What affect did Washington Irving have on the naming of the New York knicks?

The late Washington Irving was an early 19th century biographer, essayist, and author.  Many people remember him for his two most famous writings "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" and "Rip Van Winkle." When you first opened this blog I bet that you thought that you would be reading some sort of summarizing of romanticism or something about who inspired Irving to write these stories. While doing some searching and reading up on Mr. Irving, I learned that one of his writings helped form the name of what we now know them as the "New York Knicks." You may be asking yourself, "Well how did he manage to do this?" Well let me tell you!

In 1809 Irving"s first book was called, "A History of New York from the Beginning of the World to the End of the Dutch Dynasty." At the end of the story Irving uses the pseudonym Diedrich Knickerbocker. Later on the book introduced the name "Knickerbocker" to tell if someone was from New York. http://www.nykfp.com/history/knickname.php In the late 19th and early 20th century, New York's symbol was a "Knickerbocker which is the picture displayed at the beginning of the blog.


In 1845 the world got its first dosage of the word "Knickerbocker" when the Manhattan baseball team called themselves the "New York Knickerbockers." Years later in 1938 the term "Knickerbocker" had been used all around New York from Jacob Ruppert's Knickerbocker Beer to other things like plays such as the Broadway musical Knickerbocker Holiday. http://www.nba.com/knicks/history/whatsaknickerbocker.html In the summer of 1946 the NBA granted the city of New York its own basketball team. It was aid that the legendary Ned Irish mad the final decision to name the team the "Knickerbockers." The late Fred Podesta said that they each put a name in a hat to determine the name of the team and most of them came out Knickerbockers.

All of this goes to show that Washington Irving not only had an impact on what people thought of New Yorker's back then, but also on what we now know as the famous New York Knicks. Sorry that I couldn't find any videos related to the subject!