From her more enlightened perch, and with her mother on her deathbed, Devon could accept the cons with the pros, Michelle in full. She evaluated her mother as a “kind of martyr . . . a Hester Prynne” of the Connecticut suburbs, “forward-thinking for her time, a bold woman living in a man’s world.” Whatever resentments lingered—such as Brandon’s suspicion that the family’s Connecticut summer home had been sold off in part to support Michelle’s basketball habit—all of the Musler siblings accepted and admired the unlikely life she had willed herself into. Against gender and cultural odds, a suburban mother of five had made herself at home in a world whose stars were largely young black men from inner cities. The evidence of her social standing had long ago taken up residence in the family albums they had perused at Michelle’s condo during her final days—snapshots in time that were clearly not contrived fan-photo ops.
One evening during the final days, her kids and I reminisced over beers on Michelle’s back patio, and someone asked if I had been aware that she had actually once dated a retired Knick. I didn’t have a clue, and was initially astonished and even a little hurt by this rare piece of basketball gossip Michelle had not shared. But back in the day, she never did reveal much about whatever romantic interests she’d had. Maybe it was our age difference, our sometime parent-child dynamic, a need for limits and privacy. But the more I thought about it, it also made sense to me that she had dated someone inside the basketball bubble, given how much time and effort she had invested there. And why begrudge her that after all she’d been through, Devon said. Having expunged her adolescent musings of whether Michelle loved the Knicks and the whole Garden scene more than anything, including her children, why shouldn’t Michelle have had the chance to be different, “to enjoy being her”?
In a rare display of self-pity, Michelle once admitted to me, during the earliest days of her decline, that if she managed to live long enough, there might not be a half dozen people beyond her family left to attend her funeral because so many she had known had already passed. But a month after she died, Michelle’s children staged a beautiful celebration of life at a Stamford hotel event room that was crowded with her family and friends.
Brandon was the host and introductory speaker, providing loving context to Michelle’s life, referring to, without going into specific detail, the uncommon challenges most of the guests were still not privy to. Then he tagged me—without advance notice, an apparent oversight in the rush of planning—as the next speaker. As I hesitatingly made my way forward, I had no written text, no Michelle-inspired bullet points, no planned or resolute idea of what I would actually say.
I looked out at the audience, Michelle’s children and grandchildren, her friends—including Lori Hamamoto and Ernestine Miller, Jay Greenberg and Wynn Plaut—whom I knew and those I did not. One spontaneous, wishful thought thankfully came to mind. I said that if I could have five more precious minutes on the phone with Michelle, what I would most want to tell her—and what I was sure she would be dying to hear—was that I had written her obituary in the New York Times.
It was the most precious of tributes I could give her, but I have to give credit where it’s due: Ernestine Miller was the first one to suggest that I try. I reminded her that Times obits were generally reserved for people who wrote bestselling novels and cured mysterious diseases. Much to my surprise, and delight, Bill McDonald, the obits editor, responded to my pitch—the woman behind the Knicks bench for forty-plus years—within minutes. “Sure, who wouldn’t read that?” he said.
Urgently reporting as I would for a breaking story, I phoned the always-approachable Jeff Van Gundy. We chatted for a while before I got to the point. “Jeff, when you coached in New York, there was a woman who sat behind the bench—”
“You mean Michelle?” he interrupted.
In the time since Van Gundy had left the Garden in 2001, he no doubt had engaged countless people around the country, faces he had to recognize, names he needed to remember. Yet Michelle’s was still at the tip of his tongue, which told me that she had been as much a fixture at the Garden as any player, coach, or employee. I had hoped for some color for the piece, and he did not disappoint:
“Whenever I would walk out on the floor, disheveled with my collar up or my tie crooked, she would come up from behind, fix it, and just step back to her seat with a smile but without saying a word,” Van Gundy said.
With that one quote, Van Gundy captured the essence of Michelle’s decades behind the bench: her desire and ability to meaningfully connect, make her presence felt without making a scene. Alongside the full obituary ran a beautiful color photograph of her, dressed all in black, standing by her row, with Wynn Plaut a few feet behind her, graciously ceding the spotlight.
Of course, nowhere in the piece was it mentioned that Michelle had been my career coach, courtside source, and so much more. The truth was, I had straddled or crossed a fine professional line by even pitching her obit, given our close friendship. But she had so loved newspapers, particularly the Times. In one of the photos her children had used for a slideshow
