Even if you didn’t like her punny Stevie Knicks T-shirt, you have to admit Taylor Swift did something pretty funny by attending Game 4 of the NBA Finals this week. At a time when every celebrity watcher in the world is wondering whether Swift is really and truly having her wedding (to football player Travis Kelce) at Madison Square Garden next month, as news outlets began to report last week, she strolled right into the Garden on Wednesday, flanked by two Haim sisters, and took a courtside seat. She cheered on the Knicks so hard that her voice was hoarse when she spoke at an event the following night, but inside, you could almost hear her smirking: Wouldn’t you like to know?
I would like to know. Rumors have been swirling about the location of Swift’s nuptials for months. Originally, her home in Rhode Island was the prime suspect, with this coming Saturday, June 13, considered a strong contender for the date for Swift-specific numerology reasons. That hasn’t been entirely debunked—I assume we’ll all get some kind of emergency alert if Swift is spotted tying the knot this weekend?—but in recent weeks, consensus has converged on the island of Manhattan and July 4 weekend as the wedding’s true time and place. Still, when the MSG report emerged, no one was quite sure what to make of it. TMZ, after all, is reliable … except when it isn’t. Though TMZ and Page Six are sticking with the rumor, other sources insist it’s a decoy, and that if anything, maybe guests are being told to come to the Garden in order to board buses that will bring them to the real wedding location. All of it sounds equally believable and unbelievable—even if you can’t picture Swift getting married at MSG, can you picture her forcing all her guests to ride buses?
Some fans really, really want the rumor to be false. Really—MSG for a wedding? The knock against it is that it’s tacky, soulless, and self-aggrandizing—no place for the kind of storybook wedding a hopeless romantic like Swift has no doubt been imagining her whole life. But the duality of Swift has always been that she is both a dreamer and a businesswoman, equally obsessed with her vision and the practicalities of privacy, security, logistics, and execution. (Also, she’s not not self-aggrandizing.) From a tactical standpoint, MSG fits the bill. It’s an enclosed space with no windows, which means the event would be insulated from paparazzi, drones and helicopter photos, and fans—for Swift, getting all this could be more valuable than magic-hour lighting. Several news outlets have pointed out that MSG has no events scheduled between June 29 and July 6, a rarity for the venue of its size. That leaves plenty of time to build an entire set complete with its own artificial sun inside MSG if that’s what Swift wants. After the “Eras” tour? Light work.
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MSG has long billed itself as the “world’s most famous arena,” so it would be silly to say Taylor Swift is doing anything for its reputation, but at the same time, it does feel like there’s something in the air. On the recently concluded last season of Hacks, a major plotline focused on the main character, a veteran comedian, securing and selling out the Garden, which she considered the kind of achievement that would burnish her eventual obituary. The Knicks’ championship run is obviously putting a huge spotlight on MSG as well. It just seems fitting that Swift would have her wedding there as the Garden is having this all-time moment in pop culture, in the sense that Swift, to a sometimes annoying degree, always seems to get what she wants. When she first started dating Kelce and showing up at his football games, observers speculated that she was just marketing her concert film, taking advantage of the NFL’s ability to expose her to a different demographic. Clearly, it wasn’t all marketing, but also, this woman has a way of capitalizing on a moment, and I wouldn’t expect her wedding to be any different.
The last, and maybe biggest, reason I buy into the MSG rumors is because I have a sneaking suspicion that Swift likes that people think she can’t pull it off. She loves to be the underdog, even and especially when she is the biggest dog around. If you’ll recall, while she was on the “Eras” tour, she loved to talk about how nobody believed she could do it: “People would come up to me and be like, ‘So you’ve put up like five albums that you haven’t done tours for … What are you going to do? Are you just gonna do a show with all the albums in it and it’s gonna be like a three-and-a-half-hour-long show?’ And I was like … ‘Yeah, it’s gonna be called the Eras tour. See you there!’ ” Call it defiant, bratty even. This was the tenor of the documentary series on its making as well: Who would have thought little old her could put together the biggest tour of all time! And so only Swift could turn a wedding at literal Madison Square Garden into an inspiring story of proving the haters wrong.
