Once I had the D.C. assignment, the first person I reached out to after Michelle was Hamamoto, who had, not surprisingly, joined Ewing in Washington to help launch his program as its communications director.
“Need to speak with you,” I texted her.
“Please tell me it’s not about Michelle,” she answered, immediately worried it was health related. On the phone, I assured her that Michelle, relatively speaking, was fine, though undoubtedly a little jealous that we would be spending time together without her.
At Georgetown, Ewing greeted me with a bro hug, another example, as with Bernard King, of time and no doubt age having smoothed over the rough edges of our professional relationship. After so many years, we were bonded by the journey, not by any lingering memories or resentments over anything I had written.
When my story ran soon after the New Year, I tweeted a link to it with an insouciant heading: “Went to see Patrick Ewing. Think he was actually happy to see me!” A tweet back from Ewing appeared on my feed the next day: “Always happy to see a fellow Hall of Famer.” I drove up to Stamford soon after New Year’s and wasted no time showing off the tweets to Michelle, for whom Twitter was a mystery world she would never visit on her own. She guffawed in delight.
“Never thought I’d live to see the day,” she said.
• • • • •
My Ewing story was timed with a purpose, a New York angle, with Ewing bringing his Georgetown team to Madison Square Garden to play St. John’s University. It was a reunion, a homecoming, and a turf war all wrapped into one Big East Conference coaching showdown between Ewing and Chris Mullin, long-ago antagonists for these same Catholic schools during the early to mid-eighties and longtime subjects of my columns. Writing about them in tandem—this time as the best of frenemies—was an ideal career symmetry, and they playfully hyped the occasion.
“Chris knows that it’s my house,” Ewing teased, citing his number 33 Knicks jersey hanging from the rafters as proof. A call to Mullin yielded this game but prickly response: “I grew up there and came back. Patrick was put there by the NBA.”
Even as he spent his Hall of Fame pro career on the West Coast (Golden State Warriors) and in the Midwest (Indiana Pacers), Mullin was a native son of Brooklyn with a classic Irish mug, pasty white in a sport trending black. As a result, he was irresistible copy to my tabloid editors at the Post and Daily News, always fixated on endless speculation that he might return home to play for the Knicks. Our respective career beginnings had been nearly simultaneous, timed for me to report on Mullin as a high school hoops prodigy and then a St. John’s superstar along the way to a climactic college career appearance—along with Ewing’s Georgetown Hoyas—in the 1985 Final Four. His elevation to the NBA also coincided with my ascension from the Knicks beat at the Daily News to writing about the NBA at large. I happened to be on the job in Seattle one November night in 1985 when word circulated that Mullin would sign his first pro contract with the Warriors after a brief holdout and immediately make his pro debut. I took a dawn flight to Oakland, California, and sat with his proud parents, Rod and Eileen, at the introductory press conference, his tearful mother whispering to me that she wished her boy didn’t have to be so far from home.
Our careers continued evolving. Our paths kept crossing. Three years later, I caught up with Mullin—by then a full-fledged NBA All-Star—in his condo just outside Oakland, where I had covered the first two games of the 1989 Bay Area World Series. As the series shifted to San Francisco for Game 3 on a calamitously fateful Tuesday evening, my editors in New York asked me to instead pursue a Mullin feature for an NBA season’s preview. In my interview that afternoon with Mullin—hours before the tragic Loma Prieta earthquake would send me on an all-night vigil covering the collapse of a double-decker Oakland freeway—he shared in detail how his father, a recovering alcoholic, had supported him through his own very personal quake.
A year into Mullin’s NBA career, he had landed in rehab after an admission of alcoholism he had dreaded to make for fear it would, as he told me, kill his father. Instead, Rod Mullin gave himself over to the cause of helping his son get and stay clean. When Mullin returned to the Warriors, playing in the Pacific time zone, late into the wee hours back east, his father stayed awake, awaiting his son’s postgame call to talk about the game—and to make sure Chris’s sobriety had survived another day.
Journalists store such information, suspecting there will come a time to use or reuse it. It was with that disclosure in mind that I drove out to see Mullin in Brookville, Long Island, on the morning of March 17, 1991, for what would be another fatefully timed meeting at the intersection of our careers and lives. He had lost his father six months earlier to cancer at age fifty-six, one year after I had buried mine following his heart attack at sixty-seven. We lounged in the family room of the house he had bought for his parents, a suburbanized upgrade from the cramped homestead in Brooklyn’s Flatbush section, where the four brothers shared one bedroom and two bunk beds. The new digs had a pool and a basketball court, but all Mullin could dwell on was that his father had not lived long enough to enjoy it. Nor could he recall ever playing at Madison Square Garden without his father close by in the stands. “I guess,” he said sadly, “this will be the first.”
I, too, was thinking of my father with mixed emotions on a day of moving on.
