Patrick Ewing

• 1. Introduction

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  Patrick Aloysius Ewing Sr. was born on the 5th of August, 1962, in Kingston, Jamaica, one day before his home country declared independence. He would go on to become one of the most recognizable and dominant big men in the history of basketball, spending the better part of two decades as the face of the New York Knicks. But the path from Kingston to Madison Square Garden was anything but direct, and the story of how he got there raises questions worth sitting with: What does it take to shape a generational talent? What does greatness look like when a championship ring stays forever just out of reach? And what does a man do when the game he defined no longer needs him on the floor?

• 2. From Kingston to Cambridge

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  Carl and Dorothy Ewing raised their son in Kingston, Jamaica, where Patrick excelled at cricket and soccer as a child. The family moved to the United States in 1975, settling in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where Patrick enrolled at Cambridge Rindge and Latin School. It was there that a man named John Fountain and coach Mike Jarvis introduced him to basketball, a sport he had only recently taken up. With just a few years of playing experience, Ewing grew into one of the most intimidating high school players the country had ever seen, his size and athleticism combining to make him a force that rival fans genuinely feared. Once, hostile crowds rocked the team bus when his squad arrived to play an away game. He was named a Parade All-American three times, earning first-team honors in both 1980 and 1981. He led Cambridge Rindge and Latin to three consecutive Massachusetts Division I state championships from 1979 to 1981, and by the time he was a senior he had also been named Mr. Basketball USA, Parade Player of the Year, and MaxPreps National Player of the Year. To ready himself for college, he enrolled in the MIT-Wellesley Upward Bound Program.

• 3. Georgetown and the Game of the Decade

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  In 1981, Ewing made his college choice in a room full of fans who had hoped he would stay local and play for Boston College or Boston University. When he announced Georgetown, the room emptied. He had been very close to choosing the University of North Carolina and Dean Smith, but a recruiting visit there changed his mind: he witnessed a nearby Ku Klux Klan rally and decided the environment was not right for him. He also visited UCLA and Villanova before committing to coach John Thompson. As a freshman in the 1981-82 season, Ewing became one of the first college players to start and star at the varsity level in his very first year. The Hoyas advanced to the NCAA championship game, where Georgetown led late before a shot by Michael Jordan gave North Carolina the lead, and a mistaken pass by Freddy Brown directly to James Worthy sealed the loss. In the 1982-83 season, a showdown with top-ranked Virginia and star center Ralph Sampson was promoted as the "Game of the Decade". Virginia won 68-63, but Ewing delivered a slam dunk directly over Sampson that announced him to a national audience as the new dominant force in college basketball. In the 1983-84 season, facing a Kentucky team that had never lost a national semifinal, Georgetown overcame a 12-point deficit to win and advance to the title game. There Ewing and the Hoyas defeated the University of Houston, led by Hakeem Olajuwon, 84-75, giving Georgetown its first and only NCAA Championship. Ewing was named the tournament's Most Outstanding Player. His senior season ended in a shocking upset, as unranked Villanova shot a record 78.6 percent from the floor, 22 of 28, to edge Georgetown 66-64. At the conclusion of that year, Ewing won the Naismith Player of the Year Award and the Associated Press Player of the Year. ESPN would later, in 2008, rank him the 16th-greatest college basketball player of all time. He also quietly started something that outlasted his college career: a habit of wearing a short-sleeved T-shirt beneath his jersey, a fashion choice that spread through youth sports and holds on to this day.

• 4. The Lottery and the Knicks

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  Before the 1985 NBA draft, the league changed how it awarded its top pick. In previous years, the team with the worst record could win a coin toss for the first selection, a system that quietly encouraged teams to lose on purpose. The NBA replaced it with a lottery, giving each of the seven teams that had missed the playoffs an equal chance at the top pick. Commissioner David Stern drew the envelopes himself, and the one he pulled belonged to the New York Knicks. Stern had grown up a Knicks fan, and the result invited suspicion that has followed the draft ever since. New York signed Ewing to a 10-year, $32 million contract, which The New York Times would later describe as "a tremendous contract at that time or any time." Injuries limited his first season to 50 games, but he still averaged 20 points, 9 rebounds, and 2 blocks per game and won NBA Rookie of the Year. He would spend 15 years with the Knicks, appearing in eleven All-Star Games and earning a place on seven All-NBA teams. In 1990, he averaged 28.6 points per game, his career high. In 1993, he led the NBA with 789 defensive rebounds. He finished his time in New York as the franchise's all-time leading scorer with 23,665 points, the only player to appear in more than 1,000 games wearing a Knicks uniform, finishing with 1,039.

• 5. Finals Without a Ring

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  The 1993-94 season arrived with Michael Jordan retired from the sport, and Ewing had publicly declared it the Knicks' year. New York finished with the second-best record in the NBA at 60-22 and fought through two brutal seven-game playoff series, defeating the Bulls and then Reggie Miller's Indiana Pacers, to reach the NBA Finals for the first time since 1973. Their opponents were Hakeem Olajuwon's Houston Rockets. The Knicks took a 3-2 series lead but dropped the final two games. Ewing set a record during that run for most blocked shots in a Finals series with 30, a mark that stood until Tim Duncan broke it in 2003 with 32. He also set a single-game Finals record with 8 blocks in one game, a record later surpassed by Dwight Howard in 2009. The following year brought more heartbreak: a potential game-tying finger roll by Ewing rimmed out in the final seconds of a Game 7 against the Indiana Pacers. On the 20th of December, 1997, in Milwaukee, Ewing was fouled while attempting a dunk and landed with his full weight on his shooting hand. The injury involved a displaced fracture, a complete dislocation of the lunate bone, and torn ligaments, the kind of damage that doctors typically associate with vehicular accidents. He had missed only 20 games in the previous ten seasons; now he missed 56. He came back for the 1998-99 playoffs, and that lockout-shortened season produced the Knicks' second Finals appearance, but they lost to the San Antonio Spurs 4-1. In his final season with New York in 1999-2000, Ewing delivered a game-winning slam dunk over Alonzo Mourning in Game 7 of the Eastern Conference Semifinals before the Knicks were again stopped short of a title, this time by Indiana in the Conference Finals.

• 6. Olympic Gold and the Dream Team

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  Ewing won Olympic gold in 1984, averaging 11.0 points over eight games and leading the entire tournament in blocked shots with 18. Eight years later, he was part of the 1992 United States team that the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame would describe as "the greatest collection of basketball talent on the planet." That team, the first US Olympic squad composed of professional NBA players, is remembered as the Dream Team. Ewing was inducted into the Basketball Hall of Fame twice: first in 2008 for his individual career, and again in 2010 as a member of the 1992 Olympic team. In 2009, he was also inducted into the US Olympic Hall of Fame as a Dream Team member. He was named one of the 50 Greatest Players in NBA History in 1996 and one of the 75 Greatest Players in NBA History in 2021.

• 7. After the Game

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  Ewing's number 33 was retired by the Knicks on the 28th of February, 2003, in a ceremony at Madison Square Garden. He had spent one season with the Seattle SuperSonics and one with the Orlando Magic before announcing his retirement on the 18th of September, 2002. He moved quickly into coaching, serving as an assistant with the Washington Wizards under Michael Jordan, his longtime rival, and later with the Houston Rockets before resigning to spend more time with his family. On the 3rd of April, 2017, Georgetown hired him as head coach, bringing him back to the program that had shaped him. In his fourth season, Ewing led the Hoyas to the 2021 Big East Conference tournament championship as the eighth seed, defeating top-seeded Villanova in the quarterfinals and second-seeded Creighton 73-48 in the final to qualify for the NCAA tournament for the first time since the 2014-15 season. Georgetown's program declined sharply in the seasons that followed, and on the 9th of March, 2023, Ewing was fired. He returned to the Knicks in October 2024 as a basketball ambassador. Away from the court, in 2014, Ewing and sports agent David Falk donated $3.3 million to the John R. Thompson, Jr. Intercollegiate Athletics Center at Georgetown, the amount chosen as a direct nod to his retired number, 33.