Reality harshly intruded that night at the Garden. Ewing picked a bad time to have one of the worst games of his nascent career. The Knicks were blown out by the Denver Nuggets, who had lost seven straight games. The fans booed lustily while derisively chanting for Ewing to be replaced by Eddie Lee Wilkins. And then it really got ugly. The Knicks had handed out life-size posters of their young center, which restless fans began using to fashion rolled-up projectiles. One idiot slipped past security, appeared at courtside, and tore his poster to shreds. Michelle watched this unfold grimly from her courtside seat, the game delayed as ball boys cleared the floor of the promotional debris.
“The worst thing I’ve ever seen there,” she said, adding that she would never forget the sadness on Ewing’s normally stoic face. Indeed, it might well have been the most embarrassing chapter in the history of a fan base long touted as the most respectful of the game, but it was also a fair representation of a franchise with a growing knack for self-sabotage, or just rotten timing and luck. Within a few weeks, King returned to play the final six games of the season, but Ewing and his tender knees had already been shut down. The two never played a single minute together.
By summer, the Knicks had a new general manager, Al Bianchi, who wanted to hire a veteran coach but was told that ownership preferred Rick Pitino, a rising star at Providence College in Rhode Island, who had briefly served as an assistant with the Knicks under Hubie Brown. One of their first personnel decisions was to disavow any allegiance to King, who moved on to Washington, only to eventually regain his All-Star status. Initially, Bianchi and the relentlessly energetic Pitino did breathe fresh air into a stale Knicks environment. Their best acquisition was a much-needed point guard via the draft. The flamboyant and New York–bred Mark Jackson became the key that unlocked Ewing’s offensive gifts, which turned out to be more formidable than anyone had expected, and certainly superior to Bill Russell’s. Michelle immediately fell hard for Jackson, who won Rookie of the Year and helped the Knicks sneak into the 1988 playoffs, where they lost a spirited first-round series to Bird and the Celtics. She adopted as a mantra a line from my Daily News column. Jackson, I wrote, had done what Ewing had not: “turned the lights on at the Garden.” It was less a criticism of Ewing than it was a hat tip to the value of a crafty passer and charismatic personality.
With Jackson leading and Ewing dominating, the Knicks won more games in the second year of the Bianchi-Pitino regime, 1988–89, than they had since their second and last championship season sixteen years earlier. They entered the playoffs as potential contenders. But there were fissures in the relationship between Bianchi and Pitino. For two years, Bianchi had begged Pitino to incorporate a more detailed half-court offense to complement his preferred fast-break attack, which was triggered by a pressing defense. Pitino resisted what he perceived as front-office interference. Bianchi was proved right when Michael Jordan and the Bulls slowed the game tempo and eliminated the favored Knicks from the second round of the playoffs in six games. But Pitino got the last laugh, landing the premier college job at Kentucky that a bitter Bianchi believed he’d been angling for all along.
Without Pitino, the team’s growth spurt stalled. The city’s enthusiasm waned. The brief love affair with Jackson cooled. Even before Pitino left town, the fans had begun to sour on the point guard, booing his shot selection in the first two playoff games against the Bulls. He answered like the headstrong New Yorker he was, condemning his critics as “rats deserting a sinking ship.” Then he braced for an onslaught of derision when the teams returned to the Garden from Chicago.
He heard it from nearly everyone, but not Michelle, who stood up for her man as boos rained down with a handmade sign that read: JAX’S RATS—WE NEVER LEAVE THE SHIP. A photographer from the Daily News took notice, landing Michelle on the next day’s back page. It earned her a new friend—seldom was there a home game after that episode when Jackson’s mother, Marie, failed to stroll across the floor before tip-off to give her son’s most loyal fan a hug. Their friendship carried over to the postgame bar and an occasional lunch. Mark Jackson, who would much later coach the Golden State Warriors and become a popular analyst on the NBA’s lead broadcast team, would never forget Michelle’s support. “The fact is that I still get a chill thinking about her standing up for me when everyone else in the building was booing,” he told me three decades later.
The idea of kicking the Knicks when they were down was always anathema to Michelle. What did the fans think that would get them? How would they feel about being booed on their jobs? In retrospect, she also recognized the Ewing and Jackson fiascos as flash points in her understanding of how the Garden fans were really a reflection of the team’s notoriously capricious ownership. They behaved erratically because that was how the franchise typically conducted its business.
Any human resources executive worth her weight would know how counterproductive it was for the Knicks to have settled on Pitino as coach before choosing Bianchi as general manager. It was the same executive malpractice the Knicks had committed when pairing Dave DeBusschere and Hubie Brown. The smart play, Michelle kept reminding me for my stories, was to avoid shotgun marriages by allowing the highest-level basketball executive to
