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Journalists root, too. Not in the tribal way that fans do, with unconditional allegiance to the cause or team colors. Sometimes it is the opposite, secretly and selfishly wishing a local team to fail early in the playoffs to lessen the workload. In 1985, for instance, I rooted for the Lakers-Celtics Finals to end quickly so I could get home and prepare for my wedding. In the 1993 Finals, Chicago’s John Paxson hit a three-point shot to spare the Bulls a seventh game in Phoenix, also sparing Beth, who was eight months pregnant, having to close on the sale of a Brooklyn Heights co-op and the purchase of a home in Montclair, New Jersey, and move all on the same day by herself.
More often, we pull for the best story on any given day or over the course of a season. For a team’s resurrection or redemption. For the unexpected rise or, yes, spectacular collapse. When the home team is the one making big news, the local buzz is louder. Newspaper readership is larger. Our relevance feels greater.
As a young clerk at the New York Post, I worked night shifts with Vic Ziegel—one of my favorite reads during my late teen and early adult years—who was helping out with editing on the night desk. This was at the sunset of Muhammad Ali’s storied career and after Ziegel had been the Post’s star correspondent, trailing after him to Africa, the Philippines, and other distant ports during the height of his fame as the self-proclaimed greatest and an anti-war activist. The stories Ziegel passed down to me and the younger generational wannabes those nights were priceless. They made sportswriting sound so exotic, and so consequential, that for the first time in my budding career I was consumed with succeeding at it.
The dawn of the Riley era, starting with the night he led an arena in prayer for Magic Johnson, felt like the beginning of something special in New York. In retrospect, Riley could not have arrived at a more propitious time for me. My hiring at the Times had been set to the rollout of a planned expansion of the newspaper’s sports pages. Long a stepchild section, situated at the rear of Business or Metro, Sports was getting a makeover, its own daily pullout.
In the tabloid world, sports sell papers, which meant it was always essential to have comprehensive coverage of nighttime events in the morning editions. In order to survive, we had to be fast and meet brutal deadlines. The Times, conversely, had traditionally run on less-urgent sports-production cycles, given its obvious priorities of covering Washington and the world. But in the early nineties, Newsday, a literate tabloid with bountiful Los Angeles Times revenues behind it, was pushing into the city from its home base on Long Island. The Times perceived it as a threat, and responded by devoting increased resources to New York City news and sports. Neil Amdur, the sports editor, was given a mandate to quicken the pulse of the report, to compete harder with the tabloids on the New York pro beats. The simultaneous hiring of Filip Bondy and me from the Daily News seemed to be a statement of that intention to compete. How lucky for me that the expanded section I was newly working for was now, like our local competitors, seeking a sexy New York story to ride. It turned out to be the Knicks, and the sport I was putatively hired to cover.
In New York, the Yankees were in a down cycle. The Mets were a faded National League power of the eighties. The NFL’s Giants were in a post–Bill Parcells depression and the Jets were, as usual, no sight for sore eyes. Hockey was never a game for the masses. That left Riley’s upstart Knicks in particular and the NBA in general, both rapidly on the rise—not only locally, but globally.
Not long after the 1992 playoffs ended with the Bulls winning their second straight title, I embarked on a summer journey to chronicle the fortunes of the Olympic Dream Team. It was a tough life I led—a week in San Diego for the team’s training camp; another week in Portland, Oregon, for the Americas Olympic qualifying tournament; a few days of final preparation before the Summer Games, dictating stories to the office from the rooftop pool of a Monte Carlo hotel overlooking the Mediterranean Sea; and on to Barcelona, where track stars, gymnasts, and swimmers—normally the marquee attractions of the Summer Olympics—genuflected in the presence of Magic, Larry, and Michael.
As groundbreaking a concept as the Dream Team was—American corporate warriors invading the loosely defined amateur domain—I was more fascinated by the narratives of their overmatched competition, especially those remapped countries in a fast-changing geopolitical landscape. In the wake of the ongoing dissolution of the Soviet Union and the Yugoslavian Communist strangleholds on neighboring lands, the theme of nationalistic pride was rampant at the basketball venue. Halfway through the tournament, I learned of two players from Latvia who had joined what was called the Unified Team, a hastily arranged and officially flagless team for players who had been part of the Soviet sports machine. In Latvia—which, unlike the former Soviet satellite and basketball-rich Lithuania, hadn’t qualified for the Olympics—the two players were denounced as traitors for teaming with a group that reflected their longtime Russian occupiers. The debate over whether athletes with finite time to compete in an Olympics should concern themselves with politics was ideal for the Times’s sports sensibilities. The story made the paper’s front page—and was the first thing out of Michelle’s mouth when I returned home and checked in. “I called everyone and said, ‘Harvey’s on the front page of the Times!’” she said. She also rushed out to a news vendor in Stamford, snapped up a bunch of copies, and mailed them around.
For someone fully entrenched in
