The Difference Between the Knicks and the White House Cage Fight

There are moments when a phrase, or a current of thought, that had seemed condemned to archival history is suddenly all anyone talks about. So it is right now with the chewy subject of breads, circuses, and cities. New York is alight with the joy of the Knickerbockers’ doggedly pursued N.B.A. championship title with, in this summer of celebrating our gloriously hybrid Americanness, the pleasing anomaly that a team of mostly Black and brown Americans bears the name of the town’s oldest, once most élite, and now obscure Dutch element. But the subject of bread and circuses arises out of the ancient observation—from the grouchy poet and satirist Juvenal, who witnessed it in first-century Rome—that, if people are supplied with food and entertainment by their oligarchs, they won’t care or even notice if the government they live under is changing from some sort of a democracy to a dictatorship right before their eyes.

The Knicks won a week ago Saturday, and New York affirmed that victory on Thursday, with a parade and a ceremony at which Mayor Zohran Mamdani presented the team with newly redesigned keys to the city, though what, exactly, the keys unlock these days is unclear. In between those civic thrills, an openly gladiatorial spectacle was staged on the White House South Lawn: a U.F.C. cage-fighting event overseen by Dana White, the combat-sports impresario and longtime friend of President Donald Trump. Meanwhile, athletes and supporters from many nations passed through our now suspicious borders to fight for the World Cup of what the rest of the world calls football. Inevitably, the question arises of whether we are each, in our way, being distracted from our own crisis by our own oligarchs, and by the circuses that they encourage. Indeed, some of our oligarchs actually own the circuses. It was James Dolan who invited his pal Trump to visit the Garden for the Knicks’ Game Three, and it is Dolan, not New York, who owns the team, just as it was FIFA’s president, Gianni Infantino, who showered praise and a faked-up peace prize on Trump ahead of the World Cup.

Violence, of course, hovers at the edges of even our favorite games, and we are not always aware of the risks that our heroes take on behalf of our entertainment. It has been pointed out that the N.B.A. final series was rougher—what is euphemistically called “more physical”—than the game used to be. A few years ago, there was a flurry of concern about the rise of concussions in the N.F.L., but that has largely subsided, as the league continues to bring in record-breaking revenues—more than twenty-five billion dollars are projected for next year. This month, as the Carolina Hurricanes won the Stanley Cup Finals, we saw sadly that the N.H.L. has become more physical, too—with a cruder version of the game, which some Canadians think was intended to be more easily accepted by the never-seen-a-winter Sunbelt cities that the league wants to thrive in. More sadly, the former player Claude Lemieux, a paladin of both the Montreal Canadiens and the New Jersey Devils, died by suicide just weeks ago, shortly after receiving the highest honor in Montreal hockey: carrying the team torch onto the ice before the opening face-off. His family, significantly, has donated his brain to Boston University for study.

Some historian will doubtless make a case that Trump’s cage fight was a Jacksonian gesture, pleasing to the people, and that only the snobbery of an élite would disdain it. But one had merely to watch the fight, and to see the fighters paraded out of the White House to the arena, to know that on the South Lawn we have moved beyond populism and entered Caligula country, where the emperor delights in vulgar cruelty for its own sake. There is a real distinction between a city unified by five fine starting players in a game that originally involved throwing a ball into a peach basket and that, however improbably, became the city game, and the bloody display in the nation’s capital. One is about civic commonality, the other about authoritarian cynicism; one is about a city pulling together around a common pleasure, the other about desecrating the decorum of democracy.