I Left the Navy SEALs Broken. New York Fixed That. Now the Knicks Are Reminding All of Us Why.

(Photo: Flying in NYC is something I miss most and will always cherish. Hat tip to NYC Air Traffic Control, the best in the World. In the pandemic, I got to land at JFK and LGA in my little plane. Will cherish this always.)

I want to tell you something about New York City that I have never said out loud before.

When I lost my best friend Glen Doherty in 2012 (Navy SEAL/CIA Operative KIA Benghazi, Libya), I realized I was not okay.

I had buried a lot of trauma of what I’d seen in war, the friends I’d lost, and when I lost Glen, the weight crippled me, and I fell to my knees.

Before that, I was functional in all places except fatherhood. This was my one escape, and where I used trauma to grow. I became a better father because of it, but there were still many voices in my head. We all deal with this at some point in our lives.

The war was over for me, but it was not done with me. That is not a complaint. It is just the truth.

Then I moved to Manhattan in 2014.

New York did not ask me any questions about my past.

It just embraced, and absorbed me.

The city and its people hit me like a wall of sound and exhaust and a thousand different languages all talking at the same time and for the first time in a long time, I felt something close to normal.

Because in New York nobody is looking at you.

Not because they don’t care. Because everyone around you is also carrying something, also from somewhere else, also in the middle of their own improbable story, and there is a silent agreement on every sidewalk in that city that says we are all in this together, even when we are strangers.

I think this is why it’s home to a lot of celebrities who can just be themselves because the city doesn’t gawk.

New York was a crucial part of my own personal traumatic growth story and I’ll never forget what the city did for me and my family.

(Photo: Another New York moment for me, when I got to meet the incredibly talented actor, Jeffrey Wright. We later surfed together along with his son in Puerto Rico.)

One of my favorite dad memories is getting to show this to all my kids firsthand. They got to see what NYC looks like unlocked.

I had spent a decade and a half working alongside men and women from every corner of America and every branch of service and every background you can imagine.

What this taught me is that when people decide to share a mission, identity stops mattering. We all saw this in high definition with what the New York Knicks just accomplished behind the king of New York who never asked to be king but just was. And usually the people that don’t want it are the best suited for it.

(My Puddle Jumpers in NYC with one of my best friends, Maria Emma. Maria is like a sister to me, and she is the reason my daughter got a Puma artist collab at Saks 5th as a 16-year-old young woman.)

Performance and showing up for each other are all that count.

New York runs on that same operating system.

It is the most military city in America and it has never fired a shot.

So when the Knicks made their run this spring, I was all in with them like many of you reading this.

We all needed what that story was actually about. This is something I have been writing and talking about for years now, as a parent, as a coach, and as someone who watched his own kids navigate a world that constantly tells young people the gap between where they are and where they want to be is too wide to cross.

The Knicks were down. The analysts had already written the eulogy. The talking heads were doing the statistical math out loud on television like it was some kind of public service, laying out probabilities the way a doctor lays out a diagnosis that ends with the word terminal.

They didn’t fit the 40-game win statistic, the great Phil Jackson said was critical…

There is an entire industry built around explaining in great detail why things are not going to work out.

It is well-funded and it is relentless and it shows up in sports, in politics, in classrooms, in doctor’s offices, and in the conversations we have with our children about what is realistic.

We need to remind ourselves that the impossible IS possible.

Here is what I know about realistic.

I know what it looks like when a kid gets told he is not a fast enough runner, not smart enough, not from the right pedigree, not the right fit for the program.

I know what happens in those moments because I lived them when as a young man who was kicked out of the house at 16 by his father.

I wrote about it in Puddle Jumpers because I think it is the most important thing a parent can understand, because that world is coming for your kids, and you need to teach them how to deal with it.

The voice that says you probably shouldn’t gets planted early. It grows in the dark. And if nobody teaches a child how to recognize that voice for what it is, which is fear dressed up as common sense. It’s also why I talk about the importance of giving your children positive psychology tools at a young age.

That dark voice, the nay-sayers, we all deal with it at some point in our lives.

The Knicks told that voice to sit the F down.

Nike gets the NY moment with this incredible AD…

And here is where I want to get real with you, because this is not just a basketball post. This is a post about America, and I am going to need you to stay with me for one more minute.

(Photo: My friends Kamal and James on the town before the Pandemic.)

(Photo: Another NY moment with friends at my Flatiron apartment.)

We have some serious work to do in this country. Not in a divided way. In a human, in the “All of us on the same team” way.

The kind of work that does not belong to one party or one ideology because it belongs to all of us.

Education in this country is not delivering for the kids who need it most. Healthcare is still something a family can lose everything trying to afford. The gap between the people at the top of the income ladder and everyone else has gotten wide enough that it has started to feel like a permanent feature of the landscape rather than a problem we are actively solving.

An entry-level World Cup ticket shouldn’t cost $4,000.

I am not an economist. I am not a politician. I am a guy who grew up in a working class family, joined the Navy at 18, spent years in some of the worst places on earth trying to be useful, came home, left the navy for my family, built a new life as an entrepreneur and author, raised three kids as a divorced father, and wrote a book about what I learned along the way.

What I learned early in my life is that none of this gets better if we decide it is too far gone.

Tyler jumping into that parking lot puddle at six years old is still the image I keep coming back to when I think about what it means to raise a child who is not afraid. My instinct in that moment was to stop him. I am glad I didn’t. That impulse to protect kids from anything messy or uncertain or uncomfortable is exactly the impulse that produces adults who freeze when the game gets hard in the fourth quarter.

I shared a story in my book about what the Mars Biosphere researchers learned with trees.

Grown without wind resistance, the trees couldn’t support their own weight. They collapsed from the inside because they need wind stress to grow strong roots.

Our kids are not trees but the principle holds. You cannot prepare them for the world by removing the world from their path. You prepare them by teaching them to handle it.

We need to teach our kids that there is always light at the end of the tunnel. Always hope when life seems too hard. It’s darkest right before the light starts to creep over the horizon.

Back to the Knicks…

(Photo: Chess in Union Square. If you’re a New Yorker, you are just that, regardless of race or religion.

The Knicks just reminded the whole country of what most of us who’ve lived in New York understand. NY teaches us all that the underdog is never out. We know this because we see examples all around us in the city every minute of every day.

When it seems like the numbers are against you, when the analysts have moved on to the next story, when the reasonable people are telling you to manage your expectations, that is precisely the moment to decide what you are actually made of.

This country has incredible people in it. Teachers who stay late. Nurses who drive forty minutes each way for a shift that pays them nowhere near what they are worth. Parents working two jobs who still show up to the school play. Veterans who came home from places most people will never see and rebuilt their lives from scratch, in cities that absorbed them without asking too many questions.

We are not a country that has run out of good people. We are a country that has run out of patience for the idea that good people making good choices together cannot actually move the needle.

They can.

They do.

The Knicks just played that game in front of everybody.

My book Puddle Jumpers is about raising kids who grow up knowing this. Not kids who are immune to difficulty. Kids who are built for it. Kids who look at a deficit in the fourth quarter and stay calm because they were raised by parents who didn’t flinch because they know better.

Brunson’s parents know this. Just look at the lengths (and the reason behind it) Jalen’s mom went through to see his game 5 in Texas.

Start there. Start in your house. Start with your kid. Start tonight.

Because here is what I know about the people who say it can’t be done.

They are not the ones trying.

New York never waits for permission to be great. It just keeps going. Loud, busted, beautiful, stubborn, broke and brilliant all at once.

It took me in when I needed it most and asked for nothing back. It reminded me that a city, like a team, like a country, like a family, is just a collection of people who decided to keep showing up.

I wrote Puddle Jumpers because I want my kids to be those people.

I want your kids to be those people.

And I want us, all of us, to stop waiting for the right moment and start being the reason somebody else believes the right moment is now.

New York already knows this.

The Knicks just proved it again.

Your move.

xx Brandon

PS-”Go Knicks…New York or Nowhere.”