The best example of this, she always said, was a back-page essay I wrote for the Daily News’s Sunday magazine in the mid-eighties. In the piece, I recounted a farcical dream that I’d had in which I found myself in the semifinals of the US Open, along with Jimmy Connors, Bernard King, and Isaac Allen, an old basketball buddy from the West Brighton Houses.
In the dream, I was furious that I’d drawn Connors, an actual tennis great, as opposed to one of the two basketball players, and was arguing with a tournament official before the dream ended with me warming up with Connors on the big stadium court.
“Don’t you see how positive that is?” Michelle said when I sheepishly described the dream. It obviously represented different stages of my life, she said. Basketball was the game I’d always been involved with. Tennis was practically a foreign concept to me—not exactly a sport whose reach extended to kids in the projects—until a long newspaper strike during the summer of 1978. Several makeshift dailies appeared to fill the news vacuum, and one hired me to cover the US Open, despite my knowing little about the sport. Connors demolished Bjorn Börg in the men’s final in front of a raucous New York crowd. I immediately fell in love with the game and took up playing it soon after.
Tennis, Michelle insisted, was the part of the dream that represented my relatively new professional life that was so different from the work my family members had typically done. I was understandably fearful of playing Connors because he symbolized the uncertainty and insecurity of the challenge far outside my family’s comfort zone. But the dream had ended with me on the court with Connors, meeting the challenge, overcoming my fears. That all made sense. And so did the headline that my editor, Vic Ziegel, wrote: A BASKET CASE. Michelle laughed hysterically when she read it. She could admit that she had grappled with her own impostor syndrome as she rose through the corporate ranks, wondering if her success might be fleeting—and not necessarily deserved, given her family background.
Fair enough. It certainly was true that I hadn’t grown up with a belief that anything was possible, much less with any sense of entitlement. My father’s idea of a good job was the one that was most likely to last. He was chronically averse to taking risks. If you had what seemed to be a secure position, why in the world take a chance on going elsewhere?
I can still hear him cautioning me—“What do you need it for?”—before I jumped to the Post from the Staten Island Advance. As much as that job offer and move was a fantasy come true, I still struggled with leaving my friends, my routines, my secure place. The prospect of change was even worse when the Daily News recruited me to cover the Knicks in the fall of 1982. Even with a raise in salary and the chance to write for a newspaper with a larger circulation, I was torn with indecision about leaving the Post, where an army of young recruits made for a freewheeling work environment and an active social life. But as much as Michelle preferred the Post’s sports section to the Daily News’s, which focused more on football and baseball, she urged me to move on—if for no other reason than to escape Peter Vecsey’s shadow. Plus, she argued, no one’s career ever suffered because they were the object of a competitor’s desire.
“You’ll go there, make it better, and you’ll stand out more,” she said. Her powers of persuasion, no doubt what made her so good in her work, helped convince me to take the plunge. In retrospect, it also underscored how close a friend and how much of an influence she had become in so short a time, less than two years.
In that sense, I had Michelle to thank for an even greater fateful life change. The following summer, during the NBA off-season, my Daily News editor assigned me to cover the inaugural championship game of the USFL, an upstart spring football league that would ultimately suffer the self-sabotaging consequences of granting a franchise to an egomaniacal Manhattan real estate developer named Trump. I wasn’t crazy about spending a midsummer week away and initially resisted the assignment. Steve Serby, my former Post colleague, talked me into going, convincing me it would be a big party, a Brand X Super Bowl. The game was in Denver, and there, checking into the league office in the ballroom of the downtown Marriott to get my credential, I met Beth Albert, a twenty-four-year-old publicist for the league and a mutual friend of a sports copy editor at the Daily News.
The championship game was memorable mostly for a reason unrelated to football. As time expired, police confronted fans rushing onto the field, setting off a melee. Watching this unfold on deadline, frantically trying to shoehorn the chaos into a game story, I looked at Beth incredulously as she blithely handed out printed player quotes from the locker rooms.
“Can you see that there’s a damn riot going on?”
The following afternoon, after partying too hard and missing my morning flight home, I ran into Beth at the airport gate and stammered through an apology for my deadline rudeness. She laughed it off. The most serendipitous night of drinking and oversleeping led to a prolonged conversation, a dinner date, then another at a Yankees game. We were engaged by Thanksgiving.
When I had first met Michelle, I had been involved in a dysfunctional relationship that had weighed heavily on me, to the point where I was literally losing sleep. She wasted little time in advising me to extricate myself from it. But from the time I introduced her to Beth at a Knicks game, her instincts told her what I would soon come to believe: I had met the right woman.
Because Beth was from Greenwich and her parents lived two exits from Michelle
