I could tell her curiosity was piqued. Michelle was always of the mind that King, more than any single player she had watched closely from behind the Knicks bench, had a compelling story to tell—and possibly some deep, dark secret to go along with it.
King was a comet streaking across the New York sky, a roughly three-season phenomenon that all but ended with the devastating collapse of his right knee late in the 1984–85 season, in which he was dominating opponents, averaging a career-high 32.9 points per game. Yet from the day in October 1982 that he reintroduced himself to his hometown until that cruel stroke of fate, there was no one quite like him. No one as electric, enigmatic, and complex. Who could forget Bernard and his terrifying Game Face (which, predictably, was the name of his book)? It was a mask of simmering rage mysteriously summoned from the moment he stepped onto the floor—a fearsome sight, even for courtside fans and reporters, akin to the early moments of a horror film before the spilling of first blood.
“Scared the shit out of me,” Michelle said. “But he was so spectacular, so exciting, that you didn’t even have to remember who won the game because he overshadowed everything else.”
If the King era could be distilled into one game other than the Christmas sixty, it would have to be the night of April 27, 1984, in the decisive fifth game of the first-round playoff series against Isiah Thomas and the Detroit Pistons. It began at Joe Louis Arena in downtown Detroit with a ventilation system gone faulty. By the middle of the first quarter, everyone on the court—and those of us reporting at courtside—was drenched in sweat.
A furious pace made it sweatier. Led by King, the Knicks appeared to have a comfortable lead going down the stretch, until Thomas, the smallest man on the floor, erupted to score an almost unfathomable sixteen points in just over ninety seconds. With the game tied, he also had the ball for a potential game winner. But Darrell Walker, a rookie Knicks guard with exceptionally quick hands, stripped him in the lane. The game went to overtime, where King completed a 44-point night and a record 213 points for a five-game series in a 127–123 victory.
To the very end of my full-time sportswriting career, I considered that game to be as extraordinary as any I’d covered. Michelle called it the best Knicks game she’d ever seen, even if it was from her living room couch. The next time we spoke, she called me a “lucky SOB” for having watched it from courtside in Detroit.
Those of us in the building that night would argue that King was, for that series and season, as unstoppable an offensive force as any non-center they’d seen pre–Michael Jordan. But in the start to my Daily News story the following morning, Darrell Walker shared the heroism: “Bernard King stole our hearts. Isiah Thomas nearly stole the game. But Darrell Walker stole the ball.”
It was the kind of multilayered lede I was proud of, integrating characters both central and secondary to develop an all-encompassing angle that could be expounded upon in the body of the story. In large part, I owed it to Michelle. She had been telling me all season how bad she felt for Walker, how he had become a continual target of Hubie Brown’s ire, who had objected to Walker’s selection in the draft. Armed with that information, I had the perfect opportunity to explore a rich irony: In what arguably was the most memorable victory of Brown’s NBA coaching career, he was saved by a player he had little use for.
These were the inside stories that intrigued Michelle, who was never interested in mythical portrayals of players, in making them larger than life. She cared more about why and how they overcame their environmental circumstances, their human frailties—much like the power brokers she dealt with in her work. No Knick she watched so up close and personal better fit the profile or was more interesting in that psychological vein than King, with whom I’d had my differences over the years based on one column or another.
But a source of pleasant surprises in a long career in sports journalism is the ability to reconnect later in life with athletes you once covered—old wounds healed, scars faded, leaving aging adversaries with no need to hang on to hostility. At the bookstore, King and I hugged it out, and I moderated and recorded the Q&A and got it published on a new sports website, The Athletic. I sent Michelle a copy and she emailed me the next day.
LOVED THE INTERVIEW WITH BERNARD AND FINALLY LEARNING WHERE THE GAME FACE CAME FROM!!!
That was the news takeaway from King’s book: His game face had been a defense mechanism, a veneer of defiance to the beatings he had regularly taken as a child from his mother. I wrote her back: “Now that is a mother who should have some regrets!”
When I called her a few days later, she had a pleasant surprise for me: She had decided to take the Christmas Day tickets after all, thanking me for talking her into it. Perhaps it was the King remembrances—Christmas game and all—that had triggered her holiday spirit. Michelle’s Christmas Eve parties had ended years ago, but an invitation for dinner with her son, daughter-in-law, and granddaughter at their Manhattan apartment no doubt helped convince her to take Plaut’s tickets. Christmas with her families, the Knicks and the Muslers, was too tempting a proposition. She asked Robin Kelly to meet her at the Garden and shelled out eighty dollars for a limousine into the city.
In the years after my children were born, we had established
