I have to admit that as a younger man I would look at the elderly and wonder how they even motivated themselves to get through a day, much less be happy, knowing they had already lived the majority of their lives. Then I watched you throughout your retirement years and especially during the uncertainty and limitations of your final year. Until your very last days, you made the most of each one, relished every hour at yoga, or with a friend (like me!), or in front of the television with LeBron and Durant. What an example you set by refusing to let go of the life you loved—until you stared down its end with such calm resolve.
Which reminds me: In late March of 2019, three weeks before the Knicks’ season ended, we lost yet another eminent Garden elder. Cal Ramsey passed—like you, at eighty-one. I know how fond you were of him, one of your section buddies, part of the Willis Reed crowd that you ran with back in the eighties, when the whole scene was new and exciting and your great escape from suburban boredom.
Just as your children did for you, Cal’s people held a wonderful celebration of his life, though there was one downer moment during the service that would have made you cringe. It was when the hostess asked for the prearranged speakers to step forward and mentioned them by name: a cousin of Cal’s; the retired Harlem congressman Charles Rangel; and a man who needed no introduction, James Dolan.
Heads turned. There was a collective gasp and you could almost hear people thinking, Dolan is here? Alas, for whatever reason, it turned out he wasn’t, and apparently hadn’t bothered to inform anyone—at least not in time—that he would be unable to speak, or attend. When his name was called a second time with no response, it was awkward, embarrassing, infuriating. A former NBA league office employee, sitting next to me, shook his head and whispered, “Big surprise.”
Plenty of basketball people from the Knicks organization, the league, and the greater New York basketball community did show, though. I won’t name them all, but you couldn’t miss Charles Oakley’s speckled head of gray a few rows ahead of mine. And right next to Oak sat Charles Smith. In other words, Michelle, you chose your Garden friends well. And you, like Cal, were part of that greater family there not defined by the likes of its chairman—the people’s Garden. Oakley and Smith and all the others could count on you to be there for them, to not boo or abandon them when they inevitably came up short in a playoff game, or any game.
As for your Knicks, they wound up using all the salary cap space they’d created in the Porzingis trade by signing (and overpaying) a bunch of B- and C-list veteran free agents to short-term deals, hoping to provide mentorship to Barrett and their other young players. And also, I suppose, to win a few games, try to make a run at the 2020 playoffs after years of misery and tanking. The television network crowd didn’t seem too convinced. When the 2019 Christmas Day lineup of games was announced, the Knicks weren’t on it, a rare omission that spoke volumes about how far they had fallen. By the 2020 All-Star break, they had canned another coach, dumped another team president, hired a self-proclaimed branding guru, and tabbed Carmelo’s agent—no, really—as chief basketball executive.
On the night the agent-turned-president, Leon Rose, attended his first game, Spike Lee just happened to argue with Garden security over which entrance he could use—and that turned into a very public dispute between Spike and Dolan’s PR minions. Though he wasn’t handcuffed or carried out, like Oak, his takeaway quote echoed you, Michelle, in summing up the sad state of the loyal Knicks fan—celebrity or civilian—in the Dolan era. More plea than complaint, Spike whined to a reporter: “Am I going to go to the grave without another banner being raised in the world’s most famous arena?”
But who knows? Maybe in the post-pandemic world they will finally have the kind of patience Brooklyn had in nurturing Barrett and their promising young talent and perhaps then the Garden will become an attractive landing spot for an actual superstar, as Barclays Center became for the Nets. During the run-up to the 2019 summer free agency, I actually had begun to wonder how I would deal with the jubilation of the fan base if they did score big, the excitement of the nineties returned, and the Knicks somehow won the championship that never happened on your front-row watch: Would I resent it because it came too late for you, who deserved it as much as any fan who ever pushed through a Garden turnstile? Or would that be overstating the value of results, giving too much credibility to the all-or-nothing mentality that is so pervasive in (sigh) newspaper columns and on sports talk radio?
I’m not suggesting that winning is not the point of competing and not worth celebrating, and I know you never would either. But at least from the pragmatic fan’s point of view, I have come to wonder if those championship banners hanging from the rafters are even transferrable in emotional value from one generation to the next, or ultimately are more like the souvenir game notes, ticket stubs, and assorted stuff your kids predictably tossed. If we learned anything during the no-sports pandemic of 2020, morosely watching reruns of games from years past and wondering if it would ever be safe enough to go back to a crowded public space, including the Garden, it should have been what I suspected you always understood: the emotional connection was far
