It seems fitting on this day that the Knicks and Bulls would be playing one another, a day when the world saw the passing of Malik Taylor, aka Phife Dawg of A Tribe Called Quest. Why, you ask, is it a fitting matchup? Well, you have to go back to Quest’s heyday to get a sense of the thing.
I just turned 45 the other day, which hardly seems possible. Phife passed at the age of 45, which is an especially hurtful and troubling thing for me. We were contemporaries. We shared the world’s stage at the same moments.