Play resumed. The ball went to Ewing, who spun into the lane and dropped in a shot to save the Knicks—though only for a few more days before a heartbreaking defeat in Game 7 that ended with Ewing misfiring pretty much the same shot in the exact same place. But before his Game 5 basket prolonged the series, in the year of the twenty-fifth anniversary of the franchise’s first championship, it also occurred to me that the Garden fans had come to the realization that Riley’s title-less team had carved its own indelible identity, staked out its own sacred space. It had, in effect, come around to Michelle’s way of thinking after the “misery” of falling short in Houston. For those too young to remember the days of Reed and Frazier and Monroe, these would ultimately be remembered as a special time in their own right. Thus, my column continued:
Riley has said there are only two possible endings to a season, “winning and misery.” If he honestly believes that, that’s his problem. The notion that a Knicks defeat tomorrow night in Indianapolis renders the last four seasons meaningless is absurd, the ranting of sports talk radio.
Of course, the genesis of that night’s column—renouncing Riley’s rhetoric—had occurred a year earlier over that late-night drink at the Houston hotel bar. With many personal triumphs and challenges ahead, I had a long way to go before I could embrace Michelle’s more dispassionate and contextualized approach to life. But she was making her unmistakable mark on me. She was more than a column collaborator. She was, in many ways, its conscience.
Nine Dolan and the Death of Hope
To say that Michelle could hold her own when matched in the corporate arena with powerful men was an understatement. She had her own thriving business to prove it. By her midsixties she had conducted countless management seminars and had become a flourishing outsourced fixer, empowered by major companies to chasten and reorient the power brokers who, for any number of reasons, had created toxic work environments.
It wasn’t surprising, or uncommon, that some of these men responded to her workplace inquisitions and analyses with deflection, denial, or outright indignation. But by this point of her life, Michelle’s skin was toughened by personal and professional experience. Absorbing the hostility was just part of her deal, the challenge of convincing Mr. Corporate America that she—a woman with clout—was actually trying to help him.
She thought she had seen and heard it all—until James Dolan was elevated to the chairmanship of Madison Square Garden around the turn of the century and became the operating controller of her beloved Knicks. Over the next two decades, this scion of the Cablevision television empire would become the most confounding organizational strongman she had ever laid eyes on, one seemingly bent on defeating himself.
In his younger days, Dolan, a singer and guitar player, had pursued a career in music without much success before going into the family business. Handed the reins to the Garden by his father, Charles, he took his place among other alpha-male sports owners in New York—except he wasn’t bombastically entertaining like the Yankees’ George Steinbrenner or buttoned-down collegial like the Giants’ John Mara. As a public figure, Dolan was a virtual nonentity. He shunned the media. He seemed to want nothing to do with the fan bases of the Knicks and the Garden’s co-tenant, the Rangers hockey team. On nights when he showed up to watch his Knicks, he interacted with almost no one, including even his small circle of sycophants.
Dolan’s seat in the renovated Garden—front row, baseline—was a long bounce pass from Michelle’s, providing her an angled window into his courtside lair, where he typically was flanked by company aides or a freeloading friend. She inevitably would fix her gaze upon him, try to apply corporate and common sense to an uncommonly dour man. Why won’t he put on a happier face? she wondered. Why did he slump in his seat, arms folded across his chest, like some bored, petulant child? He surely had the worst public posture she had ever seen from a corporate executive.
“Anybody would look at him and come to the conclusion that he just didn’t give a shit,” she said.
Deciphering Dolan quickly became a required but formidable exercise for the city’s basketball media and fans. For Michelle—who, after all, was trained for the job—going to a game and watching Dolan in action was not all that unlike a day at the office. She would sometimes ask herself what conclusions she might have drawn had she been assigned to “fix” one of the most disliked owners in the history of New York sports. But in a brochure for the consulting company she launched in 1986—the Training Advantage, LTD—and long before she had ever heard of Dolan, she had happened to author an effective primer for the problems he eventually would pose for the Knicks:
Stars: Every organization has them. They’re financial whizzes. Technical geniuses. Sales powerhouses. Market wizards. They’re also tireless, indispensable and—unfortunately—occasionally intolerable.
They don’t listen; they dominate. They don’t reason; they rage. They don’t build up; they tear down. Their intellectual abilities have gotten them—and your organization—quite far. But without change of some kind, stars like these don’t merely shine. They burn. Their caustic behavior damages working relationships, harming others as well as themselves.
To be clear, few, if any, people thought of Dolan as a “financial whiz” or “technical genius.” A better argument could be made that the majority of the success enjoyed by the Garden as an entertainment center was based on location, in the heart of Manhattan. Also not to be overlooked was the almost $50
