The Unlikely Friendship Behind the Knicks’ Title Run |
Running an NBA team had never been part of his plan, but now, not long after news broke that he’d be doing exactly that, Leon Rose was on the phone with a friend, outlining how he intended to save one of the most embattled franchises in sports. It was February 2020, and after 25 years as an NBA agent, he knew the snake pit he was walking into.
These, after all, were the New York Knicks. In the previous 20 years, they had endured three times as many losing seasons (15) as winning ones (five), dumped one franchise icon (Patrick Ewing) and fought with another (Charles Oakley), and regularly filled the tabloids with the kinds of scandals typically reserved for reality TV. Even Phil Jackson, just three years after being welcomed as a savior, had been run out of town a few years before. The Knicks were the first NBA riddle the legend was unable to solve.
All of which was why Rose was now telling Mike Dunlap, a longtime coach and one of his earliest clients, that he’d start with the simple stuff. He’d be patient with his roster. Build a relationship with team owner James Dolan. Come in asking questions and being ready to learn. And there was one more thing, Rose told Dunlap. Something he could bring to the table that no one before him could.
“He thought Wes would be really important,” Dunlap said. Wes was William Wesley, a fellow South Jersey native known in sports as “World Wide Wes.” “Maybe the greatest connector I’ve met in my 50 years in the business,” said David Falk, Michael Jordan’s longtime agent. Whether you were a veteran general manager trying to defuse tension between a coach and a star, a rookie needing career advice, or a shoe executive wondering whether a kid was worth an investment, Wes was likely one of your first calls.
Rose understood this better than most. Over the previous four decades, he and Wes had built one of basketball’s most successful and unlikely partnerships. Neither had played college ball at a high level, let alone in the NBA, but together they’d climbed to the top of the sport.
“They’re like Batman and Robin, except they’re always swapping those roles,” said Lynn Merritt, a longtime Nike executive.
That June, with the NBA paused due to COVID, the two sat outside Rose’s Jersey Shore home and mapped out their plan. “Family is how we’re building this thing,” Wes told a friend soon after. At times, that approach seemed destined to fail. The members of their family didn’t all get along. Some had to be traded or fired for the good of the group. Others were given chances, or contracts, they might not have deserved. Over the years, rival executives and agents — and even some employees within the organization — would joke that the true genius of Rose and Wes was that in Dolan they had suckered a billionaire into handing over his checkbook so they could line their friends’ pockets. Many of these insiders, along with NBA reporters (including, it should be said, the one writing this story), believed they were in over their heads.
Yet six years after their chats at the Shore, there were Rose and Wes standing side by side, tears streaming down their cheeks, watching the team they’d built celebrate the snapping of a 53-year-drought.
Jalen Brunson may have been the catalyst, and OG Anunoby’s game-four tip might be the moment fans remember most. But the true story behind the Knicks’ magical title run is one of two outsiders — a Black kid from Camden and a Jewish kid from Cherry Hill — coming together and conquering the sport. And it’s a story that doesn’t begin in a glamourous gym but in a run-down shoe store on a nondescript stretch of South Jersey road.
It was the late ’70s, and Leon Rose wanted a pair of Julius “Dr. J” Erving’s signature shoes. So he did what most athletes in the area did at the time: He went to The Pro’s Shoe — though most in the area referred to it as Pro Shoes — in Cherry Hill. Known for its rare models and hard-to-find large sizes, the store drew ball players of all levels and ages. The owner rang up customers on an old crank register and strolled around with an unlit cigar dangling from his mouth. The heart of the store, though, was an enterprising teenager who, at around age 13, had started walking over every day after school. Most customers didn’t know his full name. To them, he was simply Fresh Wes, the kid who always outfitted them with the perfect pair of kicks.
Quick-witted and sharp, Wes had the people skills of a professional twice his age. He was a worker too — sometimes, to fund the high-school parties he and his friends liked to throw, he’d borrow a truck and go searching for old washers and dryers around town to bring to a scrapyard.
Pro Shoes became Wes’s second home. He’d talk up anyone who walked in, no matter their religion or race — an ability he’d picked up in middle school, after his family moved a few miles east to Merchantville, where “he was the only Black kid in our class,” said Jeff Selverian, one of his closest childhood friends.
By the late ’70s, the store had become a local hot spot with Wes making new friends every day. Some, like Milt Wagner and Billy Thompson, were high-school basketball stars from Camden. Others were just regular kids who needed shoes. On this day, it was a point guard from Cherry Hill High School East.
Wes made his way over to the customer.
He and Rose shook hands.
Rose’s first dream was to become a coach. This concerned his father. “I said, ‘What you should do is go to law school first,’” Zev Rose, a commercial-real-estate lawyer, recounted. They compromised: Leon became an assistant at his old high school while enrolled at Temple’s law school. After graduating in 1986, he became a Camden County prosecutor and moonlighted as an assistant coach at Division III Rutgers–Camden.
Wes, meanwhile, was carving out a path of his own. South Jersey had become a wellspring of athletic talent with future pros seemingly on every........