It had taken all of four games in his first season at the Garden for both of us to see that the Knicks had tapped into something special. On the night of November 7, 1991, the world learned that Magic Johnson had tested positive for HIV and was retiring from the Lakers. I was driving into the city, heading to the Garden from my in-laws’ home in Greenwich, when I heard on the radio the crushing news out of Los Angeles. Upon arrival at the arena, the first order of business had to be Riley’s reaction.
In a gathering with reporters before the game against the Orlando Magic, he told us of a letter he had received from Johnson the previous day, presumably mailed before he had received the medical report. “Ironic, but he talked about the moments we had in the last ten years, and he wished me luck,” Riley said, holding back tears. But it was what he did soon after that stole the night, and the Garden’s heart. Before the opening tip, Riley summoned both teams to center court and took hold of a microphone to address the players and crowd together. He extoled Magic’s “tremendous courage,” his willingness to stand up that day at a news conference and “put his face right out front,” the rare celebrity to match it to a disease still largely in the shadows. Then he brought the roughly two dozen players together and led them in quiet prayer. I turned to make eye contact with Michelle, who was crying. We all were, I suppose, given the gravity of what then sounded like a death sentence. And because Riley’s grace and conviction made it difficult not to.
“You could see how devastated he was,” Michelle said, recalling that night as one of her most disturbing but memorable behind the Knicks bench. She spent more time that night watching Riley trying to get through the night than she paid attention to the game.
Riley watching was a spectator sport in its own right at the Garden—what he was wearing on the sideline, how he commanded it, how he molded the Knicks during the course of one season from a team without great resolve to one that played a cantankerously physical brand of ball. From Michelle’s privileged vantage point, even time-outs called by Riley were compelling, as she bragged in her 1992 holiday letter.
I am part of every team huddle. I pay more attention to Riley’s orders than Greg Anthony, who watches the dancing girls, and Patrick Ewing, who watches the TV monitors, and John Starks, who is circling Mars. I know who broke the play and who is in the doghouse. I recognize every play called and am prepared to execute it should Riley call my number!
With Riley driving them, the Knicks won fifty-one games in the 1991–92 season and defeated Isiah Thomas and the two-time-champion Detroit Pistons in the first round of the playoffs. Then they took on Jordan and the Bulls, who were defending their first title. They went into Chicago and won Game 1 behind Ewing’s breakout performance. The series, suddenly competitive, turned into a nasty war of attrition and will. There was little the Knicks or anyone could do about Jordan, but Riley, like other coaches, believed the way to beat the Bulls was to bully their second-most-important player, Scottie Pippen. All series long, the Knicks’ bruising forwards—Charles Oakley, Xavier McDaniel, and Anthony Mason—muscled and manhandled Pippen until John Starks, their talented but impulsive guard, took the strategy to extremes, slamming Pippen to the floor on a fast break during a heated Game 6 at the Garden.
By a quirk of logistical fate, my press row seat that night was on the far side from the Knicks bench, providing a nearly unobstructed view into the Bulls’ huddle. After Starks’s flagrant foul, Pippen staggered to the bench, blood oozing from his nose. He was trailed by Jordan, who literally shoved Phil Jackson, their coach, aside and thrust a finger in Pippen’s face.
“Next time you touch the ball, you drive it down their fucking throats or you’ll answer to me,” Jordan told his dazed teammate, with a controlled rage I had never seen. It was that kind of courtside access that made the NBA—in those days, at least—all the more compelling for reporters and readers, and unlike any other team sport.
Back in Chicago for Game 7, the Bulls pulled out the series but the Knicks had left an impression: This was no fluke. That’s what Riley promised, and no one in New York was inclined to doubt him. Certainly not Michelle, who would send her season-ticket renewal package back with a check as soon as she received it, before the Knicks could change their mind and offer her location to someone else.
Beyond the sadness and fear on the night Riley and the Knicks prayed for Magic Johnson earlier that season was the eventual realization that the shocking announcement was also a measure of the NBA’s ascendance. Almost a year before the Dream Team would become a global marketing sensation, Magic’s retirement was worldwide news. The NBA mattered as never before, thanks to its telegenic stars and the shoe companies helping to elevate them to full-blown celebrity status—led by Nike, which had made Jordan the face of its burgeoning empire. In New York, the Knicks mattered because Riley, their leader, had fit them with an instant identity, one that belied his corporate look and mirrored the schoolyard jock he had been while growing up in a working-class family in Rome, New York.
These Knicks, aching to take Jordan down a peg or two, were going to be heard from again. Riley would have it no other way. Seven years after the Ewing draft lottery, Michelle believed the hottest show in town had finished its previews and was ready for a long, rewarding run. Having missed out on the championship years, with
