NBA Finals: Long Island die-hard basketball fans see rituals as less about logic, all about winning

Is it coincidence that Jennifer DeSena, Knicks fan and North Hempstead supervisor, has not allowed herself to watch the second half of any NBA Finals game so far, and her team now stands one game away from putting the San Antonio Spurs and this fortune-flipping, nailbiting contest to bed?

Did the universe realign because Jocelyn Ramirez, of Massapequa, the girlfriend of Spurs fan Sean McBride, of Dix Hills, watched part of the team's 115-111 Game 3 win over the Knicks with him but didn’t join for Game 4, when the Knicks thundered back from a 29-point deficit for an improbable 107-106 victory?

The answers to those questions are almost certainly yes and no, respectively. But sports and fandom seem to encourage beliefs and practices that are, at a minimum, inconsistent with science.

To sit or stand

McBride, 25, a parking valet, has several.

"If I’m sitting for the beginning of the game and it worked last game, I’m going to stay sitting," he said. "If the tides turn, the Knicks are on a run, all of a sudden the sitting thing is not working, let’s try standing," or flipping his cap backward or frontward.

"Or, if both aren’t working," McBride said, "sideways."

At some level, he said, "I realize how it doesn’t really affect the game at all." But "it’s something that just takes over. You want to be feeling like you’re part of what’s going on. That’s why we all root, to feel like we’re part of a community, feel like we’re part of something big that’s going on."

Michael "Monte" Monteleone, of Valley Stream, has been a Knicks fan since 1982. His playoff superstitions are rooted in his eating habits. Monteleone finds a place that shows the game, and sells plenty of wings, and he settles in for a win.

For Wednesday night's heart-stopping Knicks victory, Chicken Gyro Delicious in Valley Stream, was his location of choice.

“I was probably eating 10 to 15 wings last night,” he said.

If hat-swiveling and wing-eating seem a bit much, consider what actor-director Ben Stiller told Shaquille O'Neal, Charles Barkley and the rest of the ESPN broadcast crew this week: "My wife and I ... came home after (Game 3) and burned the clothes we were wearing."

There is also video floating around the internet of two guys burning what news outlets reported as sage or incense outside Madison Square Garden after that Knicks loss. "Bad energy, got to get it out," says one.

Superstitions and fandom

In sports, curses are cast and lifted, streaks run unaccountably hot or cold — and that's among the athletes. Among fans, "superstitious behavior is exceptionally common," wrote Orr Levental, an associate professor at Tel-Hai Academic College in Israel, who researches the sociology of sports and fandom, in an email to Newsday.

"The psychological mechanism driving these superstitions is the desire to establish a sense of control," Levental wrote. "Fans possess a deep inherent need to influence the game's outcome, or at the very least, to feel that they are active participants in achieving victory."

Athletic contests, Levental wrote, are one of the last, most prominent "arenas of pure, unadulterated uncertainty," where ritualistic behavior "is not only accepted but deeply normalized."

There’s little evidence to suggest that fans carry their superstitions into non-sporting life, but these otherwise rational people "absolutely" believe they are helping their teams, Levental wrote.

"When the team wins, it is taken as immediate validation that the ritual works. If the team loses, fans often rationalize the failure by assuming they did not execute the ritual precisely as they were supposed to."

Maybe that is why North Hempstead supervisor DeSena "is going to maintain this exact routine until (the Knicks) bring it home," a town spokesman, Umberto Mignardi, wrote in an email.

Nightly silence

It must explain the long nightly silences this week from Dante Duffy, Knicks fan, Calverton resident and employee of It’s Wally’s World, the Lindenhurst shop that sells memorabilia including throwback Knicks gear.

"I definitely do not talk about the game prior or after, especially if they are winning," Duffy said. "I don’t say ‘they are going to win the next one.’ I just pretend that nothing is happening." On Saturday, Duffy said, "I might throw on the Karl-Anthony Towns jersey just for some extra good luck. It's a big game."

Maybe it explains, too, the viewing routine of Matt Carlucci, 28, a Spurs fan from Hauppauge who runs Way90s, a baseball-focused YouTube channel. "I have to be in the same spot," he said. "I have to have the remote a certain way and I have to have the phone in a certain position, charging ... Maybe it’s all for nothing. I don’t care. I just do it to do it."

Carlucci has been watching the games alone for most of this week, he said. His Knicks-loving friends don’t want him around, for the time being.