(Headline USA) There was a time when Donald Trump was just another celebrity sitting courtside at New York Knicks games. He was famous, but not yet flanked by Secret Service agents or defined by the politics that have left him deeply unpopular in his hometown.
Now, more than a decade after attending his last Knicks game at Madison Square Garden, Trump is making a rare trip back to New York City as president to cheer for them in Game 3 of the NBA Finals against the San Antonio Spurs on Monday night. Invited by Knicks owner James Dolan, he will be the first sitting president to attend an NBA Finals game.
The Knicks are seeking their first championship since 1973, when Trump was 26 and a relative newcomer to the family real estate business that vaulted him to wealth and fame. Two years after that triumph, the team’s owners at the time hired him as a consultant as they looked to sell the arena.
Reporter: Who is your favorite Knick?
Trump: Brunson is fantastic. Towns is fantastic. They just have a great team. pic.twitter.com/rghpD9XD6v
— Acyn (@Acyn) June 5, 2026
Trump has been to more major sporting events than any of his predecessors, including the Super Bowl and Daytona 500, golf’s Ryder Cup in the New York City suburbs, where he was cheered, and last year’s U.S. Open men’s tennis championship in Queens, where he was booed and blamed for long security lines.
On June 14, when he turns 80 while wrestling with myriad crises including the war with Iran, economic unease and court rulings blunting his agenda, he will host a UFC fight on White House grounds. Trump also has expressed interest in attending soccer’s World Cup, which kicks off this week across the United States, Mexico and Canada.
A courtside regular in the 1990s
Trump and the Knicks came into existence the same year, 1946.
His affiliation with the team — at least in the public record — dates to 1975 when he acted as a real estate adviser to the then-owners of the Knicks and Madison Square Garden, who were looking to sell the building known in a bit of Trump-style branding as “The World’s Most Famous Arena.”
Trump claimed to reporters at the time that two groups of “Arab oil interests” were interested in paying $50 million to $75 million. But the arena’s leadership passed on the idea, saying it was “not conceivable” to make such a deal during the Middle East oil crisis raging at the time.
Trump was not much of a known entity when the Knicks won their only championships in 1970 and 1973.
By the time they rebounded in the 1990s, Trump was front and center, taking his then-wife Marla Maples to Game 3 of the NBA Finals in 1994 and his current wife, first lady Melania Trump, to Game 2 of the Eastern Conference Finals in 1999. In between, he added to his Knicks fan bona fides with a cameo in the Knicks-themed Whoopi Goldberg film “Eddie” in 1996.
Back then, Trump was a more of a mythic figure than a consequential one, known as much for the women he dated and married as the buildings he built.
But just as those Knicks came up short in the NBA Finals against Hakeem Olajuwon and the Houston Rockets and David Robinson and the Spurs, Trump was running into problems of his own. His business empire was in disarray after his casinos fell into financial trouble and his airline, Trump Shuttle, went out of business.
Like the Knicks, Trump went into rebuilding mode and charted a new course: reality TV with NBC’s “The Apprentice” and “Celebrity Apprentice,” and then, politics. On a Knicks TV broadcast in 2010, he hinted at a possible presidential run.
That same year, as the Knicks struggled to recapture the magic of the 1990s, Trump recorded a video trying to persuade LeBron James to join the team.
“The real winners of the world want to be here,” Trump told him.
Adapted from reporting by the Associated Press
