Ode to a Sofa

How an unhealthy obsession led to an unlikely acquisition

Behold my couch.

See this sofa? Hold it in your mind for just a moment because I have an

Important Message and an Apology

Two weeks ago, I offered to match any and all donations for the Razorcake Donation Drive. Minutes after sending last week’s newsletter I learned that Substack had blocked my email for some reason, which means that if you replied to one of these newsletters in recent weeks I didn’t get the message. I have since unblocked my email. So if you have donated to Razorcake, and told me, but didn’t hear from me, please let me know. I apologize for the inconvenience. Now on with our story about a

Very Significant Slate-Colored Sofa

I’ve had this couch for over 20 years—21 to be exact. On December 10, it’s replacement will arrive and the couch will go to its new home. 

I bought the sofa—are couch and sofa regional terms? I don’t know and will use them interchangeably—in the summer of 1999 at the conclusion of the lockout-shortened NBA season in which the New York Knickerbockers, a team with which I was mightily obsessed, lost to the San Antonio Spurs. 

But the loss went down easy for reasons I will now explain in excruciating detail in a tale of misplaced love, unhealthy obsessions, and a man child who loved the New York Knicks too much. 

The 1990s were an interesting time for sports. Cable and satellite TV made it easier to watch more games in more places than ever before. My brother Emmett was, and still is, a huge fantasy baseball fanatic. But I was, and still am, daunted by the enormous amount effort required to manage a fantasy baseball team. 

(If you don’t know what fantasy sports are here’s a quick rundown: At the beginning of the season, you pay money to enter a league where you pretend you’re the owner of a team. You draft real players onto your make-believe team and the stats those players generate during the course of the season count toward your fantasy team. There are all kinds of byzantine rules that govern scoring, but at the end of the season, if your players generate the most points you win a portion of the money everyone paid at the beginning of the season. In short, the teams are make believe, but the money is real. That’s the fantasy.) 

So I tried my hand at fantasy basketball because I figured I was obsessed with the Knicks to a degree that I knew a lot about the players around the league. I was a good but not great manager because my heart kept interfering with my thinking. In other words, I let my love of the New York Knicks get in the way of making solid decisions for my squad. 

This is a story about the time I went with my heart and won.

The 1998-1999 season was unusual because the owners locked out the players over a labor dispute and shortened the season. Prior to the season, the Knicks traded away John Starks and Charles Oakley, great defenders but fantasy duds, which describes much of the New York Knicks to be honest, and added Marcus Camby and Latrell Sprewell. Sprewell was a controversial signing as he’d been banned the previous season for trying to choke his former coach, P. J. Carlesimo. The dude was a tremendous athlete who played with a mean streak even though the commissioner, the league, the media, and most fans wished he’d tone down his act. (The plantation narrative that billionaire sports owners favor was on full display.) Sprewell refused and was hated for it. I loved Latrell Sprewell. 

In a season that was nearly cut in half and with a roster that had been turned upside down, the Knicks struggled but rallied the final week to squeak into the playoffs as an eight seed. Now most people saw a team with a 27-23 record that wasn’t very good. I saw a team that was loaded with talent and had finally learned how to play together. I believed that if the Knicks could get past the first round, they could go deep into the playoffs. 

The problem was the #1 team was the hated Miami Heat who were coached by former Lakers and Knicks coach Pat Riley who’d turned Alonzo Mourning into a bona fide superstar and coached up a bunch of scrubs into a bruising squad of maulers. The Knicks knew the Heat all too well. In 1997, after a benches-clearing brawl in Game 5 of the second round of the playoffs, several of the Knicks were suspended for Games 6 and 7 and they fell to the Heat despite being up in the best-of-seven series three games to one. 

Then, in 1998 they brawled again in Game 4 of the first round, but this time the Knicks prevailed only to be dispatched in the second round. Now the Heat would be looking for revenge and the contest was all but guaranteed to get ugly. Few thought the Knicks had a chance. And why would they? In the history of the NBA playoffs only one other 8-seed team had advanced to the second round, and never in the Eastern Conference. 

The odds were against the Knicks, but I thought they had a chance, and I was willing to bet on it. I signed up for a spot in a playoff fantasy basketball league.

I called my team Yegg Central. The name came from a line in my favorite movie at the time, maybe of all time, the exquisite gangster film Miller’s Crossing. A yegg is a gangster or a thug, so Yegg Central is a place with lots of tough guys, which is a pretty good description of Madison Square Garden on any given night in the 1990s. But why am I explaining all this when we have this brilliant monologue from Eddie the Dane:

Here’s the text for those who don’t like to click on links:

Eddie Dane : You are so goddamn smart. Except you ain't. I get you, smart guy. I know what you are. Straight as a corkscrew. Mr. Inside-Outski, like some goddamn Bolshevik picking up his orders from Yegg Central. You think you're so goddamn smart. You join up with Johnny Caspar, you bump Bernie Bernbaum. Up is down. Black is white. Well, I think you're half smart. I think you were straight with your frail, I think you were queer with Johnny Caspar... and I think you'd sooner join a ladies' league than gun a guy down. Then I hear from these two geniuses they never even saw this rub-out take place.

Frankie : Boss said to have him do it. He didn't say nothing about...

Eddie Dane : Shut up! Or maybe you still got too many teeth. Everyone is so goddamn smart. Well, we'll go out to Miller's Crossing... and we'll see who's smart.

Technically, fantasy sports isn’t gambling, except it is—especially in playoff challenges. If the goal in fantasy sports is to accrue as many points as possible, your players need to be playing games. For that to happen you have to correctly guess which teams will advance. That’s gambling and you better believe I was gambling on the Knicks. 

I loaded up my team with players from the Knicks—Patrick Ewing, Allan Houston, Larry Johnson, and, of course, Spreewell—and hoped for the best.

The early rounds of playoff games can be brutal. They are best-of-five series, meaning it only takes three victories to advance and with dominant teams like the Heat defeat can feel like a foregone conclusion after six quarters of play. But the scrappy Knicks came out and served the Heat 95-75 in Game 1. The Heat won Game 2, but the Knicks came back and dominated Game 3 97-73. (You have to love these ‘90s-era bruiser ball scores. No one scored 100 points against a Pat Riley team, and the Knicks coach, Jeff Van Gundy, was a Riley protégé.) The Heat won Game 4, forcing a nail biter of a Game 5. 

That day I was running in the Bay to Breakers in San Francisco and didn’t see much of the game, but I caught the last quarter in an Irish bar and got to see Allan Houston’s game-winning runner clank around the rim and drop in with .08 seconds left. The Knicks had beaten the Heat. The Guinness never tasted so sweet. 

The Knicks then proceeded to blow the doors off the Atlanta Hawks, sweeping them in four games. The basketball world was stunned. Up was down. Black was white. And I was feeling pretty goddam smart. 

With the Heat and the Hawks out of the playoffs, my fantasy playoff team was surging up the rankings. I became very interested in the scoring. These days, fantasy sports are completely automated. The results are instantaneous. You can track your teams in real time on your phone and know exactly where you stand against the competition. But in the late ’90s you figured out your roster with clipboards and calculators and to get the scores you waited for the box scores to be printed in the paper the following morning. I embarked on a project to determine which basketball stats were most valuable in real time in relation to the rest of my competition. I was basically doing differential calculus in my spare time for fun. As obsessions go, Yegg Central’s run was all encompassing. 

I calculated that if I was going to have a shot at the overall prize, the Knicks needed to advance to the Finals. That was easier said than done. They faced the Indiana Pacers and the even more hated Reggie Miller, who had eliminated the Knicks from the playoffs the previous season. (And made a nemesis out of Spike Lee.) Plus, an injury to superstar Patrick Ewing early in the series forced him out for the rest of the playoffs. Could the Knicks pull it off?

The Knicks won Game 1, and the Pacers won Game 2, but Game 3 is the one everyone remembers and I’ll never be able to forget. Down by three points, Larry Johnson hit a three- point shot from 26 feet away and was fouled by Antonio Brown, making an ultra-rare four point play possible. Johnson hit the foul shot and the Knicks won 92-91. 

I remember watching that game in a bar across the street from my apartment in Manhattan Beach called The Hole in the Wall. It was just me and the bartender, who was new at the job. She somehow unscrewed one of the tapholders and beer came gushing out of the tap. She panicked and started filling up pitchers while I ran into the back and disconnected the tap. She was so grateful, she let me drink for free the rest of the night, which I did. At one point I got really sleepy, went home for a nap, and then came back for the rest of the night. 

It was all over for the Pacers after that. The Knicks advanced to the NBA Finals where they faced David Robinson, who was at the end of his career, and Tim Duncan, who was at the beginning of his. For a brief period of time, they called them the Twin Towers. But this was 1999 and the world was very different then. 

Yegg Central was now in the top five and barring some kind of catastrophe, would eventually claim the top position. Everyone had San Antonio’s best players on their squads, but no one had Knicks, except for me, Mr. Inside-Outski, and I had all of them. I even had the Knicks reserves. I was getting points from Kurt Thomas, Charlie Ward, and Chris Dudley for fuck’s sakes. Chris Dudley!

The Knicks did not win the finals, but Yegg Central won the 1999 fantasy playoff basketball challenge and I received a prize of $5,000. 

There’s no feeling like winning a fantasy challenge. When you win at blackjack or poker, the high gives way to the realization that if the cards had been different, so would the outcome. One’s feeling is tempered by knowing the fickle hand of chance played an outsized role in the result. But the predictive nature of sports betting, the hours of analysis that go into selecting a player or setting a line-up, contribute to a feeling that the outcome was determined not by luck or chance but one’s native intelligence and shrewd decision-making. There’s plenty of luck in fantasy sports, none more so than fantasy football where outcomes are determined by whether or not one can avoid devastating injuries and nobody can predict those, but it’s immensely satisfying to imagine a scenario and then watch it unfold in real time. I imagine it’s how the gods in Mount Olympus must have felt.

Five thousand dollars is a lot of money, especially 21 years ago, but it’s an enormous amount of money to win for guessing the outcome of a sporting event. I had debts to pay but I finally had a decent job and would worry about those down the road. I was 30 years old. I’d served in the Navy and had gone to graduate school and had been in starving student mode for at least dozen years, and I was behind my peers in many respects. For instance, I didn’t own any furniture. It was time to change that. 

With the money I earned from following my heart and obsessing over the Knicks I bought a sofa and a chair-and-a-half (basically a big-ass chair that’s not quite a love seat) and installed them in my new apartment. When it was time to go, I brought them with me to Playa del Rey and then on to San Diego. 

I have watched countless movies on that couch. Sweated out innumerable sporting events on that couch. Skimmed millions of issues of the New Yorker on long hangover Sundays on that couch. And in recent years have written hundreds of thousands of words on that couch. I’m sitting on it now.

I have bought many more pieces of furniture since then, but the couch with its custom-ordered slate-colored covering, is more than a comfortable place to sit, it is a symbol of having crossed a threshold into adulthood. It is a symbol of chasing crazy dreams. It is a symbol of the one and possibly only time in my life when I looked in my heart and was proven smarter than everyone else. Even though it’s not as comfortable as it once was, the sofa is a potent reminder of that time and place in my life, and I am sad to see it go. 

So goodbye slate-colored sofa. Just like I gave up on Knickerbocker basketball when Jeff Van Gundy resigned as a head coach, a decision that also proved to be very smart since the Knicks have been trash since, I must now give up on you. It’s time to take you out to Miller’s Crossing and only one of us is coming back. 

(If you want more context and backstory about the Knick’s improbably Cinderella run to the NBA Finals in 1999, Steven Louis has an outstanding article in The Ringer.)

Bad Religion Decades on Sale Now

Can you believe it? Back in October Bad Religion secretly congregated at the Roxy Theatre on the Sunset Strip to record a series of shows. They organized the material by decades and have announced the release of four pay-per-view performance, one for each decade the band had been active. You can purchase tickets to individual shows or buy a bundle of all four. From what I’ve been told, the shows will be available to view until 72 hours after the last show airs on January 2, 2021, but do what you want.

Lastly, I hope you had a lovely Thanksgiving. Please, stay safe and mask up when you leave the house. A close friend recently lost his mother to the coronavirus. We’re not out of this yet.