The passionate, loyal fans of the New York Knicks waited 53 long, agonizing years between NBA Championships.
It turns out, all they needed was a little New Mexico pick me up.
That’s right. The historic playoff run that culminated in last month’s NBA Championship for the Knicks — the franchise’s first since 1973 — was fueled by none other than a healthy dose (some might argue near overdose) of world famous Hatch green chile.
“I’m in love with Sadie’s Green Chile Salsa. I can’t get enough,” Mike Brown told the Journal on Saturday afternoon at SolutionWerx, the Albuquerque-based software development and IT services company owned by his wife and New Mexico native Rochelle Ledesma.
“I like it with everything.”
“No, he doesn’t just like it, he orders 12 of them (jars) at a time and has them shipped and goes through them — he’ll go through a jar in one meal,” Ledesma, the St. Pius High School and New Mexico State University graduate said with her NBA champion husband sheepishly grinning next to her, giving her a little elbow nudge.
“I don’t think it’s a whole jar a meal,” Brown protested.
“OK, then every two meals, he’s done with one of these jars,” she said.
And during the recent NBA Playoffs, which included 13-consecutive Knicks wins at one point, Brown has a little secret the NBA world, and most of New York may not know: He was eating home-cooked New Mexican food throughout the run as Ledesma spent most of the playoffs in their New York home while still working remotely with her New Mexico company.
“I’ll cook a pot of beans, and he loves when I put two fried eggs over his bowl and he eats it with flour tortillas,” Ledesma said, adding she and her mom at one point during the playoffs were frying up tortillas in Brown’s New York home to make him hard-shelled tacos, his admitted favorite meal.
In case you haven’t realized it by know, the head coach of the NBA Champion New York Knicks is, driver’s license and all, indeed a New Mexican — arguably the state’s best kept sports star secret, living in a house he and his wife had built in Albuquerque a few years back.
Saturday, Brown and a close new friend named Larry O’Brien — the NBA Championship trophy — paid a visit to Ledesma’s westside business for a private showing and celebration with her family and coworkers, many of whom are in her family.
The trophy, which traveled to New Mexico with a full-time security guard/chaperone and even had its own seat in the plane to Albuquerque, was the centerpiece of photos and conversation on Saturday for the new Knicks fans and the man who has quietly called Albuquerque his offseason home for years.
“Maybe it’ll change now, but not a lot of people here in Albuquerque recognize me, or maybe they just don’t figure it is me when they see me,” Brown said.
But, why New Mexico? Why in the world does Brown trade in the New York big city life for one of anonymity in Albuquerque?
The connection started in 2015 when his son, Elijah Brown, was playing his first of two seasons for the UNM Lobos (Elijah Brown was at UNM three seasons — 2014-15 through 2016-17 — but that included that ancient time in NCAA lore when players actually sat out a year when changing schools).
Aside from traveling regularly to see the Lobos play around the Mountain West and in nonconference games, Brown had an apartment in Uptown area and, essentially, moved to Albuquerque. He had also separated by then with his previous wife.
Here, he met Rochelle Ledesma, a St. Pius High School and New Mexico State University graduate.
“That might be the one hangup,” Brown, still holding Lobo basketball close to his heart, said with a sly smile as Ledesma stood next to him talking about her proud Aggie roots.
The two have been together since.
Ledesma is President of SolutionWerx, an Albuquerque-based software development and IT services company that has created automated solutions and custom systems as a DOE Contractor with the likes of Los Alamos and Sandia National Laboratories locally, two other national labs in other states and services commercial companies in Albuquerque.
It’s a company founded by George Longmire in 2001, Ledesma began working there in 2008 and Longmire sold her the company in 2018 prior to his passing. Her commitment in running the company since has been guided in large part by her desire to keep his legacy and vision for the company alive.
And aside from her success in the business world, Brown fell in love with her, and the city, along the way.
“I had a good time out here when I was coming out to see Elijah play and practice, and it’s just different,” Brown said. “And my favorite food is Mexican food, so it was right up my alley to keep coming here even after he (Elijah) was done playing.”
Brown, 56, born in Ohio, was an Air Force brat who graduated high school in Germany, played in college at Mesa (Arizona) Community College and then at the University of San Diego before leaving a vagabond childhood for the vagabond adult life of coaching.
“I have friends all over the U.S., but I don’t necessarily have a home base,” Brown said.
Until he found out about that green chile, and Ledesma, of course.
“There was part of me that didn’t want to make my home base in an NBA city — to see if I can get away from it a little, at least in the offseason, you know?” Brown said.
And while he’s not exactly finishing his postgame pressers in Madison Square Garden with “bueno, bye,” just yet, let the record reflect the New York Knicks only made their triumphant return to the top of the NBA world when they hired a basketball lifer who got bit with a little bit of the Land of Enchantment bug, a serious case of a green chile sweet tooth and who for a decade now has made his off-the-court life in New Mexico.
So, about basketball
Saturday’s time spent with Brown wasn’t about an X’s and O’s recap of the historic season Brown just had, as understandable as it would have been to give the Albuquerque Journal his first post-championship interview about it all.
Instead, it was about a man in the national spotlight choosing to share a little time to talk about why he chose, and continues to choose, to make his home in Albuquerque.
But that doesn’t mean there was no hoops talk.
“It’s still so surreal what we accomplished,” Brown said of the NBA title run. “I don’t know when it’s going to hit me, but it (hasn’t) fully hit me yet.”
Brown’s NBA journey, for those who don’t know, is genuinely one that has included coaching just about all of the elite players of this generation at some point or another.
Aside from now having an NBA title as a head coach, two NBA Coach of the Year awards, four NBA championships as an assistant coach, take a look at some of the players he’s been an assistant or head coach to through the years:
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LeBron James
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Kobe Bryant
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Tim Duncan
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Steph Curry
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Kevin Durant
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Reggie Miller
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Pau Gasol
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David Robinson
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Jalen Brunson
As for at least one basketball nugget the Journal did manage to pull from Brown on Saturday was this gem: The moment in the recent historic playoff run when everything changed.
For Brown, he said it was when the team was down 2-1 to the Atlanta Hawks in the first round — and hadn’t exactly looked great even in its Game 1 win.
“It was one of those things as a staff, we’re up literally up all night. We’ve got scrap paper here, there, throwing them away trying things, talking to the players, I’m talking to KAT (Karl-Anthony Towns) and Jalen (Brunson) and then I don’t know, it was just one of those things late one night — probably after three nights of just banging my head against the wall — where there was like a ‘boom’ sort of moment,” Brown recalls.
The long and short of what that “boom” was is this: Brown and the staff basically was about “playing through the elbow with KAT, but more importantly — and I’m not a guy who calls plays, especially come playoff time when the other team knows all your plays, they’re scouting it. It’s a little harder to defend if actions are done conceptually.
“So, it wasn’t just about playing KAT at the elbow, but more importantly making sure we could get into it by flowing into it, and making sure that doing that wasn’t going to take away from what Jalen is doing. When we did that, it was an aha moment for me — how to flow into it, make it conceptual based and making sure it was going to elevate not just KAT, but especially Jalen and everybody else.”
Reach Geoff Grammer at ggrammer@abqjournal.com or follow him on Twitter (X) @GeoffGrammer.
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