Woody Allen is a huge Knicks supporter, but he’s no fan of the team’s owner, James Dolan.
Sources say Dolan had the Oscar-winning director banned from Suite 200, the VIP lounge at Madison Square Garden, after Allen refused to do any promotion for MSG Network or the Garden of Dreams Foundation.
Allen had been a regular for years in the suite, where models, pop stars and pro athletes gather before games and at halftime for free drinks and food.
“He got a call from someone at MSG saying they had bought the rights to air several of Woody’s movies on the MSG channel and wanted Woody to go on the air and talk about his movies or introduce them,” a Woody source told me.
“Woody said he would not be comfortable doing that. He has never done that for any show or network. They then said that this was a ‘reciprocal arrangement’ and that if Woody couldn’t go on TV for them, he should not eat in their VIP restaurant anymore. Woody said fine and thanked them for the many years he had enjoyed the space there.”
A Garden spokesman politely declined to comment but pointed out that Allen — unlike Spike Lee (who has worked on documentaries about the team) and Matthew Modine — has never done anything to help the team or Dolan’s youth charity, Garden of Dreams (of which Modine is a board member).
Suite 200 was rebuilt and enlarged in the three-year renovation of the Garden, but lots of the old faces are missing.
One businessman who is no longer invited said, “What’s that expression — ‘familiarity breeds contempt’? They’re like the bad maitre d’s of the old days.”
Tom Brokaw stopped going, but only because he swore off the Knicks after too much heartbreak. “So if he’s been banned from Suite 200 he wouldn’t know it,” said an NBC insider.