Andy Baron and Greg Armstong
Photo: courtesy of the subject
Greg Armstrong had followed the routine hundreds of times. The night before a Knicks game, he’d lay out his orange-and-blue clothes, so he could change speedily in the bathroom of a Westchester ShopRite, where he is a manager, and get to Madison Square Garden early. This time the task was tougher than usual. Not only because Armstrong owns more than 200 pieces of Knicks gear, stored in his Knicks mancave. But because after 34 years of paying for season tickets, he would be attending his first-ever NBA Finals game, the first the Knicks had played at the Garden since 1999.
The team had won an astounding 13 playoff games in a row, many of them in routs, and were returning to New York up two games to none on the San Antonio Spurs. Armstrong, 62, knew the next two wins, to close out the series, would not come easily. He bypassed the light-up sweater — that’s for Christmas Day games only. He looked at the blue Jalen Brunson jersey hanging in his closet. That was it. Brunson, the team’s leader, hadn’t shot very well in San Antonio. Wearing his jersey to the Garden could only help.
About 90 minutes away, over in North Jersey, Andy Baron, a 67-year-old lawyer who is now a state administrative-law judge, was working through his own Knicks nerves, reading every newspaper story about the team he could find, flipping through NBA podcasts, searching for signs and portents. Knicks season tickets have been in the Baron family for 36 years, long enough to produce three generations of hopes and heartache but no first-hand experience of a title. The last time the Knicks won an NBA championship was in 1973, when Baron was 14 years old. Because that Knicks team included Bill Bradley, who would go on to become a U.S. senator from New Jersey — and who would be the 21-year-old Baron’s boss for one memorable, highly influential internship — there was no debate about what Baron would be wearing: a crisp white vintage Knicks jersey bearing No. 24 and Bradley’s name on the back.
Ben Stiller, Mariska Hargitay, and Timothée Chalamet, sitting courtside, have gotten a whole lot of screen time this past month. That’s fine — they’re all serious Knicks fans, even if they’re leveraging their celebrity. For the rest of us, fandom is a thing made of promotional T-shirts and bleacher seats. The Knicks fans sitting high above the court, the ones who showed up on January nights during a pathetic 17-win season not so long ago, who endured the Isiah Thomas and David Fizdale and Frank Ntilikina and Andrea Bargnani years, the ones who resisted the serious temptation to sell their Finals tickets for college-tuition-payoff-level prices — those are the Gregs and Andys. For them, these Finals are the answer to prayers.
For Armstrong, the long road started in the East Bronx in the early ’80s, as the younger of two boys raised by a single mom whose city job was typing out welfare checks. His older brother hung a poster of Walt Frazier on the wall of the bedroom they shared, and they’d watch Knicks games on WOR, channel 9. Bernard King, a sublime scorer and a city kid too, was Armstrong’s favorite player. “I was a poor kid growing up in the Bronx,” Armstrong says. “I never imagined owning season tickets.”
But when the Knicks hired Pat Riley, who’d won four rings leading the Los Angeles Lakers, as their new head coach in 1991, Armstrong took it as a sign that the team’s fortunes might improve and he called the Garden ticket sales office. “I was a random supermarket clerk,” he says. “The lady says they’re sold out. And then, ‘Wait a minute — we have a cancellation in section 338.’” He maxed out his credit card, and he hasn’t let go of the tickets since, even as the price has soared from the original $2,000. “It felt like a little bit of a status thing,” he says, “for a kid that grew up in the hood, to have Knicks season tickets!”
One night Armstrong, “highly excitable,” was jumping around in reaction to a play and smacked another fan in the head. He apologized. Harry Baron glared. His son Andy Baron shrugged it off. It was an awkward introduction, but Andy and Greg bonded over basketball. “A Jewish guy from New Jersey and a Black kid from the Bronx,” Armstrong says, “but we’re cool together because we both love the Knicks.”
Baron eventually inherited his season tickets from his father, an advertising executive, and he and Armstrong have stayed together even as their seats gradually got better, bringing them down to section 209, where they still sit. “Our values are the same, familywise,” Baron says. “We both brought our kids to the games, and almost right away, they got along.” That does not mean Armstrong and Baron always agree. Carmelo Anthony? Armstrong grins: “I liked Melo.” Baron winces: “He wasn’t a team guy.” Armstrong: “But the guy we had heated discussions about was Julius Randle!” Baron: “For the better part of four years!”
Baron admits there was a dark time when his faith wavered, when a stretch of dreary losing seasons in the 2010s had him floating the idea of cutting back on his Knicks tickets. His wife, son, and daughter talked him out of it. “I can’t think of a family event we love more than going to a Knicks game,” says 29-year-old Ross Baron, who is wearing an Amar’e Stoudamire jersey. “We have our family, and we have our Knicks family — right here,” he says, pointing at Greg Armstrong and his 27-year-old son Daron. “I know my father, and this man, he sleeps, drinks, eats the New York Knicks, and there’s nothing in this world that he would rather spend his money on than to go see the New York Knicks at Madison Square Garden,” says Daron Armstrong, who is wearing an Allan Houston jersey. ”Nothing makes him, and us, happier.”
For game one of the Finals, Armstrong went to a watch party at the Garden while Baron watched at home in New Jersey. Armstrong texted his friend three times, but Baron was too stressed out to reply, both of them holding their breath as Brunson left the game with an injury, only to return in time to help lead a comeback win. For game two, Baron made his first visit to Armstrong’s Knicks-saturated den, and the two roared together as Victor Wembanyama missed a last-second shot and the Knicks held on for another victory.
Three days later the duo was daring to dream of a Knicks sweep as they arrived at the Garden for game three, each accompanied by a son. The arena has undergone major renovations twice since Baron and Armstrong were first randomly seated together, and both times they’ve been offered better seats in the revamped building — better sightlines, that is, but it would have meant the two men being separated. “They kept calling, and we said, ‘No, we’re good,’” Baron says. “’We want to stay together.’” After all the years looking forward to this day, it was good that they had one another to lean on after game three, a Spurs win. “Extremely deflating,” Armstrong says.
And the perfect setup for what came next in game four. The Knicks fell into a mammoth 29-point hole. But one strict rule the two men follow is that nobody leaves until the final buzzer. “It’s basketball,” Baron says. “You never know what’s going to happen.” This time it was a record-setting comeback, a Knicks win sealed by an OG Anunoby tip-in with just 1.2 seconds remaining. The rapid swing from depression to exhilaration was exhausting. “Mass hysteria. Pandemonium. I hugged and kissed people I don’t even know,” Armstrong says. Baron did his hugging at home with his son. He had unselfishly promised his game-four tickets to his wife and daughter and says he doesn’t regret it: “I try to be a good husband and father.”
Now a Knicks championship is one win away. Armstrong and Baron are trying to distract themselves as the pregame anticipation builds. “I’m anxious,” Armstrong says. “So much money invested, so much time, so much emotion. You can literally reach out and touch the moment. But it’s gotta happen. You can’t celebrate until the check clears.”
And if the Spurs somehow end up winning the series, would the fun of the Knicks finally reaching the Finals have been reward enough? “Noooo — you gotta be kidding me!” Armstrong says, physically pained by the suggestion. “This has been a 53-year odyssey!”
“We’ve been waiting for this,” Baron says, “for a long time.”
