Like the rest of the fan base, neither Michelle nor I had great hopes or expectations for the 2017–18 season. The Knicks had already lost their first three games, two by routs. Michelle was nonetheless happy because Carmelo Anthony, a player she disdained, had been traded to Oklahoma City before the start of training camp. After six-plus seasons, the Knicks had finally moved on from the failed experiment of a one-dimensional gunner as their franchise star. They were now committed to rebuilding around the intriguing Kristaps Porzingis, a twenty-two-year-old, seven-foot-three, multiskilled skyscraper from the basketball hotbed of Latvia. Having watched Porzingis closely the past two seasons, Michelle was high on him as the team’s future. She said he also seemed to be more aware of his surroundings, more cognizant of the fans, unlike many of the younger players of the past few years.
“He’s a throwback, like some of the players from the eighties and nineties,” she said.
“You mean he’s acknowledged you?” I teased.
“Oh, yes, a few times, nods and smiles,” she said. She insisted the attention was not the point—though I knew that wasn’t completely true—but more symbolic of a player who wasn’t self-involved, who understood what it meant to play for the Garden’s ever-hopeful loyalists.
Being able to make such judgments was one of the great benefits to sitting behind the bench, Michelle had always maintained. In her prime, or when the Knicks had a roster that wasn’t as transient as it had been in recent years, she could have written her own book on the behavioral character of the coaches and players.
As the game began—the Knicks promptly falling behind an equally youthful, inexperienced Brooklyn squad before rallying to take the lead in the second quarter—Michelle was distracted by an unfamiliar middle-aged man sitting immediately to her left. She knew he was a problem right from the start. Whenever play moved to the far side of the floor and something of note occurred—a dunk, a blocked shot, a hard foul—the man would stand up, blocking her line of vision and making a spectacle of himself. He did this repeatedly until she’d had enough. When he next stood up, she yanked on his elbow, trying to pull him back down. He didn’t budge, or seem to notice.
“Did you just grab that guy?” I said.
“I did,” she said. “I’m going to punch him next time. You paid all this money for a seat. Sit in it!”
I was strangely heartened to see that Michelle, bless her, hadn’t lost her feistiness.
At halftime I wandered off to say hello to Cal Ramsey, who was perched a short distance away alongside the ramp, where Michelle had once sat—back then an excellent spot to chat up reporters as they breezed by on their way to press row. Ramsey was a former New York University star who played briefly for the Knicks in 1959 before falling victim to early NBA racial quotas. During my years on the beat and beyond, he had been a broadcaster, a community relations specialist, and a friend to the franchise heroes Willis Reed and Earl Monroe, among many others.
Players came and went, but people like Ramsey and the longtime photographer George Kalinsky gave the Garden its warmth, its charm, its pulse. So many others—men like John Condon on public address; the timekeeper Nat “Feets” Broudy; the old championship coach, Red Holzman—had passed on. With every departure, Michelle felt another block removed from the foundation of the life she had built for herself at the Garden. As did I.
Now the wheelchair-bound Ramsey was failing, health issues having begun during the summer when he fell out of bed, cracked open his head on the edge of a table, and needed twenty-five stitches to close the wound. While hospitalized, tests revealed trouble with his heart, a trace of cancer. After we chatted, I promised myself that I would double back soon to interview Ramsey for the kind of column—what a pair of ancient eyes saw in Porzingis and these young Knicks—more easily conceptualized from courtside than from our sequestered enclave high above the court. When I told Michelle that chauffeuring her to the game had provided the gist of a column, she smiled.
“You don’t have to convince me that this is where something was always happening.”
I agreed, and told her that covering games at the Garden had never been the same after we had moved upstairs.
“Now you’re starting to sound like me, an old fart,” she said.
You might say. Except in Michelle’s case, I would have better characterized her as an esteemed Garden loyalist, and part of its greatest generation.
Two The Making of a Fan
Michelle’s kid brother bristled the day she dared show up to watch him shoot baskets with friends on a cement playground in working-class Hartford, Connecticut. Robert Bassell, not quite two years younger than his sister, stared her down, then finally yelled out, “What are you doing here?”
“I like to watch,” she said, defending her right, refusing to budge, giving birth to a long life of basketball spectatorship and, more significantly, holding her own in strategic conflict with men.
Her brother died in 2012, but late into life, Michelle and Robert—Uncle Bob to her five kids—would routinely and affectionately go at it at family Thanksgivings, agreeing on little about the world and especially their childhood, save for the fact that Michelle was no conventional or ordinary girl. She had seemingly been born with a chip on her shoulder and a suspicion—if not an actual belief—that there had to be more to life than what was prescribed for a girl from a working-class family.
Michelle Frances Bassell, known in her early days as Mickie, had no use for “dolls and other girlie things.” She was drawn to the games only boys played, even if there was no chance she could participate in them. She compensated by becoming the sports editor of her high school newspaper.
She persisted past those who implied that she
