Funny that this article came out right after the story about La La paying for her tickets came out. Many fans have wondered about those courtside seats — who gets them? Did they have to pay or were the tickets free? How do they decide which celebs sit where? Well we finally get a couple answers. Check it out…
Via NYTimes:
They call it Celebrity Row, the six prime courtside seats in Madison Square Garden reserved for the three most prominent celebrities (plus guests) at any given Knicks game. For the game against the Miami Heat on Jan. 9, they were filled by an actor, a musician and a model: David Duchovny, Paul Simon and Kate Upton.
No other basketball team except the Los Angeles Lakers celebrates the presence of big-name fans at its games as aggressively and as unabashedly as the New York Knicks do.
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Celebrities, of course, are different from you and me, and the Garden has developed a well-oiled system of cultivating and cosseting them.
“If you’re an A-level person and we know the fans are going to go bananas when your picture goes up on the scoreboard, then there’s a value having you there,” said Barry Watkins, the Madison Square Garden company’s executive vice president for communications and administration. “We think it’s a big part of the brand. Win or lose, it’s one of the reasons people come to the games.” (In fact, at 15-26, the Knicks have been doing a lot of losing this season.)
How these celebrities end up at the games; how they get assigned their particular seats; how they are treated when they arrive at the arena; what they do in return — all these apparently simple issues are in fact immensely complicated, reflecting the Garden’s policy of never missing an opportunity and never leaving anything to chance.
(Story Continues at NYTimes…)
-Spotted: DeadSpin
