PHILADELPHIA — We know how these cities feel about each other. And sometimes, a little of that rancor actually bleeds out from the participants, too. Chase Utley was California. David Wright was from Virginia. They weren’t exactly born into the geographic sporting blood feud between these warring factions of the northeast corridor.
But they were never shy about talking about it.
“When we beat them, it’s a little sweeter,” Wright said in 2015.
“We respect each other,” Utley said in 2008. “But we don’t like each other.”
Chuck Bednarik took great delight in flattening Frank Gifford on a cold Yankee Stadium field in 1960. DeSean Jackson seemed to enjoy himself a little extra at the end of that punt return in 2009. Asrdubal Cabrera once took so long to round the bases after a walk-off home run against the Phillies in 2016, you could’ve watched most of “The Irishman” before he touched home plate.
But never was there anything quite so audacious as what happened a week shy of 35 years ago, which was also the last time the Knicks played the Sixers in a playoff game in this city. Then — May 2, 1989 — the building was the Spectrum, still a decade away from a date with a wrecking ball.
The Knicks won a heart-thumping game that night, beating the 76ers 116-115 when Charles Barkley missed a shot at the buzzer. It clinched that first-round series — then a best-of-five — although the games had been razor thin, the Knicks winning twice by one point and winning all three by a combined eight points.
“These were the three best games I’ve ever been a part of,” Barkley said after he’d finally been peeled off the Spectrum floor, where he’d slumped after his potential game-winner had bounded away.
It was shortly after the buzzer when it happened.
Five Knicks — Sidney Green, Johnny Newman, Mark Jackson, Eddie Lee Wilkins and Charles Oakley — spotted a janitor’s mop under one of the baskets. Giddy at the sweep they’d just completed and no doubt overcome by the overwhelming symbolism, they began to mop the floor. It lasted, maybe, 10 seconds. Patrick Ewing joined for a bit.
Philadelphia, May 2, 1989 after doing the same to the
Philadelphia 76ers in the first round of their Easter Conference
Playoff matchup. AP
It was just long enough for a photographer to snap the picture.
And the next morning both The Post and the Philadelphia Daily News splashed it on their respective back pages. The dichotomy of public reaction was as you’d imagine it would be, although not nearly what it would be if something similar happened today.
“They talked trash, talked junk, all series long and they didn’t win even one game,” Ewing said with a satisfied smile a few minutes after leaving the broom behind that night. “So we decided we’d do a little talking after all was said and done.”
Thirty-five years later, there’s no telling the hysteria this would cause. There was a fairly prolonged discussion on Philly talk radio Wednesday about whether the three Villanova championship banners should be temporarily taken down in Wells Fargo Center because Jalen Brunson, Josh Hart and Donte DiVinvenzo now play for the Knicks.
DiVincenzo at the end of the game. Charles Wenzelberg / New York Post
Well, that would explain the 2016 and ’18 banners, anyway. Apparently, Harold Jensen and Easy Eddie Pinckney and the rest of the ’85 Wildcats must have enjoyed a steak or two at Gallagher’s or Bobby Van’s and thus were also deemed enemies of the state.
In the moment, the Knicks didn’t believe they were gloating so much as celebrating. And even Barkley, who in those days didn’t exactly need a lot to get his furnace boiling on overdrive, wasn’t as bothered as you’d think.
“When you win,” he said, “you can do whatever you want to win. If we don’t like it we should’ve done something about it.”
Even if things go perfectly for the Knicks on Thursday and Sunday, even if they do take a metaphorical broom to the Sixers, there is exactly a zero percent chance any of the Knicks would ever think to recreate the ’89 Knicks’ victory lap. The team isn’t wired that way, and the times dictate that they’d not only be putting themselves in danger by strutting in front of angry Philly fans, they’d also risk angering the basketball gods.
Which makes sense. The next game those ’89 Knicks played, they lost at home to Michael Jordan’s Bulls. They lost that series in six. They never did beat Jordan’s Bulls in the playoffs. Maybe the broom dance had nothing to do with that. Prove it.