To understand just how 1973 the Knicks’ last Tonight Show championship celebration was, it helps to start with the spectacle Jimmy Fallon staged 53 years later.
Monday night’s Tonight Show was built as a full Studio 6B takeover for the newly crowned NBA champs: the whole Knicks roster, head coach Mike Brown, the Knicks City Dancers, Wu-Tang Clan, and a studio audience made up entirely of Knicks superfans.
It was loud, crowded, emotional, deeply New York, and—given that the Knicks had not won an NBA title in 53 years—more than a little overdue.
It also gave Studio 6B itself a neat bit of symmetry. Fallon’s Knicks celebration took place in the same 30 Rock studio where Johnny Carson marked the team’s previous championship in 1973, during one of his New York visits after relocating The Tonight Show to California.
The similarities basically end there.
After the Knicks won the 1973 NBA Finals, Carson did not welcome the full team. There was no arena-style entrance, no wall-to-wall fan celebration, no hometown hip-hop legends waiting in the wings. Carson welcomed one Knick: Jerry Lucas, the future Hall of Fame forward who had just won his first NBA title after ten seasons in the league.
To be fair, Carson was happy for him. He congratulated Lucas on the championship and noted that he was especially glad the Knicks had wrapped things up when they did, because the clinching game had run long in the East and cut into Tonight Show viewing.
“Nobody saw our show that night,” Carson joked.
Lucas, meanwhile, explained that the title had “filled a gap” for him. He had won at the high school, college, and Olympic levels, he told Carson, but never before in the NBA. He also praised Knicks fans as “the most vocal and the most sophisticated in the country,” credited Madison Square Garden’s home-court advantage, and described the championship team as intelligent, unselfish, and unusually deep.
All very nice. All very composed.
And then the interview became something else entirely.
Lucas, whose post-basketball career would become closely tied to memory training, moved from championship talk into a demonstration of his mental skills. Carson asked him to alphabetize words and names by letter order—“Johnny Carson,” “Peter Bogdanovich,” and others—then helped him set up a more elaborate memory-and-numbers stunt involving audience-suggested objects and a magic-square-style payoff.
So yes, Fallon’s Knicks celebration had a full roster, a packed fan audience, Wu-Tang Clan, Spike Lee, and a retired lucky shoe.
Carson’s had one cerebral Knicks forward, a few minutes of playoff analysis, and a mathematical memory trick.
Watch Lucas’ 1973 Tonight Show appearance at the top of this post.
