• • • • •
While trying to catch one game a week with Michelle, I found myself not as interested in watching at home, only checking in on the games for a few minutes before switching to cable news or going to sleep and catching up with the scores the next morning. I had always loved the playoffs dating back to high school and college, the Knicks’ championship years, and certainly since my vocational attachment to the sport a few years later. But as the early rounds rolled by, I was distracted, disconnected. Beyond age catching up to me and having difficulty staying up late, the main reason was no great mystery.
By mid-May, the conference finals underway, I had not covered or attended a game, or written a word about the playoffs. Just as Michelle’s years of official ticket ownership had ended with the current season, so, too, did it seem that my run of covering the playoffs—dating back to 1978—was over.
The Times was well stocked with smart coverage, having added Marc Stein, one of the premier NBA reporters in the country, to a staff that already included the very talented Scott Cacciola. I certainly had no right to be upset: The Times had treated me splendidly as a contributor after I had left the full-time staff in 2016, even sending me to the 2017 Finals in Oakland—albeit in a cramped coach middle seat where a young child positioned one row behind me passed the time kicking me in the back. So I wasn’t dying to get on a plane to Cleveland, or anywhere, to rush into a crowded locker room, have television cameras crash into my skull, and swallow a diet of postgame clichés before facing another stressful deadline. But if I thought I had prepared myself for the eventuality of no longer being on the Times team, or any team, my mood gradually darkened as the playoffs continued. I found myself checking email, hoping to hear from an editor. Like Carmelo, I wanted back in—except I initially kept these thoughts to myself, not even mentioning them to Michelle.
That seemed only fair. Given her health issues, whatever problems I had were insignificant; it felt selfish to talk about myself. Calls to her now thus began with me trying to keep the conversation focused on how she was doing, or coping. She would play along for a few minutes, even admit that things weren’t that great, but inevitably would change the subject to me. She couldn’t help herself. With friends, this was just who Michelle was, her core identity: being interested to be interesting.
In all the time I had known her, I was aware of only one friend—a Greenwich businessman—who was so self-absorbed that Michelle made an abrupt decision to strike him from her life. I also intuitively trusted that our friendship at this point was beyond judgment, or risk. My resolve not to complain ultimately dissolved into admitting that not covering the playoffs had left me feeling a bit . . . empty. Detachment had begun to feel like disenfranchisement. Michelle wasted no time in getting on my case.
“So what you’re telling me is that you’re upset because you weren’t invited to a party that you didn’t want to go to anymore,” she said.
“I guess I thought I didn’t.”
Fine, Michelle argued, we all want to be included in something, but doesn’t everything get old? Hadn’t I been complaining about the institutional repetition of covering sports? Hadn’t I expressed a desire to connect elsewhere, do things I’d never had time for?
“Everything you’ve ever accomplished is visible in your clippings and on your bookshelf,” she said. “You can see it and touch it—that’s what I always thought was so great about being a journalist. And if that’s not enough and you need to do it over and over again even if you don’t have to, that means you’re addicted to the drug of attention and that’s pathetic.”
Michelle’s exasperation with me was nothing new—it was like a coach lacerating an underachieving star player for not hustling. But this sounded different. This was beyond irritation—more like anger.
“Michelle,” I said, “are you upset?”
“Yes, I am,” she said. “Because it makes me feel that I failed at my job. And because you’ve got time to try new things—and you don’t want to be in the position to not have more time.”
• • • • • • •
My consecutive-years’ playoff-coverage streak didn’t end, after all. On a drive north to New England with Beth for a Memorial Day weekend getaway, an email dropped from a Times editor. A staffing emergency had arisen. Could I make it to Boston to cover Game 7 of the Celtics-Cavaliers Eastern Conference Finals on Sunday night of the holiday weekend?
Heading in the right direction, I leapt at the offer like a puppy whose dinner was hours overdue. I wrote a late-night deadline piece on another magnificent performance by LeBron James as he carried an otherwise pedestrian Cleveland team into a rematch of the three previous league Finals against Golden State.
Being at the game, reconnecting with several colleagues I hadn’t seen all season, and catching up with the likes of the network announcers and old Knicks dignitaries Jeff Van Gundy and Mark Jackson was fun. But what really lifted my spirits was the next morning’s feedback. While staying with relatives in a Boston suburb, I received texts and emails from colleagues. I appreciated that Michael Schmidt, who began his career in sports, took a moment from hounding Trump in the Washington bureau to weigh in with kind words about
