As a long-time Celtic fan, whose allegiance goes back to before the Bill Russell era, I have not a wit of interest in the past, present or future of the NY Knicks. I didn’t like them since they were coached by Joe Lapchick, no less Fuzzy Levane. Ever since the retirement of the great Larry Bird, I have had little interest in the thuggish profile of the NBA. As to the criminal style of the last few successful Knick teams, which featured some of the worst offenders in the persona of Anthony Mason and others, I completely ignored the sport. The recent Celtic run to the NBA finals piqued my interest and drew me to watch basketball for the first time in years. It was too bad that they were ill-served by their brain dead coach.

As for the recent media frenzy over free agency,  the former wunderkind Lebron James showed me very little in the now forgotten 2010 series against the Celts. I was unimpressed with him, and the other “Max” stars are not much different then good players of any era. The big difference is that they are insanely overpaid, and the fools who go to their games today are paying record dollars to support their ridiculous lifestyle. My assumption is that many franchises will be in financial trouble over the next few years. But, what else is new when one looks at the history of American sports. More and more excess and the rich get richer. As for Cleveland, the northern Ohio economy is approximately $180 billion, and the loss of Lebron, like the defection of Art Modell will not doom that area to extinction. By the way, former MVHS basketball star and 10-year NBA veteran Ray Williams, who earned $2 million in his career, is currently living out of his car. What does that say for sports in America? In fact, according to the NFL, 90% of their players, who have played less than three years are now bankrupt. By the way, most of these players, unlike the NBA geniuses, actually attended college for four years.

In the recent “circus maximus” that the NBA had encouraged, I really wondered whether we had entered into another chapter of “Alice in Wonderland.” As the news came over the wires of the Lebron decision, while I was watching my nightly fix of DVRed “Have Gun Will Travel,” with Richard Boone as Paladin, I started to weep crocodile tears for the Knick fans, who had been drooling over the prospect of Lebron James coming to Madison Square Garden for five years. I had alwasy wondered why he would want to come to NYC and play for the dysfunctional Dolans who control the Knicks and the Garden, and expose his human fragilities to the carnivorous, child-eating NYC press corps!

Now it is over, and we can go back to the normality of the baseball season, and worrying about our lawns. The NBA owners will continue to put their soap box opera on the hard floors and the Knicks will invest more money in losers like Stephan Marbury and the world will continue to revolve on its axis for a few more billion years.