"Go ahead."
Patrick Ewing had wrapped a crumpled New York Knicks bathrobe around his 7 ft 1 in frame and submerged both legs in a massive tub of ice. It was mid-April in Madison Square Garden and the old man of the much-maligned basketball team found himself staring balefully at the New York city media corps and, after a tense protracted silence, giving them the okay to shoot the same questions. The theme hadn't varied all season; namely, why New York, full of flash names and zillion-dollar reputations, played so horribly.
"I have no explanation. None whatsoever," he sighed, reflecting on that evening's game when the Knicks had fallen to the lowly Toronto Raptors, drawing a cacophony of boos from clearly bored Garden fans, who reserved their rare bouts of enthusiasm for Toronto's Charles Oakley, a New York old boy.
That loss left the Knicks with just nine games remaining in which to make the post-season play-offs and the corridors of the arena that night were heavy with glum foreboding.
The Knicks is among the most heavily scrutinised professional sports organisations in America, and is regularly beaten up by the unforgiving New York media establishments. Its high-rolling, city-attitude celebrity players constantly waver between public adulation and outright derision.
This night was one for the latter. Film director Spike Lee, a Knicks fanatic, had, incredibly, failed to show up. And the ordinary folk could hardly raise a cheer when the big screen flashed up Woody Allen, another New York devotee. The arena had half emptied by the time the whistle went.
Afterwards, there was a soullessness about the New York locker room. The current bunch are an ecletic crop anyway. In one corner sat Latrell Sprewell, a dreadlocked, emotional, fireball just recently back from a year-long suspension for attempting to choke his former coach, PJ Carlesimo. Fixing a silver tie around a silver collar was Marcus Camby, a seven-foot tattooed bean-pole who had enjoyed superstardom in college but who was beginning to look distinctly flaky as a professional.
Charlie Ward, the team's squat point guard, had enjoyed a similarly glitzy career in college, but as a Heisman Trophy-winning football star. His decision to opt for pro basketball left him open to taunts from rival guards, who have publicly declared that New York won't win anything with Ward handling the ball.
The Knicks' coach, Jeff Van Gundy, paced in and out intermittently, a pale, terse man who has developed an ever more haunted, obsessive look over his four-year stewardship. And alone sat Ewing, cold eyed and thoughtful, a proud, ageing star who seemed to personify the flickering brilliance and predestined inclination to failure so long associated with the Knicks, who have not won an NBA championship since 1971.
His team-mates exited swiftly and with few words while Ewing sat on alone, rattling his limbs about in freezing water, looking like an athlete who knew he'd hung around the hardcourt he loved for one season too long.
But that was seven weeks and a lifetime ago. Tonight, the New York Knicks are, as Ewing put it, "back at the big dance". After scraping into the play-offs, the Knicks began a near miraculous run through the post-season and this evening's match-up against the San Antonio Spurs in the series already coined as "The Finals of no Michael", in mock homage to the retired Michael Jordan.
New York's unlikely run - they are the first ever eighth-seeded team to make the NBA finals - has captured the city's heart in much the same way as the Yankees did last autumn. Nationally, their dizzying renaissance has been good news for the NBA, with television ratings only dipping by eight per cent on last year's play-offs, this despite the absence of Jordan and the fact that the players' strike soured the public perception of NBA athletes, with most observers decrying them as greedy money grabbers with no concept of loyalty.
Ironically, Ewing, one of the few players to remain with one franchise over the course of his career, had acted as spokesperson for the players and thus shouldered the brunt of public abuse.
Their freakishly-swift re-invention from overpaid, often sulky misfits to a slashing, up-tempo running team playing with an almost spiritual sense of togetherness has left most fans and analysts speechless. More astonishingly, it seems to have got people behind the team that, traditionally, everybody loved to loathe. Throughout the decade, the Knicks wallowed in their reputation as being "big 'n' bad" and the local crowd deified their highly-volatile, short-fused servants like Jon Starks, Ewing and Oakley even as the rest of the country vilified them.
It seemed that no set of play-offs was complete without an old-fashioned rumble involving New York and Miami or Indiana or Chicago. Any city at all.
A series of off-season trades left the Knicks without its blue collar sparks and New Yorkers were slow to warm to newcomers such as the laconic Camby and defiant Sprewell. But it was these two who gelled and fired the team as they eliminated a host of fancied sides in electric games which have led to spontaneous street carnivals across the boroughs.
Tonight, New York are in the San Antonio Alamodome for Game One against the Spurs, a smooth and methodical team led by the monotonous, if flawless Tim Duncan. After the second game, the finals return to Madison Square Garden, where New Yorkers have re-discovered an evangelical faith in their team. The Knicks will, however, be without the talismanic Ewing, who ripped a tendon in the conference final against Indiana. His team-mates have each vowed to win the championship for him.
But he'll sit on the edge of the bench anyway, suited and glowering, hollering his lungs out, a long way from the remote and sad figure who pondered a bleak fade-out from the sport just weeks ago.
