Ron Sellers
2nd Team Getting Their First Start
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New York: A Champ When It Comes to Losing | New York Times
It has been 42 years since the Jets won a championship — four decades of failure and fiasco that, with any luck, might come to an end with a victory over the Pittsburgh Steelers on Sunday and another in the Super Bowl in Arlington, Tex., on Feb. 6.
But the fortunes of the Jets, if sad, are not exactly distinctive.
Painful as it may be for the proud and loud New York sports fan, consider this sobering rap sheet of sports disappointments for the city’s teams.
¶The Knicks were founding members of the N.B.A. They play in Madison Square Garden — the world’s most famous arena, or so the slogan goes. But their record goes like this: two titles in 64 seasons, the last in 1973. So much for the Knicks as the embodiment of the sport known as the city game.
¶The Mets have won exactly two World Series in half a century, their last a tidy 25 years back.
¶When the Rangers won the Stanley Cup in 1994, it had been an epochal 54 years since their last one. Now, they are 16 years and counting into a new losing streak.
“I never thought of New York as Title Town, but I didn’t think it was Drought Town, either,” said Len Berman, who covered New York sports from 1979 to 2009 for Channels 2 and 4.
Shall we talk about college sports? Fordham? Columbia? St. John’s? How about City College? It was the last local team to win the N.C.A.A. men’s basketball championship. That was 61 years ago, in 1950. Sixty years ago, seven of that team’s players were arrested in a point-shaving scandal.
Namath said: “You have to wonder when we see these teams that have won multiple championships like the Steelers, San Francisco or New England. “You say, ‘Wow, these guys are really something.’ But stuff happens, I promise you; injuries change the face of a team; it’s hard to keep a team together. Then there’s execution and Lady Luck.”
He added, “If it was easy, the Detroit Lions would win.”
