My old man, he’d had this view plenty back at the old Garden, the one on 50th Street and Eighth Avenue, where by the fourth quarter most of the fans in the upper deck were grateful that clouds of cigarette smoke obscured their view of the terrible basketball littering the floor a few stories below.
But one Thursday he came home and announced that he’d scored a pair of tickets for the next night’s basketball game between the Celtics and the Knicks, Game 6 of the Eastern Conference semifinals. The Celtics led the series, 3-2, and this was probably going to be the last home game of the season for the most enjoyable Knicks team of my youth (I’d been born a year or two too late to understand 1970 or ’73).
And when we showed up, it turned out we were in the ultimate Uecker seats: last row of the blues, all the way up top. Our backs literally touched the wall, and it felt like we could touch the pinwheel roof. It was May 11, 1984. And I was about to learn for the first time just what Madison Square Garden could be.
“Feels like we’re on top of the world, eh?” he asked.
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