Suburban living has to be experienced in order to be believed. Since every wife functions primarily as a chauffeur, it is mandatory for all female inhabitants of Connecticut’s Gold Coast to come equipped with a steering wheel strapped to her chest. I am best identified in my neighborhood as the ’65 white Pontiac station wagon (my close friends call me Catalina for short).
Still, she enjoyed her busy existence as a parent and also found time to take up jogging and yoga (before everyone and their mother were doing it). In a conservative environment, she wasn’t shy about her liberal politics, despairing over the Vietnam War and the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy. But even her cynical version of suburban bliss had term limits. Her husband was unfaithful and financially unreliable. The marriage was all but over by her early thirties.
Out of financial need, she entered the workforce, teaching English at a local high school, along with yoga. But the course of her professional life changed when she accepted a paid internship during summer break in 1972 at the Stamford-based Xerox Corporation, hoping to stay busy for the summer and to make some extra money in the process. Her boss, an executive named Derwin Fox, had a mandate to make the staff more gender diverse—which in those days meant a woman or two. He saw potential in Michelle and corralled her at summer’s end to offer her an editorial slot in the development of audio-visual educational programs for vocational high schools and colleges. He asked what it would cost him for her to leave teaching, where Michelle was earning roughly seven thousand dollars a year.
“Eight thousand?” she said.
“Dear, we can’t afford to pay you that little.”
They settled on low five figures. A career portal opened and Michelle charged through. The job required long days and nationwide travel—not the easiest juggling act for a single mother of five. However hectic it was making sure her children were looked after while she was away, there was no turning back. Michelle was a career striver unleashed, as she wrote in her 1972 holiday letter:
I am blissfully happy in my work. Needless to say, I see a lot less of my children but I’m a helluva lot nicer when I do. And when faced with the decision—what do they want more, mommy or money—they chose just as you would expect devoted offspring to choose: “Get the money, ma!”
Over the next six years, Michelle rose from her starter position to senior project manager and then to national account manager for Xerox’s major accounts group. She dealt exclusively with Fortune 500 companies, mostly with successful, leveraged men. No longer just a stressed-out suburban mom, she devoted a small fortune to styling herself for success—jewelry, blazers, shoes, the works. As a woman navigating corporate America in the seventies and seeking respect from the men who surrounded her, she believed she had to project her authority.
At Xerox, a colleague happened to ask her to a Knicks-Celtics game during the 1973–74 season. The Knicks were defending NBA champions, the hottest sports show in town, though in the final year of keeping their storied lineup—Willis Reed, Walt Frazier, Dave DeBusschere, Bill Bradley, and Earl Monroe—intact.
From childhood on, Michelle had been a casual pro basketball fan, in large part because her brother had played and followed the sport and she had chased after him to the neighborhood courts. She had taken in the occasional Knicks game with her husband and young sons. Her favorite player was the acrobatic Elgin Baylor of the Los Angeles Lakers, but it was difficult to live in the New York metropolitan area during the late sixties and early seventies without falling under the Knicks’ championship spell. Rooting for Reed, Frazier, and friends also made for more partisan holiday arguments with her brother, who had remained in central Connecticut, a Boston Celtics fan.
As her professional status grew, Michelle suddenly had access to company tickets. She went to another game, and another, and eventually splurged on her own ticket package. Her seats weren’t anywhere near courtside, but with every renewal came an upgrade, Michelle edging closer to the action. She finally made it there by decade’s end, with a direct cross-court view of the home-team bench. In 1983, the Knicks came over to her side, moving their bench directly in front of her. It meant a partially obstructed view of the game, but the unmatched sideline exposure to the players was worth it.
She loved everything about this new playground, including its social possibilities. Befriending her courtside neighbors, Michelle began making the pre- and postgame scenes in Charley O’s, the popular bar-restaurant establishment on the Thirty-third Street side of the building. She was ubiquitous and happy to talk to pretty much anyone. She made new, unlikely friends.
“You’d see her all the time—behind the bench, in the bar, at parties,” said Harry Robinson, the statistician on the Knicks’ radio broadcasts, another Garden lifer and Charley O’s regular.
What Michelle learned fast was that she didn’t need direct social access to the athletes in order to make their acquaintance and infiltrate their world. All that was required was getting to know a few people in their orbit. A Harry Robinson. A Cal Ramsey. She could—and did—become part of an entourage that ran with Reed, who retired after the 1973–74 season and basked in his celebrity about town until he began a brief run as the Knicks coach in 1977.
Butch Beard, a late-career Knicks point guard who transitioned into assistant coaching and, later, broadcasting, was also part of that group. One time, he went to an early eighties party at a North Jersey home that Ray Williams, a young Knicks guard, had purchased after securing a new contract. Beard walked in and spotted Michelle on the couch, in conversation with her puerile host from
