Jordan’s heckler laughed when I made my way over and introduced myself—as if to say, What took you so long?—and proceeded to tell me that he had been in the casino at Bally’s Grand Hotel in the early morning hours and had seen Jordan up close and personal. Anderson, a longtime boxing insider who knew his way around Atlantic City casinos, had sources who could confirm the fan’s report—and more.
Anderson’s column on the morning of May 27 was titled “Jordan’s Atlantic City Caper,” reporting that Jordan had been in the casino as late as two thirty a.m. and had dropped five thousand dollars playing blackjack in a private room. That was lunch money for him—but not the point. Anderson noted that while Jordan scored thirty-six points in Game 2, only eleven were in the second half. He questioned the sport’s preeminent star’s “devotion to duty.” An accompanying story with my byline—headlined “Bulls Seem to Be Playing Without a Full Deck”—mocked Jordan’s card-playing predilection. I quoted Jerry Krause, the Bulls’ general manager, who said, “I can’t believe Michael would do something like that,” but my story also reported that radio stations in Atlantic City and Philadelphia had received calls from additional casino eyewitnesses.
As the series shifted to Chicago, the Times coverage was picked up nationwide. A furious Jordan launched a boycott of all media. Back in Stamford, meanwhile, Michelle was convinced that Anderson and I had reset the series’ competitive karma. “What the hell have you guys done?” she barked.
And she was right. Michelle had good reason to believe that we had poked the wrong bear and doomed the Knicks: Thanks to her work with high-level executives, she was familiar with the alpha-male ego, the leveraged power broker with an inflated sense of competitive entitlement. Jordan, in a nutshell. He weaponized his perceived media persecution against the Knicks and led the Bulls to two series-tying wins. Meanwhile, the Times, Anderson, and I were taking a verbal lashing on New York’s sports talk radio station—which Michelle listened to religiously in her car and in her kitchen. “If I didn’t love you, Harvey, I’d want to kill you,” she said when I paid her a visit at her seat before Game 5 tipped off back at the Garden.
But in an industry with an ever-evolving narrative in conjunction with the almighty short attention span, there was always another day, another game, the next winner to extol—and, in this case, loser to deride. In what now was a best-of-three series, Anderson and I would not remain the most hated men in town for much longer.
• • • • •
Fast-forward roughly a quarter century—Michelle relaxing in the Garden’s Delta Sky360 Club, where she was de facto royalty; on game nights two seats at the bar were unofficially but routinely reserved for her and whoever happened to be using her second ticket. On this night, it was Gary Shillet, her colleague from the School of Visual Arts. Shillet, the school’s chief financial officer, was enjoying a light dinner and drinks with Michelle when she noticed a familiarly tall, slender man striding their way. Without pause, she turned to Shillet and lowered her voice.
“Charles Smith is coming over to say hello,” she told him. “He’s a friend of mine—so don’t you dare say anything about those missed layups!”
Like any adult Knicks fan who hadn’t gone to sleep for twenty years just before the night of June 2, 1993, Shillet well remembered the “layups” that were actually recorded as three blocked shots and one strip of the ball—aborted attempts destined to live forever in Knicks lore for all the wrong reasons. They comprised the sad conclusion to Game 5 of the 1993 Eastern Conference Finals, often referred to as just that—Game 5. More cruelly, it was also sometimes remembered as the Charles Smith Game.
Michelle was proud and protective of her relationships with Smith, Walt Frazier, and other former Knicks who made the club rounds but on occasion hunkered down to chat or dine with her. She felt compelled to warn Shillet, among other companions, because experience had shown her that many fans—desensitized by a little booze or a belief that highly compensated professional athletes were not necessarily deserving of common courtesy—couldn’t help themselves. Especially in the case of Smith.
It wasn’t necessarily the regulars, those accustomed to seeing Smith around. It was more the Wall Street brokers who’d get their company tickets and club privileges once or twice a year and hit the complimentary bar hard. Oh, there’s Charles Smith, let’s go over and give him shit. Michelle hated these intrusions and was determined to make sure it wouldn’t happen with anyone in her company. Astonishing to me was her ability, even in what she presumed to be the earliest stages of the dreaded dementia, to correctly recall the exact number—fifteen—of free throws the Knicks had missed in the pivotal Game 5, leading to a Game 6 elimination in Chicago. She had long reached the conclusion that the defeat had been, above all, a collective act of self-sabotage. A quarter century later, during one of our 2017–18 season dinners, she would preach to me—by then the choir—that Smith had been a convenient scapegoat, a face to plaster onto collaborative failure. Emboldened by a glass or two of red wine, she grew more intense, even indignant, on the subject of Game 5 and its ongoing aftermath.
“It was the free throws they missed,” she said.
Pause.
“And of course you and Dave Anderson had to piss off Michael in the first place.”
I laughed, happy to see that her memory—at least on Knicks matters of the highest import—was just fine.
• • • • •
All was not lost—at least not all championship hope—after Riley’s Knicks failed to reach the NBA Finals in 1993. Just when it appeared that they would never be able to get past the Bulls as long as Jordan was around, he did them an astonishing favor by not being around.
Weeks before the 1993–94 season tipped off, he took what turned out to
