Two decades before the championship Knicks owned New York, before I was even born, Michelle was already a courtside fixture, daydreaming of what was then an unattainable career. It would take another quarter century for women to bust through the sports-writing barricade—far too late for her.
The truth was that Michelle had no apparent path to any professional employment, or even to college. The daughter of a Jewish steam fitter and an Irish immigrant mother, she spent her earliest years in the Hartford projects until her father saved enough money to buy a modest home in a working-class neighborhood.
Blue-collar financial stability did not resolve old-world social disorder. Michelle grew to preadolescence without a full-time father, who kept his out-of-religion marriage—and two children—a secret to keep the peace with his mother. Until she died, Harry Bassell led a double life, dining with his family after a day of maintaining and repairing piping systems and leaving soon afterward to sleep under his mother’s roof.
This continued for years, Michelle and her brother well hidden from their Jewish relatives. Her mother, Sarah, stayed home, sleeping late. Michelle remembered her hunched over a newspaper in the kitchen, seldom cheerful or communicative. In all likelihood, Michelle would guess decades later, Sarah was clinically depressed by the aberrant family circumstances, the faith and class distinction.
Adding to her disorientation, Michelle and her brother were sent to a Catholic elementary school, where she was called “Christ-killer” by classmates for being half-Jewish and targeted with other taunts and the occasional punch on the way home. After she complained to her mother, a priest sat her down and suggested she respond as a good Catholic girl should—turn the other cheek. Which exorcised any interest she may have had in religious education.
When the grandmother she never got to hug passed away, Michelle finally met her father’s family when an uncle visited her home with his children. She immediately sensed the difference between these newly introduced cousins and those on her maternal side. They seemed different—more self-assured, yammering on about school, their favorite subjects, their plans for college. The more she was around them, the more she understood that for them, such a future was not even in question. She began for the first time to strongly consider that possibility for herself.
Soon freed from the horrors of parochial school, she set out on a mission at Bulkeley High School to be important, popular, high achieving. In addition to editing and writing sports for the newspaper, she was the lead in a class play. She was voted junior prom queen. She was popular with the boys. But then she was stricken with tuberculosis, placed into an upstate quarantine for months, the story of her illness covered in a Hartford newspaper. She would never forget the contagion unit, the glass wall, her teachers driving up to deliver reading assignments. Upon recovery, she returned to school and promptly discovered her popularity had expired.
“I was the girl who had TB,” she said. “I became an outcast.”
She switched her focus to college—taking two buses each way to a more upscale section of the city for math tutoring—but was rejected by the one school, William & Mary, to which she applied. It was senior year. Michelle was suddenly panicked by the thought of staying home, working a dull job with no optimism for anything else. Without much parental guidance, she again turned to the high school principal—Alexander MacKimmie, a name she instantly recalled almost sixty years later—and wound up at Saint Mary’s College, a sister school to Notre Dame, in South Bend, Indiana. However strange and even self-sabotaging a landing place this was for a half-Jewish girl who had hated Catholic school, where she went was less important than the fact that she was leaving home, breaking free of environmental constraints.
At Notre Dame, Michelle barely tolerated the religious instruction but loved the football tradition. Paul Hornung was the star football player and campus heartthrob. On game weekends, she participated in the traditional Friday march to the Grotto—the replica of the Grotto of Our Lady of Lourdes in France—with lighted candle. She worked year-round, in paying jobs that precluded volunteering at the student newspaper, to help her father with expenses, and she graduated in four years with a degree in English literature. She went home and added an education degree from the University of Connecticut. Almost five foot eight, brunette and pretty, she had no shortage of male suitors, but she married Joseph Musler, a high school classmate and fellow UConn student.
She had a son, Brandon, then two miscarriages. Her obstetrician told her that carrying another child to full term was unlikely. But she had a second son, Bruce, and in rapid succession three girls, Darcy, Devon, and Blair—five children born within a decade, four redheads and the dark-haired Bruce.
Friends would forever be amazed doing the math of her prolific reproductive powers. She couldn’t explain the reasoning, much less the pace, ultimately guessing it was the Irish in her, and the need to create the dynamic family structure she had grown up without. The upshot, she said, was that “all the fantasies—journalism, everything—ended when I had five kids.” Temporarily, anyway. But with the purchase of a home in the Three Lakes Park section of Stamford, Michelle settled into motherhood, a suburban lifestyle that had the superficial trappings of comfort but came with strings attached—ambitions shelved and gender stereotypes served. Her
