It was a few minutes after four on a gray, misty Friday afternoon in Stamford, Connecticut, a few weeks after my Hall of Fame induction, a new NBA season underway. We were headed into Midtown Manhattan, to a Knicks game, not unlike any of the thousands we had attended—Michelle, the fan, in her choicest of locations in the first row right behind the Knicks bench, and I, the journalist, nearby in a courtside press seat.
Madison Square Garden was the center of our sporting universe, the footing on which our friendship was founded. Over the years, we shared our love for the game—however abysmally played by the Knicks—but on that October night, days before Halloween, it had a measurably different feel, an unmistakable sense of denouement. Any game we attended together at this point in time was conceivably our last.
A fixture for decades behind the Knicks bench, Michelle was no longer a season-ticket holder. She had them for this game against the Brooklyn Nets thanks to the largesse of a wealthy financial mogul who, for several years, had been her semisecret benefactor. The tickets had once actually been affordable—a bargain, even. For years, Michelle had owned four, selling off the two that were nearby in her section, on the railing a few feet to her right, and using the markup to help defray the cost of her own seat. But courtside prices surged with the NBA’s popularity, growing steeper by the season. Michelle held on to her remaining life luxury for as long as she could, while admitting, “I’m embarrassed to tell people what I pay for basketball tickets.”
Finally, the realities of retirement and living on a fixed income set in. In 2011, when the Garden underwent an expensive redevelopment, the price of a single-game seat for Michelle soared from $330 to $900 per game. There was an option to move to a cheaper location, away from the court, far from the action, back to where she had started many years earlier. She wasn’t interested, admittedly spoiled. She figured she was done—until Wynn Plaut, the financier, stepped in to keep her in her seat, in the game.
Plaut’s wife, Robin Kelly, was a friend of Michelle’s from their yoga class in Greenwich, just south of Stamford. Even there, basketball was a uniting force. The studio was run by the wife of Gail Goodrich, a Hall of Fame player from the sixties and seventies, who occasionally showed up to fake his way through the routines, happier to talk hoops with Michelle.
Plaut’s parents were dying. His son had cancer. His marriage was in jeopardy. His wife had gone to a few games with Michelle and had enjoyed the scene. He thought, OK, these are really expensive but I’m in the financial world; I’ve done fine. Maybe going to some games with Robin might reconnect us. The marriage didn’t survive, but Michelle somehow managed to become a confidant to both as they hurtled toward divorce—and she continued attending games with one or the other.
Michelle, the Knicks loyalist, was the true survivor. Her arrangement with Plaut allowed her to attend her fair share of the season’s forty-one home games. But she was pushing eighty and winter night driving had become an adventure best avoided by the 2016–17 season. She went from rarely missing a game to needing someone—usually Plaut—to give her a ride.
For several years, she had promised him a time when she would step aside and he could have the tickets, for which he was paying roughly a hundred thousand dollars, transferred to him. That time arrived with the renewal for 2017–18, along with a sad realization. “It gets to a point where you have to just accept that you’re old,” she said. “But to be honest, when I began thinking I couldn’t go anymore, it made me so depressed because being in those seats has been my identity for so long.”
I knew what she meant. I, too, was in a quasi state of withdrawal, having taken a buyout in the fall of 2016 from the Times, having convinced myself, only months from my sixty-fifth birthday, that it was my time to slow down, engage the world differently: resume piano lessons I had abandoned twenty years earlier; volunteer in my community; spend more time with family and friends; liberate myself from the never-ending demand for content and the inherent loneliness of being with a laptop. All easier said, or imagined, than done. Three weeks after leaving the Times staff, I was back to contributing as a freelancer on a fairly regular basis, weighing in on the Knicks, the NBA, and assorted other subjects. As it turned out, I hated the sound of the R-word. I winced whenever Beth would use it in reference to me in conversation with friends. I settled on telling people I had only downsized my career, not retired entirely.
Nor did Michelle have to completely detach herself from courtside at the Garden, thanks to Plaut’s continued generosity. About the time he took full possession of her seats, he had bought a place in Florida, and was planning to spend more of his winter there. He had taken on a partner to share in the cost of the tickets, but told Michelle there still would be games available to her. She mentioned to me on the phone in early October that Plaut was more than offering; he was pressuring her to take him up on the offer. “Probably because he knows how painful it is for you to have given them up the first place,” I said.
She sighed, admitted that she would of course love to go if only she could figure out a way to get there. I told her I’d be happy to take her.
“You’ll come all the way up here, go into the city and then back up?”
“Why not?”
Michelle protested my having to
