When I started this blog some 13 years ago, it was dedicated to the power dynamic in sports and culture to accompany my series of novels. But once President Donald J. Trump was elected in 2016, I began to write more about politics, which, the analytics suggest, has garnered me a larger audience.
Still, cultural writer that I’ve been for more than 46 years, I’ve never stopped writing about sports, which like politics, religion and the arts fall under the cultural umbrella. Indeed, sports — like the arts, my actual area of expertise — are often a metaphor for life, as we’ve seen in the strategic, come-from-behind New York Knickerbockers’ championship victory over the San Antonio Spurs, which not only captured the essence of workaday New York but said something profound about the nature of winning and losing and thus the Iran War.
Why do some win while others fail? It’s one of life’s most tantalizing questions. Is it about talent and hard work? Faith and fate? Confidence? Timing? A combination of all these? Or is it about something else?
I think the defining quality that separates winners from losers is intention. True to their larger-than-life Texas roots, the Spurs came into the playoffs determined to dazzle. The Knicks, on the other hand, often playing from behind, asked themselves: What is our goal — to win — and how are we going to achieve that? This required having not only a strategy but a plan B or C, D and E for when things went wrong, because eventually they would.
And this is a very New York attitude, born a city and a state colonized by the Dutch and their West India Co., in which anyone who wanted a job could have one. That was the good news. The bad news, was, well, you were indentured to that job. You know the Tennessee Ernie Ford song “Sixteen Tons” and the lyric “I owe my soul to the company store?” Yeah, that.
In his City Hall speech lauding the Knicks post-parade — and whatever you think of him and his politics, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani is a brilliant speaker — he talked about the Knicks as the quintessential New Yorkers, who belong to the discounted .4% and yet “find a way” — as they did after 9/11, after Hurricane Sandy, after Covid.
And what did the Spurs do? They continued to dazzle — until they didn’t. Post-game, they talked a lot about dominating on the court, in the analytics (and even in the Las Vegas odds). In truth, only 12 points separated the two teams over five games. That’s a little more than two points a game.
Yet, the Spurs lost. The best team, the most talented team, the most dominant team doesn’t always win. John McEnroe, who was courtside for Knicks’ improbable come-from-behind-29-points victory at Madison Square Garden in Game Four, once said, “It’s not important to be the best. It’s only important to beat the best.”
How does this apply to the Iran War? Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin “Bibi” Netanyahu set out to dazzle. Ayatollahs fell. So did schoolchildren.
But Iran had a strategy, using drones to block the Strait of Hormuz, stagnating world shipping and driving up the price of oil. The once free strait may now become a New Jersey toll plaza. You can’t charge tolls on international waterways, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said. Well, apparently you can.
We’re now worse off than we were with the President Barack Obama nuclear accord in Iran, which Trump so derided. And that failure has caused a rift with Netanyahu, with Vice President JD Vance, who’s spearheading a new deal and needs a win here, Zelensky-ing Bibi, saying that he needs to realize the U.S. is the only friend Israel has. (Gee, did Netanyahu not say “thank you” enough?)
Trump, who showed up at the Garden for Game Three and later couldn’t spin the boos he received, may be from New York but he was never really of New York. (It remains to be seen if the Knicks become the only NBA championship team to visit the Trump White House.) If he were, he would’ve learned: You gotta find a way, baby.
Instead Iran has Trump and Netanyahu over the oil barrel in the dire Strait of Hormuz.
Trump and Netanyahu — the San Antonio Spurs of the Iran War.