Madison Square Garden

[Samoo]

It's like asking what's so special about rock chalk for Kansas fans, it's just another chant.

 

[alphasigko]

Just a note that most every rock-'n-roll band wants to play there too... It is just MSG... The most famous venue in the world

 

[HooperScooper]

I know I am going to regret asking this, but can somebody please explain this almost fetishistic love foe Madison Square Garden among UConn fans? It is beyond strange. I’ve lived in other places, including some with Big East and New Big East schools, and I have never run into fans that have made MSG such a big deal. I can’t even conceive of a Marquette fan saying they would turn down an invite to an equal or superior conference because they don’t get to play their conference tournament in MSG. Clearly BC, Syracuse, Pitt, Louisville didn’t care. I lived in Providence ( well actually South County) for several years, and never heard a PC fan wax poetic about the place the way UConn fans do. They like playing there but it isn’t a fetish like it is for UConn fans. It is just bizarre.

FWIW, I’ve been to the ACC tournament in Greenville and it dominates the town. Restaurant, bars, hotels…it’s all anyone talks about. I’ve gone to dinner 2 blocks from MSG, and there was more talk about the Rangers and Knicks and the Yankees than the tournament taking place down the street. So please, I just don’t get it. Jealousy? Am inferiority complex? Basking in reflected glory? Somebody explain it, please.

 

[Hans Sprungfeld]

You can't be taken seriously beyond this.

Nobody ever has to take him seriously. Feel free to tee off. Or ignore him, without even bothering to put him on Ignore.

 

[willie99]

Tradition

I suppose that's an intangible some people just can't comprehend

 

[Travelman6]

Didn't the b10 try to move their tourney to msg a few years ago? Even moved the tourney up a week if I recall. But ya, its just a CT thing...

 

[StllH8L8ner]

Biased opinion...he was born in Brooklyn

Lol…yeah I’m sure he experienced and remembers so much of NYC from when he was a toddler.

 

[DGRU]

Ali/Frazier I
Marciano/Joe Lewis
Pope John Paul 1979
and of course the greatest Big East final of all time, 1996 - I was there with a bunch of UConn buddies.

Yes, MSG is the greatest arena in the world. Even the Pope knows this.

I openly wept tears of joy watching Kevin Freeman get the BET MOP in '99. It's a special place. We make it a priority to get tickets at least once a year. Caught the Indiana and St John's game this season.

 

[DGRU]

So it’s a Connecticut thing, kind of like every town invented the grinder? The Big played there in 2018. They weren’t that impressed.

I’ve been there. It’s fine. Fun to go to Manhattan. But good grief. So far nobody can explain it. And it is honestly not viewed that way outside Connecticut. Maybe in North Jersey, but I don’t think so. South Jersey not so much. They prefer Philly. I’m guessing it is because CT doesn’t have a professional team, and hence a venue, of its own. So we have “adopted” MSG and made it more than it really is. But that’s my opinion. Interested to read others thoughts.

It's the site of 7 BET championships. and this...

kinda self explanatory

 

[FfldCntyFan]

It's the site of 7 BET championships. and this...

kinda self explanatory

There have been countless great Big East tournaments over the past four plus decades (including many we didn't play well in) but 2011 may have been the best ever.

Scooter's just looking for negative attention while trying to be controversial and a contrarian. Some believe it makes them appear better informed and more intelligent. Usually it merely shows how fully out of touch they are.

 

[MilliniumPrince]

Lol…yeah I’m sure he experienced and remembers so much of NYC from when he was a toddler.

Of course not, but the fact remains and it irks folks from NC. Lol

 

[my2cents]

I worked in Times Square for 13 years and commuted every day from Newtown. It's an exciting place to be with shops , restaurants, Broadway and MSG.
People from around the world vacation there. No better place to watch a basketball game.

 

[Kolumbo]

MSG
NYC
If you can make it there, you'll make it anywhere

 

[RedStickHusky]

My neighbor is a pretty nice guy. I can't, for the life of me, figure out what he sees in his wife. I don't ask him though. I just accept that I wouldn't understand.

 

[TheShot1990]

 

[phillionaire]

 

[Kitaman]

Actually the MSG fetish is all Johnnie Selvie's fault.

 

[J187Money]

Freescooter probably doesn't like his own kids more than other people's kids. What's the difference?

 

[jostar1]

 

[huskiemaniac]

I know I am going to regret asking this, but can somebody please explain this almost fetishistic love foe Madison Square Garden among UConn fans? It is beyond strange. I’ve lived in other places, including some with Big East and New Big East schools, and I have never run into fans that have made MSG such a big deal. I can’t even conceive of a Marquette fan saying they would turn down an invite to an equal or superior conference because they don’t get to play their conference tournament in MSG. Clearly BC, Syracuse, Pitt, Louisville didn’t care. I lived in Providence ( well actually South County) for several years, and never heard a PC fan wax poetic about the place the way UConn fans do. They like playing there but it isn’t a fetish like it is for UConn fans. It is just bizarre.

FWIW, I’ve been to the ACC tournament in Greenville and it dominates the town. Restaurant, bars, hotels…it’s all anyone talks about. I’ve gone to dinner 2 blocks from MSG, and there was more talk about the Rangers and Knicks and the Yankees than the tournament taking place down the street. So please, I just don’t get it. Jealousy? Am inferiority complex? Basking in reflected glory? Somebody explain it, please.

Where are these UConn fans that you reference saying they would turn down an offer to a better conference because they dont play their conference tourney at MSG?

 

[ElGuapo]

Aside from UConn, I am also a Phish phan and can confirm that MSG is also a Mecca for the band with countless greatest shows played there including this most recent one which I was lucky enough to be in attendance.

 

[ctfjr]

My friends and I drove down for that '96 Georgetown game. We took a lot of crap from the row of G'town fans behind us for 'most' of the game. We were out of our minds at the end.
I have always been 'that fan' - the guy who was screaming his brains out and jumping up n down. At 77 now I've slowed a bit but there is something about the Garden that brings it all on.

 

[Hans Sprungfeld]

The troll job most of you have missed is the rest of the "good" BE teams don't bring the energy to NYC.

No doubt if UConn, St John's, Nova and Gtown were on top and Seton Hall and PC were decent, the city would be electric.

But Marquette, Creighton, Xavier or Butler just don't get the locals excited to the same degree.

That's the "trap" the troll thinks he's setting.

This is a very solid Yes/No reply.

The Yes part is well on display here.

The No part is no knock on you. I'll try to capture it simply, but I wish I had the decades old, full-page, New Yorker cartoon that made the point so clearly (even elegantly) at the time. If I were certain of the artist, at least some here might instantly picture it, and that would be enough. It might have been Roz Chast. It could have been Stan Mack, but I doubt it. Or even James Stevenson, though certainly not him. Anyway, the point is about New York City, Manhattan-centrically but still.

In multiple illustrated vignettes, a particular event on a particular day in New York was the focus. It was VERY large. It could have been Simon & Garkunkel in Central Park, or the 1979 No Nukes rally on the landfill created by excavation for the original twin towers if the World Trade Center. The latter became the site for Battery Park City, essentially everything along the Hudson River to the west of the then West Side Highway (now West Avenue) from the Chambers Street site of Stuyvesant High School to Battery Park itself. The rally was a mass gathering in the wake of the Three Mile Island partial fire meltdown of a nuclear power plant along the Suswquehann River near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. It's fair to simply consider this and the S&G concert as one-off gatherings of half a million people that quite naturally reverberated outward from their center, and hugely impacted railroad & other transportation hubs, and were lead stories in the major news outlets. Or, if they were not the lead story, that further proves the point.

Within the full cartoon, there is a quiet scene, perhaps of a quiet Carrol Gardens block of Brooklyn rowhouses where the artist began the day or returned to at its end. The illustrator marvels in commenting how New York so regularly displays the ability to absorb such massive crowds for things that feel so all-encompassing but add up to 'just another thing' in one part of the giant, busy, busy city.

In "fwiw/obviously" Greensboro, the conference tournament isn't the lead story; it's the only story. On 7th Avenue, just south of the Garment District, it's overweight Louisville fans wheeling their luggage toward the least magnificent, third version of "The World's Most Famous Arena," in the consensus "Capital of the World" city, one of many huge and/or worthy happenings on any given day, and, as correctly pointed out, people whose fan passion emanates from sleepy Storrs can drive in less than an hour to a direct train ride of less than an hour for their favorite show, within a specific & larger setting that attracts people from around the world, again on any given day, just as it has in all of our lifetimes. Is that incomprehensibly fetishistic? Only to a person with a a deep, disordered fixation on disrespecting and devaluing what is implicitly claimed (with the repeated use of the first person plural if nothing else) to be his object of loyalty and wishes for success.

Yes, the folks who fly in from Omaha, Milwaukee, Indianapolis, and Cincinnati don't necessarily impress those of us along the Eastern Seaboard (including Amtrak stops in Providence and Newark), they know where they're going, and it isn't Carl Sandburg's "City of Big Shoulders."

For anybody who ventures down to World Financial Center, maybe even a DePaul fan on a day after dreams of victory in the Garden have evaporated.

O’hara and Whitman–Overlooking the Hudson Together | The Walt Whitman Blog / Transnational Poetry

 

[John]

Heck, I attended yearly back when Perno was coach (Earl fckin Kelly!!!) and we'd play a one-and-done game, and even attending epic semi and final games with UConn not remotely involved was exciting stuff.

 

[Waquoit]

Every other league is dying to put their championship in MSG. Ask them why.