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[Katz]Having a ball with the Knicks’ Mitchell Robinson: ‘Mitch is always Mitch’



[Katz]Having a ball with the Knicks’ Mitchell Robinson: ‘Mitch is always Mitch’

by starks3_

6 Comments

  1. Street_Plate_6461

    Love this guy. When we drafted him I remember everyone saying how he would at the best least be a starting center- and he’s live up to that. For being a 2nd rd pick that’s not bad at all.

  2. imzerooo

    Wow Mitch is hilarious. I had to snag the full text:

    Mitchell Robinson found his favorite newspaper headline months ago.

    In early December, after a New York Knicks blowout win over the Charlotte Hornets, the New York Post ran a back page highlighting yet another stingy defensive performance from a team that was rolling. There it was, pressed on the back of the paper in can’t-miss-all caps:

    “RIDIN’ THE D TRAIN.”

    Robinson saw it on social media, immediately invoked the lewder meaning of that phrase, and promptly posted a screenshot of the back page to his Instagram story with an added caption. “Gotta relax,” he wrote, followed by two crying laughing emojis.

    No one — and I repeat, no one — doubts Robinson’s ability to turn any subject into a joke. Even when he’s not down to do an interview, he’s still good for a quote.

    Earlier this season, he declined an interview request by saying, “My mama told me not to talk to strangers.” In January, Stefan Bondy of the New York Daily News asked him for a one-on-one, and Robinson said he couldn’t do it because he had to go post on his OnlyFans. He leaves little bread crumbs once he’s done, too. One time, he finished a postgame interview and as he was walking away said, “OK, now I’m gonna troll some people on Twitter.” Unsurprisingly, he proceeded to troll some people on Twitter.

    As RJ Barrett once told me with a sigh and a smile wider than Robinson’s outstretched arms: “Mitch is always Mitch.”

    And sometimes, even when Robinson is sitting at his locker preparing for an upcoming game, the zingers are just too easy. Unintentional innuendo printed in all caps on an iconic New York paper is a comedic slam dunk. And that’s how Robinson discovered a new love for accidentally erotic print journalism. Weeks after the Charlotte game, he was still wisecracking about that headline.

    By then, it was less of a joke and more of a public service announcement. This was no bit. It had become a cause.

    When Robinson first saw the back page, he thought it was fake, a photoshop that some internet sleuth had created to make 12-year-olds trapped in 24-year-old bodies laugh. But this headline — which was supposed to be a pun about the New York City subway but, to Robinson, might as well have been ripped straight out of Urban Dictionary — was as real as DEWEY DEFEATS TRUMAN. Robinson needed to tell the world, anyone who would listen, that it existed.

    Heck, when I asked Robinson if it was cool for me to write this meaningless anecdote about his never-ending obsession with RIDIN’ THE D TRAIN awareness, he responded as if he were an activist, not a humorist.

    “Yeah, the people gotta know!” he shouted.

    “They trying to get people fined with that headline,” he added, a quip about how the NBA wouldn’t allow him to make any racy jokes about such subjects in a news conference.

    This is one topic his mama must have told him he can talk about — even if he’s still turning down interview requests with his personal flair.

    More than a month after RIDIN’ THE D TRAIN was published, I approached Robinson before a game to ask if he had a moment for an interview.

    “Why?” he responded.

    He was sitting at his locker. He did not look up.

    “Because I wanna write something about your defense,” I said.

    He responded the same way.

    “Why?” he said again.

    “Because you’re good at it,” I answered.

    At this point, I knew what he was going to say next.

    “Why?” he asked again.

    Once Robinson decides to mess with you, you can either play the game or walk away. I played, but I also knew there was no winning. My only hope was to keep stringing the whys along until he grew too exhausted to continue and agreed to the interview.

    “Because you block a lot of shots and have done well guarding pick-and-rolls,” I said.

    He was still looking down at his locker when he once again asked me, “Why?”

    And that’s where I knew I had him.

    “I don’t know!” I said with a bit more emphasis than I should have used in a quiet locker room. “That’s what I wanna ask you about!”

    But I should have remembered the first rule of interacting with Robinson: Mitch will always have the last word, and it will always be something that only he would say — even if he’s just parting ways with you. Mitch doesn’t say goodbye to people conventionally.

    Instead, he repeats quirky synonyms for it. He is known to shout “Toodles” in a falsetto. Sometimes, he goofily jogs away in the middle of a sentence. One evening, when reporters were leaving the locker room, he yelled to us, “See ya, buckos!” and waved his right hand in one sweeping wave as if he were one of “The Little Rascals.”

    But in this moment, I thought Robinson would answer my question. I would finally get him to say something other than “Why?” And I was right about that part. He did change it up. But what I didn’t realize is that he had me right where he wanted.

    He took a deep breath and looked up at me inquisitively. He squinted one eye and dropped the line he was surely angling for the whole time:

    “You gonna write some s— about riding the D train?”

  3. The_Real_Todd_Gack

    Someone please please if you go to a playoff game bring a sign that says All Aboard The D Train!

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