But as you often and so eloquently put it: Everything at the Garden always turns to shit. Durant ruptured an Achilles tendon in the Finals (helping Toronto win a thrilling championship during what amounted to a one-season rental of Kawhi Leonard) over the Warriors. Durant and Irving did, in fact, decide to team up in New York—but it was in Brooklyn, with the Nets, who had made the playoffs with a talented young nucleus. As we always said, build a culture and the stars will come.
I couldn’t help but channel what I imagined your reaction to all of this would have been into the column the Times asked me to write. At the risk of sounding shrill, I excoriated Dolan for blighting the Garden’s curb appeal with his disrespect of fans and bad body language. In a landmark summer for superstar movement, none of them chose or so much as took a meeting with the loser Knicks. Kawhi bolted from Toronto and landed in Los Angeles with the Clippers—joined there by Paul George, who had asked for a trade from Oklahoma City. That left your guy, Russell Westbrook, as the lone Thunder star, but not for long. He was traded to Houston to reunite with James Harden, in a deal for Chris Paul and draft picks. Anthony Davis strong-armed his way out of New Orleans and went to the Lakers to join LeBron. A humbled Carmelo even resurfaced early in the 2019–20 season with Portland.
Then the retired commissioner, David Stern, died at seventy-seven on the very day the calendar flipped ominously to 2020, weeks after he’d suffered a brain hemorrhage. Soon after that came an unspeakable tragedy mourned worldwide: Kobe Bryant, his thirteen-year-old daughter, and seven others were killed in a helicopter crash. And finally, horrifically, the world (as we knew it) ended. The 2019–20 NBA season shut down in March along with the rest of sports, the country, and much of the planet when a contagious and deadly virus struck China, spread into Europe, and surged into the United States and New York, to the point where the metropolitan area became the pandemic’s epicenter. The virus killed hundreds of thousands of people worldwide and especially struck the elderly. We hunkered down at home, distanced socially from loved ones, wary of even stepping into a market. I’m truly grateful that you didn’t have to live through this nightmare, but of course in such terrifying times I missed you more than ever.
Backtracking, I should tell you that around the 2018 Christmas holidays, I visited again with our pal Patrick at Georgetown, this time for a story on him coaching Alonzo Mourning’s son. By coincidence, I got there the day after Lori had resigned as the basketball team’s PR person for a job in New York. Helping me with my story was her last order of business, which seemed fitting, she said. But Lori being loyal Lori, she also felt guilty about abandoning her buddy Patrick after half of a second season for a higher-paying position in New York. In the role of surrogate Michelle, I insisted that she had actually done him a favor by helping him launch his program.
I also went to Brooklyn for the retiring Dwyane Wade’s farewell on the last night of the 2018–19 regular season. I always loved Wade’s stylish game, just as you did. It turned into one of those impromptu NBA “events” you loved so much. LeBron showed up to support his buddy, as did Carmelo. Mr. Miami, Pat Riley, was there, tanned and dapper as ever at seventy-four. The game ended at 10:30. Wade addressed the media at 11:15. Got home at midnight. Finished a column at 3:30 A.M. Woke up at 6:15 to edit it. Filed at 7 A.M. Spent the next two days in recovery, hearing my father’s voice asking me: What do you need it for? And with yours countering: It’s not what you need. It’s what you want.
Michelle, I have to tell you that I will always feel selfish for having complained to you about feeling left out from covering the 2018 playoffs at a time you already knew or at least suspected you were dying. You had every right to be annoyed, even angry. But I also realize now that when you scolded me for sulking you weren’t telling me never to write again—just not to agonize over the inactivity and the inevitable transition to the career afterlife. To regard the possibility of being professionally idle not as punishment, but as reward. To not correlate career closure as a prelude to life’s conclusion.
I suppose the work drug isn’t the worst way to self-medicate as we age—though I am trying to keep in mind the adage you occasionally invoked that nobody on their deathbed ever wished they had spent more time at the office. I still don’t want to be that person who regrets clinging to what I know and have already done. And while I’d like to believe I have years remaining to explore, to find that place of personal contentment—as you did for a good spell—sixty-seven is the age at which my father died, exactly my age in 2019. So, yes, even before the pandemic, mortality had been on my mind.
You often said that people use their careers to avoid the mere contemplation of it, to preoccupy themselves in the whirlwind of the workweek while convincing themselves that being needed at the office means they are still in a vital stage of life. My eye condition, of course, works as an effective rejoinder. Fortunately, Frank Bruni continues to write columns about coping with his sight challenges, including one about a man who lost his vision and proceeded to publish his first novel! I find these columns to be uplifting, even therapeutic.
