Yet it was impossible to escape the ominousness of the seizures, especially after her neurologist raised the possibility that the ministrokes foretold a much bigger one, along with the creeping specter of dementia—a fate that to Michelle sounded truly worse than death. She likened it to “the movie with Julianne Moore,” referring to Still Alice, a haunting tale of a middle-aged woman grappling with early-onset Alzheimer’s. “That’s what I think about, what I am terrified of,” she said. “When I won’t know what’s going on.” She paused, and with comic timing, added: “Please let me get hit by a bus before then.”
These moments of gallows humor were awkward, to say the least. I wanted to say something soothing, but the best I seemed capable of doing was to steer the subject elsewhere, with levity. “Who knows how long, if ever, before that happens—and I don’t mean the bus,” I said. “Besides, you have to know what’s going on—who else is going to do the job of listening to me?”
“You know that I’ve loved that job,” she said. “I always wanted to know what made you tick, and how you got to where you were.”
Michelle knew well that our paths to Madison Square Garden, while entirely different, had at least been alike in their improbability.
Three The Making of a Reporter
As the 1990s became the 2000s, I had already been writing about sports for multiple decades. While I realized that I had many people’s dream job—including my own!—I was also growing tired of the repetition of covering the same athletes and giant sporting events year after year. At the Times, whose sports section increasingly considered the planet to be its playing field, I began to take more advantage of the opportunities to travel far and wide—to Zimbabwe in Africa for a 2000 Davis Cup tennis competition; to the former Soviet Union two years later to report on a little-known NBA draft pick from Tbilisi in the Republic of Georgia; to Olympics across Europe and Asia.
But the offbeat story didn’t necessarily require a marathon flight and a stamped passport. My interest in women’s college basketball, for instance, grew out of my disdain for what the men’s game had become: an exploitative meat market that left too many young men unpaid and uneducated. The women’s game was different: Its star players typically stayed four years, long enough to graduate. The longer college career also created a more compelling narrative to chronicle.
At the 2005 Women’s Final Four in Indianapolis, I became acquainted with a player whom I took an immediate and special interest in. Nicky Anosike, Tennessee’s freshman center, happened to be from Staten Island, the borough of New York where I’d grown up. I located her in the locker room—not that difficult, at six feet four—and casually asked what neighborhood of the island she was from.
“West Brighton,” she said.
Really, what street?
“Castleton Avenue.”
Now I was really intrigued. What number, I asked?
She shot me a quizzical look but played along: “Ten seventy-seven.”
“Wow,” I said, “that’s the same building that I lived in.”
Apartment 2B—exactly one level above hers, it turned out, more than a quarter century apart.
The look on Anosike’s face did not hide her skepticism: This guy with graying hair and bookish glasses from the New York Times grew up in the projects?
Granted, times had changed. The West Brighton I had grown up in was modest working class, but not impoverished. It was racially diverse, not predominantly black. It was sketchy but not yet ravaged by the scourge of drugs, guns, and gangs. But I sounded more authentic to Anosike when I told her that I had spent much of my childhood hanging around the development’s outdoor basketball courts and correctly recalled the street name—Henderson Avenue—along the perimeter. It turned out that we knew a small handful of the same neighborhood lifers spanning generations. Street cred apparently established, I learned more about Anosike: She was the sixth of eight children crammed into three bedrooms, while her Nigerian immigrant mother made certain everyone was fed and studied to earn a nursing degree at age forty. When Pat Summitt had recruited Anosike, the teenager had requested that the Tennessee coaching legend meet her and her family at her high school, not at home.
I didn’t have to ask why. A city-subsidized cluster of eight-story buildings casting an unwelcome shadow over a gritty pocket on Staten Island’s north shore, the West Brighton Houses were a place from which you wished to escape, not necessarily where you’d invite the person you hoped would help you get out.
Growing up in the projects could be a source of survivalist pride, provided you did get out. They were a place where a child could count on having playmates but a teenager could feel a sense of isolation—or alienation—from the outside world. To those of us on the inside, those who lived in modest homes on the surrounding streets seemed better off, if not well off. And those who were comparatively affluent didn’t hide their sneers and snickers when the school bus pulled up to the projects to let us off.
My father, Gilbert, a Manhattan postal worker, worked hard against the odds to keep our family solvent, but
