From Michelle’s vantage point, I had achieved journalism nirvana, but her enthusiasm was less of the gee-whiz variety, more atta-boy cheerleading combined with a career coach’s satisfaction of seeing her protégé stretch his limits. I, of course, craved such approval, the affirmation I could not get from my family—not because they didn’t care, but because they all lived in a world where nobody reads that paper.
If any one story turned out to be most worthy of retelling, of sharing with the next generation à la Vic Ziegel, it was my summer with the Dream Team, with an addendum that helped produce a stunning residual career benefit. It occurred a couple of months after returning from Spain, when I walked into the visitors’ locker room at Madison Square Garden before a preseason game between the Knicks and the Utah Jazz and there, alone, sat a shirtless Karl Malone, the All-Star power forward and Dream Team member. I am certain that he did not remember my name, but he surely recognized me as one of the handful of reporters who had been embedded with the greatest team ever assembled in any sport.
I sat down alongside him and said that I, like every other NBA league reporter, was working on a welcome-back Magic Johnson story. (Magic, after enjoying the Olympics so much and having experienced no ill effects to his body, had come home and promptly unretired.) Malone stopped me before I could ask a question. “Look at this, scabs and cuts all over me,” he said, pressing a finger to a small pinkish hole on his thigh that was developing into a scab. “I get these things every night, every game. They can’t tell you that you’re not at risk, and you can’t tell me there’s one guy in the NBA who hasn’t thought about it.”
Before the Olympics, there had been some apprehension expressed about competing against Magic, though nothing that lingered. But that was prior to a tournament that no one believed would be much more than a Dream Team promotional showcase, nothing like NBA nightly combat. Malone wasn’t finished, far from it. “Just because he came back doesn’t mean nothing to me,” he said. “I’m no fan, no cheerleader. It may be good for basketball, but you have to look far beyond that. You have a lot of young men who have a long life ahead of them. The Dream Team was a concept everybody loved. But now we’re back to reality.”
By interview’s end, I realized that I had stumbled upon a rare NBA player who was willing to go against the tide of love for Magic and air feelings and fears that others were afraid to admit. My story ran the following Sunday in the Times, with several other players and executives—a few anonymously—squeamishly supporting Malone’s contention that many players and their families were worried about exposure to HIV-contaminated blood. Magic aborted his comeback the very next day, with my story widely cited around the country and presumably the world.
Reporting and writing that story was challenging and not much fun. For his unflinching honesty, Malone became the face of the unenlightened when he was far from alone at a time when HIV education was not widespread. And Magic was an extraordinarily popular athlete, the gold standard for reporters, who seldom left a session with a notebook unfilled. He was a player I couldn’t help but root for. I was conflicted about the story’s impact, but back at the Times, where my personal feelings were irrelevant, the chain of events caught the attention of the paper’s masthead editors—not a bad thing when the sports pages were suddenly more of a priority. Within a year I found myself nominated for a Pulitzer Prize for a wide range of basketball coverage—from a series on a troubled high school team in Brooklyn to the announcement of Jordan’s so-called sabbatical from the Chicago Bulls. The same week that Jordan took leave of the Bulls on the eve of the 1993–94 season training camp, I was summoned to the office by Amdur, the sports editor, and offered a chance to write a general sports column. I hadn’t yet been at the Times—an institution where dues paying was legendary—for three years, and I was being asked to join the Sports of the Times rotation.
The column held a vaunted place at the Times and in a media landscape very different from today’s. No newspaper was yet online. The popular opinion shows on ESPN—Pardon the Interruption, Around the Horn—were yet to appear. Even twenty-four-hour sports talk radio was only a developing concept. Opinion—and especially informed opinion—was not readily accessible. Terrific sports columnists were churning out multiple pieces a week at dailies large and small across the country. But only the Times had measurable reach outside its own local market. The case could be made that a Sports of the Times column was the industry apex.
It was also, I suppose, why I told Amdur that I needed time to think about the offer and spent the next few days trying to talk myself out of it while wrestling with my father’s old refrain: What do you need it for? I already had a highly visible gig—a legitimate comfort zone—covering the NBA. I figured Michelle, who had no use for
