Not everyone had to ask. Mike Breen took a few moments from his broadcast preparation to comment on how kind Michelle could be, how she often asked about his family or complimented him on his suit or his work on the MSG Network with Walt Frazier.
“The last ten years she would say, ‘This might be my last,’ but you just knew she wasn’t going anywhere,” Breen said. “She loved it so much, and I always said it was people like Michelle who make the NBA so great, who give an arena its character, more so than in any other sport. Because they’re so close, they can literally reach out and touch you and create that special bond.”
As if to validate his longtime partner’s point, Frazier strolled by—in one of his trademark loud sports jackets that looked like it had been lifted from the wall of a modern art museum—to second the motion that Michelle was among the very special people at the Garden. He recalled ribbing her endlessly about having never patronized his far–West Side restaurant, until she arranged a year-end School of Visual Arts staff party that was at that point the joint’s largest booking. I wondered what her reaction would have been to the tributes she was getting on this night—especially from someone like the iconic Clyde. Embarrassed? Flattered? Probably both.
With game time approaching and fans streaming in, the security guard removed the flowers from seat 13, whose occupant for this night and many more to come would be Noah Goodhart. I vaguely remembered Goodhart from the game I had attended with Michelle early during the previous season against Brooklyn. She had thanked him by name after he delivered a bottle of water to her from the club before the start of the second half, as he apparently did many nights after it became a struggle for Michelle to navigate the crowd.
Young. Rich. Scooping up the best seats in the house. On the surface, Goodhart seemed like the kind of replacement fan Michelle used to say she would cringe upon seeing in her seat when she tuned in on TV. Noah and Jonah Goodhart had for some time been buying Michelle’s other seats, on the railing. The brothers eventually suggested partnering with Plaut on the seats directly behind the bench after he purchased his Florida home.
But the Goodhart brothers, more than casual fans, were actual basketball junkies, sons of modest-earning educators in Ann Arbor, Michigan. During the Bad Boys era of the Detroit Pistons, they attended games with freebie tickets supplied by local businesses. They sat at the top of the Pontiac Silverdome, their view obstructed by a giant curtain cutting off half the massive football stadium in a futile attempt to create an intimacy more conducive to basketball. The brothers wound up in New York, starting, running, and investing in internet companies, amassing a fortune. To Michelle, their backstory as self-made men made the difference. They were legitimate fans, not rich kids handed their status in life or stargazers in search of a hot scene.
Soon the players were introduced. The national anthem was sung. The season tipped off. Just before halftime, as the Knicks blitzed Atlanta with forty-nine points in the second quarter—the highest-scoring quarter in franchise history—I received a slew of text messages. Breen and Frazier—as they had indicated to me before the game they would—had paid tribute to Michelle on the MSG Network broadcast. On the train home that night, I emailed a photo I had taken of the flowers to Michelle’s children and told them that while she was gone from the Garden, she was not forgotten. There was also evidence in the arena that she never would be.
Following their opening-night victory, the young Knicks reverted to predicted form, dropping five of their next six games. On Halloween night, they hosted the Indiana Pacers in a rare nationally televised appearance on ESPN, which brought Van Gundy back to town. Early in the game, he took the opportunity to make a nationally televised homage to Michelle, a recounting of the clothes-grooming story he had shared with me months earlier for the obit. He also mentioned a ninety-five-dollar playoff ticket of Michelle’s that was on display in the Garden.
Actually, there were two: one from Game 2 of the 1993 Eastern Conference Finals, featuring John Starks’s dunk on Horace Grant and Michael Jordan, and a second from a 1999 conference finals playoff game, which the Knicks had won on Larry Johnson’s miracle four-point play (a three-point shot and accompanying foul) against the Larry Bird–coached Pacers.
For a team without a championship in decades, these were cherished moments that Jonathan Supranowitz, the former PR director, had set out to memorialize when the Garden was renovated. On the prowl for souvenirs, he asked Michelle if she had anything left from her most savored games. She showed up early for the next game, carrying a Tupperware container filled with tickets from every Garden playoff game she had ever attended. “Help yourself,” she said. Her Starks and Johnson tickets were encased and hung in separate concourses along with the famous photos, the players’ jerseys, and plaques that acknowledged the donors. “Her name will be on those walls for as long as they are up,” Supranowitz told me not long after Michelle had died.
On opening night, I went looking for the Starks dunk exhibit and found it a short walk from the media workroom, on the Garden’s sixth level. I snapped a photo and stood there awhile, relishing the sight of Michelle’s name etched in Knicks history. Short of having her actual seat number retired and hung high in the Garden rafters, what more could
