Donald Trump, once a familiar celebrity courtside at New York Knicks games, is set to make a rare return to his hometown as president, attending Game 3 of the NBA Finals.
His presence stands in stark contrast to a bygone era, when he was famous but not yet defined by the politics that have left him deeply unpopular in New York City.
More than a decade after his last Knicks game at Madison Square Garden, Trump will cheer for the team against the San Antonio Spurs on Monday night.
Invited by Knicks owner James Dolan, he will be the first sitting president to attend an NBA Finals game.
The Knicks are seeking their first championship since 1973, a time when Trump, then 26, was a relative newcomer to the family real estate business that propelled him to wealth and fame.
Two years after that triumph, the team’s owners hired him as a consultant as they explored selling the arena.
The Republican president is an avid sports fan, having attended more major sporting events than any of his predecessors, including the Super Bowl and Daytona 500.
He was cheered at golf’s Ryder Cup in the New York City suburbs but booed at last year’s U.S. Open men’s tennis championship in Queens, where he was also blamed for long security lines.
On June 14, his 80th birthday, he will host a UFC fight on White House grounds amidst various crises, and has expressed interest in attending soccer’s World Cup, which kicks off this week across North America.
Trump’s professed affinity for the Knicks speaks to his identity as a New Yorker, harkening back to a time when a front-row seat at a Knicks game was a chance for him and other prominent figures to see and be seen.
In a city where many wealthy gatekeepers largely dismissed his brash personality and playboy image in the 1990s and 2000s, the Garden’s Celebrity Row was one club where he felt at home. “I’ve been a Knick fan for a long time,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office last week, a day after New York rallied to win Game 1.
“I watched that end of the game and they were dominant — really amazing.”
After another win Friday in San Antonio, the Knicks head home with a 2-0 lead in the best-of-seven series, having won a remarkable 13 straight playoff games.
His return to the Knicks zeitgeist is not as the tabloid curiosity who once sat shoulder to shoulder with the late John F. Kennedy Jr. in 1999, but as a president disliked by a majority of the city’s Democratic voters.
Trump, who gave up his lifelong New York residency for Florida in 2019, is making his first trip to New York City since speaking at the United Nations in September.
Knicks fans, however, seem less concerned with his politics and more with the potential for his attendance – and the accompanying fanfare – to disrupt the team’s momentum.
“Why does Donald Trump always have to ruin a good thing?” U.S. Rep. Hakeem Jeffries of New York, an avid Knicks fan and the House Democratic leader, told CNN.
“Like, literally, the Knicks haven’t been in the NBA finals for 27 years. The city is trying to celebrate this. We’ve embraced this team, and this guy has to inject himself.” Mayor Zohran Mamdani, a Democrat who developed a cordial relationship with Trump after meeting him in November, offered a more welcoming stance.
“We’re excited to welcome anyone and everyone who’s rooting for the Knicks in this moment,” said Mamdani, who will also be at the game, though not with Trump.
Last week, as Trump floated the idea of attending, New York magazine published an article, “Is Trump Really a Knicks Fan? An Investigation,” which, filled with pictures of him at games from 1991 to 2014, described him as a “textbook example of a celebrity bandwagon fan.”
NBA Commissioner Adam Silver, however, disagrees. “Before he ever ran for office, he was a big Knicks fan,” Silver told reporters last week.
“I’ve been with the league for a long time. I was there at many Knicks games with him in the old days.”
Trump and the Knicks both came into existence in 1946.
His public affiliation with the team dates to 1975, when he advised the then-owners of the Knicks and Madison Square Garden, who sought to sell the building known, in a bit of Trump-style branding, as “The World’s Most Famous Arena.”
The arena’s leadership passed on the idea, deeming such a deal “not conceivable” during the Middle East oil crisis.
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