New York boy Timothée Chalamet joins the celebrations as Knicks fans dare to dream
Madison Square Garden
last Friday night,
Timothée Chalamet
left his courtside seat and was picked up by a car service at the VIP entrance. As the driver tried to navigate through thousands of demented fans dancing in the midtown streets, celebrating their team reaching the Eastern Conference finals, the star of A Complete Unknown felt he was missing out. So, he half climbed out the window of the vehicle and, much to the dismay of his security, started hugging and high-fiving everybody he could reach. Joy unbridled.
Chalamet grew up in Hell's Kitchen, a 15-minute walk down to the Garden. He knows what getting within a series victory of the NBA finals means around here. As a teenager he used to spend hours loitering outside the players' entrance trying to cadge autographs and there's a wonderful shot of him, a callow 14-year-old boy, getting Amar'e Stoudemire to ink his beloved blue and orange jersey. Now closing in on 30, the actor has lived through some of the worst teams in club history but, after last Friday night's game, he headed down to Chez Margaux, a private club in the Meatpacking District, to party with the current Knicks. The winning edition. At last.
When the New York Yankees took on their crosstown rival Mets in the Subway Series up in the Bronx last Sunday night, a cameraman spotted Karl Anthony Towns, the Knicks powerhouse centre, and flashed his smiling face up on the Jumbotron screen. At which point, fans of two baseball teams who despise each other united in acclaiming a basketball player. When the Knicks start to look like title contenders, as they do now, it hits different and matters more in these parts.
At its heart, this has always been a basketball town, the street game of filmic lore, a place where hardscrabble courts with chain mail baskets and unforgiving rims never stop thrumming. Day and night. Night and day. The city's soundtrack is a relentless urban drumbeat of balls hitting backboards, a chorus of 'I got next', the whoop and holler arpeggio of minor asphalt legends and shoot-the-lights-out hoop dreamers.
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Fifty-two years have passed since a starting five of Willis Reed, Clyde Frazier, Bill Bradley, Dave DeBusschere and Earl 'The Pearl' Monroe delivered New York its last championship, the second title in four seasons. Names evoking a golden age, washed-out colour footage of Reed hobbling on to the court with a torn thigh muscle to start Game Seven against the Lakers in 1970 retains the power to make old men's eyes turn rheumy. For subsequent generations, those wins were epic tales, cherished heirlooms handed down by fathers and grandfathers.
Younger fans have long craved yarns of their own to spin because their supporting lives have been grim affairs, hallmarked by failure. Aside from when the Patrick Ewing-led team threatened to win a title in the 1990s, it has been pretty much decades of suffering since. Through all the false dawns, seriously misguided trades and consistently embarrassing antics of man-child owner James Dolan, the Knicks faithful somehow continued to fill the Garden, paying exorbitant sums to endure truly mediocre outfits. In a Manchester-United-right-now kind of way.
Timothée Chalamet and Kylie Jenner sit court-side during the first quarter in Game Four of the Eastern Conference Second Round NBA playoffs between the Boston Celtics and the New York Knicks at Madison Square Garden. Photograph: Elsa/Getty Images
Their penance duly served; these supporters have lately glimpsed a burgeoning greatness with Jalen Brunson a force-of-nature point guard conducting a thrilling quintet. The addition of Towns last October brought them a dominant big man regarded by some as maybe the last piece of the jigsaw. After knocking out the reigning champion Celtics, this team has the city believing anything is possible. Of course, in the media capital of the world, hyperbole is the default setting, and the formidable Indiana Pacers could well stop them reaching the finals.
The Knicks have always leant into Manhattan's glamour, exploiting proximity to the rich and famous with the notorious celebrity row, invite-only courtside seats given to stars of the brightest wattage. A random selection on any night could feature old-school boldface names like Spike Lee, Ben Stiller and John McEnroe, alongside freshly minted luminaries like Cardi B, Bad Bunny, Kylie Jenner and, of course, her boyfriend Chalamet, whose elevation to the most prestigious perches means he's living every Knicks fan's dream. Little wonder they see themselves in him.
'Right now, it's an incredible time in New York City and the best time ever to be a New Yorker,' said Fat Joe, rapper and staple in the celeb line-up through so many fallow seasons. 'When the Knicks are winning and thriving, it's like a feeling of euphoria and magic. But from 2001 to 2020, those were some painful memories. The Knicks would be competitive at times, but they would always lose games in the clutch and just break your heart.'
In 2017, McEnroe busted out a guitar during an appearance on The Dan Patrick Show and riffed about yet one more disastrous Knicks campaign. A fan since walking into Madison Square Garden for the first time at eight years old, he began strumming his own mournful version of Green Day's Good Riddance (Time of your Life), the lyrics changed to reflect his concern about the fresh depths his team had plumbed.
'I still believe or at least I can hope,' he sang, 'that the Knicks won't keep being the butt of everyone's joke ...'
Time of their lives.
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He was also, as he would be the first to admit, an idiot when it came to money, when it came to women, when it came to taking care of himself. But he was not a cartoon figure. 'Why did the Colonel get this reputation? One [reason] was nobody had any idea what he did. He was totally uninvolved in Elvis's creative process, but he was totally committed to furthering Elvis's creative process, and he signed on to doing that almost from the moment they met. Elvis Presley and his manager Colonel Tom Parker in Hawaii, March 1961. Photograph: Michael'Except for Sam Phillips, who didn't have the money to promote him, nobody else saw what Colonel saw, which was not necessarily the music that Elvis was doing but the vision that Elvis had. He saw Elvis as being entirely apart, and was prepared to set aside all the conventional success that he had achieved – which was the greatest success that anyone could achieve at that time within the world, with Eddy Arnold and Hank Snow – and he was prepared to walk away from that in a minute for this untried, untested, unproven kid that he saw unlimited potential in not for money but for artistic self-expression. 'I would say, until the mid-1960s, maybe even until Las Vegas, he was seen as the smartest manager in the business, somebody whose imperious sense of humour set him apart and above. I mean, who did Brian Epstein seek out when he wanted advice? Nobody ever questioned his integrity.' So how did this trailblazing character end up adrift, lost, purposeless, prey to a gambling addiction? 'This is not a question of blame, but Elvis began to stumble in public. 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And it's absolutely crystal clear from what Loanne told me, which comes straight out of her diary, her journal, how devastated Colonel was by his own addiction.' [ Priscilla Presley on marriage to Elvis: 'I knew what I was in for. I saw it from a very young age' Opens in new window ] In fact, The Colonel and the King contains a desperately sad photograph of Presley and Parker taken in Las Vegas in 1972. The singer looks completely out of it, and for the first time his manager appears fragile and frail. 'Isn't that awful? At first I said, 'I can't put that in the book.' And then I thought, it has to be in the book, because whatever was happening at that moment, it expressed so much of what you just described. It was like I thought Colonel was a lovable rapscallion, and as foolish as what he was doing was, he never overextended himself. He lost a lot of money, but he left Loanne with $1 million in the bank. He always had $1 million in the bank to cover both his and Elvis's potential losses. 'But, jeez, I mean, to be up three days in the casino and then just to go to bed, to be so overwhelmed, the devastation of the [final] tours – and again, this is not putting the blame on Elvis, but I think I may have used the words in Careless Love: it was like a folie a deux. Everybody was living in a fool's paradise. Everybody seemed to believe that Elvis could rise to the challenge. That was the crippling illusion that Colonel was under.' The Colonel and the King: Tom Parker, Elvis Presley and the Partnership That Rocked the World is published by White Rabbit on Tuesday, August 5th
RTÉ News
a day ago
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K Club confirmed as new host venue for Women's Irish Open
The K Club has been announced as the venue for the 2026 Women's Irish Open, with the event taking place at the end of August. After being staged at Carton House for the last two years and Dromoland Castle before that, the Ladies European Tour have now confirmed the Palmer South Course at the Co Kildare venue will host the tournament from 27-30 August. The return to a late August date will no doubt act a perfect warm-up for those players who make the Solheim Cup team, with the match against the USA taking place in the Netherlands from the 11-13 September. Looking ahead to the KPMG Women's Irish Open, the K Club director MJ Fetherston said: "We are delighted to announce the KPMG Women's Irish Open is coming to The K Club in 2026. This is a tournament we want to support and elevate. There is so much brilliant talent in women's golf. We have been supporting Leona Maguire for the past few years and this is a terrific development on that. "The Palmer South course has been given a lot of love and energy over the past few years. We are excited to bring tournament golf back to this challenging course. Our family and the whole team at the resort want to make this the best Women's Irish Open yet."
