When you’re rich and famous, New York City opens up to you. Dinner reservations, backstage at Saturday Night Live, box seats at the US Open, you name it. But one invite is intensely coveted, small in supply and high in demand—and subject to the whims of one single 71-year-old cable TV billionaire. That’s right, you apparently can’t sit courtside at the New York Knicks playoff games in Celebrity Row unless you are personally handpicked by owner James Dolan.
Sure, you might be an A-list celebrity, but at Madison Square Garden, loyalty to the New York Knickerbockers is paramount to all other metrics. Look no further than Gen-X silver screen icon Ethan Hawke. He was a regular sitting courtside, openly trying to flirt with Rihanna, but once he started offering some constructive criticism of the front office, he found himself off the invite list.
“I’ve been a Knicks fan for a long time, but I got kicked out of the Garden. They won’t give me tickets anymore. I was really vocal on some talk shows like this, that I thought it was a huge mistake to let Mike D’Antoni go,” Hawke said on Bill Simmons’s podcast in 2018. “They’d always hook me up, and then I called up one time and they said, ‘That’ll be $7,800.’ I was like, ‘Why is this the first time you guys are charging me?’ And they said, ‘You should have thought of that before you went on the Jimmy Fallon show.’” (Vanity Fair reached out to a representative for Dolan for comment.)
And this intense vetting makes for a hodgepodge of talent from all walks of life. During this remarkable gallop into the Eastern Conference finals, we’ve seen a few incredible lineups of famous fans sitting within sweat-drip range of the starting five. Take the April 28 home game against the Atlanta Hawks, which featured a bruising 39-point performance from Jalen Brunson en route to a 126–97 rout. It was hard to pay attention to the action on the court with a Celebrity Row as stacked as this one: Tracy Morgan, Tina Fey, Timothée Chalamet, Kylie Jenner, Ben Stiller, Christine Taylor, Spike Lee.
The ownership can only curate the Row because influential New Yorkers buy their own tickets, and they buy with abandon. CEOs, bank presidents, art collectors, Hollywood studio heads, rock stars, restaurateurs—the perimeter around the action is often a microcosm of Manhattan power. A year ago, I reported a story on the closest reaches of the Knicks arena as an ultimate court to prove you’re the king—with the Delta lounge as the modern day Mrs. Astor’s ballroom.
But of course there’s always a more exclusive room—and the super-secret celeb-only lounge, with access meted out by the Dolan family, is it. As we enter game one of the Eastern Conference finals, Tuesday night at the Garden against the Cavs, let’s break down the world of high-profile Knicks fans who might be sitting courtside.
And if you’re willing to accept the seats, you have to be down for anything—including shielding yourself from a toppling point guard who falls down after leaping for a high pass. As Iman Shumpert, former Knicks first-round draft pick, put it recently on a podcast, “This is an appearance—you don’t just get to go to the Knicks game.”
“You don’t get the free tickets for nothing; you better be touchable,” Shumpert went on. “Getting out them dabs, we need them autograph, take them pictures with them kids. Sign them basketballs. Yeah, we need that!”