In the last months of her life, as I made my weekly visits to Stamford, I couldn’t help but notice the stacks of newspapers—particularly the Times—grow higher and higher. I asked her one night if she was planning on lining a few hundred birdcages with all the excess paper. She laughed ruefully. “It takes me forever to get through one day’s worth,” she said. “But if I don’t, then I feel like I’m failing at keeping up.”
In a snowballing era of trashy clickbait, lightweight sites, and outright fakery, she was allergic to news online, steadfastly old-school. Only print that rubbed off on her fingers represented legitimacy and gravitas. Above all news sources, to be on those gray pages of the Times was to matter, to have made it—if not for the sake of fame, then for a sense of self-actualization.
Michelle, like me, was proud of what she had achieved against the odds. On the day her obit was posted on the Times’s website, I had a flashback to one of the things she had told me about being afraid to let go of my work—it was all right there, in the archives, for me to reconnect with, to reassure myself of what I had done. What joy I felt in knowing that her extraordinary life—if only in roughly nine hundred words—was now there as well, and would be forever.
• • • • •
The response to Michelle’s obituary was swift and widespread. The Knicks public relations staff inquired about a family contact, wanting to offer an expression of sympathy. Many who knew her from the Garden emailed their memories, heartfelt and whimsical alike. Steffi Berne, who sat behind Michelle with her husband, Bob, affectionately wrote in an email that she would never forget the night Michelle read her the riot act for having the audacity to unfold a newspaper during a game, which she insisted was disrespectful to the players. Tim Walsh, a former Knicks trainer, fondly recalled Michelle’s knack for sending a note of congratulations or sympathy whenever she would hear he had started or lost another job—making the point that she didn’t forget people after they’d moved on.
One Garden employee emailed to say that he had watched Michelle more than hold her own with high-powered men who had the mistaken idea they could sweet-talk her into a swindle in the ongoing resale ticket exchange that courtside fans typically engaged in. “You couldn’t get anything past her,” said the employee, requesting anonymity in deference to James Dolan’s media policies. And then there was Charles Oakley, by reputation the fiercest and most candid of all the Knicks, who understood how tough-minded Michelle must have been just to be in her seat—night after night, season after season—while juggling all of life’s obligations.
“The Oak Man of Knicks fans,” he called her when I reached him by phone.
And why was that?
“People, you know, they appreciated me for how I played, sacrificed my body,” he said. “Michelle better than anyone knew that no one ever had to get on me to play hard because she was sitting right there and heard everything. Just like me, she was there every night for over forty years, all the way from Connecticut, two hours in and two hours out, and after all the operations she had on her knee, her back. She was a warrior. Everybody always makes a big deal about Spike, but he comes in a chauffeured car from the Upper East Side—you know what I’m saying?”
I did. And when he said it I could have kicked myself for not having called him sooner. In the obituary, I had quoted Lori Hamamoto calling Michelle “as big a staple at the Garden as Spike Lee.” It was a splendid line, but Oakley’s quote was richer, even, than Van Gundy’s. While he was always colorful and occasionally controversial, he was rarely off the mark. “The Oak Man of Knicks fans” was a classic and fitting tribute. And there were still more to come.
• • • • •
On opening night of the 2018–19 NBA season, when even a team pegged to be one of the worst in the league could play dress-up and pretend to be elite, the Knicks acknowledged neither extreme. They merely cast themselves as a franchise with heart and loyal fans. Each one in attendance was greeted with a souvenir T-shirt draped over the back of their seat. It was Knicks blue with an orange team logo, the name of the obligatory bank sponsor, and an inscription in white lettering: “New York Forever.” The ambiguous marketing slogan suggested only that better times were coming at some future date while promising nothing for the present.
Meanwhile, behind the Knicks bench, in the first row of section 6, on seat 13, sat a token of appreciation for an important part of the dearly departed past. It was a colorful bouquet of flowers—in memoriam, for Michelle, who had never abandoned her team, through good times, bad times, and, more recently, horrendous times. A security guard kept vigil. His mission was to ensure that they remained on the seat Michelle had long occupied until the season tip-off against the Atlanta Hawks.
I had come to the Garden that night having asked to write a curtain-raising column for the Times, but with an ulterior motive. I had to be there in the event the Knicks’ public relations staff followed up on its stated summer promise of “wanting to do something” for Michelle. The team had already contributed in her name to a Stamford library, but the flowers constituted a more public statement.
As much of a turnoff as James Dolan’s Knicks had been over the previous two decades, I had to admit to being moved by the gesture. I didn’t kid myself that he—more likely to eject a fan than fete one—was so
