“You mean from you?” I said.
“OK, from me, and a lot of other people who took an interest in you because you had talent.”
In the years after his death—better too late, I suppose, than never—I did come to appreciate how my father had, in his own way, inspired me. He got up at the crack of dawn every morning and commuted an hour and a half each way into Midtown. He sat at the kitchen table, his monthly bills laid out, stretching what he earned to meet his obligations. He passed along his work ethic without ever preaching to me about it. I’ve wondered many times whether I would have crossed the picket line had he been alive. I doubt it. I also know it would have made leaving the Daily News for the Times—the paper he read for the one that nobody read—even harder than it was.
On the drive into the city from the Mullin home on Long Island, I entered Manhattan on the East Side, a few blocks from the News’s old headquarters on Forty-second Street between Second and Third avenues. I drove over and parked behind the building. I sat in the car for a good half hour, more uncertain than I’d ever been about my career, my purpose, my place. I got out, walked to a street phone, and, like an addict dialing his sponsor, called Michelle to tell her that I was outside the Daily News and was considering going back in, hoping I could reclaim my job.
“Oh?” she said.
I told her about the interview with Mullin, the shared recollections of our fathers, the temptation I felt in my gut to hold on to the job that I’d spent the previous five months fighting for.
“For you or for your father?” she said. “Because if it’s for him, how do you know that’s what he would have wanted?”
“You remember what he said about the Times, don’t you?”
“I do,” she said. “But he didn’t really read the stories in the Post or the News either. He bought them and saved them to show you that he cared.”
I didn’t have to ask Michelle for her opinion on which newspaper she thought I belonged at. I already knew. The sports-heavy tabloids could never have the heft of the Times, which she devoured front to back and considered the apex of journalism.
“You sound like you need permission from someone to do this,” she said.
“Maybe I do,” I said.
“Then go take it and don’t look back,” she said. “It’s your life, not your father’s. And if you think he wouldn’t buy the Times and also cut out everything you write there, then you didn’t know him very well.”
I thanked her for hearing me out. In tears, but emboldened with newfound clarity, I walked back to the car and drove across town to the Times building on the West Side. As Michelle had insisted, I didn’t look back.
Seven The New Good Old Days
Hands down, the most insufferable Knicks fans are those who lived through the glory of the early seventies, who worshipped the legendary teams colloquially known as the “Old Knicks.” Their fans—and count me among them—are forever lecturing their titleless descendants on the joys of authentic drama (Willis Reed limping out for Game 7 of the 1970 Finals) and real basketball (the selfless, find-the-open-man style of that two-title era).
For that aging crowd, even mentioning any contemporary Knicks team in the same breath as their Red Holzman–coached heroes is tantamount to comparing today’s cable news pontificators to Walter Cronkite. Younger fans, deprived of championship parades, have had to settle for the brief period in which Bernard King was a sensation, the noble but ringless nineties, and, in the case of youngest and most deprived, the near destitution of the twenty-first century.
Michelle and I were part of a small faction that occupied the space between: We were fortunate to remember the title-winning teams of the seventies, but given how far away those true glory days felt, the nineties took on the status of the new good old days, a time in recent history that we felt we’d properly lived through and could feel proud of as fans and respectful of as journalists. Michelle had been a preoccupied mother of five and thus only a casual fan when the Knicks twice within four seasons overcame Jerry West, Wilt Chamberlain, and the Lakers to capture the franchise’s first titles. But she had become a courtside fanatic by the time the nineties Knicks, under the coaching tutelage of Pat Riley and later Jeff Van Gundy, twice electrified the city with runs to the Finals. I was a high school– and college-age diehard when Reed was the team’s heart and soul and Walt Frazier the king of cool. But I was an established insider just hitting the peak of my sports journalism career when Riley, Patrick Ewing, and company lugged the Knicks back onto center stage as a worthy adversary of Michael Jordan and the Chicago Bulls.
The hiring of Riley is commonly recalled as the birth of a sustained Knicks revival. But it was actually an intervention by David Stern, reflecting his backroom determination to resurrect the media-rich New York market, that pointed the Knicks in a new direction. Stern targeted the fractious front office, advocating for thirty-five-year-old Dave Checketts, who had broken into the league in the NBA’s executive office and later with the Utah Jazz, to replace Al Bianchi as the Knicks’ general manager. Blond, blue-eyed, and evincing a virtuous rectitude based on his Mormon faith, Checketts was a paradoxical personality for New York City. He nonetheless became the polished executive the franchise never had, luring Riley back into coaching after an unhappy year as a network television analyst and dragging a historically
