John Turturro was on the subway from Brooklyn early Thursday morning heading to the Knicks parade like a million other people when he ran into a problem: The subway on the Brooklyn side was, for security reasons, bypassing the route to 14th Street in Manhattan, miles away from the parade.
So Turturro did what Nix would do when faced with an obstacle, and 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 makes a new friend (of course), a woman named Alma whom he helps get into the tightly controlled show barn when they arrive.
“I know how to walk to the Brooklyn Bridge, so I walked,” he said, with an Anunoby demeanor.
Of all the loyal celebrity Knicks fans not named after Spike Lee — Chalamet, Stiller, Hargitay, Morgan — Turturro may hold that title the most ardent, and certainly the longest. He listened to the heroics of the early 1970s as a teenager in Queens on the radio, sweating every bill Bradley and Earl the Pearl circus flyers. He was so loyal to those iconic bands that he pressured his mother to send her 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 black-and-white Zenith television. That 1994 Game 7 when John Starks kept making shots as the title fell to the Rockets? Turturro was on the scene in Houston, experiencing the same stress as the rest of us.
Of course, all this pain makes the current round more fun.
“We’ve been through thick and thin. We’ve been through thick and thin,” Turturro said. Some really dark days, really dark,” he said, slipping down a tortured memory hole, where he pointed out the lack of a supporting cast for Patrick Ewing, the 2010-era farm trade for Carmelo, and other known traumas primarily to the Knicks’ PTSD.
Then his mood turned cheerful. “Bronson, he’s just a winner. What he did in that last game. He took it to Wimpy; even Shea Alexander didn’t take it that way,” he said, referring to the Spurs big man and the Thunder’s MVP, respectively.
As he sat on Zoom with a reporter Thursday afternoon, still wearing his Knicks championship jersey, but at home in Brooklyn in a reading room filled with books, Turturro still couldn’t contain himself. “16-3.16-3!” He said, referring to the team’s record in the playoffs this season. “I mean it’s just…” his voice trailed off in disbelief.
Turturro is the kind of fan for whom team, city and personal identity become intertwined, and they’re not sure where one ends and the other begins, or sometimes what they’re referring to. He is a long-time season ticket holder and often goes to games with him Do the right thing collaborator Spike Lee, who invited him to their fifth title match in San Antonio when Lee’s wife couldn’t make the trip. Their basketball friendship has the material of an odd-buddy comedy.
Once Spike couldn’t pay him for an independent film that Turturro had a cameo role in, so Lee instead gave him tickets to four matches; In another movie, Turturro managed to increase the number of toys.
When Charles Barkley played, he used to predict which Knicks player would put him in front of Turturro and Lee sitting courtside, and then go out and do it. One time Shaq almost fell on them when he was playing for Orlando. Turturro tucked Lee under him to protect him. “I’m older than him, so I thought this was the thing to do,” he said reasonably.
On set to cut In recent years, Turturro often talked about the Knicks with the Steelers and Brett Lauer, who played ball in high school. “But I used to offer people Knicks tickets a lot, and a lot of times there was no one to buy them,” he said sadly, a phenomenon he noted was unlikely to happen now.
“It was a hungry fan base but we were building hope,” he said before going into the epic comeback in Game 4, a theme that — in fairness, like many New Yorkers now — has.
“I was completely depressed. We were saying, ‘They are destroying us.'” And then we saw a miracle. A miracle.” He nodded to New York Mayor Zahran Mamdani’s speech on the show about the huge odds the team overcame in the fourth quarter of the game. “I loved his talk about the 0.4%,” he said. That’s what we do,” he said, apparently referring to the Knicks, Knicks fans, New Yorkers, or just humans. “When you give us 0.4%, that’s when we’re at our best.”
(When asked about Taylor Swift’s on-court presence in that miraculous Game 4, Turturro said, almost obliquely, “There are people who come and show up. Are they going to show up again? I don’t know. That’s what it is.”)
The actor who stars in the upcoming Sundance film Darling and Gorty Gotham The only living pickpocket in New YorkHe says he finds the dialogue between the city and the Knicks a long-standing theme.
“When I was a kid, the Knicks brought the city together at a turbulent time, with a beautiful team of black and white players.” He now said the club had the same effect. “You feel it outside the park and on the train he regularly takes home.” “Sports can be a unifying thing, where everyone talks to each other. It’s a beautiful thing.”
While Hollywood’s views on the Knicks winning the title are clear, Turturro isn’t convinced the team is ready to handle sports movies. “The thing about basketball movies is you need people who can play basketball. They need to play hoop. It’s not easy.” But the actor had another idea.
“I’ll take seven of them and remake Seven Samurai,” he said. “Seven samurai with the Knicks. OG will be the guy with the bow and arrow. You see, Bronson led the guys when they were outnumbered. Josh Hart will be Toshiro Mifune’s crazy character. Now, that’s what I can see.”
