-old moment forward, to bring his own son to the Garden, McAllister figured it was perfect: his 9-year-old, Sean, would see the Cavaliers, too. It would be LeBron James instead of Austin Carr. But the magic would be the same.
Only the McAllisters stayed home last night. Frank tried giving away his pair of $44 tickets in Section 419 at the office. There were no takers.
“When it’s his time,” McAllister said, “I want it to be as special as it was for me. If it was just bad basketball, that would be one thing. But it’s gotten so ugly at the Garden . . . I’ll just have to believe it’ll get better. Hopefully before Sean goes to college.”
Those are the voices that should concern the Knicks most, the voices who weren’t at Madison Square Garden last night, the ones that weren’t protesting outside the World’s Most Famous Arena, or signing that big silly pink slip. Nor were they the ones who would cheer what turned out to be the Knicks’ finest effort of the year, a 108-90 blowout of the Cavs.
This is the stuff that should paralyze James Dolan where he sits and where he slumps, that should finally make him see what his favorite son, Isiah Thomas, has done to the Knicks, and to the Garden, and to New York City basketball. Teams go through lulls. They go through cold spates. But it isn’t supposed to get like this.
“I was brought here to make this team into a winner,” Thomas said last night before the game, before his team would justify that vision for one 48-minute stretch, at least. “And I will accomplish that.”
He can be as bold, as defiant, as brassy as he wants to be; nobody hears him anymore. Nobody listens. There comes a time when a coach stops being unpopular and passes into a far more venal place. There is no recovering from that place.
Every team in New York has one of those in its history: Ray Handley for the Giants, Rich Kotite for the Jets. Art Howe for the Mets, Stump Merrill for the Yankees. You say their names, even years after the fact, and fans still get red in the face. Isiah joined that club long ago. He’s destined to become its permanent chairman.
“I think the future is brighter now than when I first came here,” Thomas said, maybe an hour before his name would be smothered in boos, two hours before his team would play well enough to spare him a night of ugliness for a change. Maybe he even believes that.
If so, he sits in a lonely corner.