Tall and lanky as some of the players, he had grown up a devout Knicks fan during the mideighties, and beyond. At home games, he liked to chat up fans before getting on with his night’s work. Michelle, he said, was a star attraction, the regular he most enjoyed seeing, night after night, waiting for her to appear with a small token of his appreciation.
In the days when the media sat courtside, with beat reporters or star columnists usually positioned to the left of the bench, a stack of media game notes would be placed on the table by the seat reserved for the public relations director. Michelle—and only Michelle—helped herself each night to a packet, page upon page of statistical minutiae she would seldom look at, until the game notes vanished along with the reporters.
“Where did the stats go?” she asked Supranowitz.
“The media doesn’t sit here anymore,” he told her.
“Well, I do,” she said.
Fair point, he thought. From then on, he made sure to hold on to one packet, reserved for Michelle, when she emerged from the club—not that she needed it. If she read anything before a game, or at halftime, it was a newspaper—the Times or one of the city’s tabloids she lugged around in a tote bag embellished with an embroidered M. Yet Michelle gratefully accepted the game notes, brought them home, dropped them onto a shelf. She had stacks and stacks, just part of her ever-expanding collection of Knicks and NBA memorabilia saved over decades. Posters, books, photos of her with various Knicks personalities, framed newspaper clippings that detailed—humorously, in some cases—her basketball fanaticism.
She had long been a hoarder, unable to part with her kids’ baby clothes and furniture, until she bought her condo and sold her family home in 2004 and nearly drove herself crazy confronting the mountain of stuff in her garage. She hired someone to help her sort through it all and part with much of it. Her basketball collection, including every Knicks yearbook over twenty-seven years, went with her.
• • • • •
Supranowitz smiled when he saw Michelle coming his way, walking stiffly through the aisle. He had noticed that she hadn’t attended any of the preseason games or the home opener against the Detroit Pistons a few days earlier.
“Where ya been?” he said, handing her the game notes.
“Well,” she said apologetically, “I’ve had a couple of little strokes.”
He nodded. “No excuses,” he said.
She didn’t argue with him. I almost suspected that she agreed.
No excuses.
For as long as I had known Michelle, only the rarest of occasions counted as a rationale to miss a Knicks home game. A crucial work trip. A child’s illness. During one extended spell, over the course of roughly a decade, she missed a single regular-season home game. And God forbid she not show up for a playoff game—though that hadn’t been a problem of late, as the Knicks had seldom qualified for the postseason in recent years.
Few would dispute Spike Lee’s status as the Knicks’ most famous and visible fan, preening in the superdeluxe seats across the court from the bench on Celebrity Row. But to her way of thinking, Michelle was more symbolically situated—happily and partially hidden, right behind her guys. “Like Dani said, this has been my second home,” she said wistfully as we settled into our seats.
Now she, too, was just a visitor, having moved on, like so many others long ago priced out—or aged out, if not carried out. Only a few of the section’s regulars—Bob Iger, the executive chairman and former CEO of the Walt Disney Company, to name-drop one—could afford to show up on the occasion of a visit by LeBron James or Stephen Curry, while passing on the majority of game tickets to family, friends, or business contacts.
Change had become the norm at the Garden for Michelle, accelerating like the passage of years. Weeks after this night’s game against the Nets, even Supranowitz would no longer be around to greet her and hand her the stats when—or if—she showed up next. He was laid off by a new Knicks management team, replaced by someone who would not know her name, much less her history.
“It’s a strange feeling to be sitting here now,” she said.
I felt a surge of emotion, put my arm around her, and snapped a selfie of us with my phone.
“For me, too,” I said.
• • • • •
Just a few feet away from Michelle’s seats had been my station for multiple decades, a privileged courtside perch on press row. No more, though. Not for several years. First had come a move to a newly carved-out press section several rows behind one of the baskets and then a veritable banishment to the arena’s second-highest level, far above where sneakers could be heard squeaking on hardwood floors, above other sweet sounds and sights of the game. The seats from which reporters could really see the game, bring it to life for their readers, were now packaged with waiter service for the corporate elite and one-percenters.
To reporters half my age, recollections of being close enough to the action to hear what the players and coaches were saying were akin to my admission of lugging around a portable Olivetti typewriter during my earliest days covering the Knicks in the late seventies. I might as well have admitted to reaching the Garden by horse and buggy. But I had to admit it was a treat to be courtside again, to experience the game as I once routinely did, even if a security guard always seemed to be blocking my view into the Knicks’ team huddle. Was it my imagination or a deliberate House of Dolan obstruction of a nosy media member appearing where he
