John Turturro was on the subway from Brooklyn early Thursday morning heading to the Knicks parade like a million other giddy schlubs when he hit a snag: The subway on the Brooklyn side was, for security reasons, skipping all the way to 14th Street in Manhattan, miles from the parade.
So Turturro did what his Knicks would do when faced with an obstacle — he found a way.
The actor decided to get off the train and walk across the Brooklyn Bridge, joining an impromptu group of determined fans. Along the way, he made a new friend (of course), a woman named Alma whom he helped get into the tightly controlled parade pen when they arrived.
“I know how to walk to the Brooklyn Bridge, so I walked,” he said, Anunoby-esque in his demeanor.
Of all the Knicks’ devoted celebrity fans this title run not named Spike Lee — Chalamet, Stiller, Hargitay, Morgan — Turturro may hold the claim on most ardent, and certainly the most longtime. He listened to the early-1970’s championships as a teenager in Queens on the radio, sweating out every Bill Bradley board and Earl the Pearl circus jumper. So devoted was he to those title teams he lobbied his mother to send away for tickets to Willis Reed’s short-lived talk show.
When the Knicks lost the finals in 1971, he threw a shoe and broke his family’s small Zenith black-and-white TV. That 1994 Game 7 when John Starks kept clanging shots as the title slipped away against the Rockets? Turturro was at the Garden, enduring the same agita as the rest of us.
All that pain, of course, makes the current run that much sweeter.
“We’ve been through thick and thin. Some really dark days, really dark,” Turturro said, slipping into a tormented memory hole, as he cited the lack of supporting cast for Patrick Ewing, the 2010’s-era trading of the farm for Carmelo, and other traumas known mainly to the Knicks PTSD-ed.
Then his mood turned exultant. “Brunson, he’s just a winner. What he did in that last game. He took it to Wemby; even Shea Alexander didn’t take it to him like that,” he said, referring to the Spurs big man and Thunder MVP, respectively.
As he sat on a Zoom with a reporter Thursday afternoon, still wearing a Knicks championship T-shirt but back home in Brooklyn in his book-filled reading room, Turturro still couldn’t contain himself. “16-3. 16-3!” he said, noting the team’s playoff record this season. “I mean that’s just….” His voice trailed off in disbelief.
Turturro is the kind of fan for whom team, city and personal identity become so entwined you, and they, are not sure where one ends and the other begins, or sometimes which they’re referring to. A longtime season ticket holder, he often goes to games with his Do The Right Thing collaborator Spike Lee, who invited him down for the title-clinching Game 5 in San Antonio when Lee’s wife couldn’t make the trip. Their basketball friendship has the stuff of an odd-couple buddy comedy.
Once Spike couldn’t pay him on an indie movie that Turturro did a cameo on, so instead Lee gave him tickets to four games; on another film Turturro was able to get the number of games up.
When Charles Barkley was playing, he would make a habit of predicting the Knicks player he would dunk on to Turturro and Lee sitting courtside, then go out and do it. Once Shaq nearly fell on them when he was playing for Orlando. Turturro tucked Lee underneath to protect him. “I’m bigger than him, so I figured that was something I should do,” he said reasonably.
On the set of Severance in recent years, Turturro would often talk about the Knicks with Stiller and Britt Lower, who played high-school ball. “But I used to offer people Knicks tickets a lot and a lot of times there were no takers,” he said, ruefully, a phenomenon he noted was unlikely to happen now.
“It’s been a starved fanbase but we’ve been building up hope,” he said, before going to the epic comeback in Game 4, a topic that — in fairness, like many New Yorkers right now — he can’t go five seconds without bringing up.
“I was completely depressed. We were saying ’they were destroying us.’ And then we saw a miracle. A miracle.” He nodded to the New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s speech at the parade about the very tall odds the team overcame in the fourth quarter of the game. “I love that he talked about the 0.4 percent. That’s what we do,” he said, presumably referring to Knicks, or Knicks fans, or New Yorkers, or just humans. “When you give us 0.4 percent, that’s when we are at our best.”
(Asked about Taylor Swift’s courtside presence at that miraculous Game 4, Turturro said, semi-obliquely,”There are people who come and show up. Will they show up again? I don’t know. It is what it is.”)
The actor, who stars in the upcoming Sundance darling and gritty Gotham picture The Only Living Pickpocket in New York, says he finds the dialog between the city and the Knicks a long-running theme.
“When I was a kid, the Knicks brought the city together at a tumultuous time, a beautiful team of Black and white players.” Now, he said, the club has had the same effect. “You feel it outside the Garden and on the train home,” which he regularly takes. “Sports can be a unifying thing, everyone talking to each other. A beautiful thing.”
While the Hollywood angles to this Knicks title run seem obvious, Turturro isn’t convinced the team is ready for a sports-movie treatment. “The thing about basketball movies is you need people who can play basketball. They need to hoop. That’s not so easy.” But the actor had another idea.
“I would take seven of them and remake Seven Samurai,” he said. “Seven Samurai with the Knicks. OG would be the guy with the bow and arrow. Brunson, you could see would lead the guys when they were outnumbered. Josh Hart would be the crazy Toshiro Mifune character. Now that, that I can see.”
