She was right, of course. The Times column represented much more than a collection of results, a tabulation of winners and losers. This was where readers—and in this newspaper’s case, the highest brows of sports-minded readers—went for informed clarity on the issues. It was one thing to break down the game, profile players on the NBA beat. But the blue-collar kid and college transient in me wasn’t quite ready to believe that I could play to this upscale crowd.
“Did you ever think they want you because you do sound different than the people they’ve had?” Michelle said. This was vintage Michelle, my loyal and brutally honest human resource, who recognized the prestige of the Sports of the Times column, who knew it was a destination position—not to mention the home of her favorite sports columnist, George Vecsey. The others were Dave Anderson, a dean of American sports journalism, and Ira Berkow, a renowned storyteller.
How, Michelle wondered, could I possibly pass up an opportunity to join such an esteemed rotation? If I allowed fear to dictate my decision, I would regret it for the rest of my life. “That’s a long time—hopefully,” I joked. I told her that I would probably take the job but reserved the right to blame her if I was miserable doing it. Fine, she said, if that’s what it’d take.
Over the next fifteen years, there were more than a few days when I cringed while trudging into football locker rooms filled with hulking gladiators, endured the Steinbrenner circus under the Yankee Stadium big tent, and furiously wrestled with the social and cultural issues that spilled from real life onto the sports pages. It wasn’t always a treat waking up to a flood of nasty email responses from readers, or knee-jerk tweets from socially or politically offended readers in a deeply coarsening culture.
Writing the column was also a job that could be maddeningly all-consuming and life disrupting—inviting disapproving looks from Beth when she and the boys talked to a man whose mind had wandered off to the next column on the work schedule. But regret? Never. The work was challenging, growth inducing, deeply rewarding. Each column had the potential to be an empowering process of self-actualization: I wrote it, I believe it, I stand by it. My fifteen years of sharing the Sports of the Times space with Vecsey, Anderson, Berkow, and later Selena Roberts and William C. Rhoden would be the proudest of my journalism career. As she did when I wavered in my decisions to leave the Post and the Daily News, Michelle had put her own basketball rooting and reading preferences aside and helped steer me right again.
Eight Winning and Misery
Michelle didn’t watch live games the way other fans did. While friends like Ernestine Miller and Drucie De Vries whooped it up in triumphant Knicks moments—such as they were—with all their courtside neighbors, Michelle sat calmly, stoically, barely shifting in her seat. She never yelled at the refs or the opposing players. She didn’t erupt with joy when the Knicks pulled out a close one. The occasional section resident would sidle up to Miller and ask why Michelle was so muted. “She’s an observer of the game—she shows interest in her own way,” Miller would tell them, herself guessing.
But while she never would change her game demeanor, the 1992–93 season, and specifically the playoffs, provided plenty of opportunity for high drama. Until the night of Game 2 of the Eastern Conference Finals, or actually through that night, all had been proceeding on championship schedule for Pat Riley and his marauding Knicks. They rose to the top of the conference, winning sixty regular-season games, second-best in the league and three more than the Michael Jordan–led Bulls. To further whet their fans’ appetite for the playoffs, they took three of four of their head-to-head meetings. They marched through the first two rounds, setting up another showdown with the two-time defending champions in the Eastern Conference Finals. Only this time, the Knicks had home-court advantage, which meant that a seventh game, if necessary, would be played in New York.
“I keep pinching myself,” Michelle told me again and again—it was her standard line when the promise of Knicks greatness peeked through the perpetual cloud cover—as that season progressed. It was no dream, though it felt like the continuation of Riley’s fantasy life with all of New York along for the ride. These brawny, emboldened Knicks looked formidable holding serve against the Bulls in Game 1 at the Garden. In Game 2, John Starks, a onetime minimum-wage supermarket stock boy, went airborne and dunked like Mike, famously posterizing Jordan and his teammate, Horace Grant, and icing the game for a 2–0 series lead. The Garden joyously erupted. The Bulls looked vulnerable. Better yet, Jordan looked mortal. We soon had answers—or at least educated guesses—as to why.
At halftime of that game, Dave Anderson, my fellow Times columnist, strolled my way with a tip: Throughout the first half, he had been listening to a fan behind his seat along the baseline hector Jordan about being in Atlantic City early that morning. This was not exactly shocking information—Jordan’s gambling excesses, occasionally with characters of questionable repute, were already a media preoccupation, a cloud hanging over him and the league. But Anderson and I agreed: If he had actually been out in the wee hours on the morning of a playoff game, that was a story we needed to pursue because it spoke to
