My earliest recollection of Michelle is from that All-Star weekend, when she crashed an evening gathering of media regulars at a downtown hotel with a filched New York Times press credential. Incongruous as that may sound, it was also somewhat par for the NBA course. All-Star weekend in those days was far from the orgy of corporate sponsorship revelers it would become in David Stern’s expansionist reign, the genesis of which was still three years away. Anyone who knew anyone could pretty much talk their way into anything. Michelle was an artful and articulate enough schmoozer to take full advantage.
I don’t remember what our conversation was about—the state of the Knicks would be a pretty good guess. I do remember walking away thinking, Cool lady. But when we reminisced in later years about how our friendship began, she always had a different version. She recalled earlier conversations at courtside before Knicks home games, prior to the 1981 All-Star weekend in Cleveland. And then one embarrassing evening outside the Garden when she was with one of her children and saw me heading in their direction.
“I said, ‘Oh, that’s Harvey, he covers the team. I know him.’”
And . . . ?
“You walked right by without even acknowledging me,” she said.
Completely possible, I knew, recalling how I was, at the time, living in my little bubble of ambition, unwaveringly focused on that day’s pursuit of the almighty scoop. Michelle had many times teased me about the snub, but it came up again over dinner one night in Stamford, a couple of weeks after I had chauffeured her to the Knicks-Nets game at the outset of the 2017–18 season.
By this point, it was clear that I was going to be a frequent visitor on game nights, determined not to let Michelle transition from courtside to couch all on her own. The routine was set: a late-afternoon drive from Montclair, New Jersey, to beat rush-hour traffic, dinner at a nearby restaurant, and back to her place for the opening tip.
Michelle’s condo was on Forest Street in an area dominated by high-rise buildings, within walking distance of a bustling commercial strip that included a small indie movie theater. Access to the theater and the nearby restaurants were prime considerations to buying the three-level condo as an empty nester, much to the consternation of her friends and family. All the home’s stairs should have been a red flag for anyone already eligible for Medicare. Worse, Michelle’s bedroom was on the top floor, directly above a room with workout equipment and walls filled with basketball stuff, the most prominent of which was a framed No. 1 Knicks jersey with “Musler” stitched onto the back.
She dismissed the stairs, even as navigating them became a challenge. “I go slow,” she said. “It’s fine.” Except Michelle obviously wasn’t fine and she couldn’t hide it anymore. Through the previous dozen or so years, I had lost count of her surgeries and treatments—back, foot, hip, knee. She could list seven, while conceding she might have forgotten one or two. She’d also survived breast cancer, and sometime past her seventieth birthday she developed a neurological disorder with some Parkinson’s-like symptoms, most visibly a tremor in the hands. The condition was treatable with medication—which Michelle refused to take, claiming it dulled her mentally. That was a nonstarter.
She endured the shaking in the way she did an ongoing and severe case of shingles, which aggressively attacked her eyes and head. She took to wearing one of the visors she ritually purchased every summer at the US Open—tennis being her second-favorite sport. Yanking the brim up and down helped stifle a maddening itch; she scratched and coped. Vulnerability had long been her sworn enemy. Even visits in rehab after surgery were practically forbidden, in large part because Michelle, clinging to the residual vanity of her old corporate life, hated being seen in any state of disrepair—and especially without her makeup.
“Can I come by?” I would ask.
“Absolutely not,” she would say, telling me she would see me at the Garden as soon as she could get back there.
Being independent was the doctrine she lived by. In all the years I had known Michelle, only when her youngest child, Blair, was battling a rare form of cancer in Southern California around the turn of the century could she admit to a state of high anxiety—an anger at the terrible unfairness of it all, a terror that accompanied every ring of the phone.
None of her own surgeries were worth “bitching and moaning” about. They were all problems that were, with any luck, fixable. But her latest medical challenge was entirely different, an unresolved mystery. The ministrokes—or transient ischemic attacks (TIAs)—had begun late in 2016, producing dizziness and numbness on her left side and requiring several brief hospitalizations for observation and medication, without much luck in determining the cause. Typical of Michelle, she told no one, not me or even her children, of her hospital stays—“What’s the point of worrying them?” she’d tell me—until she was home, after the fact.
One rare exception was made when she’d had to break a Knicks game date with Wynn Plaut during the 2016–17 season. She felt the onset of a seizure in the late afternoon and called for help. With an ambulance idling out front, she hastily phoned Plaut to tell him she couldn’t make the game. She would leave the tickets in a ziplock bag inside her mailbox.
“While you were about to go to the hospital?” I said.
“How else was he going to get the tickets?”
She dismissed any thought of making concessions—like not driving anymore—but admitted to worrying about her mental acuity. Her sardonic go-to line became: “I
