Also by Harvey Araton
Driving Mr. Yogi
When the Garden Was Eden
Cold Type
Crashing the Borders
Alive and Kicking
Money Players (coauthor)
The Selling of the Green (coauthor)
PENGUIN PRESS
An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC
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Copyright © 2020 by Harvey Araton
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All images not indicated below courtesy of the Musler family.
1, 2, 3, 4, and 5: courtesy of the author; 6: courtesy of the New York Daily News; 7, 8, 9, and 10: © Eileen Miller.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Names: Araton, Harvey, author.
Title: Our last season : a writer, a fan, a friendship / Harvey Araton.
Description: New York : Penguin Press, 2020. | Includes index. |
Identifiers: LCCN 2019053128 (print) | LCCN 2019053129 (ebook) | ISBN 9781984877987 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781984877994 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Araton, Harvey. | Araton, Harvey—Friends and associates. | Musler, Michelle, 1936–2018. | New York Knickerbockers (Basketball team) | Sportswriters—United States—Biography. | Basketball fans—United States—Biography. | Basketball—New York (State)—New York—History. | Friendship.
Classification: LCC GV742.42.A77 A3 2020 (print) | LCC GV742.42.A77 (ebook) | DDC 070.4/49796—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019053128
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019053129
Cover design: Darren Haggar
Cover photograph: Eileen Miller
pid_prh_5.6.0_c0_r0
For Beth, of course
Contents
Introduction: Ad-libbing
One: HOMECOMING
Two: THE MAKING OF A FAN
Three: THE MAKING OF A REPORTER
Four: COURTSHIP
Five: CHRISTMAS CHEER
Six: OLD FRIENDS AND BOOKENDS
Seven: THE NEW GOOD OLD DAYS
Eight: WINNING AND MISERY
Nine: DOLAN AND THE DEATH OF HOPE
Ten: THE LONG VIEW
Eleven: THE END GAME
Twelve: THE POSTSEASON
Postscript
Photographs
Acknowledgments
Index
INTRODUCTION Ad-libbing
September 2017
All too well, my wife knew the pattern, and it meant trouble. After more than three decades of living with a man also married to his work as a reporter and newspaper columnist, she recognized distraction that was quickly devolving into full-blown obsession.
The closer we got to the critical day, the more unsettled I was getting. Dread was a state I hadn’t yet reached, but with each fitful night’s sleep, I suppose I was getting there, too. Finally, Beth had had enough of what one might call conversations in which I apparently hadn’t listened to a word she’d said. You’re being honored at the Hall of freaking Fame, she told me. You need to figure out a way to relax and enjoy this, not drive yourself and everyone around you crazy about making a damn speech.
“So do yourself a favor,” she said. “Call Michelle.”
Call your friend, your career adviser, your unpaid therapist. Dial her long-memorized 203 area code number—Stamford, Connecticut—and talk it out, as you’ve done so many times before.
Call Michelle.
For almost four decades, I had been doing that, reaching out to the steady voice of reason in my life, the proverbial wise elder, the trusted friend I always could count on. We all need one like Michelle Musler, whose instincts and insights and tough but dedicated love had guided me through so many professional and personal storms. In the parlance of basketball, the game we loved and shared, she was the coach who knew how to help me be the best version of myself.
As a player, I maxed out my abilities as a five-foot-eight, shot-happy and turnover-prone point guard at a Jewish Community Center. Only in my most grandiose adolescent fantasies as the second coming of “Pistol Pete” Maravich or Walt “Clyde” Frazier could I imagine myself as a Hall of Famer. Nonetheless, I was headed to the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame in Springfield, Massachusetts. Named for the legendary sportscaster Curt Gowdy, the award I was about to receive was actually for watching from the sideline, an honor bestowed annually on one member of the print media and one from the broadcast side for distinguished coverage of the sport. That connection to the game I could make without mocking realism or risking conceit. I dearly loved basketball and had dedicated a great deal of my four-decade-plus career to chronicling it for four newspapers, the past quarter century as a columnist and reporter for the New York Times.
The award came with a trophy and a fine-print inscription on a wall of past winners inside the shrine for the actual greats, from George Mikan to Michael Jordan. But it required doing what I enjoyed least: talking in public about myself, in this case addressing a dinner crowd of several hundred that would include:
The woman I had been married to for thirty-two years. The boys we had reared to young adulthood. An assortment of talented colleagues. Men and women—from David Stern to Bernard King to Dwyane Wade to Geno Auriemma to Rebecca Lobo—whose celebrated careers I had regularly chronicled and critiqued. Rare in a life of sixty-five years is a gathering so inclusive—except, I suppose, one’s funeral. But from the time I was notified of the Gowdy Award in February 2017, I found myself trying to minimize it, half joking that I must not have insulted or alienated enough people within the basketball establishment that would grant such an honor.
My young-adult sons, in whom I had instilled a love of the game, wouldn’t hear it, disabusing me of that self-shielding sentiment with their enthusiasm and pride. For no better reason than it was so important to them, it had to be for me, as well. And the closer it got, the more significant the award seemed to become, and the more anxious I was. In the days before the event, I compulsively fine-tuned my speech as if the Pulitzer Prize were hanging in the balance. I wanted it to be smooth, entertaining, a story in itself. Of course, manic rewrites were nothing new for me; they were now a familiar,
