At the risk of overplaying my armchair psychology, I wanted to believe that Michelle was pulling what she would have called “a Harvey”—merely feeling sorry for herself, missing her many Garden friends and acquaintances. That at least was a more preferable diagnosis than the alternative, and it made sense that the narrowing of her life—as she had referred to it during our drive to the Garden in late October—would have had some psychological effect.
With the exception of Brandon, who lived in Manhattan, Michelle’s children were scattered around the country—two in California, one in Florida, another in New England. Her grandchildren had transitioned into busy, young-adult lives. Her best friends from the Garden—Drucie De Vries and Ernestine Miller—had moved on from her courtside perch, and checked in only with an occasional call. She’d lost a valued yoga partner when Robin Kelly moved to Manhattan after her divorce from Wynn Plaut.
To a much lesser degree, I could relate to the vacuum created by sudden vocational—or avocational, in Michelle’s case—detachment. In the year-plus time since I had taken the buyout from the Times, many of the people with whom I had watched countless games, dragged myself through airports, and stood around sweaty locker rooms had pretty much vanished as quickly as I could sign the papers to collect my pension.
It was an emotionally jarring experience—more so than I had anticipated—to step off the carousel and watch it spin on while few, if any, bothered to wave. I did have the good fortune of being able to occasionally leap back on, continuing to contribute to the newspaper and so clinging to my perceived relevance, even as I berated myself for not yet trying new things.
Michelle was no shut-in either. Her neurological condition notwithstanding, she rarely missed a yoga class—what she called her “lifeblood”—or an opportunity to limber up in the gym. She made lunch dates, took herself to the movies, and looked forward to the limousine ride into the city for the occasional School of Visual Arts board meeting. But what happens when age, anxiety, and depression conspire to impede such pleasurable distractions? When an encroaching dread mixed with more isolation than usual creates the sensation of being, as Michelle described it, “slowly sucked into a void”?
Worried about her state of mind, I drove up to Stamford a few days after our phone conversation, the week before Christmas. Over dinner, I asked if she had reached the point where she needed help attending to daily . . . things. Was it time, perhaps, to reach out more, specifically to her children? She was adamant that it wasn’t.
“All they would do is worry, and what does that accomplish?” she said, reminding me once again that her family relationships were complicated, with baggage from the past that, for her, was too difficult to pry open.
A close friend in the area, then?
There were, she said, a couple of people in her condominium mews she knew she could count on in an emergency. But no one she particularly wanted to burden on any regular basis—which, she argued, was still entirely unnecessary and would only risk their willingness to help out in a pinch.
“Friendships dissipate because most are of convenience in the first place,” she said. “And from my age, you look back and wonder, who were your real friends?” She laughed and added, “You just need about ten more years and a few more good ones to die and you’ll realize how few of them you actually had.”
As fatalistic as that was, I at least knew that Michelle considered our friendship to be not just one of the good ones, but one of the better ones—and at this point in her life, perhaps the best one, even if it was a status I had reached by default. It nonetheless made me feel as if it was my responsibility to help get her out of her funk, as she had often done for me.
Over dinner, I pressed her on the Christmas tickets, knowing it had always been one of her favorite days of the season. Christmas traffic into the city most years was light and her second ticket usually went unsold, enabling her to show off a child, or in later years, a grandchild. No matter how badly the season was going, the Garden was festive, and the Knicks typically were resolved to put up a fight for the nationally televised audience.
More than thirty years earlier, on Christmas night 1984, Michelle and I had witnessed one of the greatest individual performances at the Garden: Bernard King’s then-record sixty points in a losing cause against the New Jersey Nets. I covered the game as the beat reporter for the Daily News, writing on the usual tight nighttime deadline. Michelle waited for me to finish downstairs at the bar, which was buzzing with elation over the Knicks’ good fortune of finally having a legitimate superstar—at twenty-eight, right in his prime—around which to build.
If there was one player who bridged whatever evaluative differences there may have been between fan and reporter, it was the Brooklyn-born King, hands down. We could argue about which other player was the greatest Knick of all—she would anoint Willis Reed, I would counter with Walt Frazier, and we both would give honorable mention to Patrick Ewing. But Michelle considered King to be the one and only Knick worth the price of admission every single night he suited up, and I once claimed in print that he was among the rarest of players anywhere I would have paid my way in to see (fortunately, nobody took me up on the offer).
As it happened, in the fall of 2017 King had released an autobiography,
