No one could have known that a Knicks legend would be born in the stifling heat of a cramped summer gym in the Catskill Mountains.

But it was there, over just a few days in July of 1991, where a hellbent product of Queens bulldozed his way into a city’s heart.

The story started a few months earlier. Mary Mason worked in the Garment District and had a son who could play a little basketball. Fuzzy Levane was a hoop gypsy who was tipped off to Mrs. Mason – and her son — by a guy named Ed Krinsky, who ran a minor league team called the Long Island Surf. On that team was Mary Mason’s son, a 6-foot-7 purveyor of brute force named Anthony.

Anthony Mason, pride of Queens and Springfield Gardens High, had bounced around a little bit overseas and had already played bits of seasons with the Nets and Nuggets. But now, in 1991, he found himself playing for the Surf in something called the United States Basketball League. He was only 24, but, having already been waived three times in the NBA as the owner of a checkered reputation, he was already fighting for his basketball life.

It had been Fuzzy Levane’s job for years to scout out places like the USBL and the old CBA (which spawned Phil Jackson as a head coach in Albany), looking for players that could fill a Knicks roster space. In the spring of ’91, he ran into Ed Krinsky, who told

ANTHONYMASON

by Dennis D’Agostino

Remembering

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him of Mary Mason’s son. The Knicks had just hired a new coach and everything about the franchise was changing, fast. New blood, new thinking, would be the order of the day.

And so Anthony Mason got himself invited to Summer League with the Knicks in July of 1991. And suddenly, nothing about the Knicks would ever be the same again.

For two days, against teams from the Celtics and 76ers, Anthony Mason was the best player on the floor. He ran, with blinding speed for a man his size. He defended like a demon possessed. He passed, he scored, he dominated. He was the one player among the ten on the floor that you couldn’t take your eyes off.

Remember that Summer League, vintage 1991, was not the nationally-televised, League-sanctioned, slickly-produced basketball Summerfest it is today. Anthony Mason had to win a roster spot playing in the stuffy, wood beamed Kutsher’s Sports Academy gym, in front of an audience of teenage campers, on a rickety World War-II vintage floor that Red Auerbach had donated from the Boston Garden.

And sitting at center court, on a splintered wooden folding chair, was the new Knicks coach, watching

intently and making notations on his trademark piece of thin blue cardboard. It took only two days in the Catskills — not even the subsequent trip to Southern California for another week of play — for Pat Riley to decide that, for whatever kind of team he was going to coach in New York, Anthony Mason was his kind of player.

And of course, he was. The Pat Riley Knicks had bigger stars, named Ewing and Oakley and Starks and Rivers and Harper, but none of them captured the spirit, tenacity, toughness and, yes, danger of those teams more perfectly than the bull from Springfield Gardens.

He was 250 pounds of mayhem. For anyone who watched it in stunned disbelief, the Riley Era officially

began with a now-legendary full-court brawl between Mase and Xavier McDaniel on the very first day of training camp down in Charleston. A little later, one of the greatest-ever on-court fights featured Mase in full swingout mode against J.R. Reid (ironically, a future teammate and close friend) in a charity game — yes, a charity game — at the Garden.

Mase knew no other way to play except all-out, every minute. That’s what got him back into the League and that’s what would keep him there. His

take-no-prisoners style on both ends of the floor meshed perfectly with the ultra-physical Riley teams of the mid-‘90s, and the Knicks wouldn’t have made two trips to the Eastern Conference Finals — or gotten close to the 1994 Finals in a season where, ironically, he was suspended just before the Playoffs — without him.

And during that time, he wasn’t just a New York Knick, he was New York’s Knick.

On a team with very few local products, Mase was every inch a New Yorker, and he lived it to the hilt. No Knick was more visible on the streets, or in the community, or in a nightspot following a game. He had lived out the ultimate dream — making it big in his hometown. He was the kind of athlete New York loved best...a rough-edged hometown guy, not a superstar, who worked like hell to make it big.

It didn’t hurt, of course, that the city had never seen a Knick quite like Mase. No player could drive an opponent — or one of his own teammates or coaches — to distraction better than Mase. No one played with more emotion. No one had that look, that build, or that mischievous grin. And no one, of course, could have the Knicks’ battlecry of the day, or the team logo, or any other message that came into his mind carved into the side of his head.

Everything worked for him during an NBA career that spanned nearly a decade-and-a-half. In 1995, he became the first Knick ever to win the NBA’s Sixth Man of the Year award. The following year, thrust into the starting lineup for all 82 games, he rang up a League-leading 3,457 total minutes, still a franchise record. That same season, his speed and ball-handling skills enabled him to be the first player ever called a “point forward”, a term devised by then-head coach Don Nelson.

Mase was dealt to Charlotte in 1996 in the deal that brought Larry Johnson to the Knicks as part of Ernie Grunfeld’s massive team makeover that would lead to the ’99 East title. In his first season in Charlotte, he was named second team All-Defensive and third team All-NBA. After sitting out the 1998-99 lockout season due to injury, he would be reunited

with Riley in Miami and earn NBA All-Star honors with the Heat in 2001.

Mase only played five of his 13 NBA seasons as a Knick, but he was forever linked to the orange and blue. A frequent Garden visitor in later years, his name still resonated as he lived to see two of his sons play college ball, Anthony Jr. at St. John’s and Antoine at Niagara and then Auburn.

It will probably never happen for another Knick in quite the same way it happened for Anthony Mason. They don’t play Summer League games in places like Kutsher’s anymore, for one thing. But it’s more than that. No other player will be embraced by New York in quite the same way Mase was, when he parlayed perhaps his last gasp as a basketball player into capturing the imagination of his native city.

That’s why it was so painful, why New York took it so hard, when, at age 48, Anthony Mason’s heart finally gave out...a heart that seemed as big as the city he once owned. It was too soon, criminally too soon, for one of New York’s own.

HE WAS 250 POUNDS OF MAYHEM

HE HAD LIVED OUT THE ULTIMATE DREAM

— MAKING IT BIG IN HIS HOMETOWN.

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