I told the secretary, “This is Mickey—I need George.”
“Hold on, Mick, I’ll get him.”
Mickey Morabito was the Yankees’ lead PR guy, a job description that was shorthand for Steinbrenner’s 24-7 personal press secretary and repository for letting off steam. Within seconds, Steinbrenner was on the line and I was hemming and hawing my way through an apologetic explanation of who I really was and why I had called. Inclined to slam down the phone, he couldn’t help but give me a lecture—only to come around to the conclusion that he admired my audacity.
“Don’t ever do this again—but what do you need?”
I got my quote—a rather bland one for the bombastic boss, but I had done as I was told: I’d gotten Steinbrenner. The lesson was clear: Pathways to success didn’t come easy to a new kid on the beat. I had to make the most of any opportunity I had. And at the Garden, a rather obvious one was Michelle.
As charming as she was during our earliest conversations, my initial interest in her had much to do with the understanding that she was something of a Knicks insider, a potential source. When the Knicks relocated their bench directly in front of her, she even had a direct line to the team huddle. Whatever was going on there, I, as the Post’s beat reporter, the emergent Murdoch-subsidized muckraker, figured that she was likely to be privy to it. She had to know which players were ticked off when removed from a game. Who had cursed out a teammate or two during a time-out. The poor souls in the crosshairs of the coaches, especially after the congenitally profane Hubie Brown had replaced Red Holzman the previous season and begun his reign of coaching terror. The early stages of our friendship thus were less a recognition of like-mindedness and more a process born of self-interest. Stopping by Michelle’s seat before every game was strategic, even if I didn’t have her undivided attention. I certainly had no arrangement of exclusivity; in fact, I had plenty of company.
My enduring image of Michelle at courtside is with her tote bag of daily newspapers at her feet; a stream of pregame or halftime visitors wedged into the narrow area between her seat and the aisle behind the Knicks bench; and a security guard making a half-hearted attempt to keep traffic moving, but ultimately deferring to her and putting up with the logjam. They came from all walks of Garden life—employees; fellow fans; and players’ wives, girlfriends, and mothers, varying from game to game, season to season; while neighboring fans watched in bewilderment. Bob Berne, a real estate developer who for decades sat behind Michelle and whose wife, Steffi, initially mistook her for some high-powered Garden executive, summed up the scene perfectly when he once asked her, “Do you come here to watch the game or to take attendance?”
But the most welcome visitors were the sportswriters. Her appreciation and envy of our backstage access was most obvious to the women who sat beside her and could see how important we were to Michelle. They seldom imposed on the conversations. “It was her time to shine, to be on the inside,” said Drucie De Vries, whom Michelle had met when De Vries married a Greenwich-based businessman who was a friend of Michelle’s. She lived in Greenwich until the marriage dissolved; she then moved to Manhattan and, like Michelle, rebooted her social life at courtside with the Knicks.
De Vries was amazed by how Michelle seemed to have a rapport with virtually everyone on press row. Even an esteemed columnist like George Vecsey of the Times—Peter’s older brother, who dropped by the Garden mostly for the highest-profile games—would make it his business to stroll over for a pregame chat about the latest political news, the weather, and, of course, the state of the Knicks. As Vecsey remembers it, Michelle was “like a queen sitting there, but with the eyes and ears of a trained spy.”
Indeed, she was always watching closely, more than any of us really knew at the time. Because Michelle, not unlike me, also had an agenda rooted in the fulfillment, at least abstractly, of her own adolescent sports journalist’s ambition. “Your job is my fantasy job,” she would tell me years later. “I lived vicariously through you because I wanted to be you.”
The way reporters always kept an eye on one another in the locker room, paranoid about whom their counterparts at competing papers were talking to, so it was, in a sense, with Michelle. On any given night, my main competitors during those early days on the beat—especially Dave Sims of the Daily News and Roy Johnson of the Times—might have beaten me to her side pregame. None of us had a clue as to why this fortysomething woman from the far northern suburbs was so fascinated by what we did, nor did we bother to ask. If she had pertinent information, we were all ears. Whatever friendships developed began with that simple truth.
So how did I gain the inside edge with Michelle? How did she become my courtside coconspirator? It helped that Sims exited the newspaper business in the early eighties to work in broadcasting and Johnson left the Times and New York for a job in Atlanta. But what drew me closer to her more than any other factor was the pure luck of toiling for the afternoon newspaper. The Post would eventually launch a morning edition and later completely abandon the dying p.m. market. But my tactical advantage as a young beat reporter was that I had all night—or at least
