Riley wasn’t Checketts’s only import with Los Angeles roots. As the 1991–92 season approached—my first at the Times—he announced the formation of the Knicks City Dancers, embracing the leggy pageantry conceptualized by Jerry Buss, the Lakers’ playboy owner, with the Laker Girls at the dawn of the Magic Johnson/Showtime era in 1979. The prospect of dancers at the hallowed Madison Square Garden drew the immediate ire of at least one courtside traditionalist, who complained that time-outs and halftime “are for schmoozing” and took the opportunity to voice her sincere objections by mail to Checketts, copying me:
Dear David Checketts:
When you reach the bottom of this letter, there will be a woman’s signature there. DO NOT ASSUME that this has anything to do with a women’s issue.
This is a basketball issue. This is New York City. We know the game. We love the game. We go to the Garden to see THE GAME.
DANCING GIRLS?????
Tell me it isn’t true. Not here, no way, no time, never, never, never.
Put them in the Paramount with Barry Manilow, that’s where they belong.
Sincerely,
Michelle Musler, Sept. 19, 1991.
I immediately put the letter to good use, reprinting it in a column in which I fully agreed with Michelle while introducing her to my new Times readers. Checketts took note of it. When training camp commenced, while making his introductory rounds with the writers, he turned to me and asked, “This Michelle Musler—is she someone I need to know?”
Yes, I told him. Because she was as authentic and loyal a fan as he was going to find. Because she was an incorrigible letter writer on multiple matters—she once chastised the broadcaster Dick Schaap on the lack of racial diversity on his Sunday morning ESPN panel discussion show, The Sports Reporters. Checketts was likely to hear from her again, and again, and she also was certain to copy at least one member of the media on every letter she wrote. But at least on the subject of the City Dancers, her letter didn’t deter Checketts because, well, no one else seemed to mind them too much. There certainly was no backlash from our newspaper pals, who had apparently been enjoying the eye candy at the Great Western Forum in Los Angeles and in other league venues going for glitz. In so many words, they told me I was nuts.
The reality was that professional basketball of the nineties was almost unrecognizable from its origins, the days of burly white men pounding on one another inside smoky gyms in forbidding winter outposts like Fort Wayne, Indiana, and Rochester, New York. In the eighties, Julius Erving, Larry Bird, and Magic Johnson had comprised the inaugural generation of genuine star power in the NBA. In the later eighties and nineties, Air Jordan would take the game’s promotional potential to soaring heights. There was no turning back the clock, no resetting the blurring lines between entertainment and sports. In New York, no one embodied this profound cultural shift more than Pat Riley. Checketts was an effective corporate front man, but Riley was—night in, night out—a star on the coaching front line, for all to behold.
He arrived in town with the coaching imprimatur of a champion four times over, a luminary right out of Hollywood casting. The stylized aura he created with the Lakers was mimicked in popular film, his slicked-back hair and aspirational certitude a harbinger of the fictitious Gordon Gekko from the 1987 blockbuster film Wall Street. Gekko’s insatiable appetite for earning had nothing on the competitive ambitions of Riley, whose star was destined to shine even brighter in New York, where the Knicks had no Magic personality—only Patrick Ewing and his aversion to attention.
Riley’s primary appeal was his aloof, serious style. He didn’t even have to try very hard to attract the spotlight. Like Ewing, he was all business, not one to mingle with fans like Michelle. Over the four years Riley coached in New York, she could recall just two interactions. One game night, Ernestine Miller happened to notice a widening split on a back seam of Riley’s sports jacket. But what to do? Riley was not readily approachable, and certainly not in the middle of a game. As he turned to walk off at halftime, the good women behind the iconic, GQ-cool coach waved to get his attention and told him that he’d probably want to know that his jacket was unraveling. He nodded coolly, returned for the second half wearing a different one, and thanked them. “That was probably the friendliest he ever was,” Michelle said.
Not long after, at a promotional event at the NBA store, she encountered Riley and reminded him that she had been one of the sports jacket whisperers the night his seam split. He acknowledged her, but left it at that, as if the wardrobe malfunction needed to remain their little secret.
By then, Riley was above it all, virtual basketball royalty. On occasion, he dropped his guard exactly enough to allow us a glimpse beyond the pose to see just how big a celebrity he was. One night after a game, I wandered with a few colleagues into Elaine’s, the Upper East Side hangout that attracted an eclectic mix of entertainers and journalists. By chance, we landed at a table next to Riley’s; he was having a late meal with his wife, Chris, and the movie star couple Alec Baldwin and Kim Basinger. At one point, Riley surprised and flattered me, wisecracking to his actor friends, deliberately loud enough for me to hear, “Careful what you say, the New York Times is right behind you.” That led to a brief introduction, which enabled me to shamelessly inform my wife the next morning that Basinger had blessed me with a smile.
Michelle, for her part, prided herself on trying not to be overly impressed by fame—but there were exceptions. Riley was one. Even she couldn’t resist the persona he had so carefully cultivated. “He was just so beautiful to look at,” she said, amazed
