Beloved comedian Richard Lewis, who died Tuesday night at 76 years old after a battle with Parkinson’s disease, was an avid Knicks fan.
Lewis, a mainstay courtside at Madison Square Garden over the years, wrote about his Knicks fandom in a 1991 guest story for the New York Times, calling the basketball team a “monumental part” of his life.
“I live for just two things,” Lewis wrote.
“For the Knicks to win another championship and to find a woman who won’t inevitably find the right moment to pour lamb’s blood over my head in front of close friends.”
He traced the Knicks being a part of his life back to about 1949, recalling his father taking his mother to a game on a date.
“I mean, come on, where were you when Willis [Reed] hobbled onto the court and on one leg single-handedly inspired his teammates to dismantle the powerful Lakers?” Lewis wrote in the Times.
“While most of my relatives were undoubtedly glued to the tube watching ‘My Mother, the Car’ I wept openly as the greatest sportscaster of all time, the golden throat of the Knicks, Marv [Albert], described near perfectly the action from a crummy television high atop a noisy cash register at some sleazy pickup bar as a nurse from Teaneck brazenly and impossibly tried to veer my attention away (not knowing that even under the best of circumstances she never would have had a shot in hell after I witnessed, during a commercial, her spitting a golf-ball-sized wad of Dentyne into her glass before downing what had to be at least her 10th drink) to no avail.”
Lewis, who also appeared in an early-1990s “I Love This Game” NBA commercial, maintained his love for the Knicks through thick and thin, with The Post’s Stefan Bondy revealing that the comic told the beat reporter a few years ago that he still wore his “Knicks prayers” pajamas each preseason.
He also spoke to Bondy about memories of traveling to see the Knicks in the 1994 NBA Finals in Houston and bringing his friend, “Seinfeld” and “Curb Your Enthusiasm” creator Larry David, to the Finals in San Antonio in 1999.
“Richard and I were born three days apart in the same hospital and for most of my life he’s been like a brother to me,” David wrote in a statement Wednesday. “He had that rare combination of being the funniest person and also the sweetest. But today he made me sob, and for that, I’ll never forgive him.”
Throughout the bleak seasons of the 21st century, Lewis maintained whimsical optimism that the Knicks would return to the promised land.
“I’ll be 67 on stage Sat in West Nyack and in 43rd year in stand-up and will not stop till my Knicks win another Championship,” Lewis posted on then-Twitter in 2013.
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