New York — There was a time when Donald Trump was just another celebrity sitting courtside at New York Knicks games. He was famous, but he was not yet surrounded by Secret Service agents or known for the politics that made him so unpopular in his hometown.
Now, more than a decade after he attended his last Knicks game at Madison Square Garden, Trump is making a rare trip to New York City as president to cheer them on in Game 3 of the NBA Finals against the San Antonio Spurs on Monday night. At the invitation of Knicks owner James Dolan, he will be the first president to attend an NBA Finals game.
The Knicks are seeking to win their first title since 1973, when Trump was 26 years old and a relative newcomer to the family real estate business that led him to wealth and fame. Two years after this victory, the team’s owners at the time hired him as a consultant as they looked to sell the stadium.
Trump has attended more major sporting events than any of his predecessors, including the Super Bowl, the Daytona 500, golf’s Ryder Cup in suburban New York City, where he was cheered, and last year’s US Men’s Open in Queens, where he was booed and blamed for long security lines.
On June 14, when he turns 80 while grappling with countless crises including war with Iran, economic turmoil and court rulings that undermine his agenda, he will host a UFC bout on the White House grounds. Trump also expressed his interest in attending the FIFA World Cup finals, which begin this week in the United States, Mexico and Canada.
New Yorkers love the Knicks more than they love Trump
Trump is an avid sports fan, but his affinity with the Knicks is different.
It speaks to the Republican president’s identity as a New Yorker and evokes a bygone era when a front-row seat to a Knicks game was a chance for him and other bold names to be seen and seen.
In a city whose wealthy gatekeepers largely turned their noses up at Trump’s brash persona and playboy image in the 1990s and 2000s, the Celebrity Club on Garden Row was one where he felt at home.
“I’ve been a Nick’s fan for a long time. I watched the end of the game and they were dominant — really amazing,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office last week, a day after New York rallied to win Game 1.
After another win on Friday in San Antonio, the Knicks return home with a 2-0 lead in a best-of-seven series. They have won 13 straight playoff games, losing the last time on April 23, uniting the city in a way not seen since the Knicks went to the NBA Finals twice in the 1990s.
Enter Trump. He returns to the Knicks zeitgeist, not as the curious figure who once sat next to the late John Kennedy Jr. at a game in 1999, but as a president disliked by a majority of the city’s Democratic voters.
Trump, who gave up his lifelong residency in New York in favor of Florida in 2019, is making his first trip to New York City since he spoke at the United Nations in September. In 2024, he was tried in the city and convicted of 34 felony counts related to slush funds paid on his behalf during his 2016 election campaign.
However, Knicks fans don’t seem to care much about his politics, but his presence — and the hype that accompanies it — could spoil the team’s momentum. People going to the game should arrive at least two hours before tipoff for an airport-style security screening, the Knicks said.
“Why does Donald Trump always have to ruin a good thing?” US Rep. Hakeem Jeffries of New York, a huge fan of Nix and the Democratic leader in the House, told CNN. “Literally, the Knicks haven’t made the NBA Finals in 27 years. The city is trying to celebrate that. We embraced this team, and this guy needs to get an injection,” he added.
Mayor Zahran Mamdani, a Democrat who struck up a cordial relationship with Trump after they met in November, was more charismatic.
“We are excited to welcome anyone and everyone who is a Knicks fan at this moment,” said Mamdani, who will also be at the game, but not with Trump.
Last week, when Trump began toying with the idea of attending a game, New York Magazine published an article titled “Is Trump Really a Knicks Fan? An Investigation.” The story, filled with photos of Trump at Knicks games from 1991 to 2014, called him “a typical example of a celebrity bandwagon fan.”
NBA Commissioner Adam Silver disagrees.
“Before he ran for office, he was a big Knicks fan,” Silver told reporters last week. “I’ve been with the league a long time. I was there for a lot of Knicks games with him in the old days.”
FILE – Actor Elliot Gould joins Donald Trump and Marla Maples on the court during an NBA basketball game between the Phoenix Suns and New York Knicks, March 6, 1991.
AP Photo/Steve Freeman, file
A regular player on the field in the 90s
The Trump-Knicks team came into existence in the same year, 1946.
His affiliation with the team — at least in the public record — dates back to 1975 when he served as a real estate consultant for the then-owners of the Knicks and Madison Square Garden, who were looking to sell the building known in some Trump-style brands as “the most famous arena in the world.”
Trump claimed to reporters at the time that two groups of “Arab oil interests” were interested in paying between $50 million and $75 million. But the arena’s leadership conveyed the idea, saying that it was “unreasonable” to conclude such a deal in light of the raging oil crisis in the Middle East at that time.
Trump wasn’t much of a known entity when the Knicks won their only championships in 1970 and 1973.
By the time they rebounded in the 1990s, Trump was front and center, taking his then-wife Marla Maples to Game 3 of the NBA Finals in 1994 and his current wife, First Lady Melania Trump, to Game 2 of the Eastern Conference Finals in 1999. In between, he added to his Knicks fan bona fides by appearing in Whoopi Goldberg’s Knicks-themed movie “Eddie.” 1996.
At the time, Trump was more of a figure of legend than a figure of importance, known as much for the women he dated and married as the buildings he built.
But just as the Knicks had failed in the NBA Finals against Hakeem Olajuwon, the Houston Rockets, David Robinson and the Spurs, Trump was facing problems of his own. His business empire was in disarray after his casinos ran into financial trouble and his airline, Trump Shuttle, went out of business.
Like Nix, Trump went into rebuilding mode and charted a new course: reality television with NBC’s “The Apprentice” and “Celebrity Apprentice,” then politics. In a 2010 Knicks television broadcast, he hinted at a possible run for president.
That same year, as the Knicks struggled to recapture the magic of the 1990s, Trump recorded a video trying to convince LeBron James to join the team.
Trump told him: “The real winners in the world want to be here.”
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