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Sports of The Times

A Rivalry to Add to the City’s Rich History

Carmelo Anthony and the Knicks face the Nets in Brooklyn on Monday.Credit...Barton Silverman/The New York Times

“Is Brooklyn still in the league?” — Bill Terry, manager, New York Giants, 1934

New York is awaiting the first snide remark and first epic play in the basketball rivalry between the Nets of Brooklyn and the Knicks of Manhattan, which begins Monday in Brooklyn.

It helps that both teams have made good starts this season — well, at least the Knicks until they ran into Jeremy Lin’s team Friday night. The rivalry could be so immediate, so up close, but it needs a symbol, a cause — not the packaged noise that teams blast at the paying customers, incessantly. Something real.

It may take a while, but that’s all right. The 177 previous games between these franchises do not count. That was suburban stuff, with the Nets wandering from one leaky or dingy or soulless place to another, looking for urbanity. Now they have a home. What the relocated rivalry needs is history, and that takes time.

The best sporting rivalry ever in the New York region was between the Brooklyn Dodgers and the New York Giants until they went west after 1957. (Yes, Casey Stengel’s Dodgers made sure that Terry’s Giants did not win the pennant in 1934.)

The best rivalry in the more modern era has been — anybody remember hockey? — between the Islanders and the Rangers from the late 1970s into the mid-’80s.

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Manager Joe Torre, left, and the Mets’ Bobby Valentine at the 2000 World Series, won by the Yankees. It was the city’s first Subway Series in 44 years.Credit...Barton Silverman/The New York Times

Those division rivals collided all season, and sometimes in the playoffs. That generation’s Rangers reached the Stanley Cup finals once, in 1979, after eliminating the Islanders and touching off celebrations in tonier corners of Manhattan. The Islanders then won four straight Stanley Cups and got a parade down prosaic Hempstead Turnpike.

The ethos of hockey dictated that Islanders whack into Rangers, early and often, and vice versa, and that was how the single greatest New York rivalry came to be personalized in one rhythmic memorial.

The Potvin Chant.

It still lingers in the renovated rafters of the Garden whenever these rivals meet between labor stoppages. Rangers fans are hard-wired, like migrating swallows or salmon. Whenever the teams meet in the Garden, by prearranged signal, from some nether corner of the arena comes the beat — Beep-beep-beep! (pause) Potvin stinks! Or words to that effect.

The Potvin Chant recalls the broken ankle sustained by the Rangers’ Ulf Nilsson after a hard — but definitely legal — check by the Islanders’ Denis Potvin on Feb. 25, 1979. Nilsson was never the same, yet to this day he reiterates that the damage was due more to the sloppy ice in the Garden than to anything dirty by Potvin, the great Islanders defenseman.

The players have long since moved on, but the chant remains. Nobody wishes injury to any current Net or Knick, but eventually something will happen between the Brooklyn team and the Manhattan team.

Every sport needs local rivalries, or derbies as they are called in soccer. Roma-Lazio. Chelsea-Arsenal. Istanbul has three teams on tram-and-ferry lines. Those blokes take it seriously. Major League Soccer, which will finish its 17th season of incremental growth with its championship game on Saturday, is longing for a derby between the Red Bulls of industrial Harrison, N.J., and some future expansion team east of the Hudson — with fans taking the rails and bridges and tunnels, preferably peacefully, emitting their homegrown chants and taunts.

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Jackie Robinson of the Dodgers beat Wes Westrum’s tag on a steal of home against the Giants in April 1956.Credit...National Baseball Hall of Fame Library Archive

If the N.H.L. resumes by 2015, the Islanders will move to Brooklyn, perhaps reviving a dormant rivalry. (The Devils, even with their three Stanley Cups, have been more or less mainland interlopers in the region.)

Don’t count on this happening Monday, but once in a lifetime a rivalry may reach its zenith in the first meeting between teams. In August 1969, the Jets were the extremely improbable Super Bowl champions and the Giants were a landmark franchise in decline when they met for the first time.

Football exhibitions are the lowest form of sporting life. Most of them should have free admission, if they are played at all. That game happened to take place at the same time as Woodstock, taking psychic attention from the Yale Bowl in Connecticut. But the game had a clear plot: the Giants were obviously heading toward a trouncing by the upstarts from the A.F.L.

Joe Namath picked the Giants apart early, but the worst part came when Mike Battle, a brash rookie from Southern California who was said to chew on beer bottles as a stupid human bar trick, ran back a punt 86 yards for a touchdown, hurdling the Giants’ rookie punter, Dave Lewis.

That humiliating 37-14 loss stayed with the Giants and their fans — at least until they won four Super Bowls, which has more or less evened things out. The Giants have an 8-4 advantage over the Jets during the regular season, with few sparks. They even share a stadium and rake in the bucks and resent their division rivals more.

That leaves baseball. The great Gordon Jenkins once wrote lyrics for a Sammy Davis Jr. song called “New York’s My Home,” giving zillions of good reasons for not leaving, including, “It’s a city where a man/Can fulfill his dreams/The only town that’s left/That’s got three baseball teams.”

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John Tonelli and the Islanders beat the Rangers in overtime in a 1979 playoff game, but the Islanders’ first Stanley Cup was a year away.Credit...Ray Stubblebine/Associated Press

That song came out in 1956, five years after the single greatest New York baseball game ever played — the Bobby Thomson home run, Oct. 3, 1951. (I just happen to remember that date; it is gouged into my memory bank.)

The participants in that nasty 22-games-a-year rivalry defected after 1957, leaving only the Yankees. (Some of us call that time the Dark Ages.)

The Mets were formed in 1962, and the New York derby has since served as a Rorschach test of all human traits. In the first years, Stengel used to pitch his aces in a summer charity game for the Mayor’s Trophy, while the Yankees disdainfully called up pitchers from the minors. Then, in the Steinbrenner Age, the Boss warned his troops to crush their rivals — in spring training. The Yankees have won 54 of 90 games against the Mets since the beginning of 1997, as the interleague genre increasingly becomes irrelevant.

Even the 2000 World Series, the first New York Subway Series since 1956, was largely anticlimactic because a team with Jeter and Rivera crushed a nice little team with Agbayani and Payton. And yuppie Yankee fans bought huge portions of tickets and ate the Mets fans’ lunches.

That leaves basketball. The players are too cool and rich and interconnected to embody any upstairs-downstairs resentments; they will say what they think fans and the news media want to hear about the glory of a New York rivalry.

The future of this four-times-a-season derby ultimately depends on the quality of the teams — surprisingly high so far — and any outer-borough-vs.-Midtown resentments that kick in. Or maybe the personalities of the owners: the tall, voluble Russian owner of the Nets vs. the bearded recluse owner of the Knicks, polar opposites right there.

Don’t rush it. This is New York — Brooklyn and Manhattan. Listen for the beat. Beep-beep-beep. Something will happen.

A correction was made on 
Nov. 26, 2012

An earlier version of this column misidentified the location of the Knicks-Nets game on Monday night. The Nets’ new arena is near Downtown Brooklyn, not in it.

How we handle corrections

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section D, Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: A Rivalry to Add to the City’s Rich History. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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