Unlike reporters for the morning dailies, I could spend as much time as I needed in postgame locker rooms, sidling up to players while my competitors rushed upstairs to sweat out their deadlines. My notebook full, I would work my way down to the bar, where I could find Michelle, my new friend and Knicks pipeline, among the lingering players, their entourages, and assorted extras.
In the days before the internet and ESPN dominance, when newspapers were far and away the primary sources of sports team news, she waited to hear from me what had transpired in the locker room, a preview of what she would read in the next day’s Post. Michelle especially loved the inside dope, the locker room chatter only reporters had access to. While George Vecsey was the sports columnist she most admired, Michelle—like most basketball junkies in the city—was also addicted to Peter’s “Hoop du Jour” offerings in the Post. Nowhere in the country was there anyone quite like Peter Vecsey, the first of the full-time, sport-specific insiders now so prevalent across the sports-media landscape. His thrice-weekly columns were filled with league-wide secrets, grapevine scuttlebutt, and mordant asides. As a result, the Post’s sports section had the cachet of being the city’s most basketball savvy.
While Michelle was a devoted reader of the Times, if there was one daily sports section that she absolutely had to read, it was the Post’s. “My dark secret,” she called it, sheepish about the paper’s unapologetic exploitation of scandal, crime, and ultraconservative politics.
I would provide her a run-down of what had occurred in the Knicks’ locker room, and in return, Michelle would share with me what she had seen behind the bench and heard in the bar. She wasn’t then or ever a basketball X’s and O’s strategist who could provide a dissertation on defensive rotations or the intricacies of the high screen and roll. But she was a professional observer of people and behavior, and the part she loved most about being so close to the bench was seeing how the coaches and players reacted to the drama and the pressure, for better or worse. While most fans used time-outs for grabbing a beer, gabbing with friends, or, in later years, checking their email and Twitter feeds, Michelle was locked into the goings-on in the Knicks’ team huddle. And I—given the time to go beyond the straight details of the generic game story—wanted to get them into my stories. Our interests were aligned.
Some of what she would tell me was just gossip she knew I wouldn’t use. Some of it was valuable as background material. But on occasion, Michelle’s insider access actually led to a jackpot, a back-page Post exclusive. The first of these was set in motion by a phone call one summer day, with Michelle telling me that she had heard something: Ray Williams, the Knicks’ talented young guard, was in talks to sign as a free agent with the Cleveland Cavaliers.
Where had she heard that, I asked, knowing it could have been from any number of people.
“Mederia,” she said.
The wife of Marvin Webster, the Knicks’ seven-foot center, Mederia Webster was a twentysomething woman far from her North Carolina home, with a young son and a need for a good friend. Or better yet, a maternal substitute.
If Mederia Webster was offering this tidbit, I knew it was more than a rumor. A quick call to Williams’s agent, who was happy to get the word out to pressure the Knicks into stepping up with an offer, was all I needed to confirm the story. If I had suspected that Michelle might be my secret weapon on the Knicks beat, this scoop confirmed it.
There were more leads, more exclusives originating with Michelle, including one of the biggest Knicks stories of the early eighties. In late September 1982, she called me one morning and coyly told me she had heard from someone—this time, she wouldn’t say whom—that the Knicks were about to reel in Bernard King, one of the league’s rising stars, as a free agent.
I immediately called King’s agent but got no response. Knowing information like this could spread quickly, I took a calculated risk and called John Hewig, the Knicks’ public relations director. “I hear you guys are signing Bernard King,” I said with feigned certainty.
Hewig laughed. “What took you so long?” he said, respecting the fact that I apparently had an informed source, but with no idea that that source was a well-placed season ticket holder. Hewig, who understood the beat-reporting game better than most PR people, honored my scoop and promised not to officially release the story until my back-page report was out in one of the Post’s afternoon editions.
Michelle was thrilled when I called to tell her that Hewig had confirmed the King signing and the story was being fast-tracked into the paper. It was almost as if she had broken the news. She still wouldn’t divulge her source’s identity; I never did find out. Like any credible journalist, she was suddenly protecting her people.
I was by then developing other Knicks sources, but there’s no doubt that my friendship with Michelle helped me to establish a reputation on the beat, cement my job at the Post, and survive a period of my career that was fraught with insecurity.
She once told me that one of the main reasons she had befriended and helped me—beyond my eagerness to indulge her vicarious reporter’s whimsy—was because she found me interesting. Angst-ridden, but interesting. She compared me to a Woody Allen character—too mired in self-analysis to fully appreciate my good fortune and allow for the possibility that talent and hard work had much to do with it and would sustain it. Dealing with guarded or emotionally repressed male executives in her corporate training work was frustrating, Michelle told me. I, on the other hand, seldom hid my inner conflict, but at the same time I was able to at least laugh at myself as
