“You hit the jackpot,” she congratulated me, while adding a few choice words (“Grow the fuck up”) when I worried about how Beth’s family would regard the union of the son of a city postal worker and the Greenwich-bred daughter of a Yale-educated lawyer.
Yet she also sympathized with me when I grew to fear that we had rushed into an engagement and didn’t really know each other well enough with the marriage date fast approaching.
Wedding plans had consumed my time with Beth when I wasn’t on the road with the Knicks. We had never had an argument, much less a crisis. As a date of consequence approached—the printing of invitations—I confided to Michelle that I wasn’t sure I was ready to get married and was considering a postponement. And who knew better than Michelle that rushing into marriage was not a good idea?
“If she’s mature enough to be her own person, she’ll understand,” she said. But Beth was six years younger than I was, still very much under her parents’ influence, and I worried that she might feel pressured by them to tell me it was now or never. “Then you’ll have a very difficult decision to make, won’t you?” Michelle said. “But from everything I know about Beth, I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised.”
She was right. When I broke the news, Beth took it tearfully but respectfully. In lieu of a wedding, we traveled together to Europe that summer. The pressure was off. It was just us, on the road, enjoying each other. I knew before the trip was over that we would soon reschedule the wedding. We were married in June 1985, the reception taking place under a tent on the front lawn of my new in-laws’ home.
Michelle called me after receiving her invitation to say she was thrilled to receive one, but that she knew how difficult it could be to pare down guest lists—was there really room for someone I hadn’t known that long? However long it had been, since that Cleveland All-Star game or sometime prior, I told her that she already was a special friend, on my A-list.
We sat Michelle at a table with several of my basketball sportswriting pals, all of whom she knew from being around the Garden—a few who, like me, leaned and even cried on Michelle’s shoulder from time to time. She was not quite one of the gang, though—more the equivalent of a trusted bartender, the good listener. But her own life—or at least past life—was more or less off-limits.
• • • • •
Over the decades, Michelle had shared her most personal details only with friends from outside the NBA world. At courtside, she was only Michelle Musler, high-powered executive and rabid Knicks fan. She had also become, over time, a fan advocate of sorts, appearing in numerous newspaper articles—including my own—as an increasingly price-gouged loyalist more frustrated by the Knicks’ organizational upheaval and inability to win a championship. But in 2000, interviewed for a New York Times story on the psychology of sports fanaticism, she offered a glimpse into the genesis of her involvement with the Knicks.
“My ex-husband ran away with the lady next door and I didn’t seem to fit into suburbia anymore,” she said. “The Knicks gave me a purpose, something to do, a place to go. As a fan, I guess, there is a sense of belonging. That you are a part of something . . . What happened through the years is that the Knicks have become my social life.”
She would, years later, tell me that she had regretted the quote, feeling embarrassed that she had revealed too much. She worried that she had stereotyped herself as a jilted, embittered woman desperately trying to fill time in an otherwise empty life.
But the mother of five was by then a grandmother of three. Her daughters had all moved west and south but Brandon, her firstborn, lived in Manhattan with a daughter, Dylan; her other son, Bruce, had two sons, Andrew and Sam, in a suburb of Boston. Michelle, meanwhile, was still thriving in her executive-training business. She had her inner Knicks circle—myself very much a part of it—her yoga classes, and a multitude of friends in Stamford and New York. She also held a seat on the board of the prestigious School of Visual Arts in Manhattan, the result of a spontaneous friendship she had struck up with Silas Rhodes, the school’s founder, while sitting in an adjacent corporate box at the US Open.
Outwardly, at least, she had long moved past bitterness; her life was far from empty. But the Garden had always, by design, represented her refuge, her clean social slate. And because the story had appeared in the Times, the newspaper she assumed most of her friends at the Garden read, she felt exposed, vulnerable to pity—the very judgments she had sought to escape at courtside.
Divorces happen. They are not big news, anything to hide. The failure of Michelle’s marriage, however, was anything but ordinary. She made it sound like a Shakespearean tragedy, suburban-style. Only once was I able to see through the cool veneer she maintained on the rare occasions she talked about it. It was in Boston, at Bruce’s 1988 wedding reception, when her ex drove up in a luxury car with the woman he had left her for, his second wife. The composed, pragmatic Michelle suddenly vanished, replaced by a fuming, profane version. It was a side of her I had never seen, the inverse of her identity—Michelle in need of emotional support. The reception was on a boat in Boston Harbor. As the guests boarded, Beth and I sat with her
