The first? That was probably Carl Braun, born in Brooklyn, who led the city in scoring as a sophomore and junior at Adelphi Academy in Bay Ridge before his family moved to Garden City. As a senior, he led Long Island in scoring, too. He tried to be a baseball player for a while after starring at Colgate. Then he remembered basketball.
“Then,” he told me in 2005, “I found the Knicks. And it was magic, all of it.”
Braun was the first New York kid who grew up to star for the Knicks. He joined the team in its second season, sat out two years while in the Army, and, in 1952, returned to become a five-time All-Star. The Knicks made the NBA Finals that first year, then fell on some hard times, but Braun was the biggest reason — sometimes the only reason — why fans would make their way to the Garden or the 69th Regiment Armory.
One of those die-hard loyalists was a kid from Manhattan who lived and died with the Knicks in those years and always kept his eyes firmly lasered on No. 4.
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