How Landry Fields made me a New York Knicks fan
If my parents drove me to school, maybe I wouldn't have discovered basketball.
I rode the bus to school every day, it would drop me off about 40 minutes before school started, so there were barely any kids there when I arrived each day.
One of the maybe three kids that were on my sixth grade floor when I walked into school every morning was this girl from my homeroom. She used to wear these Knick hair ties. I was a sports fan at the time so, one day while we were just sitting on the floor in front of our lockers, I asked her about them. She said she was a Knicks fan and told me about her favorite player, Landry Fields.
No one in my family is a big NBA fan (crazy right?), so at this time I really wasn't introduced to basketball or the Knicks. I went home and started to try and learn about the team, and of course Landry Fields.
Landry Fields became that guy for me, the player who made me like basketball. Getting to school early now meant talking about the Knicks and our favorite rookie Landry. Yes, we called him just Landry, I guess in our heads we thought us 11-year-olds we were cool enough to be on a first-name basis with a guy we never met. I guess we liked Landry Fields so much because he was a rookie, young, and we were just kids. Or maybe it was because of videos like this.
I was in 6th grade from 2010-2011, we all know what happened that year. A few months after I started to get into the Knicks, "I'm coming home" happened, Carmelo Anthony was traded to the Knicks. By that point, the New York Knicks were the talk of my whole sixth grade class.
For many people, middle school is an awkward time that they don't want to remember. I got lucky though, in middle school I discovered, basketball, something that would become a passion of mine for the rest of my life.
