ARE YOU SURE?
I was more than sure. I was thrilled. And nobody had ever had to twist my arm to go to a game and sit in a courtside seat.
• • • • •
We pulled out of her driveway, cruised through the streets of downtown Stamford and onto Interstate 95—as usual, slowed to a truck-infested crawl.
“I have to tell you, this is so exciting for me . . . because my life has become so fucking narrow,” Michelle said as a sixty-minute ride into the city stretched in traffic to ninety.
I stole a glance at her—dress stylishly casual, hair meticulously done, makeup carefully applied. Still elegant. But noticeably struggling with her new terms of engagement. A proud woman well known to her friends for refusing to stay in her lane, becoming more and more dependent on the kindness of others.
Finally reaching Midtown, we turned onto Thirty-fourth Street and pulled into her regular indoor garage. Michelle exited the car as the elderly often do, in slow-motion stages. The parking attendant greeted her with a hug before steering my car into an easy-access spot obviously reserved for a VIP—who clearly wasn’t me.
At the cashier’s window, the face of the woman who took my payment lit up when she noticed who was beside me.
“Michelle!” she said. “So good to see you.”
I could see that Michelle was pleased by the attention, especially with me as a witness. But it was nothing I hadn’t seen before. Everyone in or around the Garden seemed to know her.
We proceeded into the arena and up to the glass-enclosed Delta Sky360 Club, a posh mélange of food and drink stations for owners of the priciest season tickets. When the club originally opened following a renovation of the self-proclaimed World’s Most Famous Arena, I wrote a column about the dilemmas for longtime Knicks courtside ticket holders created by the exorbitant price markups. Michelle already had struck her arrangement with Plaut, but some of her oldest Garden friends had left, and others, in seats farther from the court, no longer had access to the same club. Michelle was more than annoyed. She was offended. “They’ve segregated the damn sections,” she complained, not relishing being in a first-class cabin that was off-limits to those in coach.
Once-unimaginable price escalation was destroying what had been a sense of family and community. She could at a moment’s notice drop a half dozen names of the dearly departed. More and more in recent years, there were nights when Michelle had felt practically anachronistic, a distant alumnus returning for a homecoming game.
Inside the club, she looked around and saw only unfamiliar faces. She’d been hoping that Walt Frazier and a few of the other former players who often made the social rounds would come by. But no one so much as acknowledged her until a young woman named Dani Brand, the Garden’s consumer service representative for elite ticket holders (official title: premium experience specialist), came over to give her a hug.
“I feel a bit like a stranger in here now,” Michelle told her.
“No way—this is your second home,” Dani said. Not really, Michelle knew. Not so much anymore.
She had tried to be pragmatic and unemotional about the deal with Plaut. But surrendering her tickets had been an agonizing capitulation to age, a disengagement from the place that made her feel different, unique. She had dreaded the nights ahead at home, the television close-ups of the Knicks bench, wondering whose faces—if not Plaut’s—might peek through the gaps between the players and coaches, in her seats. She knew the partner he had taken on—a young entrepreneur named Noah Goodhart—and liked him very much. She still worried that her tickets would wind up being used as symbols of privilege more than passion, as business bargaining chips. “That’s driving me crazy,” she said.
This for years was a chronic Michelle complaint: fans who weren’t real fans, just those with the financial wherewithal and access, more into what the NBA branded its in-game experience than the actual game. To Michelle, these embellishments amounted to continuous noise that served as a wily NBA marketing scheme: a potent distraction from hearing oneself think about how much was being spent on those nights when the game was poorly played or hopelessly lopsided. Or—as was too often the case in recent years—when a superstar or two was conspicuously missing with a hastily contrived medical condition that amounted to a night off to rest. “The real fans,” she said, “don’t need to sit there and watch someone ride a unicycle balancing dishes on his head.”
The more expensive the tickets became, the more pretend fans there were, taking selfies, scoping out celebrities—some of whom were comped their seats for the very purpose of being eye candy. When someone at the Garden would point out a celebrity—an Ethan Hawke, a John Turturro, a Woody Allen—she had a standard reply: Big deal.
Who would come to a basketball game to watch other people watch the game?
• • • • •
Having finished our dinner in the club, we made our way out to the court, Michelle carefully navigating the narrow passageway between the team bench and the front row. I followed close behind and stopped when she paused to greet Jonathan Supranowitz, the Knicks’ director of public relations.
A Brooklyn boy, Supranowitz was the media director in an organization dominated—all but destroyed, as many Knicks fans would argue—by James Dolan, scion of the Cablevision family dynasty. The working conditions at the Garden under Dolan, who held the same regard for most newspaper reporters as does Donald Trump, had become, at best, barely tolerable. Some of the beat writers believed that Supranowitz relished enforcing Dolan’s Kremlinesque rules—ordering staff to restrict access to players while eavesdropping on whatever interviews were allowed, among other degradations.
Michelle was well aware of Dolan’s petty media feuds—his staff went so far as to
