Your Michelle. My Michelle.
All told, Michelle’s day at the Garden had been exhausting. Making the trip to the arena from Stamford and navigating to her seat were taxing enough, and she was exasperated when Robin misplaced her wallet and needed help gaining entrance into the Garden. The next day, she felt the effects of a long day in the city. But she also had to admit, even after the Knicks had lost a close one to the Philadelphia 76ers, that it had felt good, very good, to be back.
Hearing Michelle talk about the Garden reinforced to me how important it was for her to still have occasional access. The arena was an entirely natural place for her to spend a holiday, a place where she could, for a few precious hours, feel connected, secure, holding on to hope—the Knicks’ and her own.
I asked her if she still was thinking about cutting ties, letting go.
“No,” she said. “I feel like I’m going to hang on for as long as I can.”
It was exactly what I wanted—and needed—to hear.
Six Old Friends and Bookends
On the afternoon of May 12, 1985, Michelle and I both had cause for jubilation when Dave DeBusschere, the Knicks’ championship-era icon turned general manager, rose halfway from his seat in a ballroom at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in Manhattan and gently punched the air in triumph. He and the Knicks had just won the NBA’s inaugural draft lottery with its much-heralded prize, Patrick Ewing.
My friendship with Michelle by this time was close in ways that transcended basketball. But seldom did the state of the Knicks not come up in our many conversations—on the phone or over long breakfasts at a diner near the Greenwich-Stamford border on weekends Beth and I spent out of the city with her parents. And in the half decade Michelle and I had known each other, there had been no bigger development, no greater newsbreak, than the Knicks landing Ewing, who was supposedly the second coming of Bill Russell, the hub of the Boston Celtics’ unmatchable dynasty of the fifties and sixties. An intimidating seven-footer who had dominated opponents during his four years at Georgetown, Ewing was considered a virtual lock to lift the Knicks from the rash of injuries—most notably Bernard King’s—that had dropped them to the depths of the league standings. If Ewing was to become even half as successful as Russell—winner of eleven titles in thirteen years—the Knicks stood to go on a joyride that would include multiple championship parades.
Because all seven lottery participants—the teams that had not qualified for the playoffs during the 1984–85 season—had had the same percentage chance of winning, cries of the fix being in quickly arose, never to be proven or quelled. Could the league have actually rigged the lottery to resurrect its biggest media market? Years after the fact, Michelle and I agreed that the conspiracy theories were preposterous, if only because David Stern, in only his second year as the NBA commissioner, would have been out of his mind to position his league one whistleblower from forfeiture of its credibility. But that was the business pragmatist (Michelle) and the journalist (me) who didn’t want to believe the sport we were so invested in might not be competitively authentic. More from the heart, Michelle had boldly and wishfully assured friends and family in her Christmas letter months earlier that the Knicks—by hook or by crook—would wind up with Ewing. And on the day of the lottery, I filed a column to the Daily News, noting that the accounting firm in charge of the lottery’s security just happened to represent the corporation that owned Madison Square Garden.
Whatever the truth was, Michelle (the fan) didn’t much care. While the Garden’s phone lines were jammed with requests for tickets, she was sitting pretty with orchestra seats for what promised to be Broadway’s hottest and longest-running show. “I’m pinching myself,” she said when I called from a phone bank in the lobby of the Waldorf after finishing my work that day, Mother’s Day. Meanwhile, the fatalist in me just had to cause trouble. I reminded Michelle that the King injury, occurring just weeks earlier, had left a cloud over the potential King-Ewing pairing and by extension the franchise.
“If only Bernard hadn’t gotten hurt,” I told her.
“Would you please let me enjoy this?” she said.
The truth was, my naysaying was a complete act—I was as giddy as she. After spending the majority of my playoff springs in Boston, Los Angeles, and other league outposts, here was the possibility that New York City would soon become the center of the NBA universe. Not only would it spare me incessant travel, but what a story that would be to cover, the resurrection of the team I had idolized as a kid.
But the next few years didn’t unfold as we had envisioned. For starters, Ewing never did represent the individual star power Larry Bird and Magic Johnson had already brought in tandem to the NBA, and certainly not the enhanced version that Michael Jordan would singularly define in the years ahead. He was no driver of overpriced sneakers and soft drinks. Worse, Ewing struggled with knee tendinitis over the first two seasons, King’s rehab dragged on for almost all of them, and the franchise suffered from internal turmoil. Behind the scenes, Hubie Brown busily undercut DeBusschere, deflecting blame from himself for the team’s poor record. When DeBusschere was fired, Brown bullied his replacement, Scotty Stirling, into sacrificing precious draft assets for stopgap transactions
