It was no place for an earnest, honest public relations person. Lori Hamamoto moved on from her coveted PR director’s job, another Michelle favorite gone. Other Garden employees she knew who stayed suddenly began excusing themselves after a greeting. Reports of more-hostile media policies soon surfaced. Michelle could almost smell the fear inside the arena, a familiar sign of corporate disorder. When the good people left, something had to be wrong at the top.
Many times, she had walked into a large company setting operating in such a poisonous climate, having been hired to trace its origins. Treated with suspicion at best and outright contempt at worst, she would conduct her introductory interview with the person on the hot seat before requesting permission to speak with members of the staff. The process demanded Michelle’s gaining the confidence of the employees in order to present a thorough report that would convince the executive to take a long hard look in the mirror.
Dolan, no doubt, would have been a unique challenge. He didn’t seem to listen to anyone. Colleagues at the Garden had tried to warn him against letting the Thomas–Browne Sanders case go to trial, to no avail. There was little doubt in Michelle’s mind how Dolan would have reacted to someone like her. Nor did she have to stretch her imagination to build a picture of what it was like to work for Dolan, or what his employees would have confided to her if offered anonymity.
But her experience had also told her to view any executive she worked with as complex, not incorrigible. She recognized that there was some kind of positive side to Dolan, expressed via philanthropic interests, especially through a foundation he had established to fight against pancreatic cancer, which had taken the life of a longtime Dolan family ally. He was said to be deeply loyal to some employees. Michelle also believed that his efforts to get and remain sober spoke of an inner strength and possible determination to be a responsible father.
As a student of not only the game but also the business of basketball, though, Michelle was inclined to look around the league at other owners—and found hers wanting. No one could ignore Dallas’s Mark Cuban, to name one example. While Michelle found Cuban’s insatiable hunger for attention to be obnoxious at times, his demonstrative fanboy enthusiasm for his team had clearly created a positive environment for players and coaches.
While Cuban thrived on being out front, eager to engage players, fans, and reporters, Dolan was woefully miscast for an owner’s social and public obligations. Cuban was a self-made man. Born on third base, Dolan struck Michelle as “probably an angry kid who didn’t have much self-esteem, who really wanted to rebel with his music, tell the world that he was pissed off with everything—his father, the pressure to be successful, all of it.”
Yet the body language of Dolan the musician intrigued her. He looked different when she watched video clips of him onstage with his band, JD and the Straight Shot, his vibe antithetical to the gloomy, defiant demeanor in his courtside seat. Dolan’s day job came with expectations related to his father and his standing in the family. Rocking a fedora, behind a guitar, he looked more comfortable playing with the band than he appeared in the owner’s seat—more alive, at peace with the world and himself.
“He may own the Knicks but doesn’t seem to know how to make people like him in that role,” Michelle said. This all sounded plausible to me. I asked her, half-jokingly, if I could steal her analysis for a column.
While the common fan and media refrain was for Dolan to sell the Knicks, Michelle considered such hopes to be wishful at best, even when the occasional rumor surfaced that he was considering cashing out. Unless there was a full-blown shareholder revolt, Dolan was like many of the executive “stars” Michelle had been hired to help salvage—not to make disappear. Her fantasy was to tackle Dolan as one last project, one long-shot attempt to convince him he had the ability to “make people feel better about the team and about what they were buying.”
Dolan habitually did the opposite, to embarrassing extremes, most pitifully confronting fans when they really couldn’t be blamed for heckling him, given the Knicks’ results during his reign. Noting that Dolan was known for using prepared notes during rare interviews, Michelle wished she could hand him a set of cue cards for different social settings. One, written for the typical disaffected fan, would read: Stick with us; we’re going to give you a winner [big smile and extended hand!].
She had even entertained the thought of going to David Stern when he was still commissioner, volunteering her services to help Dolan lower the paranoia levels around his arena. Wasn’t it in the league’s marketing interests to allow reporters less-managed access to players? Would it kill Dolan to occasionally crack a joke or a smile in their presence?
During one of our dinners in the 2017–18 season, Michelle asked if Dolan had ever bothered to say hello to any of the reporters and columnists who were regularly around the team. In my case, there was never so much as a nod, and forget about matching names and faces at one of the many press conferences he threw to introduce the next Knicks executive or coach. In sharp contrast, I told her of the time Jerry Buss, the Lakers’ owner, invited the Knicks beat writers into his limousine after a game in Los Angeles, and then left it at our disposal, along with a few of his female friends, for the rest of the night. Granted, that was hedonism, L.A.-style.
With Dolan, we were lucky we didn’t get run over. That nearly happened to me in May 2013, when he and his
