Fans of the Knicks and Arsenal have long experienced disappointment. They finally have reasons to cheer.
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NEW YORK — He was still a block away, but already he could see it in the distance, a swarm of red jerseys surrounding his sports bar.
Marc Jean, a lifelong New York Knicks fan, watches every game at FancyFree, an airy Brooklyn bar on a bustling corner a few blocks from Barclays Center, home, mostly, to the WNBA’s Liberty. Jean is 40, which means for most of his life, seats at a Knicks bar have not been hard to come by. But Tuesday was Tuesday.
The Knicks — the Knicks! — were the favorites to win the Eastern Conference Finals. All over the city, the sidewalks were dotted with orange and blue hats, their occupants greeting one another with “Let’s go Knicks!” Their team had won seven straight games by an average of 25 points, looking perhaps good enough to bring home the team’s first title since 1973.
Jean had been coming to FancyFree long enough to remember when only a few die-hards would show up, before it became famous as the bar where Spike Lee and Mayor Zohran Mamdani watch their favorite teams. As Jean rode the subway over, leaving his job in Queens in time to arrive two hours before tip-off, Lee was already in the building.
“It went from three, four people to packed wall to wall,” Jean said, as he strolled up to a scene that resembled a block party. “Last two years, you gotta be here two hours early.”
But here’s the thing: FancyFree is also an Arsenal bar. So as Jean and other Knicks fans arrived, drenched in blue and orange, they found the bar inundated with red.
A team-specific sports bar rides the waves of that team’s prospects, losing business in losing seasons and winning it in successful ones. But for the sports-maddest among us, watching alongside like-minded supporters offers an immersive escape into a shared passion, a magical setting where strangers spiritually and literally lock arms on a nerve-racking journey of squeezed shoulders, the highest fives and hugs free of inhibition.
After wins, fans savor a unifying joy, a party at its climax. After losses, they sulk together, safe from rivals’ taunts and the judgment of those who don’t understand. Fans of the Knicks and Arsenal, and as a result, FancyFree, have long known the agonies better than the ecstasies. But over the last four years, as the Knicks and Arsenal simultaneously returned to contention, the two proud fan bases have cycled through FancyFree like shiftworkers clocking in for duty, bonded by the scars of devastatingly improbable defeats.
As Jean arrived on Tuesday, Arsenal had won the Premier League championship after a 22-year drought, and its fans were not even two hours into their celebration. He slapped hands with an Arsenal fan on the front patio, Howard Grandison, a filmmaker and copywriter who has lived in Brooklyn for 25 years and co-founded the local Arsenal fan club.
“Shift change,” Jean said. “Where the seats?”
“I’ll make another announcement,” Grandison said apologetically. “Nobody wants to leave.”
Before it was a hybrid Knicks-Arsenal-city-hall bar, FancyFree was an Irish Pub with decent wings called Mullane’s. “And before that it was a bodega,” Dre Washington, a 55-year-old Knicks fan, said as he waited for the Arsenal fans to depart.
Washington grew up here in the ‘70s and ‘80s, when crime rates were soaring across the city, and the neighborhood, Fort Greene, drew few outsiders, a victim of racist housing policies and systematic disinvestment. “Nobody wanted to live here,” said Tracy Williams, another Knicks fan from Fort Greene.
That was already changing by the time the Barclays Center opened in 2012. Home to the borough’s biggest subway stop and shopping district, Fort Greene turned into a cultural and commercial hub. An independent bookstore sprouted up not far from Mullane’s, not to mention the railway-themed Thai spot.
Early in the pandemic, the owner of Mullane’s moved to Florida and sold the property to Jason Burelle and Danny de la Huerta, who owned a cocktail bar in the neighborhood. They envisioned it as a local sports bar that “made the space feel like Brooklyn,” de la Huerta said. “Like if there was a Brooklyn Pub in another country, how that would look.”
They changed the name, added a projector screen and made a point to build connections with “regulars who had been coming every day for 20 years,” de la Huerta said, and who show up no matter who’s playing. “They’re the heart and soul of this place.”
The bar happened to sit next door to Spike Lee’s studio, and Burrelle used to work as a copywriter for Lee’s advertising agency. So Lee started coming in, sometimes joining the regulars for Knicks games. Jean remembers being starstruck the first time the director sidled up next to him for a drink. But once the game tipped off, and Lee gesticulated “just like he does on TV” sitting courtside at Madison Square Garden, the gap between them closed into a tangle of shared anxieties, just two guys talking hoops.
Jean’s parents, immigrants from Haiti, were soccer fans, but basketball was all around him growing up in Brooklyn in the ‘90s, the sport he played and watched with friends. It helped that those Knicks were led then by Jamaican superstar Patrick Ewing. “Caribbean like me,” Jean said. He fell hard.
Those Knicks thrilled the city with playoff runs that kept ending in disappointment, even devastation. And those were the good times. Then came the “dark years when we couldn’t beat anybody,” Jean said. Nine straight losing seasons in the 2000s, then seven straight in the late 2010s. At the sports bar closest to his apartment in Flatbush, he found himself outnumbered by fans of other teams, “begging them to put the Knicks game on.” So he sought refuge elsewhere.
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Among the regulars he met at FancyFree was Grandison, who came with his recreation soccer teammates. They were Arsenal fans, mostly, who had pledged allegiance in the late ‘90s, when the team fielded more Black players than other top European clubs, and Black stars Ian Wright, Patrick Viera, and Thierry Henry led the team to three Premier League titles in seven years. Growing up in Delaware, Grandison remembers being the only Black kid on the pitch, and when he started researching about Black pro soccer players around the world, his inquiries led him to Arsenal, he said. “I was sold.”
“Arsenal was the team you saw yourself as,” said Jason Andrew, 40, who was born in Brooklyn to Nigerian immigrants.
They asked Burrelle, an Arsenal fan himself, if the bar could open early for Arsenal’s weekend morning games, promising to bring in a crowd of at least a dozen. They dubbed their fan club Brooklyn Invincibles, after the nickname for the undefeated 2004 championship team, the last Arsenal squad to win a Premier League title. The years after that brought stretches of agonizing close calls and exasperating mediocrity, but the team surged back into contention in 2022, finishing runner-up three straight years and electrifying a fan base starved for excitement.
Word spread. Fans from across the city, and visitors from around the world, lined up before kickoff on cold winter dawns, camping out with coffee and bagels from a shop next door. Lee, who said he became an Arsenal fan when he befriended Henry at a video shoot, started showing up for nearly every game, perched at the same corner table, sometimes with his son. Mamdani, a lifelong Arsenal fan who has been coming to FancyFree since at least 2024, sometimes with his wife, now gets the table next to Lee.
Their reserved tables stand out as the only unoccupied pocket of a bar that fills up long before the game starts. The actor Daniel Kaluuya once came for a game. Burrelle said that Idris Elba shouted out the bar in a podcast interview. When Lee or Mamdani march in through a side door, usually a few minutes before kickoff, the crowd parts respectfully, extending hands for high-fives, discreetly snapping photos as the place hushes into a giddy buzz. On Mamdani’s recent visits, his fellow Arsenal fans have serenaded him with a special song, howling his name to the tune of a White Stripes hit.
Neither Lee nor Mamdani was at the bar on Monday, when Arsenal won its penultimate game of a tense season. (Lee was in London watching the game in person.) On Tuesday, Arsenal wasn’t playing but could secure the championship if second-place Manchester City lost. Lee, back in town, watched from his usual spot, decked out in Knicks gear. As Manchester City fell behind, more Arsenal fans trickled in, and after the final whistle blew, more kept streaming in to celebrate.
Lee headed out to catch a car to Manhattan for the Knicks game. Andrew tried to usher the festivities outside before “the shift change, when old New York starts coming in,” though the effort seemed futile, he said. “It’s hard to tell people to stop partying.”
An hour before tip-off, Andy Walker, a 71-year-old retired pro basketball player from Queens, hovered by the door, scanning for space. He lived nearby and often walked past on the way back from Sunday church, noticing the Arsenal fans “going crazy.” He loved the energy they brought to the neighborhood, he said.
“But now it’s time for them to leave.”
It was the first 90-degree day of the year; inside, the Arsenal fans sang their chants on repeat, slick with sweat below ceiling fans spinning at full speed. The floor was sticky, from drinks spilled in the celebratory mayhem; the water cooler was empty. Knicks fans clustered in a corner near the door as an unmoving storm of revelry raged on, blocking every conceivable path to the cold drinks. The televisions had switched to basketball, but FancyFree was not ready for its set change.
“I can’t deal with all this singing before I’ve even had a drink,” a woman said to Jean.
“Y’all got to get the f— up out of here,” another Knicks fan said.
“I’m not mad at it, I’d do the same thing,” another said, “but take it to the streets!”
“Just wait till eight o’clock,” Jean said then, pleading for patience. “Listen, if the Knicks won the championship, we’re gonna be a hundred times worse, so I’ll give them some grace.”
Nobody has watched more Knicks games at FancyFree than Jean, usually from the same stool at the end of the bar, too superstitious to change. So people listened, and the Arsenal fans proved him right, migrating out in time for tip-off. Jean and his crew took their spots at the bar counter. Slowly, the space transformed, Arsenal songs fading into “Let’s go Knicks” chants. More than a few fans in Arsenal jerseys donned Knicks hats, including Grandison, who got a round of drinks for Jean and another Knicks regular.
“Howard, I gotta talk to your Arsenal people,” Jean said. “Almost got ugly in here!”
Soon it did get ugly, for other reasons more familiar to Jean. The Knicks missed shot after shot. Fans stewed in frustrated silence, broken by the occasional curse. With the Knicks down 22 midway through the fourth quarter, some people started to leave, ignoring Jean’s warnings about giving up hope.
“That’s how you know who are the real Knicks fans,” he said.
He stayed calm, clapping for every bucket that chipped away at the deficit. His subdued comrades slowly awakened. The closer the Knicks got, the louder the cheers from the Knicks fans, and the more Arsenal fans outside on the patio and the sidewalks turned to face the game, until eventually the whole corner ignited when the Knicks tied the game in the final minute.
Inside, they were standing on chairs, leading chants, leaping into the arms of strangers as star point guard Jalen Brunson delivered salvation with a dizzying run of physics-defying shots. They drowned out the final buzzer. Jean turned to the crowd and roared in ecstasy. A sea of embraces engulfed him. Napkins fluttered through the air like confetti. The bar felt like it was shaking.
When the opening notes of Frank Sinatra’s “New York, New York” sounded from the speakers, Jean hopped to sit up on the counter with another regular, arms in the air as they led the bar in song.
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“I want to be a part of it!” Jean belted, and he was.
