My column the next day made sure to mention that Dolan had “run out” on a rare fine Knicks season without bothering to visit the locker room to offer salutations. A tad spiteful? Perhaps. Inaccurate? Well, no. But while Dolan couldn’t be bothered to do the bare minimum to engage or acknowledge reporters, he wasn’t above complaining about what was written via his hired help. In the case of the hasty departure from Indy, I was predictably called and told by his PR servant that Dolan and company had only left the arena early to catch a flight back to New York for a hockey playoff game the next night.
“Wait,” Michelle cut me off before I could deliver the punch line to this joke of an excuse. “Don’t they travel by private jet?”
“Exactly,” I said.
Dolan through the years made a series of grand promises to various executives, offering full operational autonomy—which arguably was an impossibility given the financial stakes of the contemporary sports industry. As with all owners, Michelle recognized that Dolan had a right to occasionally weigh in or intervene in some situations. But the question she always wished she could pose to him was why he would want to. What emotional need had his involvement with the Knicks fulfilled? How had it made him a more successful—and happier—man? These were the hard questions she had once posed to the Dolans of corporate America, trying to make them understand that change and growth could transpire only with honest reflection.
Only with that, Michelle believed, could the Knicks restore the exuberance of the nineties, much less the eminence of the seventies. But she also knew that whatever Dolan might do to make things better for his team, it was too late for her to reap any benefits. Because in one of his most infamous and self-defeating cases of meddling, he had succeeded only in making a competitive mockery of her final courtside seasons.
• • • • •
In her company brochures, Michelle liked to use quotes from historical figures to support her strategies, including one from Horace Mann, the nineteenth-century public-education reformer and politician: “If any man seeks for greatness, let him forget greatness and ask for truth, and he will find both.”
But as Michelle had written in her company brochure long before Dolan’s rise at MSG, men like him didn’t listen, they dominated. They didn’t reason, they raged. They didn’t build up, they tore down. Or at least they went for the most expedient form of construction that had little chance of adhering to championship code. Never was this more glaring than during Donnie Walsh’s time at Madison Square Garden.
A highly respected veteran basketball executive hired in 2008 as the Knicks’ new team president to clean up the toxicity of Isiah Thomas’s five-year run as president and coach, Walsh left the security and relative tranquility of the Indiana Pacers for the opportunity to grow a contender in his native New York. He signed on only after Dolan promised a pledge of noninterference. The arrangement lasted until it no longer suited Dolan’s business agenda.
While he was in charge, Walsh hired Mike D’Antoni, an innovative coach who was far ahead of the sport’s evolutionary curve. He structured the Knicks’ payroll to create a variety of personnel options, in case the most obvious but improbable strategy—luring LeBron James to New York as a free agent in the summer of 2010—failed to materialize. Still in the formative stages of the master plan, Walsh assembled a young, entertaining team by the 2010–11 season, revolving around Amar’e Stoudemire, the free-agent consolation prize he had reeled in when James signed with Miami. Michelle fell hard for that team’s competitive spirit and D’Antoni’s entertaining, fast-tempo offense—a far cry from the nineties Knicks’ savage scrums with Miami.
There was a thrilling night in mid-December 2011 when the Boston Celtics came to the Garden with a 19–4 record and were fortunate to escape with a riveting two-point victory. Two weeks later, San Antonio hit town with a 29–4 mark only to lose, the Knicks piling up 128 points. Michelle was so sure her Knicks were finally on the right track that she dug out a souvenir playoff towel from the nineties and took to draping it across her shoulder at courtside. On the bench, Stoudemire wore a similar orange towel with blue trim for sponsorship considerations. Michelle wore hers in support of Stoudemire—whom she admired for having the guts to tackle New York’s pressurized environment—and also as a symbol of hope for better days ahead, like the nineties days of yore.
The city’s basketball cognoscenti—myself included—shared her optimism. Walsh still had salary cap flexibility. He had refused to part with future draft picks, as past Knicks regimes had a nasty habit of doing, only to be haunted by their impatience. In other words, Walsh’s plan was well conceived. But Dolan had one of his own and it was only marginally related to the proper construction of a basketball team.
That same year, Cablevision had spun off the Garden, its teams, and its cable television network into a publicly traded company. Dolan had also embarked on a three-year, billion-dollar overhaul of the arena, and was planning to help pay for it with a massive increase in premium seating for the following season. Despite the positive reviews of Walsh’s foundational work, Dolan wasn’t all that impressed. Walsh, after all, hadn’t landed James, the marquee prize. Stoudemire wasn’t the big-enough brand name Dolan apparently believed he needed to present to fans
