Her pronouncement of independence, framed on the wall, read: “Some mothers bake brownies. Our mother makes money.”
Five Christmas Cheer
Still early in a career that would primarily exist on the fringes of the professional game, Ron Cavenall was in his first and only season with the Hubie Brown–coached Knicks. His arrival in New York—and the NBA, for that matter—during the 1984–85 season was serendipitous, and largely attributable to a desperate team.
A seven-footer who had averaged five points and five rebounds in the college basketball minors, at Texas Southern University, Cavenall was spotted by Rick Pitino, then a Brown assistant, while working as a basketball counselor at Kutsher’s Sports Academy in Monticello, New York. He joined a Knicks team ravaged by injuries to its big men and including the likes of the immortal Eddie Lee Wilkins from Gardner-Webb and Ken “the Animal” Bannister from Saint Augustine’s College.
Cavenall spent most of his time at the end of the Knicks bench—in other words, directly in front of Michelle, who wasn’t thrilled with the quality of play but whose journalistic-like curiosity was not dampened by the cast of marginal players in front of her. She loved hearing their backstories, and Cavenall’s was uncommonly interesting. Ignored in the ten-round 1981 college draft, he had wound up on the Harlem Magicians, a barnstorming team formed in the image of basketball’s clown princes, the world-famous Globetrotters, after befriending the daughter of the team’s owner and star, Marques Haynes, in college. Haynes hired Cavenall for the Kutsher’s summer job—he signed on as the tallest counselor in the Catskills, and the next thing he knew he was suiting up for the Knicks.
The son of a biology teacher, Cavenall had studied computer science and impressed Michelle with his realistic approach to his athletic career—he was already planning for its inevitable end with the assumption he wouldn’t have much financial security to show for it. She, in turn, imparted whatever management expertise she could and took the opportunity to invite him to a holiday family celebration in a part of the country where he had no kin and apparently no place else to go.
It was one thing for the wife of a seven-foot Knick—Mederia Webster—to show up at Michelle’s house. But an actual seven-footer? An active player? Michelle’s young-adult and college-age children, already vacillating between bewildered and bothered by their mother’s obsession with all things Knicks, initially didn’t quite know what to make of this twenty-five-year-old African American from Beaumont, Texas, dropped suddenly into upper-middle-class white suburbia. They played the gracious hosts, peppering the soft-spoken Cavenall with abundant questions, hearing all about his unorthodox path to the Garden, all the while wondering why he had agreed to be there in the first place. But to Michelle, what was the big deal? Cavenall was just another acquaintance born of courtside access, another statement about her expanding social life in the big city. In the season of holiday spirit, why not bring home a dislodged Knick?
In spite of her Jewish roots and aversion to her Catholic grade-schooling, Michelle loved Christmas. The Muslers always celebrated with a tree and all the trimmings, conventionality making a rare visit to a most unconventional family. As her children ventured into young adulthood and spread around the country, Christmas was also an increasingly rare time they were all together. But once Michelle was entrenched at the Garden as a Knicks devotee, the holiday meal was served on Christmas Eve, conveniently scheduled to free her up to attend the traditional Knicks’ Christmas Day game at the Garden.
By the time of the Cavenall visit, she had moved her family out of their old neighborhood and into a spacious ranch home on Rockridge Lane, a winding residential cul-de-sac hard off the Merritt Parkway in North Stamford. I, too, made the guest list at Michelle’s new home, a couple of years after Beth and I were married. It was there that I saw a different side of my friend from the front row—a less self-assured side. At home, the maternal Michelle—not unlike most suburban mothers anxious about their children making a good impression on their invited guests—treaded carefully and sometimes clumsily with the five disparate personalities of her children, orchestrating the night as best she could and typically giving up along the way.
I didn’t have to be around Michelle’s kids long to see that they were all quite bright, bonded by a witty, acerbic dialogue, almost a language of their own—suggesting much time spent without a parent around to referee. When the dinner conversation inevitably turned to the Knicks, there was a fair amount of here-we-go-again eye-rolling, a collective reflex to the strange obsession they had long lived with, for better or worse.
For the boys, Brandon and Bruce, the two oldest, having the mom with the cool basketball tickets had had its benefit: an occasional game passed off to them and their friends. Bruce, in particular, enjoyed attending Knicks games as a high schooler in the late seventies. An accomplished athlete himself, he loved the game, along with the privilege of driving Michelle’s sporty Datsun 280ZX home to Connecticut. The downside was her insistence on dragging him to the bar afterward to hang with the Garden in-crowd, munching on a late-night cheeseburger while she made the social rounds, leaving him exhausted the next morning and dozing through physics class.
In the mind of an adolescent girl uninterested in sports, on the other hand, Michelle’s devotion to a pro basketball team made little sense. Devon, her middle daughter, wondered why her mother on occasion prioritized the Knicks over a school function, thinking, Does she love the Knicks more than me? The artistic Musler child,
