With the PGA Championship now a late May sporting event and not a fixture of your August sports calendar, it competes with the NHL and NBA playoffs, a full slate of MLB weekend action, and the culmination of the Premier League. In an insanely packed weekend of sports, Phil Mickelson’s victory at the 2021 PGA Championship may have been the hallmark. At the age of fifty, Mickelson became the oldest golfer to win a major and he had to achieve this august feat by surviving a horde of maskless, probably slightly drunk or ten-in White Claw golf fans, who wanted to coronate Lefty on the 18th green. The coronation was presided over by the dulcet tones of Jim Nantz and it was as if we were transported beyond the reach of COVID and into a post-pandemic world.

Mickelson’s victory will be cherished and become a precious bauble in the history of golf.

But that is not the sporting event that grabbed my attention and made me realize that we are rapidly moving to normal after experiencing the “new normal.”

Watching over 15,000 people transform Madison Square Garden into the MSG that is the mecca for hoops and not the empty reminder of sports being played in a pandemic, prompted a visceral reaction in my lapsed sports fan synapses. Real sports was back. Sports with fans. Fans rubbing elbow to elbow with each other. Knicks fans chanting “M-V-P” for Julius Randle who submitted a stat line wreaking of John Starks at his lowest playoff moments versus The Dream’s Houston Rockets. Young gun Trae Young taking over late in the 4th quarter for the Atlanta Hawks, and making The Garden faithful moan at his ability to draw fouls and flummox a parade of Knicks defenders.

Playoff hoops was back in the Big Apple. And it was magnificent.

This wasn’t your Vineyard Vines PGA golf crowd, but New Yorkers cheering on the Knickerbockers. The Knicks buried by James Dolan. And resurrected by Leon Rose and Tom Thibodeau. Fans embracing the veteran savoir faire of Derrick Rose, the boundless energy of Immanuel Quickley, and the quiet but deadly game of Alec Burks. Spike Lee in all of his Spike Lee-ness was roaming the front row and basketball was back. Not back in a bubble. But back amongst the people who love roundball.

The mecca of hoops was alive. And it felt good. It felt right.

It also felt right that the Knicks lost to the Hawks, 107 – 105, giving Atlanta a 1-0 lead in their First Round playoff series. A Knicks win would have been too much. It would have been fairy tale-esque and not a drama fit for a Midtown theater that had been dark for far too long.

Phil’s PGA win will become a story for posterity. Atlanta’s victory over the Knicks will be forgotten except for those of us who realized that New York was made whole again. And all it took was 15,000 people to demonstrate their unabashed love for a city and one of its most beloved treasures: The New York Knicks

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Muddled Thoughts

I experience a perverse sense of pleasure whenever Aroldis Chapman blows a save. Chapman, the New York Yankees closer. is an athletic god with muscles chiseled from granite. Any time he blows a save is a triumph for the little guy. In Sunday’s matinee at Yankee Stadium, Chapman allowed the Chicago White Sox to tie things up in the top of the 9th off a solo shot by Andrew Vaughn. The Yankees would go on to win it in the bottom of the 9th on a walk-off base on balls to Aaron Judge. But, for a moment, the little guy could celebrate.

Chris Paul is the Mark Messier of hoops.

Does anyone remember when John Calipari did not start Devin Booker as a freshman at Kentucky, but instead started the forgotten Harrison brothers (Andrew and Aaron)?

With the amount of players the Mets have on the Injured List, they should be charging minor league prices to attend a game at Citi Field.

The Bruins’ Brad Marchand is all that is right about hockey. And sometimes he can be viewed as all that is wrong with hockey.

I wonder how much Phil Mickelson has invested in Dogecoin? Or does Lefty only invest when he has insider information?

The Toronto Blue Jays will be vacating their home park in Dunedin, Florida, and moving to their new home field in Buffalo, New York. Maybe they’ll make it back to Toronto in 2021?

Premier League Championship Sunday, where there are ten games played at the exact same time to determine each team’s placement in the final table and where berths to the Champions League can be won or lost, should be replicated by the NFL on its final Sunday of the regular season.