On Monday night, two members of the British royal family, the Duke and Duchess of Kent – or Prince William and Kate Middleton as they sometimes call themselves – will take their place in the steep-pitched stands at Barclays Center as the Brooklyn Nets play host to LeBron James’s rejuvenated Cleveland Cavaliers. The royals? That doesn’t sound right. Horseracing, polo, croquet and rugby: these are the sports of royals. Basketball, with its street edge, minimal rulekeeping and pick-up spontaneity, seems to represent the antithesis of stagey, ceremony-bound royalty. And basketball fandom, in New York at least, is most closely associated with the twin figures of a firebrand black film director and his ultra-neurotic, over-thinking Jewish counterpart – two people as intellectually removed from the pretty, comfortably smug projections of the royal couple as it’s possible to get.
The royals’ trip across the East River is testament to the nascent star power of the host borough. Everyone wants a bit of Brooklyn these days. Everyone needs their Brooklyn Experience – even the heirs to the House of Windsor. The royal couple will jet in to the Barclays fresh from a flying visit to Washington DC to congratulate Barack Obama and Joe Biden on losing the Senate; they’ll also take in the 9/11 memorial in downtown Manhattan. Once those rote check-ins have been dealt with, it’ll be all Brooklyn. Although it’s hard to think of a part of Brooklyn less representative of the borough as a whole than that desperate, striving stretch around the junction of Atlantic and Flatbush Avenues, with its jumble of crap malls and pretensions to identity-free commercial sleekness: the Barclays Center paints a Brooklyn that exists, in reality, only around the Barclays Center.
On the face of it, Will and Kate – I refer to them by their first names, of course, because we are close personal friends – at the Nets seems like evidence of some approaching Cultural Singularity. But think about it: they’re rich. They’re from somewhere else. And they don’t appear to care all that much about basketball. In that sense, they are the perfect embodiment of the Brooklyn Nets, a product cobbled together from a franchise that has pinballed from Long Island to New Jersey and now to Kings County in the five decades of its existence. The team from everywhere has found its ideal fan set in the couple from over there. But then, it’s important to embrace the flux. Neighbourhoods – just like royal dynasties – change. I didn’t grow up selling crack on the streets of Bed-Stuy (well, Clinton Hill – but who’s arguing?) like Biggie Smalls, so I can’t really appreciate how far Brooklyn has come: when I got here, almost five years ago, there was already a place round the corner selling flat whites.
Gentrification was a done deal, and all that was left to be worked out was the details. For people who grew up here in the 80s or 90s, living the possibility of death as an everyday subway experience, there’s probably more good than bad in the post-financial crisis renovation of Brooklyn. The Nets represent everything that revived, aspirational Brooklyn wants to be: a wide-seated, well-stocked balm to the mean streets in the lesser boroughs beyond.
In their short time as a married couple, Will and Kate have made a point of appearing as approachable and normal as possible. Rejecting protocol and embracing the very ordinariness of all existence, they’ve managed to make themselves seem no different from any other rich young trust fund couple. They’ve taken the British royal family down a pay scale or two, to the palatable upper middle class ground of the non-chauffeured SUV. They’ve done to the House of Windsor what countless developers are attempting to do for Brooklyn (or at the very least, the upper left-hand bit of Brooklyn): they’ve given it a makeover.
When they enter the Barclays Center on Monday night, they’ll find plenty to jar the senses – Nathan’s dogs and the still-inexplicable popularity of Coors Light – but there will be solace in the upscale calorific delights of Fatty Cue and Calexico. Perhaps Jay-Z and Beyonce will be in attendance, a blanket to reassure that the event and the venue are Safe For The Famous. And as they circle the perimeter of the stadium towards their seats, bouncing across concrete floors still squeaky underfoot, still shiny with that New Brooklyn sparkle, they’ll be able to marvel at the example of a borough whose relentless self-smoothing, whose journey from danger and anomie to condo living, ramen burgers and ironic shuffleboard, presents the urban corollary of their own little trick at soft-brushing the royal family’s rich history of entitlement into a pantomime of violently unassuming middle-class contentment. The makeover couple at the home of the makeover team: what could be sweeter than that?
One thing’s for sure: Will and Kate are unlikely to pay much attention to the game. The Nets have been reliably underwhelming in their two and a bit seasons “back” in Brooklyn (not that they were ever really here to begin with, but still). The cash splash of last season – Paul Pierce! Kevin Garnett! – yielded meagre returns, and while Deron Williams’s resurgence this term holds the promise of a better end-of-season payoff, there’s little to suggest the Nets will fulfil anything other than their customary role of playoff makeweights. Events on the court, in other words, promise to be every bit as drab and routine as the royal visit itself. I’d develop the thesis more, but it’s getting late and I have a date with a ramen burger.
