Kings of the Garden

Kings of the Garden: The New York Knicks and Their City is a well-written, well-researched book that will have a limited impact on the field of sport history in the United States. Historian Adam Criblez offers readers a detailed reconstructionist account of the National Basketball Association (NBA) franchise the New York Knicks during the 1970s and ’80s, arguing that the franchise's struggles during this period “mirrored those facing New York City over the same span” (6). This comparative focus is arguably the book's significant contribution to the field: seeing the history of a professional sports team as sport history and urban history and relating the team's history to developments in the communities that make up metropolitan New York City (particularly, for Criblez, Black cultural expression and the rise of hip-hop). By chronicling the history of the Knicks during the ’70s and ’80s, the book explains how the prominent Black male players who represented and played for the team epitomized how Black men “helped spur two global cultural phenomena, hip-hop and professional basketball” during a time of widening socioeconomic divisions, the dismantling of social welfare programs both within and beyond New York, and the rise of Reaganite neoconservatism (4). The book does not necessarily offer a new way of studying or thinking about modern sports in relation to cities, but it does remind historians of sport that the meaning of sport is always tied in important, influential ways to its built environments and spatial contexts.The book is a chronological history of the Knicks franchise from 1973—which, for Criblez, marks a period of decline following the team's “Golden Age” (11) with famous players such as Willis Reed and Walt Frazier—to 1985, the drafting of future great Patrick Ewing and the promise of a new era of Knicks basketball. Each chapter primarily recounts the Knicks’ struggles from year to year, with at times an attention to detail that should appeal to Knicks and basketball fans but may prove frustrating to those readers less familiar with the team. Criblez shines in the moments where he starts exploring the history of the Knicks in tandem with Black cultural expression in New York City. For example, in the second chapter Criblez briefly shifts his focus to the history of hip-hop in the city and how early artists formed crews and engaged in “toasts, dance-offs, and deejay contests” in spaces such as parks and, if they could afford it, high school gymnasiums (42). In such instances, the histories of Black music, sport, and New York City intersected, with hip-hop pioneers using the same spaces of flat concrete as those young Black men used for pick-up basketball games. However, Criblez too often leaves such otherwise tantalizing moments as underdeveloped historical vignettes tucked inside an otherwise focused discussion on the Knicks, the activities of the players, and their season at hand. This happens throughout the book, with chapters often including a few pages of fascinating context—local politics, New York City nightlife, crime in the city, and most prominently developments in hip-hop music—sandwiched between lengthy, narrowly focused recounting of the Knicks during the years in question. The result is a historical narrative that briefly suggests, but does not effectively unpack, the fascinating dialectical relations among sport, space, and urban life.Thus, though tantalizing in its aims—I am particularly fascinated by Criblez's notion of failure in history in his intent to study how “the Knicks’ efforts at creating a new dynasty fell short” and how this failure related to the NBA's capitalizing on hip-hop as “integrationist music to appeal to both Black and white fans as the league emerged as a global enterprise” (6)—the book misses multiple opportunities to illuminate the spatial dimensions of sport and rethink how we conceptualize the relations between sport and the cities in which they exist(ed). Sport never simply, as Criblez writes, “mirrors” what is taking place in its surrounding social conditions. Sport, like our lived and living spaces, is shaped by and subsequently shapes the multifaceted, uneven social conditions and contingencies that produced it. The book is highly informative and will be useful to those already interested in the history of the Knicks, the NBA, and basketball. Readers seeking to complicate their understanding of the mutually constitutive relations among sport, popular culture, and the built environment may find themselves seeking other studies for analysis and illumination

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