Whatever resistance there was at home to Michelle’s love affair with the Knicks pretty much fell on deaf ears. She liked to say that the key to making an impact with people was to be a good listener—“be interested to be interesting,” she would advise her kids and clients alike. But her children at times wondered if she was actually interested in listening to them as she made the Garden the center of her social universe, adding more hours away from home to her time spent at the office and on the road.
In retrospect, Blair, the youngest, saw an upside to her mother’s basketball preoccupation: Michelle’s absence from matters of maternal discipline. She considered the Knicks’ schedule to be the family’s authority surrogate of sorts—“the closest thing to a father figure.” If a school event was scheduled on a night the Knicks were at home, the girls knew they shouldn’t count on Michelle for transportation, much less attendance. But as Blair got older and less interested in her mother’s involvement than her own independence, the Knicks’ schedule also became “the greatest blueprint a teenager could ask for.” It told her in advance what nighttime adventures she could get away with—even if she was grounded for trouble she’d already gotten into.
For her part, Michelle made no bones about the fact that she was more comfortable in the role of the typical dad—the career-oriented sports devotee with the best Knicks tickets. For almost all her life, it helped her to rationalize her absences and other parental flaws. A rare moment when she couldn’t repress that guilt was triggered by, of all people, a basketball player. At home on her couch, she wept over a young multimillionaire giving thanks on national television to his mother.
In the spring of 2014, Kevin Durant, at a news conference in Oklahoma City to accept the NBA’s Most Valuable Player trophy, gazed at his sobbing mother, Wanda Durant, in the audience and said, “You kept us off the street. You put clothes on our back. Food on the table. When you didn’t eat, you made sure we ate. You went to sleep hungry. You sacrificed for us. You’re the real MVP.”
ESPN rewound the clip on a SportsCenter loop, and Michelle watched it again and again, tearing up each time. She knew why the connection was so meaningful, so poignant—and why she was steadfastly taken with the backstories of Durant and LeBron James, the best players of the twenty-first century, who habitually paid tribute to their mothers, their singular saviors through thick and thin. Secretly, Michelle fantasized about such a tribute from her own children—for toughing it out, staying the course. There was one catch, though. She never directly asked or lobbied for such acknowledgment because on a deep-seated level, unlike the single basketball moms she so admired, she didn’t think she deserved it.
“I was never there for them,” she told me during the 2017 holiday season, in what was a rare rumination, “and now it’s too late.”
For most of the time I had known Michelle, she made matter-of-fact, passing references to all that she hadn’t done as a parent, all that she’d missed while working and playing. She would listen to me prattle on about my trials, tribulations, and triumphs with two growing boys—how for years I had exhausted myself rushing home from one road trip or another for a weekend soccer game or a birthday party—and invariably say, “I did none of that. I never had time.”
She of course had a reason—or rationalization—for all she hadn’t done as a parent. Working mom by day, devoted fan by night, she believed that she needed to keep changing, growing, because her career—and by extension her kids’ lives—depended on it. Who would they have, she worried, if something happened to her? So much already had—illness, divorce, near-impoverishment.
“I was obsessed with making money, keeping the house, and one way to do that was to be socially engaged, connected to the right people,” she said. She was convinced that her fluency in speaking the language of the game had helped her navigate a world of sports-obsessed men. O. B. Gray, a marketing executive at Warner who lived in Stamford and often rode the train home with Michelle, said she indeed had a “celebrity aura in the office,” as the woman with the prize Knicks seats and access to the stars.
For much of her adult life, Michelle had accepted the trade-offs and terms of her reconstructed social life—the cards she’d been dealt, or played. Her children grew up, found partners, moved away, and led productive lives. For Michelle, the games continued, one season blurring into the next. She loved sports because she always thought a single game, segmented into stages, was a microcosm of life, with a beginning, a middle, and an end. But in life’s twilight, and especially in the aftermath of another ministroke, she began to take inventory, to fret over what she had to show for what really mattered—or should have mattered—most.
What did all her game notes packets, programs, lanyards, and ticket stubs mean now? What would her children do with her profligate indulgences except toss them out with the trash when she was gone? “I keep thinking that there is no way to measure that family part,” she said. “There is no final score, so what have I accomplished?”
Rationally, Michelle knew that she had been the MVP of her family—but only if the P stood for “provider.” She’d given her children upper-middle-class stability and a first-rate education. She happily paid for all the tutors and coaches. Her pride about providing was never more palpable than when her adult daughter Blair
