When the car stops outside the Colina Hotel at the top of Stac Voror, the steep hill that overlooks the Scottish city of Challaid, you can see the love of sport down below. Looking across the sprawl that loops round a sea loch you can see multiple stadiums and pitches for soccer and for camanachd. What you won’t see, anywhere, is a basketball court. “I wanted to play camanachd,” Gorm MacGilling tells me, with his deep voice and nervous smile. We’re sitting in the café of the five-star hotel, the table and chair too small for him but he doesn’t complain. “It was a teacher of mine in high school that said I should try basketball, so I did.” He did, and for one week in May last year he was the center of the basketball universe, not that you’d realize it now.
If you follow the NBA, the play that made MacGilling famous hardly needs to be retold; it was the subject of a million vines and gifs, a hashtag and a frenzy of media attention. “It was pretty mad. We were up in Cleveland for the game and by the time we got back to New York I had gone from 5 thousand followers on twitter to about 30 thousand. Crazy.” It sounds like he’s talking about someone else.
So, the play. The Knicks had brought MacGilling to the club in February on a short-term deal, not expecting him to play much. “I’d been playing in Ukraine but things were bad there so I was out of contract, and my agent got me the chance in New York.” He didn’t play a minute in the regular season, and watched without playing as Kristaps Porzingis led the Knicks to the Eastern Conference Finals, and a shot at the no. 1 seed Cleveland Cavaliers.
The series went to a deciding game seven, the game tight going into the last two minutes when Willy Hernangomez fouled out and injuries meant the only big body left on the bench was the Scot. “I thought we might just go small for the last couple of minutes, but they put me out there.”
Four seconds on the clock, the Knicks down by two. Lee inbounds the ball to Carmelo Anthony, MacGilling sets a screen for him at the top of the key and Melo uses it. The crowd expects a shot but Melo spins to kick out to Porzingis in the corner, but as the ball leaves his fingers it’s tipped by Tristan Thompson. “I saw the ball change direction. I saw it coming toward me and I knew there was no time left. I had to throw up the shot.” With Thompson and Lebron James racing toward him, MacGilling took the shot. Swish, and his world changed.
It hardly seems to matter that the Knicks lost the finals in 6 games and MacGilling got nothing more than garbage time throughout. If you add up all his minutes across the five appearances he made for the Knicks, he was on court for fifteen minutes and twelve seconds. Still, in a world of instant media he hit a shot that mattered and became a sort of legend. “There was all this attention, but it didn’t feel like it, not really. I was right in the middle of it, and the club was preparing for the finals, so I didn’t really get the chance to experience it much.”
And after the anticlimax of the defeat by the Golden State Warriors, the Knicks didn’t offer MacGilling the chance to come back. “That was disappointing, I would have loved to stay, I loved New York. They wanted all the cap space they could get for the summer though, I understand that.” There were no concrete NBA offers for him, and as he prepared to try to win a spot on a summer league team, hoping to make a strong impression, he suffered the injury that’s kept him out for nearly a year. “That was tough, the timing of it couldn’t have been worse. I came back home, I’ve been working out every day, getting myself into shape. I’ve never been fitter than I am now, never.”
He’s recognized a couple of times while we chat, both times by members of staff. At seven foot tall and two hundred and ninety pounds he’s hard to miss. “I’m not famous here,” he tells me with a smile. “I can do normal stuff. I went to New York for a holiday in the summer and got recognized everywhere, but not here. Here I can just be me. Go to camanachd matches, hang out with my mates.” He talks of life here in a way that suggests the NBA is behind him. “No, no, no way. I’m only twenty-six still, I have loads of time. I need to get a new agent and get onto people’s radar again, but I’ll be back in the NBA again, I’m sure of that. Might have to go back to Europe first, or the D-League, but I’ll make it.” He hasn’t given up, and he doesn’t want to be forgotten. Gorm MacGilling is a legend for one shot, but he wants to be famous for more.