While James won’t directly make the case that he’s the most influential athlete of the past half-century, on the barroom debate about the basketball GOAT, he doesn’t hesitate. “I’m not taking nobody over me,” says James. “There’s no question. But I think Mike will say the same thing. Rest his soul, Kobe will say the same thing. Magic will say the same thing. Bird will say the same thing. Shaq could say the same thing. The late great Wilt. Kareem. I don’t think none of us are going to take somebody else. If there’s a general manager and he’s eyeballing all of us on a baseline, with the No. 1 pick, it’s gonna be hard not to take me, champ.”
On Monday night, the most powerful man in the world crashed a citywide celebration 27 years in the making and almost shut it down, with barricades around Midtown Manhattan, security lines outside Madison Square Garden and agents wanding Victor Wembanyama as if the San Antonio Spurs phenom were a threat off the court as well as on it. And when Donald Trump finally arrived for his grand entrance, it was in a half-mile-long motorcade. Anyone taking in the scene couldn’t help but ask the quintessential New York question: who does this guy think he is, some kind of big shot?
At this point in Trump’s presidency, it’s fair to wonder if he got into politics for the free tickets. On a night when he could’ve been dealing with far more pressing issues – soaring living costs, war with Iran, a global economy under strain – Trump flew to New York expressly to watch the Knicks play host to their first NBA finals game since he started making noisesabout running for office someday; he evidently couldn’t turn down the game after being invited by “numerous people.”
Monday’s trip to the NBA finals came amid a stacked sports calendar for the president during his second term that has seen him appear at everything from the Super Bowl to college wrestling championships. This weekend he will even turn the White House South Lawn into the staging ground for a UFC card on his 80th birthday. There’s no doubt Trump is a sports fan – the zero-sum contests, the dominant athletes, the spectacle of it all. But that’s not the real pull for him.
The point is social hierarchy. Sports makes that legible. The farther you are from the action, the lower you are in status – unless, of course, you’re watching from a suite, where you either have connections or are the connection. When Trump went to Knicks games in his pre-presidential days, he sat courtside between his second wife, Marla Maples, and the actor Elliott Gould. The Garden’s celebrity row was a glitzy club where he fit relatively comfortably – unlike the US Open, where New York’s old-money gatekeepers still treated him as a headline-chasing arriviste.